We’re Moving!

To all and sundry, I’m in the process of moving my blog over to http://www.jonathancamara.com. I may try to keep both blogs in sync or I might leave this one to roll with the tumbleweeds. I’m not completely sure.

Are We Designing Ourselves To Death?

Last month, I read the printed issue of WIRED on the Future Of Design, and for some reason, I felt used, alienated, and just about ready to throw my computer and all my chic electronic devices out the window. Why? because I felt I was being limited and controlled through them. The moment I turned on an electronic device and opened an app, I was being manipulated by it to click this button or type that text or swipe some direction on the screen.  I did have a goal in mind, but that goal was being modified and changed by the device I was using. Now I could put these modifications down to the limitations of the hardware and software I had available to me, but that wasn’t the whole story, at least, not according to the articles in WIRED. Some of these limitations were set intentionally by designers in order to ensure that their users would have the “best experience” in using their products. WIRED noted this and proposed a future for design in an increasingly connected world.

Three words on the front cover, and referred to in each article, boldly proclaimed their vision for design: “Invisible, Beautiful, Everywhere.” The vision proclaimed by these words make sense when you consider the current focus of modern design as spearheaded by Apple: to make a device or service which allows the user to easily achieve the goal or end that he has in mind. Using those three words, WIRED painted a picture of devices invisibly woven into our reality that help us accomplish our goals simply and easily while removing supposedly frivolous and unnecessary choices as well as limiting error.

Sounds good right?

Yet somehow, at the end of this rosy picture, I wanted to punch a designer in the face. Why? because the modern designer suddenly sounds like a puppeteer who pulls the needed strings to ensure people use his devices as he intended. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If I design a store website, I want people to enjoy that online store so that they buy more. However, the reach of design does not simply end here. Good design inherently takes into account human psychology and the user’s goal, intentionally limiting the user’s focus to those tasks needed to accomplish that goal. For what broad goal are we designing these devices that they must be available “everywhere” to us?

These articles brought to my mind the last chapter in C.S. Lewis’ book, The Abolition of Man. C.S. Lewis describes the consequences of scientific planners crafting a superman. Since the cause must be greater than it’s effect, Lewis ridicules the superman idea with the logical conclusion that a superman will be limited and less than those scientific planners who brought him into existence. In the current push to design modern electronics to be invisible, beautiful and everywhere, I see a trend to design an experience using a similarly limited and materialistic conception of man and the world that either blithely ignores or shrilly protests any actual facts which do not fit within that conception of reality.

We designers need to be careful with the broad or final goal of design and the role our modern electronic devices play within our lives, for if we design wrong we will design ourselves toward death. So let us design not only for the immediate human goal, but also for the final or eternal Creator-given goal because only then will designers make experiences which allow human beings to be what they are created to be.

Gnosticism masquerading as Catholicism

I went to a Catholic Mass several months ago that was celebrated beautifully. The priest sang the extraordinary form of the Mass, the servers all knew their duties, the congregation diligently participated. But it was during the homily that a false chord jarred the entire symphony of smells, actions, and sounds. I heard not the harmony of solid Catholic doctrine but a weak sycophantic Gnosticism masked with Catholic language.

In the previous week, I had studied Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, in which he lists the different characteristics of gnosticism. These characteristics nearly matched with the description of gnosticism given in Cardinal Ratzinger’s homilies on creation in In the Beginning. Gnostic thought creates an “Us versus Them” mentality, attacks love as unstable, does not believe in conversion of heart, attacks legitimate authority figures who do not agree with gnostic philosophy, and pushes its members to create or build some kind of salvation which is attainable here on earth.

Just a quick note before diving into the homily. My main goal is to point out the dangers of a creeping gnosticism for those who seek to be truly Catholic. I firmly believe that Gnostic thought is again permeating the Church, spurred by ignorance and reactionary thinking. I pray for this priest and his congregation because they are trying to do their best to live the faith in an increasingly hostile environment

The homily covered a then recent poll of both practicing and non-practicing Catholics in the United States, which revealed the devastating fact that most Catholics do not know or have confused ideas about major doctrines of the Catholic faith. But rather than pointing out the sorry state of Catholic religious education and calling for an evangelization of ignorant Catholics who are living pagan lives, the priest turned the poll into a whipping post for his own purposes. Blaming the results of the poll on the teachings of the Council of Vatican II, he called for his congregation to oppose ignorant Catholics and the evils they spread. He congratulated his congregation for being radically different from the “mainstream” that was presented in the poll by refusing to “get with the times” concerning dress, by eating organic foods, and by avoiding pharmaceutical drugs. Looking at the recent election of Pope Francis, and the “mainstream” adulation of his actions and speeches, he questioned whether the line of good popes had ended (not that those after Vatican II were that wonderful). He went so far as to cast doubt upon papal infallibility as he connected the possibility of a change in discipline so that priests could marry, to a possible change in doctrine which would allow women priests. He criticized the use of the word “Love” in connection with such “mainstream catholics”, insisting that all those in the room knew better. Finally, Citing the biblical verse that novelty tickles the ears of the foolish, he launched an all out attack upon the term “New Evangelization.”  The “New Evangelization,” as he saw it, was just an excuse to create a bunch of noise in order to promote “Love,” when what the Church really needed, as he saw it, was to kick out all the bad apples. He finally ended his sermon, with two things: First, that all these problems were due to Vatican II, and second, that all those listening to him should use their Liberty of Conscience and reject all this nonsense.

I’ll admit, I had a hard time stomaching all of this, and if we had been in a seminar rather than at Mass, I probably would have called him out on much of what he said. There was and still is a possibility that upon clarification of some of his points, I would realize that I had understood him all wrong, but I never got the opportunity to talk with him afterwards.

I will continue to pray for him. He was a truly passionate man, and I know he was trying to be a good Catholic and fulfill his vocation. If he ever reads this post, I hope he contacts me in case I understood him wrong. And to you, gentle reader, beware of the Gnostic, for his talk does attract those itchy ears. But do not kick him out, engage him in dialogue, and be willing to walk along his road, for then you might see how to help him out of his discordant echo chamber.

Unix and Obamacare

I was working on my Linux machine and thinking about the required insurance mandated in Obamacare when it hit me. Why don’t large companies split themselves up into smaller companies of less than 50 people in order to avoid having to pay insurance for their employees? Now this may be practically impossible but humor me for this article.

In Unix-based operating systems, the real power is found on the command line, where you chain together small programs in order to accomplish complex tasks. It looks something like this:

> # put list of video devices into a file
> lspci | grep VGA > video_devices.log

In this little shell script “lspci” lists all the devices connected to the PCI bus in your computer. This list is searched by “grep” for all lines with “VGA” and those lines are put into the file “video_devices.log”. Now, while this is a very simple shell script, the flexibility and power that is present is enormous. Each program is small, does one thing well, and is able to communicate to each of the other programs the information that they need in order to fulfill their function.  Why should a company not do the same thing?

To put this into better perspective for business owners, the idea would be for the different functions of the company to be split off into different smaller companies rather than keeping everything under one roof. This isn’t very different from what some companies to today, with IT and human resources being outsourced to different companies.  Let’s say I were to take a product from a large technology company like Google (I know there’s probably no chance that Google will do this, but come on, work with me here.) and spin off of Google a group of different small companies with less than 50 people on staff to work on this product. One company could work on the product’s design, another on developing it, a third on testing it.  Each reporting to the others, like a bunch of Unix programs, working together to help form one fantastic product. if one design company isn’t enough, then bring in another company to help work with the product.

Now, this is probably a logistics nightmare, especially if communication broke down between two companies and, because of “corporate secrets” and the current patent system, this kind of arrangement might well be untenable, but this kind of arrangement, if those communication kinks were worked out, would allow companies to be more flexible, increase competition, and possible even create jobs as more employees are needed in order to help keep the different businesses running. It might be ridiculous to have, say, 10 different software development companies working on a single project, but, if you look at the model that has been formed by the Open Source Community, there is a way for such cooperation to happen.

What do you think, Internet?

The Proper Use of Technology: Knowledge vs. Love

The development and use of technology should be founded upon a philosophy which not only agrees with the findings of science and known facts about man, but also helps to explain them. The Gnostic philosophy that underlies the technocratic goals for technological advancement sees man as a mere pattern of information, destined in the near future to build a machine that will surpass the human pattern, allowing the next step in the chain of evolution to occur. This philosophy fails because it ignores any attempt to explain man’s origin, rejects love, the mystery of suffering, and substitutionary redemption, and focuses on controlling life and the world through knowledge. Love appears too insecure a foundation because it is not absolutely certain, and makes the person absolutely dependent. To the Gnostic technocrat, this dependence is burdensome, and only by attempting to achieve god-like power and skill to create a new world can “salvation” be attained. On the other hand, the Christian philosophy sees man as being created by God in His own image and likeness. This philosophy succeeds because it not only gives a description of the origin of man, but also allows for the very rational scientific progress upon which the technocrats attempt to base their philosophy. Man, because he is created, is dependent, but this dependence takes the form of love that essentially says, “I want you to be.” This kind of love transforms dependence into freedom. The attempt to remove man’s inherent dependence rejects the love that brought him into existence and the freedom which that love gives him. The fact of creation also gives man the end of achieve union with his Creator, which means that he will become God-like through the love of God. Technology, therefore,would be better developed and used if it helped man achieve his final end as stated by the Christian philosophy.

Finis

Theme Update

I just updated the theme of my site to be more readable. The old theme hurt the eyes a little too much. Let me know what you think!

The Proper Use of Technology: Luddites

In the final argument of Joseph Ratzinger from the last post, many people might start claiming that technology is evil. The fact that technology seems to lead to a breakdown in man’s moral nature and a push toward totalitarian control often leads some people to the conclusion that technology should be either rejected or treated as a necessary evil. This rejection is present in certain segments of the environmentalist movement and is often seen in the push for organic foods. This rejection and resentment of technology, however, eventually becomes a resentment against humans and especially human freedom since that freedom allowed the development of technology. This resentment often leads to the idea that man is diseased by his mind and its freedom. But the view of man as presented earlier by Joseph Ratzinger, sees this rejection of man’s reason as another way of denying man’s nature. Technology, as it is not man’s salvation nor man’s bane, and yet can be used for either, must be a mere tool which man uses. This means that technology does not form it’s own philosophy, but rather it is philosophy that determines the development and use of technology.

The next post will conclude this series of posts, and will examine which philosophical foundation the development and proper use of technology should be based.

The Proper Use of Technology: Kurzweil vs. Ratzinger – A Conversation

Thus far in this series of blog posts, I have been pulling paragraphs directly from my more academic and probably boring Bachelor’s thesis. Reading over them again has been a little painful, so I’ve decided to rewrite the long boring argument between Kurzweil’s and Ratzinger’s viewpoints into a hopefully more interesting – though fictional – conversation(Note: I do not know the writing or conversational styles of either Kurzweil or Ratzinger, this is merely a vehicle to give each side’s argument.)

Ratzinger: It appears, Mr. Kurzweil, that your argument for the close relationship between humanity and technology rests on the idea that an organism is the same as a machine.

Kurzweil: an organism is the same as a machine, just one of a more advanced pattern than anything we have built thus far in human history.

Ratzinger: But an organism is fundamentally different from a machine. First, an organism is incomparably smarter and more daring than most sophisticated machines. Machines in comparison are dully planned and dully constructed. Second, An organism also moves itself from within, while a machine must be operated by someone from without. Third, an organism has the power to reproduce itself and bring into existence another living being like itself. A machine can’t do the same.

Kurzweil: Cardinal Ratzinger, your reasons are outdated and don’t encompass some new facts which point to the reality that organisms and machines exist on a continuum. In response to your first point, I grant you that organisms are smarter than current machines. But when a machine is built that copies the pattern of an organism, that pattern can be analyzed and improved. The new machine built upon the improved pattern would surpass the original organism. On your second point, the advent of computers brought machines that are capable of self-direction. The software of the computer acts like the mind and the hardware like the body of an organism. As to your third point, machines are increasingly capable of building other machines and even of replicating parts of themselves. It is now feasible that they will reproduce themselves just like biological organisms.

Ratzinger: You do have a point…but, since we are talking about the relationship between humanity and technology, the one organism which is different from any other organism is the human being. Any attempt to reduce the human being to a machine necessarily rejects man’s moral dignity of being made in the image of God. This does not liberate the human person but crushes him or her. Man must not be considered only by the physical-natural scientific reason but also by the moral-religious reason which recognizes this moral dignity of human beings. This moral reason cannot be rejected as gross unreason or superstition as not being mathematical because it is the more fundamental of these two kinds of reason. Moral reason alone will preserve the human dimensions of both the natural sciences and technology and prevent them from destroying the concept and fact of humankind.

Kurzweil: All your claims about this supposed dignity of man will be called into question when machines attain consciousness. Your denial of the ability to machines to have consciousness is based on the fact that today’s machines are not as capable as humans and on your rejection of technology’s continued march toward imitating the human pattern. When machines successfully attain consciousness, man will not only understand how his thinking arises from matter but will also vastly extend and expand its reach by merging human and machine consciousness. This would allow humankind to transcend its biological roots while maintaining the fundamental human quality of seeking extend physical and mental reason beyond current limitations. Technology will not destroy humankind. It will allow human beings to no longer be bound by the limitations of biology and to expand the human pattern into the nonbiological world.

Ratzinger: Your claim that mind arises from matter makes no scientific sense. Matter is inherently unstable and chaotic. Your claim might have made sense in the nineteenth century when the theories of the conservation of matter an the conservation of energy made the whole universe appear ever-existent, unchanging and depending only on itself. But because of the discovery of the theory of entropy and the theory of relativity, science now knows that temporality is inscribed in the universe. Mind cannot arise from matter, it must be imposed upon it.

Kurzweil: you are right that matter is temporal, but wrong that it tends to disorder. Evolution demonstrates that by following the law of accelerating returns. This law states that matter under the evolutionary process becomes increasingly ordered, continually building upon previous stages of evolution. This is best demonstrated in the evolution of technology, which grows and improves upon an exponential curve. The theory of entropy which you mention, only affects a closed system, but the law of accelerating returns applies to the open system of evolution. Each stage of evolution draws upon the surrounding chaos of matter to create more diversity from which greater order can be formed

Ratzinger: The theory of Evolution you mention seeks to understand and describe biological developments. It does not tell of where the human person came from, where he is going, or what is his purpose. Without know the end of humankind, your cannot claim that evolution achieves a higher order from a lower, because there is no standard from which to measure. The inability of science to explain man’s final end seems to be acknowledge even by science itself, for even an attempt at an explanation merely replaces God with the unscientific idea of blind chance. Something within man demands a reason for existence that is more than blind chance. The claim that blind chance is the reason for existence removes the possibility for a meaningful existence as well as the ability to measure progress.

Kurzweil: Ah, but you see, the purpose of the human person is perfectly evident if you examine the evolution of technology. Just as nature, over millions of years, evolved the human person with an intelligence that set it apart from the rest of nature, so will the human person, in a few decades, evolve technology until it surpasses his intelligence. Man and machine will merge, each build on the strengths of the other, allowing for the development of even more advanced and intelligent beings. Ultimately, the final end will be realized when intelligence – that is, the pattern capable of recognizing and manipulating patterns – permeates the universe and decides the destiny of the cosmos.

Ratzinger: This end of man that you mention has one fatal flaw, and it is a flaw which Catholics faced before in the heresy of Gnosticism. This isn’t an end of man, it’s a desire for complete control of the universe. If the complete permeation of intelligence is the final end of the universe, it can only happen through complete control of the world and of life, a fundamental tenet of Gnosticism. Gnosticism does not embrace reality, but rejects it for a future reality to come, and you, Mr. Kurzweil, seem too focused on the future of technology. You fail to answer the most important question raised by the temporality  of matter, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” You ignore it and seem to claim that all questions concerning origin are unnecessary. This implicit arational or antirational claim allows the living souls of all organisms to be reduced to mere patterns of information that keep  matter in order. But a living soul requires a beginning and an end, while a pattern simply exists. Machines can be built according to patterns, so it would appear that organisms and machines are the same, but organisms act through a force innate to them, a living pattern that is imposed remotely by God through the proximate means of the genetic code which is unique to organisms. Machines are run by programs which make them ultimately dependent upon human beings. Rather than elevating man, you have reduced man to a machine, making him a creature of man rather than a creature of God and giving him a purely material end in place of his supernatural end. This material end, the “waking up” of the universe, would remain in the control of those scientists who create the machines bring it about. You, Mr. Kurzweil, as a scientist researching and pushing for these changes, seem to be positioning yourself to be one of those scientists in control, who will subject humankind to the determinism of the machine.

The next post will look at the claims of those who insist that technology is evil and should be rejected.

The Proper Use of Technology: The Genesis of Catholic Human Dignity

In opposition to Kurzweil (see previous post) are some Catholic Theologians, most notably Joseph Ratzinger (Now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), who argue that the dignity of man needs to be defended in this world of technology. When forming their argument on the relation and of man and technology, these Catholic Theologians, first listen to the facts of human biology and the history of technological advances and then point to the agreement with those truths developed or revealed in both philosophy and theology. The first principles of this argument, as presented in the book In the Beginning by Joseph Ratzinger, are found in the two creation narratives that open the book of Genesis.

The very first statement in the first creation narrative, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” indicates one of the most important distinctions: God is separate from his creation, He is entirely other. The second statement, “the earth was without form and void, and darkness wason the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters,” indicates that matter is, of its nature, unstable and without any internal order, and in need of some kind of order that must be imposed from without. This natural tendency toward disorder was postulated scientifically with the theory of entropy, which states that energy, when used up in a particular area, can never be restored, and was confirmed with the discovery that matter could be converted into energy and the theory of relativity. Into this disordered matter, God built or imposed order, separating light from darkness, heaven from earth, and creating moon, sun, stars, plants, and animals. The face of the reasonableness of creation is only confirmed by the presence of the sciences themselves, and so for order to exist in the world as taught by science, something or Someone must have instilled order and keeps that order in place. Ratzinger notes that the Creation narrative is not a scientific or historical account of the formation of the world or the development of life, but an allegory to emphasize that God created the world. Since evolution is only a description of how life developed, God could have created the world directly or through evolution.

In the second creation narrative, “The Lord God formed man of dust form the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” this statement indicates two principles, first that God formed man from unstable matter, that his basic material is earth, and second that the human being comes into existence after God has breathed into the nostrils of the body formed from this unstable matter. From the first principle, there is something both humbling and consoling. Humbling because man is told that he is not God, he did not make himself, he does not rule the universe, he is limited, and he is destined for death as are all living things. Consoling because man is no demon or evil spirit, he has been fashioned from God’s good earth, and despite all distinctions the human race is fundamentally the same and are of equal value. From the second principle, we see that a divine reality is essential to man, a reality more deeply stated in the first Creation narrative “Let us make man in our own imge and likeness.” In the human being, God enters into his creation, for the human being is directly related to God. the fact that each human being is God’s image is the deepest reason for the inviolability of human dignity.

Because of the divine reality essential to man’s being, technological advancement springs both from an urge to create that reflects that divine reality as well as a grasping of man upon the fact of matter’s instability and the order God imposed upon it. The building of robotic and retinal prosthetics and the brain-machine interface demonstrates man’s desire to both understand this order imposed upon matter by God as well as to instill order upon unstable matter. The fact of creation imposes a necessary rational and order upon the world, and man – filled with the breath of God – seeks to understand and imitated those ordered patterns he finds in nature. Of course, the fact that he is matter and is working with matter imposes several limitations on man. He must work within the laws which God has imposed upon matter itself, and thus he cannot make it do anything which God has not or could not do with it. he can limit but he cannot improve Nature. Thus man can imitate but cannot create life because it is an order imposed by God upon matter. This also means that man cannot imposed upon himself or others and order that violates the divine reality, the God-given order of his own soul, since it would lessen or crush the human person. It is from this aspect of the advancement of technology which Ratzinger warns against. Technological advances have given me a certain freedom from anxiety and superstition, a certain power over the world. But this power leads to a temptation to view as reasonable and therefore as serious only what can be corroborated through experiment and computation and to reject as irrational all that is moral and holy. By denying all that is moral and holy, the essential nature of man as made in the image and likeness of God is denied, crushing him to fit within a utilitarian view of the world, and eventually destroying him. Ratzinger posits that man must recognize the existence of two different kinds of reason, the physical-natural scientific and the moral-religious reason, and that the contours and scope of moral-religious reason are not mathematical as it is more fundamental. It is also in the moral-religious reason that man, in his moral freedom, images God and is more than earth. Without moral-religious reason, man will increasingly isolate himself, unable to love or find meaning in life and would eventually destroy himself for existing without purpose.

My next post will be a fictional argument between Kurzweil and Ratzinger using their books, The Singularity is Near and In the Beginning, respectively, as sources for the dialogue.

The Proper Use of Technology: The Evolution of Technology and The End of Man

The technocrats, in order to help bolster their arguments that man is a machine, turn to the history of technological development and not only compare it to but say it is a part of Evolution. One such technocrat is Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer to faithfully recreate several orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software and recipient of the MIT-Lemelson Prize and the National Medal of Technology. In his book The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil argues that Evolution demonstrates a law of this particular universe “The law of accelerating returns,” that is, that lasting or meaningful patterns develop into better meaningful patterns at an exponential rate and that the end of Evolution is universal intelligence. He then place man as a key component of Evolution as being the first meaningful pattern that both recognizes and analyzes meaningful patterns. For Kurzweil, Man’s drive to develop technology arises from the evolutionary urge to develop better meaningful patterns and that Man, because he is hingepin upon which the rise of a better meaningful pattern, will eventually merge with that better pattern, just as single cell organisms merged to become multi-cellular organisms. This will happen since, according to Kurzweil, reality is purely composed of meaningful patterns of information.

This view of reality and man’s nature denies that man’s dignity comes from his moral and spiritual nature, but rather from the fact that each man is a meaningful, though flawed unique pattern information. Man is trapped in his biological limitations and must discover some way to allow his unique pattern to overcome those limitations. Looking at the power of computers in storing information, and the improving algorithms that allow computers to form meaningful patterns from that data, Kurzweil states that if man, as the highest product of biological evolution is to overcome his biologically imposed limitations and continue to evolve, then he must take on those powers of the computer. All claims of morality and spirituality are merely the manifestation of the evolutionary urge to seek greater intelligence, all desire for salvation is a desire to become a flawless meaningful pattern of information. thus, seeking to accomplish that evolutionary urge by freeing and perfecting man’s intelligence from the severe limitations of its biological form can be regarded as an essentially spiritual undertaking.

Kurzweil does not stop here. He then states that since evolution is inevitable, all attempts to stop the merging of man and machine will come to naught as those who have embraced this next phase of evolution will leave behind those who refuse to join. Man must seek this next step relentlessly, according to Kurzweil, for once the human pattern can be copied or stored, it will be possible to prevent each unique human pattern from ceasing to exist. Also, since the pattern of human consciousness would be understood, those limitations which cause suffering, disease, and death could be overcome. Any attempt  to hold back this evolutionary step would result in the unnecessary continued suffering and death of millions of human beings.

This is the argument of the technocrats for man and his relation to technology. My next post will be concerning another side of the argument, the side held by Joseph Ratzinger who wants to maintain man’s dignity, seemingly in spite of the development of technology.