All posts by Tim Gorichanaz

Thinking, Good and Bad

Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 1954

In my research on information experience, I continue to be drawn to the intersection of mind and information. Many philosophers would define thinking as a series of electrical impulses in the brain that could be done as well in an armchair as in a vat, and information scientists tend to simply assume that to inform someone of something is simply a matter of putting the information in front of their nose. Both views miss quite a bit. (Okay, yes, I’m being a little uncharitable here.)

Ryan McGinness, Mindscape 31, 2019

Lately, I’ve been thinking about thinking—about what it means to think well and poorly, and how we use information and documents to help us think (or not), and how we might do so differently. Today, in the coronavirus era, this is as needful as ever. But it’s not a new question.

On the eve of World War II, the philosopher Susan Stebbing wrote:

There is an urgent need to-day for the citizens of a democracy to think well. It is not enough to have freedom of the Press and parliamentary institutions. Our difficulties are due partly to our own stupidity, partly to the exploitation of that stupidity, and partly to our own prejudices and personal desires.

Susan Stebbing, Thinking to Some Purpose, 1939

This appeared on the dust jacket of Thinking to Some Purpose, a how-to manual for spotting logical fallacies on the road to thinking more effectively. It was well received and pioneered a whole genre of writing on similar topics.

Such approaches to improving one’s thinking fall within the rubric of virtue epistemology, which looks at people’s mental traits, attitudes and thinking styles, and how these serve (or don’t) the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Virtue epistemologists discuss and disentangle the virtues and vices of thinking. Lists of both are myriad and diffuse:

  • The intellectual virtues may include: attentiveness, autonomy, benevolence, carefulness, cognitive empathy, confidence, conscientiousness, courage, creativity, discernment, fair-mindedness, honesty, humility, imagination, integrity, love, objectivity, open-mindedness, parsimony, perseverance, responsibility, studiousness, thoroughness, understanding, warranty, and wisdom—among others.
  • The intellectual vices may include: carelessness, closed-mindedness, conformity, cowardice, curiosity, dishonesty, dogmatism, folly, foolishness, gullibility, idleness, indifference to truth, insensitivity to detail, lack of thoroughness, negligence, obtuseness, prejudice, pride, rigidity, self-deception, superficiality, superstition, twisted thinking, willful naivety, and wishful thinking—among others.

The fact that curiosity appears on both lists may incite us to wonder how the virtues and vices are related. In some cases, virtues and vices may be opposites (e.g., open-mindedness and closed-mindedness). In other cases, a virtue may be a middle-point between two vices; for instance, intellectual humility lies at the sweet spot between intellectual arrogance and diffidence, both of which can be considered vices. What’s more, we might wonder if these all represent distinct virtues/vices or if some should be lumped together or split apart, or if others lie in waiting. All in all, it seems to me that we need more work that brings these visions of intellectual virtues and vices into a more coherent picture.

Moreover, it may be that we need to update our notion of intellectual virtues and vices for the digital age. While the medieval Seven Deadly Sins—lust, gluttony and all the rest—are as relevant today as ever for personal comportment writ large, it seems to me that our information environment has changed so dramatically that intellectual virtues tuned to a medieval scriptorium are no longer sufficient.

To speak of virtues for the digital age, I might suggest tinkering, championed for instance in Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile. More and more we learn by trying things out and making subtle manipulations and interpretations in a way that does not separate thinking from doing. Additionally, I’ve recently been thinking that silence may be a worthy virtue for our age. I made a short video describing silence as a virtue:

And what about vices? To give one example, Quassim Cassam, in his 2019 book Vices of the Mind, shines a spotlight on what he terms epistemic insouciance, which is a “lack of concern with respect to whether their claims are grounded in reality or the evidence.” It’s an indifference to truth, and sometimes a dismissive coping mechanism for dealing with a hopelessly complex world. This is the vice of the bullshitter.

We can recognize epistemic insouciance at play in our post-truth era. Writes Cassam, “Being subjected to a relentless barrage of misleading pronouncements about a given subject can deprive one of one’s prior knowledge of that subject by muddying the waters and making one mistrust one’s own judgement.” And when we mistrust our own judgment and sense that the prevailing social consensus is this or that, we are prone to commit ourselves to precisely this or that—I’m thinking of the Asch conformity experiments from the 1950s, which showed the power of conformity in social reasoning.

And while Cassam does not explicitly bring up disinformation in his discussion, this is a particularly chilling concern today. In her book Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, journalist Nina Schick describes the rise of disinformation and the coming “infocalypse,” discussing particularly deepfakes—synthetic media (such as videos) intended to deceive—which are now trivial to create with free software and a little time and expertise. The “photograph” you see to the right, for instance, is a computer-generated image of a person who does not exist. Predictably, it gets worse—like the deepfake porn bot that automatically removes the clothing from images of women. And that’s just the start. What happens when nation-state actors and other interest groups begin to create and circulate synthetic evidence—disinformation—depicting brutal or incriminating events that never happened? It doesn’t take much imagination to see some dark possibilities. Hence the term infocalypse—but unlike in the Biblical apocalypse, the infocalypse does not foretell the second coming of any savior or prophet.

The proliferation of disinformation—already upon us, and only slated to get worse—brings us back to Stebbing’s diagnosis, quoted above, that our difficulties thinking are due partly to the exploitation of our stupidity. Here we may be tempted to throw up our hands that the situation is hopeless. Of course this would be a demonstration of the utmost epistemic insouciance, on Cassam’s account—and yet what other choice is there? Could we make ourselves less exploitable?

I am hoping that we can find a satisfactory answer to that question in the coming years. It may have something to do with delineating the intellectual virtues and vices—ones up to the task of the digital age and the infocalypse—and for coming up with ways to instill the virtues and root out the vices in the public and our students.

To be sure, our personal traits and behaviors are only part of a very complex picture; our mental and political outcomes are due to a mix of network-level social effects and sub-personal cognitive biases. But there are things we can do as individuals, and in any case we ought to tend to the things we can.

Interruptions and Philosophy

Yo, Taylor. I’m really happy for you. Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!

Kanye West, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards
Socrates, Study, Boardman Robinson, 1935
Boardman Robinson, Socrates (study for “The Law Givers”), ca. 1935, Smithsonian American Art Museum

A foundational work in European philosophy is Plato’s Republic. Even today, 2,400 years after it was written, it is still one of the top college texts assigned worldwide. The tome takes the form of a dialogue in which Socrates discusses a number of topics with various interlocutors, from the meaning of justice to the structure of the soul.

An interesting feature of the Republic is the role of interruption in the dialogue. Plato scholar David Roochnik goes so far as to say the Republic is structured around five key interruptions. Perhaps a chief observation here is that the entire book itself is framed as an interruption. The Republic starts this way:

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess […] When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.

Republic, Book I

At this point, the characters go to Polemarchus’ home, where the philosophical dialogue takes place. For Roochnik, the interruptive character of the Republic emphasizes that the book is (a) a conversation, which is how philosophy happens; and (b) deeply human, rather than abstract or systematic in nature.

If the Republic is a monument of Western philosophy, the Mahabharata is a monument of Eastern philosophy. It’s a Sanskrit epic—the national epic of India—and one of the major texts of Hinduism. But besides being purely spiritual or historical, the Mahabharata is also deeply philosophical.

I’ve only recently begun studying the Mahabharata, but I’ve already been piqued by the role of interruption in this text as well. Just as with the Republic, the entirety of the Mahabharata is sparked from an interruption: In this case, the seer Vyasa and his disciples have come to interrupt King Janamejaya, who was carrying out a snake sacrifice that threatened to wipe out the entire race of serpents. Nothing like a 1.8-million-word poem about your ancestors to make you forget what you were doing, I suppose.

And just like with the Republic, the dialogue of the Mahabharata is dotted with interruptions along the way. Perhaps the most famous is when Prince Arjuna is riding into war alongside his charioteer Krishna, when he calls Krishna to pause in no man’s land—”time freezes,” says my translation—to have a discussion about metaphysics and ethics. In the West, this part of the Mahabharata is best known of all: It’s the Bhagavad Gita.

I’m not sure what to make of all this yet. Perhaps it is only that we humans interrupt each other, and that interruption is present in any dialogue. But it seems that there’s something deeper at play.

In the Republic, Plato makes the point that learning is a matter of turning around—exemplified in the Allegory of the Cave—of questioning, of thinking, of dialogue. Perhaps these are all forms of interruption. This is quite interesting, given that the word interruption has a negative connotation: we don’t want to be interrupted, and we feel we shouldn’t interrupt other people. Then again, we don’t quite like learning, either, and we avoid it when we can. But when is interruption good, and when is it Kanye West at the 2009 VMA’s? (Or is it, perhaps, that Kanye West was being the consummate philosopher here?)

Origin Stories and Being Thrown

Humans are storytelling creatures, and some stories have been with us for as long as we’ve been human. Among these are, fittingly, stories of our own origins. It’s futile to try to pin down when such and such story originated—and what’s more, it’s mostly missing the point.

17th century RajasthanI manuscript of the Mahabharata depicting Vyasa narrating the Mahabharata to Ganesha, who serves as the scribe
Detail, 17th century Rajasthani manuscript of Ganesha recording the Mahabharata (Wikipedia)

I’m reading the Mahabharata, in Carol Satyamurti’s retelling, and the opening pages of the epic give a fascinating example of what I mean. The story begins with the story of its own origin, in crystal clear description. Yet by the story’s own story, it’s hard to say how exactly it came about. We are told that Vyasa, a seer, composed the poem, and then he dictated it to Ganesha, who wrote it down. Vyasa then taught the poem to a number of disciples, who recited it to a king to interrupt a sacrifice. Ugrashravas, a poet, was present at that event, and he later told the story to a group of ascetics in a forest. The Mahabharata tells us that the version within its pages is the one told by Ugrashravas—as if Vyasa and Ganesha already knew that Ugrashravas would go to the forest from the start.

So what should be made of this? Why not simplify matters by just saying that we’re reading what was written down by Ganesha? Or why not have Vyasa write it down himself? It’s all as if to suggest that if we are looking for origins we’ll wind up going around in circles.

It may be useful to think about this through the concept of thrownness from phenomenology. The idea is that we humans are “thrown” into our human situation. Part of what this means is that we don’t choose our starting conditions: we don’t pick our family, location and so on. As James Baldwin wrote memorably in Giovanni’s Room, “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

More deeply, being thrown means that there’s not an objective starting point for our lives. We don’t remember our first moments. Of course we must have started at some point, and certainly we have some impressionistic early memories, but our conscious lives seem to start up already on, sort of like how giraffes are born running.

The phenomenological concept describes human conscious experience as thrown, but it also seems to describe humanity more broadly. Our species evolved from some common ancestor with other primates, indeed with everything else alive today, shaped within and as part of our world… and so there never was a first human. And nor was there ever really a first story. Our stories about our origins seem to have emerged in the same way. Today we are thrown into them.