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I'm not sure how that Plato quote demonstrates any advantages. He's talking about how reliance on the written word can erode one's memory. It's precisely about
by mbrock 11y ago
I'm not sure how that Plato quote demonstrates any advantages. He's talking about how reliance on the written word can erode one's memory. It's precisely about the disadvantages of using external tools that replace internal faculties. I cited it to show that the founding father (if you will) of Western philosophy broadly agreed with your point about "assistants" causing us to lose useful skills.
- jacquesm 11y agoInteresting. I wonder what percentage of the readers took that one way or the other. Thank you for the addendum. Below a couple of interesting viewpoints on the 'augmented human', I had not considered those. Trying hard to imagine a modern society without the written word, and whether or not such a thing would even be possible. Imagine somehow leaping to a technological society without having writing in between, what would that society look like?
- mbrock 11y agoThere's some tangentially relevant ideas in a book called "The Spell of the Sensuous," and also in various works by McLuhan. I think the basic idea is attributed to Eric Havelock. This essay seems to be relevant though I just started skimming it: http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/1i/6_havelock.pdf http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/1i/6_haveloc... But basically the idea is that alphabetic literacy creates a whole new style of abstraction and detachment. Before the alphabet there were pictorial glyphs which are still not very abstract, but after the alphabetic revolution in Greece, Havelock traces a new style of philosophy and thinking in general, starting around the time of Plato. Maybe you could compare it to something like the development of algebraic geometry, which allows you to say all kinds of new things in an abstract way, because you move to a level of abstraction that's not limited to what you can represent diagrammatically. Oh, it's called the "alphabet effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_effect It's at least something to consider when thinking about an alternate history where we didn't use written words. We would probably still have "external memory," but maybe in a more symbolic/pictorial/diagrammatic/geometric way. Perhaps we would even have symbolic algebra and math, taught by oral instruction... It is pretty hard to imagine! Abram who wrote "The Spell of the Sensuous" has a different argument than Plato. He also critiques writing and the alphabet, not because it ruins memory but because it allows us to retreat from our sensuous embedding in nature, which ultimately helps create a modern world in which we mostly live in a kind of isolation where we are always surrounded by things of human making. > Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations. The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. To try to steer back towards the original conversation... I'm thinking of things like alarm clocks, which are also technological assistants for doing stuff that we used to do ourselves. They also help maintain a kind of abstraction from our surroundings and "natural" premises: they make us independent of sunrise, circadian rhythms, and so on. And maybe they erode a capacity for waking up at the appropriate time without help. Personally I do avoid using them unless I risk missing a flight or something. If I need to wake up early, I prefer to go to bed early enough to give me a reasonable margin. If I tended to oversleep by hours, I'd consider that a symptom of sleep deprivation or something.