More Information Can Mean Less Knowledge

When Rosalyn Bettiford, a forty-seven-year-old editor, arrived at her weekend house in Washington, Connecticut—a two-hour drive from Manhattan—the July night had turned chilly. Her teenage son was asleep in his bedroom. The living room was dark. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed that one of the big sliding-glass windows was wide open. She reached for its handle and—as the heavy window suddenly slipped out of its track—she plunged, screaming, glass and all, to a flagstone terrace twelve feet below. In that fall, Rosalyn (her name has been changed here for privacy reasons, but the story is true) fractured her skull, cracked a number of vertebrae, broke an arm and smashed all her toes. Her terrified son found her moaning and semi-conscious, with colorless fluid seeping out of her ears. The young men who arrived only minutes later quickly splinted her arm and drove her madly over country roads to the nearest hospital. They saved her life and vanished quietly into the night when doctors came to her side. The next day they turned up at her bedside in the hospital to see how she was doing. They were volunteers at the local firehouse. Rosalyn and her family did not need the horrors of 9/11 to remind them of the range of emergency services volunteer firefighters provide—and not just in the United States of America. Japan in 2022, there are approximately 900,000 men as members of shobodan—local volunteer firefighter associations. Similar groups exist in Austria, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, South Africa and other countries. Their member risk—and all too often lose—their lives. In economic terms, volunteers are prosumers, delivering valuable services without remuneration for their time, skills and risks. The scale of volunteer work in the United States of America is huge with something like 84 million people devoting at least a few hours a week to unpaid volunteer work, contributing an estimated 8.8 billion hours, valued at $195.0 billion—additional “free lunch” for the visible economy.

In 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated American’s Gulf Coast, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes and jobs, and led to an almost total breakdown of government emergency assistance efforts. By contrast, volunteers all over the South opened their homes and offered food, medical care and other necessities to the stricken population. In Japan, domestic energy services were seriously underdeveloped until the Great 2011 Tohoku Earthquake with a magnitude 9.0-9.01 struck in the Pacific Ocean, 72 km east of the Oshika Peninsula of the Tohoku region, and lasted six minutes causing a tsunami. This disaster destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and jobs, killed 15,899 people, and cost $360 billion USD. That catastrophe galvanized the nation, and 960,000 volunteers rushed to help with construction, medical care, food and water supplied and counseling services. What was the monetary equivalent of their services to the Japanese economy? Was any of it counted as part of Japan’s GDP? More important, what was its human value? In South Korea, an estimated 6.5 million residents serve as volunteers. They provide relief after typhoon flooding. They help build homes for Habitat for Humanity. They teach refugees from North Korea how to adapt to life in the south. In Italy, volunteers help care for cancer patients and work in hospices. And when unprecedented floods struck Germany in 2002, tend of thousands of volunteers traveled cross-country to battle the rising waters. All these activities are part of the hidden half-the largely off-the-books part—of each country’s wealth system. If their full value were properly calculated, it would change many of the decisions now made by business leaders and politicians.

When economies were local and decentralized, prosuming, too, remained a strictly local phenomenon. With the rise of national markets and the nation-state, helping hands reached beyond the village or neighborhood. Recently, as economies have globalized or re-globalized, many volunteer organizations have gone global as well—expanding their definition of community to embrace the entire human race, and extending their operations accordingly in every field. Examples of international volunteering abound. In 1989, after the San Francisco earthquake, the Japan Emergency Team flew student volunteers across the Pacific to help the victims. When thousands of horses were left to starve in Zimbabwe in 2002 as farmers were ordered off the land, volunteers from as far away as Scotland, Switzerland and South Africa rushed in to rescue the emaciated animals. On a far larger scale, the Red Cross and Red Crescent operate Worldwide. They claim 105 million volunteers in 178 counties and, like other global non-governmental organizations (NGOs), send doctors, nurses, teachers, agronomists and other specialists all over the planet to perform professional services. Almost invariably, these volunteers are assisted by local “amateurs” who pitch in during crises or emergencies. Nothing compared with the outpouring of volunteer assistance after the great tsunami of December 2004. If it ever did, government and organizations publicly pledged huge amounts of emergency assistance money, much of which took a long time to materialize. By contrast, volunteers quickly came from everywhere. The government of Australia closed down an overloaded hotline for volunteers after ten thousand calls “exceeded all expectations.” Aid organizations around the World found themselves so flooded with volunteers they had to turn them away. Amateur radio operators, pilots, nurses, teachers, construction workers, and truck drivers freely applied their skill to the common good.

Here we saw invisible wealth, over and above monetary contributions, being transferred from one country to another, from one end of the Earth to another. The domain now supervised by psychiatrists, as well as other specialists in the deeper understanding of man, is the self. It is another one of the discoveries made in the state of nature, perhaps the most important because it reveals what we really are. We are selves, and everything we do is to satisfy or fulfill ourselves. If not the earliest, Locke was one of the early thinkers, to use the word in its modern sense. From the very beginning it has been difficult to define; and so Woody Allen helped teach us, it has become ever more difficult to do so. We are suffering from a three-hundred-year-long identity crisis. We go back and back, ever farther, hunting the self as it retreats int the forest, just a step ahead of us. Although disquieting, this may, from the point of view of its latest interpretation, be the essence of the self: mysterious, ineffable, indefinable, unlimited, creative, known only by its deeds; in short, like God, of whom it is the impious mirror image. Above all, it is individual, unique; it is me, not some distant man in general or man-in-himself. As Ivan Llyich in Tolstoy’s story explains, “All men are mortal,” in the famous syllogism that guarantees Socrates’ death cannot apply to this Ivan Llyich who had a striped leather ball when he was a child. Everyone knows that the particular as particular escapes the grasp of reason, the form of which is the general or the universal. To sum up, the self is the modern substitute for the soul. All of this goes back to that audacious innovator Machiavelli, who spoke admiringly of men who cared more for their fatherland than for the salvation of their souls. The higher demand made on humans by the soul inevitable lead them to neglect this World in favor of the other World.

Millennia of philosophizing about the soul had resulted in no certitude about it, while those who pretended to know it, the priests, held power or influenced it, and corrupted politics as a result. Princes were rendered ineffective by their own or their subjects’ opinions about the salvation of their souls, while men slaughtered each other wholesale because of differences of such opinion. The care of the soul crippled men in the conduct of their lives. Machiavelli dared men literally to forget about their souls and the possibility of eternal damnation, to do so in theory as well as in practice, as did those men whom he praised. Hobbes, among others, took him up on the dare with a very new interpretation of the old Delphic inscription “Know thyself!,” which Socrates had interpreted as an exhortation to philosophize, and Dr. Freud was to interpret as an invitation to psychoanalysis. Dr. Freud was unknowingly following in the line of Hobbes, who said that each man should look to what he feels—feels, not thinks; he, not another. Self is more feeling than reason, and is in the first place defined as the contrary of the other. “Be yourself.” Astonishingly, Hobbes is the first propagandist for bohemia and preacher of sincerity or authenticity. No wanderings to the ends of the Universe on the wings of imagination, no metaphysical foundations, no soul ordering things as well as men. Man is perhaps a stranger in nature. However, he is something and can get his bearings by his most powerful passions. “Feel!,” Hobbes said. In particular you should imagine how you feel when another man holds a gun to your temple and threatens to shoot you. That concentrates all of the self in a single point, tells us what counts. At that moment one is a real self, not a false consciousness, not alienated by opinions of the church, the state or the public. This experience helps much more to “set priorities” than does any knowledge of the soul or any of its alleged emanations such as conscience.

Throughout the whole tradition, religious and philosophic, man had two concerns, the care of his body and the care of his soul, expressed in the opposition between desire and virtue. In principle he was supposed to long to be all virtue, to break free from the chains of bodily desire. Wholeness would be happiness; but it is not possible, at least in this life. Machiavelli turned things upside down. Happiness is indeed wholeness, so let us try the wholeness available to us in this life. The tradition viewed man as the incomprehensible and self-contradictory union of two substances, body and soul. Man cannot be conceived as body only. However, if the function of whatever is not body in him is to cooperate in the satisfaction of bodily desire, then man’s dividedness is overcome. Simple virtue is not possible, and love of virtue is only an imagination, a kind of perversion of desire effected by society’s (id est, others’) demands on us. However, simple desire is possible. This absoluteness of desire uninhibited by thoughts of virtue is what is found in the state of nature. It represents the turn in philosophy away from trying to tame or perfect desire by virtue, and toward finding out what one’s desire is and living according to it. This is largely accomplished by criticizing virtue, which covers and corrupts desire. Our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is now the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us. This unity of man in desire is fraught with theoretical difficulties, but it is, as we would say, existentially persuasive because, unlike the incomprehensible and self-contradictory union of body and soul, it is affirmed by powerful experiences, such as fear of violent death, that do not require abstract reasonings or exhortations.

Kathleen Norris, the Protestant author of The Cloister Walk, was so drawn to monastic life that she became a Benedictine oblate attached to St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. This involved pledging to abide by the Rule of St. Benedict insofar as her personal situation permitted. Because Norris is married, she observes her vows by frequent visits to the monastery, by assiduous and contemplative reading of the Scriptures, and by learning from the wisdom of St. John’s religious residents. The Benedictine nuns’ reflections on celibacy are so grounded in love that Norris titles one chapter in The Cloister Walk “Learning to Love: Benedictine Women on Celibacy and Relationship.” Older sisters recall the days when they were taught to avoid thoughts of pleasures of the flesh and, of course, actual pleasures of the flesh itself. Surprisingly, several sisters confided that falling in love is an essential element of celibacy. One nun told Norris that she first realized what celibacy really meant when she fell in love with a priest. A prioress elaborated publicly on this theme: “The worst sin against celibacy is to pretend to not have any affections at all. To fall in love is celibacy at work. Celibacy is not a vow to repress our feelings. It is a vow to put all our feelings, acceptable or not, close to our hearts and bring them into consciousness through prayer.” Another nun explained to Norris that when a nun falls in love—a common occurrence—she can use the occasion to shed her romantic images and develop her understanding of what being a nun is really about. The Benedictines also realize that nuns and monks define celibacy differently. The men think of it as abstaining from pleasures of the flesh, the women more as living together in a community and as a way to manage affective relationships. Celibate monks believe their celibacy conserves vital energy, which they divert into church service or expend in consuming food and alcohol, playing sports, and working.

Nuns, on the other hand, deal with their celibacy more directly, thinking, talking, and praying about it. Above all, they must accept it as a personal commitment. “It is a daily choice to live as a celibate,” one nun concluded. Norris extrapolates from nunly meditations on celibacy, particularly its roots in religion and love, to her own state of matrimony and its vow of fidelity. Like Benedictine celibacy, marriage begins as a sacred lifetime commitment that requires self-transcendence. Both celibacy and matrimony “are a discipline. Both can be a form of asceticism,” Norris quotes one nun approvingly. She worries, however, that today’s culture promotes an incompatible view of true love, equating it with possessing and being possessed, whereas the nature of the celibacy she celebrates is precisely the opposite because it “seeks to love non-exclusively, non-possessively.” Indeed, mature Benedictine celibates often speak about their freedom “to love many people without being unfaithful to any of them.” Simply put, their deepest wish is that celibacy will give them “an undivided heart.” It is not that pleasures of the flesh in itself is a sin, but that self-respect demands it should be an expression of something finer than mere barter. It is more satisfactory in the end to establish yourself materially through determination and courage than to yield to temptation. Another point is that promiscuous pleasures of the flesh not infrequently leads to disagreeable entanglements of the universal law which has to be disentangled at the price of suffering. That is one of the several reasons why marriage has been laid down as the normal path for humanity. From a certain time onwards, greater asceticism may be necessary. Dietary changes, with which the individual may experiment, are one step in the right direction.

One should strive to improve one’s whole general condition. All matters involving self-restraint where diet, drinking, smoking, and so on, are concerned should be watched and inner promptings carefully followed. It is also advisable to have regular periods of complete chastity—partly to exercise and develop the will and partly to prepare oneself for the practice of higher meditation. Although a philosophic discipline rejects permanent and exaggerated forms of asceticism, it both accepts and uses occasional and intelligent ones. It remains merely an animal act, an expression of the body’s lust, an nothing more. The reasons are obvious and have prompted many spiritual aspirants, both Asiatic and Christian, to become celibates and monks. These reasons may not be so obvious to those who are obsessed by pleasures of the flesh, as so many modern writers have been who have influenced the younger generations, who are stupefied by the sense-pleasure of it, who are slaves to its recurring habit-forming urges and understanding nothing of the need for its discipline. The philosophers have long known that there is a higher view of pleasures of the flesh, and some among them know that there is even a higher practice of it which eliminates the spiritual obstacle and raises it to the level of spiritual co-operation. This is brought about by substituting stillness for passion. Such a change cannot be achieved without the practice of physical, nervous, emotional, and mental self-control. Just as the high point of meditation provides its glorious result under the condition of a thought-free stillness, in the same way raising pleasures of the flesh to his immeasurably higher octave requires the condition of an inward and outward immobilization. That this can be reached, that the coupling of the two genders could possibly have any relationship with the higher development of man, may seem incredible to those who know only its true purpose.

That inferior tantric sects have eagerly used the teaching to make their desires for pleasures of the flesh appear as holy aspirations is quite true. This is part of the danger in such methods and why they are held in ill repute by many Christian authorities. Pleasures of the flesh must be controlled. It may be conquered, but its strength differs at different stages of the fighter’s life. Chastity is a mind that is completely free from all image making, all the pictures, sensations, which thought has built in its search for pleasure through intimate passions. Then you will find an abundance of energy. Man and woman, having the power between them to create another human being, may use this power either in submission to animal urges or in consonance with their highest ideals. In the former case, only physical or social penalties will keep them from being unrestrainedly self-indulgent. In the latter case, only the serious decision by both parties to provide a bodily vehicle for a higher type of reincarnating ego will bring them together in the procreative act. Children will then owe their birth to the serious act and deliberate purpose of two calm, mature persons, not to the chance union and ungoverned passion of two drifting ones. A substance so valuable that it can create another human being, must be used in accordance with its value, not squandered in unthinking indulgence. History gives enough evidence to show that too many stern attempts to impose celibate ways of living unloosed some of the lusts and monsters they seek to bind. They could not be enforced on the unready. Yet, humans still need to be taught how they can be lifted up to the Heavens. They can be brought to dismiss their ancient enmity towards spiritual aspiration, to unite and work together for humans’ redemption, their enlightenment, and their salvation.

When he tried to eradicate all desires for pleasures of the flesh, Tolstoy took long cross-county walks and bicycle rides in the early period. Those who have no desire to go to the extreme length to which his highly ascetic turn took him, may nevertheless find cycling a helpful and healthy exercise. When this process of balancing the two forces comes to an end, the male-female consciousness of the real human being will be established at last. The person who is pure of heart, experiences that God is good to one. One does not experience it as a consequence of the purification of one’s heart, but because only as one who is pure in heart is one able to come to the sanctuaries. This does not mean the Temple precincts in America, but the sphere of God’s holiness, they holy mysteries of God. Only to one who draw near to these is the true meaning of the conflict revealed. However, the true meaning of the conflict, is the wicked, for the pure in heart is not only too easily misled into thinking—that the present state of affairs is replaced by a future state of affairs of a quite different kind, in which in the end things go well with the good and badly with the bad; in the language of modern though the meaning is that the bad do not truly exist, and their end brings about only this change, that they now inescapably experience their non-existence, the suspicion of which they had again and again succeeded in dispelling. Their life was set in slippery places; it was so arranged as to slide into the knowledge of their own nothingness; and when this finally happens, in a moment, the great terror fall upon them and they are consumed with terror. Their life has been a shadow structure in a dream of God’s. God awakes, shakes off the dream, and disdainfully watches the dissolving shadow image.

Speaking of images, there has been so little research on the neurophysiology of television viewing. However, TV viewing is known to affect children’s verbal abilities and other physical, cognitive, and emotional development in psychological studies. However, the brain structural development associated with TV viewing has never been investigated. Here we examined cross-sectional correlations between the duration of TV viewing and regional gray/white matter volume (rGMV/rWMV) among 133 boys and 143 girls as well as correlations between the duration of TV viewing and longitudinal changes that occurred a few years later among 111 boys and 105 girls. After correcting for confounding factors, we found positive effects of TV viewing or rGMV of the frontoplar and medial prefrontal areas in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, positive effects of TV view on rGMV/rWHV of areas of the visual cortex in cross-sectional analyses, and positive effects of TV viewing on rGMV of the hypothalamus/septum and sensorimotor areas in the longitudinal analyses. These anatomical correlates may be linked to previously known effects on TV viewing on verbal competence, aggression, and physical activity. In particular, the present results showed effects of TV viewing on the frontopolar area of the brain, which has been associated with intellectual abilities. Nonetheless, when we watch television, our usual processes of thinking and discernment are semifunctional at best. While television appears to have the potential to provide useful information to viewers—and is celebrated for its educational function—the technology of television and the inherent nature of the viewing experience actually inhibit learning as we usually think of it. Very little cognitive, recallable, analyzable, thought-based learnings takes place while watching TV.

TV viewing can lead to reduced amounts of cranial gray matter—home to the neurons that perform the bulk of our mental processing. Individuals who watched, on average, about an hour and a half more daily television than their peers throughout mid-to-late adulthood saw their brain volume reduced by approximately .5 percent. That percentage may seem small, but prevailing scientific thought indicates that preserving our brain integrity can prolong the time until we notice age-related cognitive decline. Longitudinal study data points to a correlation between excessive TV viewing and poorer performance on cognitive tests. The evidence is that television not only destroys the capacity of the viewer to attend, it also, by taking over complex of direct and indirect neural pathways, decreases vigilance—the general state of arousal which prepares the organism for action should its attention be drawn to specific stimulus. The individual therefore may be looking at the unexpected or interesting but cannot act upon it in such a way as to complete the purposeful processing gestalt. The continuous trance-like fixation of the TV viewer is then not attention but distraction—a form akin to daydreaming or time out. Since television information is taking place where the viewer is not, it cannot be acted upon. The viewer must deliberately inhibit the neural pathways between visual data and the autonomic nervous system, which stimulate movement and mental attention. To do otherwise than inhibit the process would be ridiculous. The viewer is left in a passive but also frustrated state. The nature of the processes carried out in the left cortex and particularly area thirty-nine [the common integrative area] are those unique to human as opposed to other mammalian life. It is the center of logic, logical human communication an analysis, integration of sensory components and memory, the basis of humans’ conscious, purposeful, and time free abilities and actions. It is the critical function of humans that makes one distinctively human.

The evidence shows that human beings “habituate” to repetitive light-stimuli (flickering light, dot patterns, limited eye movement). If habituation occurs, then the brain has essentially decided that there is nothing of interest going on—at least nothing that anything can be done about—and virtually quits processing the information that goes in. In particular, the left-brains common integrative area goes into a kind of holding pattern. Viewing is at the conscious level of somnambulism. The right half of the brain, which deals with more subjective cognitive processes—dream images, fantasy, intuition—continues to receive the television images. However, because the bridge between the right and the left brains has been effectively shattered, all cross-processing, the making conscious of the unconscious data and brining it into usability, is eliminated. The information goes in, but it cannot be easily recalled or thought about. Therefore, television information enters unfiltered and whole, directly into the memory banks, but it is not available for conscious analysis, understanding or learning. It is sleep teaching. All of this helps to explain recent findings that children, after watching television, have difficulty recalling what they have just seen. Whatever “knowledge” they gain is the sort that passes through the conscious regions where it would be available for recall and use. Television a sleep teaching would also help explain other observations, from political work, that the more that public issues are confined to television, the less knowledgeable the public seems to be about them. The voter cannot process information, or is apparently receiving. When Carter and Ford made their implicit agreement to avoid content and concentrate on style, they were right on the mark. Brain activity during television viewing, no matter what program it is, human brainwave activity enters a characteristic pattern.

The response is to the medium, rather than to any of its content. Once the set goes on, the brain waves slow down until a preponderance of alpha and delta brain waves become the habitual pattern. The longer the set is on, the slower the brainwave activity. As a universal medium, a supremely versatile extension of our senses, our cognition, and our memory, the networked computer, which is another electronic device that takes up our time and alters the way the brain works, serves as a particularly powerful neural amplifier. Its numbing effects are equally strong. The computer extends the processing capabilities of our central nervous system and in the process also alters it. Electronic media are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and easily linked. Thanks to its plasticity, the nervous system can take advantage of this compatibility and merge with the electronic media, making a single, larger system. There is another, even deeper reason why our nervous systems are so quick to “merge” with our computers. Evolution has imbued our brains with a powerful social instinct, which is a set of processes for inferring what those around us are thinking and feeling. Recent neuroimaging studies indicate that three highly active brain regions—one in the prefrontal cortex, one in the parietal cortex, and one at the intersection of the parietal and temporal cortices—are specifically dedicated to the task of understanding the goings-on of other people’s minds. Out innate ability for mind reading has played an important role in the success of our species, allowing us to coordinate large groups of people to achieve goals that individuals could not.

As we have entered the computer age, however, our talent for connecting with other minds has had an unintended consequence. The chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought can lead us to perceived minds where no minds exist, even in inanimate objects. There is growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined. Such neural mirroring helps explain why we are so quick to attribute human characteristics to our computers and computer characteristics to ourselves—why we hear a human voice when a digital assistant speaks. Our willingness, even eagerness, to enter into a single, larger system with our data-processing devices is an outgrowth not only of the characteristics of the digital computer as an informational medium but of the characteristics of our socially adapted brains. While this cybernetic blurring of mind and machine may allow us to carry out certain cognitive tasks far more efficiently, it poses a threat to our integrity as human beings. Even as the larger system into which our minds so readily meld is lending us its powers, it is also imposing on us its limitations. To put a new spin on the idea that we program our computers and thereafter they program us. Even at a practical level, the effects are not always as beneficial as we want them to be. As the many studies of hypertext and multimedia show, our ability to learn can be severely compromised when our brains become overloaded with diverse stimuli online. More information can mean loess knowledge. While the computer may show some benefits in the beginning with software programs that can help solve puzzles, calculate equations, and correct spelling, in the end there are declines in the ability to use these functions when software is not available.

However, people who use their own brains to solve puzzles, calculate equations, dictionaries to check their spelling may start off slower, but build up enough cognitive ability to become more proficient and quicker at dealing with these tasks. Those who use their own brains are better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tend to rely on simple trial and error. Often, in fact, those with the helpful software are shown to become so dependent that they no longer rely on their brain, they may even trust their own intellectual ability less, which decreases their confidence and brain functioning. Eight months after the study, people who use their own brains more frequently, instead of depending on computer software some more confidence and quicker intellectual abilities, they tend to be twice as fast as those who relay on computer software. People who use their own brains consistently demonstrate more focus, more direct and economical solutions, better strategies, and better knowledge. The more that people depend on explicit guidance from software programs, the less engaged they are in the task and the less they end up learning. The findings indicate that as we externalize problem solving and other cognitive chores to our computer, we reduce our brain’s ability to build stable knowledge structures—schemas. The brighter the software, the dimmer the user. That is why old fashion men are always planning for a time when the lights go out. They always want to make sure they know how to drive and park their own cars, to use their own brains to think, write by hand, and make sure they know how to build things and repair stuff without waiting on a machine or another person.