How to Be Human…?
I have been pondering the concept of ‘being human’ a lot lately. Perhaps it is a response to our increasingly machine-metaphor world. Perhaps it is living in NY, perhaps it is just something I am interested in…whatever the reason a dear friend and colleague Joep said something yesterday that rung extremely clear and true
"I can only be human when I am amongst other humans"
So how to be human? Look around at the humans around you…
Be with more humans…
Subscribe to think talk walk
October 5th, 2006 at 3:32 am
Sometimes I feel most human when I am grappling with a hard math problem. Because I think it’s peculiarly human to invent a constraining way of looking at the world, identify a shortcoming in it, and struggle against that problem.
The trace of humanity is there in the expression of the problem and the habitual modes of solution. But the grappling with it has to be solitary to some degree. Because otherwise it wouldn’t be a human problem, it’d be a collective problem, and a collective of humans is not human.
In other words, there has to be a self as well as a relation of that self to a collective (sounding like Hegel?!). One lost in the other doesn’t work. One separated from the other doesn’t work either. For instance:
Being in a group of feral humans wouldn’t make me feel more human, would it? Being in a group of people whose language and customs were so foreign as to be alien wouldn’t make me feel human either. It’s important that the people be different but not too different.
Treating ourselves as machines threatens to immerse us in a massive mechanism. We’re cogs in a system, or we’re bits adrift in a bitstream — it amounts to the same thing, personal identity lost to a collective. But there is no personal identity without the collective (feral, psychotic…).
A tree grows against the direction of gravity. Without gravity, trees wouldn’t grow tall and straight. Without gravity, trees wouldn’t have evolved at all. If they didn’t grow against gravity, trees would be crushed to the ground and die. A tree’s life balances the danger and necessity of a force.
Our humanity does too, I feel. We need the pressure to collapse and comform, and we need to fight that pressure to really be alive (a first step towards being human :)
(geez, I’m definitely sounding like Hegel: being, nothingness, becoming; thesis, antithesis, synthesis).
October 5th, 2006 at 6:52 am
Anthony I like this musing - I too can be very human alone/ when working through my thoughts alone.
Your reminding me of trees. We have a lot to learn. Maybe we need to be with more humans amongst trees. a return so to speak…though I acknowledge that we needed to leave the trees to learn and become what we have…I am concerned at the expense of what…
I would like explore human-ess, humanity…and the idea of personal identity more…and what that means in the context of community…I think one thing we were discussing that I left out of post: that there seems a general lack of community in the (’western’) world today and we are more and more isolated, and as a result I think/see trading shortterm gains for extreme long term, and short term losses, in our quality of life. I see that in myself sometimes - and others. And I wonder whether that is associated with loss of identity, community and knowledge of our interconnectedness…
I suppose I wonder, if we continue the way it sometimes seems, are we really being/living human? Or human’s living/being something else entirely?
October 6th, 2006 at 5:28 am
I found myself watching tv tonight - certianly a fabulous tune out tool - and caught an Advertisement from the old ‘ask jeeves’ - they have rebranded to “Ask.com” which I like as a general concept and to be fair, their layout nicely combines a google clean with a website style
interesting to see whether it picks up?! that said I was vaguley disturbed by the advertisement
“Use tools, be human”
Could they know have written “be a better human - ask” ??
October 6th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
“Use tools” implies “don’t be used by tools,” in my mind, so I like the slogan for that. I like your idea — “be human, ask” is elegant!
Please pardon a bit of pompous-sounding rambling on this subject, because I’m trying to sort this out in my own mind and it feels relevant.
askjeeves suffered from the same throughput problem that many such endeavors seem to suffer (see http://www.cycorp.com for an AI version of more-or-less the same idea, or Google’s version at http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ ; and don’t forget the “Alexander Hamilton” controversies on wikipedia)
There’s a Malthusian process at work: every time people add another layer of information to a database like ask.com, users figure out an exponential number of ways to combine that data. The demand rapidly grows beyond the abilities of the provider to supply it. And so it’s useful to a point, but it’s not a replacement for an expert. I asked ask.com “what algorithm do you use?” and the first hit was http://www.invoicedealers.com/cars/cpc/default.aspx?refid=94107&detid=10000&img2=freeq.gif&img3=comit.gif&img5=BB.gif&img1=TBMW.gif&img4=cBMW.jpg&RA3=used
I wonder when this shift happened: “I wonder if I know someone who could answer X?” versus “I wonder where I could find X on the web?” Definitely within my lifetime. I want to say it had started, but hadn’t happened, by 1996, but had largely happened by 2000 or so.
When you ask someone a question, you are signalling that you are ready to be changed (by its answer, at a minimum). An expert ought to be sensitive to that; an educator, surely. A web site never will be. In my opinion, a certain amount of purposeful, and public, humbling of self is necessary to be educated (contrast with “informed,” which just means filled up with information — education entails a change in point of view). That is, you recognize that someone else knows more than you do, you approach them with that recognition in mind, and you request that they help you learn. I feel that you aren’t ready to receive what’s about to be given if you don’t do that. Public instruction in school, serves this function. Searching the web does not.
Part of me sees web sites like these as (perhaps unwitting) instruments of a defection from a community of learning. Modern egotism makes the taking of an educable stance too unpleasant, so we shun education and become internet-enabled autodidacts. Pushed too far it bcomes an orinic inversion of the ivory tower critique. Rather than academics disconnected from masses who want their expertise (hence the power of the critique), we have masses disconnected from academics who desperately want their support (hence the cries of anti-intellectualism in the US). Do we all become Henry Dargers?
It’s tempting to be judgmental and declare that this trend is bad. I’m tempted in that direction, anyway. But, I think it’s important to keep this space open. In particular, one important move, in my mind (and this has always been good practice, even before the internet) is to do your best to keep people aware of their information consumption. Where’d the information come from (who produced it, for what audience and to what end); how’d you get it (who transmitted it to you, did they filter it, why did they give it to you), and how are you going to use it? Springboard from that sense to a sense of responsibility to a community (people made these materials whether they were on the internet or not; and so we all could potentially contribute) Maybe, I don’t know.
October 10th, 2006 at 8:53 am
Not sure about whether to post this in this post on being human or the last one on internet break but in my ongoing and re-elevated quest for working/thinking/enjoying dialogue context and storytelling work…
I just saw this following quote on a blog via a search on dialogue and context (understudied and a current area of passion thanks to Lyndsey who works at a place in BC the dialogue centre I never knew about but am so delighted I found tonight!):
http://www.rule88.com/lyndsey/wp2727/?p=13#comments
“we’re not so much numbing our senses as we are creating a different world with a very different aesthetic sense…because we don’t engage with people, we can lose the ability to relate directly to each other, to think critically about the data in shared dialogue†(Menzies, 2005, p.104).”
I am imagining actually that now more than ever there is a need for shared spaces, contexts that enable us to re-learn/remember our need to be human/in the company of others…or perhaps it is something other entirely: new conceptions of what sustained dialogue space/place mean - maybe they do mean virtual spaces…I think this is a case of AND…too often I get concerned that rather than add new knowledge and think critcally about how old methods can evolve to be better we get rid of them entirely (I am thinking about unions for instance, rather than spending time to critically rethink and improve their concept, their role to serve/look after the worker, we remove them entirely for a short term gain…)
I am tried but very clear this post was a beautiful find and the start of something important for me…I have been talking about a dialogue project for a long time but have been challenged by my own lack on connecting with those involved in that dialogue - this weekend I am off to a dialogue retreat…thank you Lyndsey…
And for the record - someone other than your professor read this post…though almost a year since you wrote it which also makes for an interesting conversation/reflection on dialogue today: time and space are both compressed and expanded and the concept of the metaphysical bindings/connections are more easily ’seen’ ‘heard’ and ’shared’ in the virtual world which is both connected in ’seen’ and ‘unseen’ ways
October 10th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Very weird. Nat I was just thinking about your blog because I promised to send you information on dynamical systems (which I haven’t forgotten).
A minute ago, I was writing some thoughts about space/time dualities in computer science. These have been on my mind lately, so I was just listing as many as I could think of and annotating the examples for later.
The one which jumps out is the storage/transmission duality. Theoretically at least, compressing information to store it in a file is equivalent to compressing information to transmit it over a network. Some computers make this completely transparent because the compression step is blind to where the data actually goes (into a file, or across a network).
You can view storage as transmission through time (you’ll read the file later), whereas a network transmits through space. Storage requires space (the physical hard disk space, say) to get “motion through time.” Network transmission requires time (the time data spends in the wires) to get motion through space.
Anyway, I was thinking about how these dualities represent certain (philosophical?) commitments to the relations between space and time. Not exactly relevant to your post, but still weird to me that space, time, and compression left my fingers a few moments ago and then entered my eyes via your blog.
I’m wondering about the perception of ‘missing something.’ Knowing that information is flying by you, knowing that if only you had a bit more time you could process it and get something from it, but oops too late it’s gone. It’s unpleasant, right? Like motion sickness. Maybe dialog is a way of slowing that down because you’re actually engaged with the source of information, versus looking at it from a distance. Like being a driver versus being a passenger (funny, some people get carsick when someone else is driving but not when they are).