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From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose
by cercatrova 4y ago
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b:
Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters.
Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved.
"The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
- CobrastanJorji 4y agoHow dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?
- MereInterest 4y agoIt depends on where you draw the boundary between "you" and "not-you". If that boundary extends only as far as your skin, then your cell phone makes you forgetful and dependent. If that boundary extends to tools that you use, books in front of you, texts that you can summon up at a moment, then your cell phone gives you a phenomenal recall for facts, though also an increased risk of mind control. For me, I draw the boundary based on latency, unconscious guidance, and predictability. I can send a thought to move my hand, and it moves as I think of it. The hand is within the boundary of "me". Holding a pencil, I do not need to consciously consider how to form each curve of a letter. The pencil is within the boundary of "me". I can predict what emacs will do when given keystrokes, so emacs is within the boundary of "me". On the other hand, there is a large delay between deciding to open a door and it responding to my pull, so it clearly is not "me". I need to consciously consider what search terms to query, and cannot do so at an unconscious level. Even when I repeat the exact same query as I did a year ago, I may not find the results I was searching for, and so there is no predictability. These lead me to feel that a search engine is not within the boundary of "me".
- CobrastanJorji 4y agoYour system of distinguishing "me" from "not-me" via a quantitative metric is interesting to me because it's not a binary. Human reaction time for hands is a bit faster than feet. Are my hands more "me" than my feet? Well, that kind of intuitively checks out to me. But reflex reactions, like blinking, have less than half the latency of conscious reactions. Are my reflex reactions more me than my conscious decisions? Your door example raises further questions. When I pick up a remote control, the control moves just as easily as my hand. Does the remote become an equal part of me immediately?
- medstrom 4y agoA remote-controlled door would become part of you, the instant you hold the remote.
- 4y ago
- SilasX 4y agoDid you have a point with this? That couldn't be placed at the top? I don't know how hating on writing is related to people being disoriented by pushbuttons, and maybe if you stated what you thought the parallel was, you could have saved everyone some time and effort in reading hard-to-parse prose.
- cercatrova 4y ago> people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”
- SilasX 4y agoAny reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing a critical block of 50?
- plurinshael 4y agoLighten up, Francis.
- NIL8 4y agoI spotted this gem of a comment while scrolling and had to scroll back up to be sure I hadn't misread it. It's both hilarious and pertinent! Well said, "Big Toe."
- yamtaddle 4y agoI think the reference is cliché to the point that I usually hate to see it, but did understand the original post's intent in context (that is, the context provided by skimming the linked article to which the post is a reaction) without issue. It didn't even occur to me that it was anything other than plain.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blix 4y agoIs Ammon not absolutely right? New information technology induces changes with how we interface with information, almost certainly a mixed bag of good and bad. Writing is directly associated with the decline of memory-based oral traditions. You can probably safely argue that writing brings many positives, but that does not preclude the existence of negatives.
- noobermin 4y agoThis allegory is a trope at this point, but it is sort of true in some sense. People seem to internalize (yes, memorize) facts less and less nowadays because such facts can be queried immediately from the internet. While being able to look things up is great, without memorization synthesizing information is difficult because it's harder to draw connections between facts without having them in your head at the same time.
- eru 4y agoOf course, programs like SuperMemo can harness the power of computers to make us remember.
- pas 4y agoNot really. He mentioned instruction, but he fails to notice that reading and hearing can both happen, as they do happen without instruction. And the crux of the matter is not the mode of information transmission, it's the veracity of the content. And if someone has the time, attention, effort to speak to you they usually want something. How do you know your interests are aligned? Reciting things from memory doesn't help much with applied epistemology (rationality).
- blix 4y ago> He mentioned instruction, but he fails to notice that reading and hearing can both happen, as they do happen without instruction. > ... they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant By claiming he doesn't notice something that he clearly and explicitly mentions, I feel you are directly making his point.