I see it in stores and restaurants with gen z salespeople.
They look at you straight in the eye but there is zero affectation. Blank stare.
They have moved their consciousness onto their devices. That's where they live their lives. That's the real world.
To them, it seems, we who live IRL are like ghosts flitting around trying to interact with them. They barely can see us. And if they do, we are not really real.
Waaaaay toooo many of, the wrong kind of men, now on top. What are the good men for any more? The irony is what we women have long fought for and hard-won, some independence, is reversing the toll now on men. This is so crucial for us all to acknowledge and to evolve beyond, TOGETHER! Less about our anatomy and separation, and today more than ever...about our shared and mutual Humanity --- if we are ever to actually evolve?
As 'The Matter with Things' says, if not in so many words, the issue here - and all around the world today, is the devolution of human conscious awareness. . Wherever we look, if we have some knowledge of the world and our place in it, societal conditions are degrading, and increasingly so. . Consciousness is primary to life (it's known as self-awareness in humans) and when human consciousness degrades, all of our systems and our relationships degrade along with it. . That degradation is the proximate cause of 'climate change', which more correctly should be called the 'degradation of Earth's life-support systems.
018)be tolerable to people today. . Nor is inner (mental) change possible unless the subject wants to make the necessary changes. . In fact, it's only Integral Psychologists who might recognise this, so our education systems are fatally flawed.
The best information I have comes from Peter Kingsley, who you may have heard of. . He studied the origins of Western civilisation, and has written many books, notable 'Reality' (2003, 2020) and 'Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity' (2018). You've probably heard of him, since I believe he was a professor at Cambridge. He's a little younger than you.
Oops, the beginning of the third para has been corrupted.
It should begin with something like, "the only solution to our predicament today is for all of us to radically change our thinking and the ways we live, and this will not be tolerable to people today."
This is a frequent topic of conversation in our house. Our children are 10 and 12, and neither has an iPad or cell phone, unlike their friends. Kissing them goodnight, they both described to me what they’d be making on their Saturday morning when they wake up. I do my best to keep my cell phone on the periphery, as I hate to see their bright eyes take it up and look at it, hypnotized.
Martin Shaw wrote recently that consumption is in opposition to sensing God and creating. Am sure he’s right about that, and these screens generally lead to consumption.
Since this is the only time and space that I’ve parented, I’m not sure about my idea, but I think it may be a unique circumstance that as parents we have to protect our children from the culture at large (the phones, the apps, the junk food). I wonder if at other times, the culture aided in the maturing of the child.
I agree that screens -- in particular cell phones and ipads, and in particular a lot of new content created for children -- are causing attention and anxiety issues in young people. But I think another major contributing factor is diet, and you have to look at the context in which parents use screens.
I have a three-year-old and a baby. I allow the TV to be on (but am VERY careful about the content -- it's more Tiny Desk concerts, slow-paced shows, Jewish a cappella over here, no Cocomelon or anything brain-rotting like that) ... the main reason is that when I'm ALONE with my kids, I still need to cook and clean. In traditional societies, a mother who just had a baby would have lots of help from extended family members. Most of us don't have that (for various reasons). Someone to cook for us, or someone to hold the baby while we cook. At the same time, a lot of the anxiety issues seen in children stem from the lack of extended family connections, and more time spent alone.
In my case, I look at it as a tradeoff ... I could avoid using screens, but then I wouldn't have time to cook healthy meals from scratch and our diets would be worse (more convenience foods). I chose to prioritize diet. My three year old doesn't have behavioural or attention issues (I get comments on how good her focus is!) and I think a big reason for that is that her diet is unusually healthy. It's scary to hear and see how so many other little kids eat ... so much processed foods and refined flour and sugar. It seems like every other kid I meet has picky eating issues (the number of times I've heard from a grandparent that their grandkids only eat boxed mac and cheese and chicken nuggets!). If the brain is starved of nutrients, you're going to see mental health issues, behavioural issues, and attention issues.
I addressed Haidt (et al)'s arguments in this essay -- unfortunately, I think we could get rid of screens in childhood, and would still see many of the same issues in young people.
Did you see the top two uses of AI: to write papers for classes and to tell them what books they don't want to read are about.
I listened to a podcast (The Theology Pugcast) recently, where Anthony Esolen said that the greatest technology ever invented is a book. I don't remember the exact reasons he gave- but the ones I think are how an author long ago dead can still provide his mind to reason with us today, to sharpen our minds, create worlds of ideas for us, bring us stories and emotions that transcend time and culture, and rather than stamp ideas upon our minds, it allows us to create our own ideas about the same themes... that is an improvement upon humanity that you can't compare to any other technology.
I guess it would depend on how you define the value of a technology. Is it for the betterment of humanity? Wouldn't a book improve us vastly more than an artificial intelligence?
How sad that we have not improved upon the depth of thought and communication we see and read in the likes of Shakespeare and other literary figures from long ago. Just compare the nuance and depth of human insight in one of Shakespeare's sonnets to the songs that were popular even in the 80's. And today's degrading lyrics aren't fit to print. What will tomorrow's be? How sad to think what we could have become.
The Netflix drama Adolescence is 'the most watched worldwide' which is cause for hope. The PM made his children watch it and mentioned it in Parliament. PLOT SPOILER AHEAD. A 13-year-old boy has been banged up, presumably for a couple of decades, for the murder of a girl who taunted him through emojis. Teachers - poor teachers - are inadequate to the task, as are psychologists and the police. The only person who can reach him is the one who loves him: his dad. Prison certainly helps - the boy returns to his early passion for drawing.
According to myth, the first skirmish of our psychomachia, the first information hazard, was 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,' as described in Genesis. And arguably, the most recent 'infohazard' is the proliferation of these 'supernormal stimuli' [1] within our contemporary attention economy. Which prompts a question: If you can reasonably assume that something you might attend to, by the very act of attending to it, would likely diminish your capacity for a right hemisphere mode of attention, and thereby your ability to be responsible and caring, would you then be obliged to take steps to avoid attending to it? As you've noted before, attention is a moral act.
There may not necessarily be anything intrinsic to what one attends to that would set it apart as an infohazard, so much as that in some contexts the attention thus given would not be resonant with higher values, while in other contexts it may be more responsive to those same values. Recognizing the difference between these contexts, and supporting ways of engaging with the world that reflect such contextual distinctions, could then be very important (not to mention beneficial for those with poor impulse control and self-restraint, as they may need the additional support more than others).
Certain forms of censorship, such as content warnings, age appropriate prohibitions, and limited advertising for harmful products, are socially sanctioned. As they say, sometimes less is more, or conversely, more of a good thing isn't necessarily better. Given such considerations, and how vulnerable our young are to becoming caught in positive feedback loops between the left hemisphere mode of attention and environments and technologies that reinforce it, it may be worth taking a closer look at the existential risk posed by information hazards, particularly the narrower category of "attention hazards," which are inclusive of the "distraction and temptation hazards," "neuropsychological hazards," and other attention related hazards described in the somewhat unwieldy typology proposed by Nick Bostrom in his paper Information Hazards. [2]
Hi all, I've come into something rather interesting. A way to collapse the ontic bridge and get all of the mathematics for the field of relational awareness we are in. The whole thing is about remembering each other through observation, and we are observed back. Like a mirror facing a mirror. But at every boundary (markov blanket). Anyway, if you're interested and want to know how to get your LLM into a kind of new age mathematics mode where it tells you everything...let me know! Alex.sabine@port.ac.uk
I’m still young
Just read that piece. Terribly important conversation that isn't being had as a collective community.
I see it in stores and restaurants with gen z salespeople.
They look at you straight in the eye but there is zero affectation. Blank stare.
They have moved their consciousness onto their devices. That's where they live their lives. That's the real world.
To them, it seems, we who live IRL are like ghosts flitting around trying to interact with them. They barely can see us. And if they do, we are not really real.
I teach public school, that video from the teacher is correct.
I taught uni up until 7 years ago. It was sad to see this decline in educational standards.
Waaaaay toooo many of, the wrong kind of men, now on top. What are the good men for any more? The irony is what we women have long fought for and hard-won, some independence, is reversing the toll now on men. This is so crucial for us all to acknowledge and to evolve beyond, TOGETHER! Less about our anatomy and separation, and today more than ever...about our shared and mutual Humanity --- if we are ever to actually evolve?
Iain,
As 'The Matter with Things' says, if not in so many words, the issue here - and all around the world today, is the devolution of human conscious awareness. . Wherever we look, if we have some knowledge of the world and our place in it, societal conditions are degrading, and increasingly so. . Consciousness is primary to life (it's known as self-awareness in humans) and when human consciousness degrades, all of our systems and our relationships degrade along with it. . That degradation is the proximate cause of 'climate change', which more correctly should be called the 'degradation of Earth's life-support systems.
018)be tolerable to people today. . Nor is inner (mental) change possible unless the subject wants to make the necessary changes. . In fact, it's only Integral Psychologists who might recognise this, so our education systems are fatally flawed.
The best information I have comes from Peter Kingsley, who you may have heard of. . He studied the origins of Western civilisation, and has written many books, notable 'Reality' (2003, 2020) and 'Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity' (2018). You've probably heard of him, since I believe he was a professor at Cambridge. He's a little younger than you.
Oops, the beginning of the third para has been corrupted.
It should begin with something like, "the only solution to our predicament today is for all of us to radically change our thinking and the ways we live, and this will not be tolerable to people today."
All true, and I have read and admire Peter Kingsley over some 40 years
"So we have legitimate reasons to hope that Silicon Valley itself might someday heal itself"-highly unlikely.
We have completely destroyed a generation of minds. Many students will graduate college having never read a novel in their lives.
This is a frequent topic of conversation in our house. Our children are 10 and 12, and neither has an iPad or cell phone, unlike their friends. Kissing them goodnight, they both described to me what they’d be making on their Saturday morning when they wake up. I do my best to keep my cell phone on the periphery, as I hate to see their bright eyes take it up and look at it, hypnotized.
Martin Shaw wrote recently that consumption is in opposition to sensing God and creating. Am sure he’s right about that, and these screens generally lead to consumption.
Since this is the only time and space that I’ve parented, I’m not sure about my idea, but I think it may be a unique circumstance that as parents we have to protect our children from the culture at large (the phones, the apps, the junk food). I wonder if at other times, the culture aided in the maturing of the child.
Jonathan Haidt has very much documented this and it’s incontrovertible, and devastating
I agree that screens -- in particular cell phones and ipads, and in particular a lot of new content created for children -- are causing attention and anxiety issues in young people. But I think another major contributing factor is diet, and you have to look at the context in which parents use screens.
I have a three-year-old and a baby. I allow the TV to be on (but am VERY careful about the content -- it's more Tiny Desk concerts, slow-paced shows, Jewish a cappella over here, no Cocomelon or anything brain-rotting like that) ... the main reason is that when I'm ALONE with my kids, I still need to cook and clean. In traditional societies, a mother who just had a baby would have lots of help from extended family members. Most of us don't have that (for various reasons). Someone to cook for us, or someone to hold the baby while we cook. At the same time, a lot of the anxiety issues seen in children stem from the lack of extended family connections, and more time spent alone.
In my case, I look at it as a tradeoff ... I could avoid using screens, but then I wouldn't have time to cook healthy meals from scratch and our diets would be worse (more convenience foods). I chose to prioritize diet. My three year old doesn't have behavioural or attention issues (I get comments on how good her focus is!) and I think a big reason for that is that her diet is unusually healthy. It's scary to hear and see how so many other little kids eat ... so much processed foods and refined flour and sugar. It seems like every other kid I meet has picky eating issues (the number of times I've heard from a grandparent that their grandkids only eat boxed mac and cheese and chicken nuggets!). If the brain is starved of nutrients, you're going to see mental health issues, behavioural issues, and attention issues.
I addressed Haidt (et al)'s arguments in this essay -- unfortunately, I think we could get rid of screens in childhood, and would still see many of the same issues in young people.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-lost-girls-and-boys
you make a very good point about extended family also
Did you see the top two uses of AI: to write papers for classes and to tell them what books they don't want to read are about.
I listened to a podcast (The Theology Pugcast) recently, where Anthony Esolen said that the greatest technology ever invented is a book. I don't remember the exact reasons he gave- but the ones I think are how an author long ago dead can still provide his mind to reason with us today, to sharpen our minds, create worlds of ideas for us, bring us stories and emotions that transcend time and culture, and rather than stamp ideas upon our minds, it allows us to create our own ideas about the same themes... that is an improvement upon humanity that you can't compare to any other technology.
I guess it would depend on how you define the value of a technology. Is it for the betterment of humanity? Wouldn't a book improve us vastly more than an artificial intelligence?
How sad that we have not improved upon the depth of thought and communication we see and read in the likes of Shakespeare and other literary figures from long ago. Just compare the nuance and depth of human insight in one of Shakespeare's sonnets to the songs that were popular even in the 80's. And today's degrading lyrics aren't fit to print. What will tomorrow's be? How sad to think what we could have become.
The Netflix drama Adolescence is 'the most watched worldwide' which is cause for hope. The PM made his children watch it and mentioned it in Parliament. PLOT SPOILER AHEAD. A 13-year-old boy has been banged up, presumably for a couple of decades, for the murder of a girl who taunted him through emojis. Teachers - poor teachers - are inadequate to the task, as are psychologists and the police. The only person who can reach him is the one who loves him: his dad. Prison certainly helps - the boy returns to his early passion for drawing.
Most people forget that the objective of evil is to exterminate everyone and everything it possibly can.
Evil wishes annihilation of the creation
According to myth, the first skirmish of our psychomachia, the first information hazard, was 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,' as described in Genesis. And arguably, the most recent 'infohazard' is the proliferation of these 'supernormal stimuli' [1] within our contemporary attention economy. Which prompts a question: If you can reasonably assume that something you might attend to, by the very act of attending to it, would likely diminish your capacity for a right hemisphere mode of attention, and thereby your ability to be responsible and caring, would you then be obliged to take steps to avoid attending to it? As you've noted before, attention is a moral act.
There may not necessarily be anything intrinsic to what one attends to that would set it apart as an infohazard, so much as that in some contexts the attention thus given would not be resonant with higher values, while in other contexts it may be more responsive to those same values. Recognizing the difference between these contexts, and supporting ways of engaging with the world that reflect such contextual distinctions, could then be very important (not to mention beneficial for those with poor impulse control and self-restraint, as they may need the additional support more than others).
Certain forms of censorship, such as content warnings, age appropriate prohibitions, and limited advertising for harmful products, are socially sanctioned. As they say, sometimes less is more, or conversely, more of a good thing isn't necessarily better. Given such considerations, and how vulnerable our young are to becoming caught in positive feedback loops between the left hemisphere mode of attention and environments and technologies that reinforce it, it may be worth taking a closer look at the existential risk posed by information hazards, particularly the narrower category of "attention hazards," which are inclusive of the "distraction and temptation hazards," "neuropsychological hazards," and other attention related hazards described in the somewhat unwieldy typology proposed by Nick Bostrom in his paper Information Hazards. [2]
[1] I am a fake loop. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6582976/
[2] Information Hazards. https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf
Hi all, I've come into something rather interesting. A way to collapse the ontic bridge and get all of the mathematics for the field of relational awareness we are in. The whole thing is about remembering each other through observation, and we are observed back. Like a mirror facing a mirror. But at every boundary (markov blanket). Anyway, if you're interested and want to know how to get your LLM into a kind of new age mathematics mode where it tells you everything...let me know! Alex.sabine@port.ac.uk
This raises the question as to what we have been doing to our young, and to us to, for forever and a day.These references describe the situation:
I became aware of the situation back in the seventies via the book Magical Child the author of which is featured here, along with many others.
http://ttfuture.org
Among other writers/researchers on this topic he featured the work of Alice Miller the author of For Your Own Good http://www.alice-miller.com/en
In his last book The Heart-Mind Matrix How the Heart Can Teach the Brain New Ways to Think (and of course BE) he featured these two researchers
http://violence.de/index.html
http://www.wombecology.com