Translator Introduction

Did the invention of the Internet really help humanity gain knowledge and wisdom?

Philosopher Matt Blomenck examines the impact of the Internet on memory and attention, through the dialectics of Socrates and his student Plato 2400 years ago.

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Thoth said, "Behold, O king...a knowledge that will make the Egyptians wiser and more able to remember. I have discovered the secret of wisdom and memory."

And the king answered: "O Thoth, unparalleled master of arts: there is a man who has been given the ability to invent art, and there is another man who judges the harm or benefit this art has brought to those who use it. And now, as the inventor of writing, I see you have attributed to her the opposite of her correct results out of your bias. For this invention will end up in those who will teach it to have poor memory, because they will stop exercising their memory when they rely on the written."

The Phaedrus Dialogue by Plato, translated by Dr.

Princess Helmy Matar

It is surprising that a quote that is more than two thousand years old remains so relevant to the problems we face in our contemporary society.

In this quote, from Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates uses this imagined dialogue between the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of writing, and King Tamuz, to show Phaedrus the dangers of writing and its troubling effects on human wisdom in Socrates' view.

Thoth believes that by inventing letters he found a way to preserve the memories of the Egyptians, and that by doing so he gave the Egyptian people wisdom that goes beyond the limits of natural possibilities.

But Tamuz argues that Thoth's invention of a revolutionary writing technology would not bring Egyptians wisdom at all.

Instead of acquiring new memorizing abilities, the Egyptians would delegate their memory to an external system, thus losing the natural ability to possess internal memory, which is the bedrock of knowledge.

Their memory, and their wisdom, will deteriorate, as knowledge is increasingly stored in external symbols.

The book "Phaedrus Dialogue" by Plato (communication sites)

We're jumping back in time 2,400 years. to the present. Suppose that the invention of Thoth was not the written letters, but the Internet. It is really surprising that the quote at the beginning of the article still applies to the situation. According to Socrates, the Internet is the greatest vehicle for collective amnesia in human history. Because the Internet memory capacity is infinite. While books increase the storage capacity of memory, we find that relying on modern technology, especially the Internet as a huge external bank that stores memory, leads us more and more to amnesia.

Modern philosophers are aware of this, wrote Chalmers, a philosopher interested in memory and the brain, “I bought an iPhone a month ago, and it has already taken over some of the central functions of the brain. The iPhone replaced a portion of my memory when I stored phone numbers and addresses on it that I used to bother my brain with memorizing before.” .

Stigler also wrote in his book For a New Critique of Political Economy (2009) that technology “causes memory to be passed on to machines, to the point where we no longer know the phone numbers of those close to us.”

Smartphones of our modern age are an excellent example of the external objects that can become part of our working memory processes.

Attention and memory

What determines what we remember and what we forget?

To answer this question, we begin by looking at the work of a man who devoted his life to the study of memory.

This man is Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist and neurologist.

According to Kandel, attention is the key to forming vivid memories.

Storing and retaining these memories by linking ideas is a process that requires high levels of mental focus, which can be accessed through intellectual or emotional turnout, or attention, in other words.

In his book In Search of Memory (2006), Kandel writes that for a memory to stick in the mind “the incoming information must be analyzed in depth. This is achieved by paying attention to the information and linking it in a systematic and meaningful way to the knowledge embedded in memory.”

And when we don't pay attention to an idea or experience, the neurons lose their excitatory state within seconds, and the memory escapes the mind, leaving a slight trace.

Our brains are adapted to forgetting by delegating memory tasks and by degrading the ability to pay attention, making them inefficient at remembering.

Attention has become a pressing issue in Western society in recent years, because our capacity for sustained attention has diminished since the inception of the Internet in the early 1990s.

The plethora of messages we encounter every time we go online not only burden our working memory, but also make it difficult for our frontal lobes to pay attention to one specific task.

So, Kandel says, the healthy process of creating memories doesn't start at the origin.

How many of us find it increasingly difficult to focus on tasks that require prolonged attention, such as reading a book or watching a feature film?

Whenever we use the Internet, our brains get used to getting distracted and processing information incredibly quickly and efficiently, without even paying attention to it.

Even while writing this article, I noticed how hard it was to stop opening a page to check Facebook or email, and how hard it was to focus and not get distracted by an external link on a web page I'm looking at.

Our brains are adapted to forgetting by delegating memory tasks and by degrading the ability to pay attention, making them inefficient at remembering.

And so we got caught up in an endless cycle: the more difficult it is to store information in our biological memory, due to the use of the Internet, the more we have to rely on external memory banks.

toxic drug

So, was Socrates right?

Does our increasing reliance on outside technology mean that humanity is doomed to a future of poor concentration and social dementia?

It might seem so.

But there is another way.

According to Kandel, the focus should be on deep thinking in order to regain attention and reverse the flatness of understanding caused by the Internet (networking sites)

In the Phaedrus Dialogue, Thoth describes the invention of writing as "pharmako," a word that has two meanings, antidote and poison.

Thus, after the Phaedrus dialogue, philosophers looked at technology - what humans make and use - in this dual way, meaning that technology bears a pharmacological nature, so to speak.

Also, modern technology can and should be understood as having both curative and toxic properties.

But what is the most effective way to improve focus in the world of flashy knowledge and random information?

Focus on deep thinking in order to regain attention.

The flatness of understanding caused by the Internet must be reversed.

According to Kandel, we should care.

interest

It is interesting to know that the word attention derives from the Latin word (attendere), which can mean the exercise of the mind, and it means to take care of one thing at the same time.

We can see how the word retains its double meaning when we say that the doctor "cares" about the patient.

So if the key to forming memories is attention, then we should really care about what we're doing with our minds.

Furthermore, Bernard Stigler explains that when you describe someone as (attentionné), that is, attentive in French, you are expressing their consideration and respect for others.

"That is, being civil. Although we usually think of attention as the mental ability to focus, it is also a social phenomenon. Attention is both psychological and social, and they are inseparable from one another."

Simply put, to be attentive is to be empathetic.

Not only that, but neglecting the other's point of view loses one's ability to feel the feelings of others, and thus the ability to "caring" for and care for the other, or for the surrounding community.

Based on this, the issue of attention should not be considered as purely neurocentric and dependent on the brain alone.

Our memory extends beyond the boundaries of the biological to the cultural.

As Donald Hebb put it in his timeless phrase: "Cells that stimulate together are linked together."

Thus, links can be formed and dismantled by the cultural situation.

And it is this neuronal ability to form that will save us in the struggle to regain attention and memory.

If we develop a culture in which we learn to balance internet browsing habits with methods of facilitating the deep concentration required in reading or writing, then we can change the structure of our minds to use the many benefits found in external memories.

intellectual legacy

In Plato's dialogues we find references to Socrates' rejection of writing, due to the various dangers inherent in presenting ideas through writing.

But it should be noted that warning of these dangers would have been impossible without this review.

Socrates was an orator, but Plato was a writer, and his legacy lives on to this day through his books.

Indeed, neither Socrates nor Plato can condemn the practice of writing with strong justifications.

It can be said that Plato is the most influential writer in history.

Even Socrates did not write anything, but his thoughts were read carefully by millions.

The nature of the dialectics raised by Socrates through Plato's dialogues is based on a Greek cultural heritage based on writing.

The constant deep attention, which is necessary for reading long writings, especially books, can be seen as a way to take care of our brains and minds. But mastering this first requires understanding how to care for society as a whole. (Then comes attention, in every sense of the word, to the way our culture has developed.) This is if we seek to restore the capabilities that began to fade in the age of the Internet. The Internet is still a recent invention, and we are still learning to adapt to it, but it is necessary to understand its dual “pharmacological” nature in order to make rational decisions based on knowledge, at the individual and collective levels, regarding dealing with technology in the future.

In conclusion, I leave you with a quote from a speech by a writer, in 2005, who saw these problems more clearly than most of his peers.

The great David Foster Wallace says, "To learn to think...that means learning to exercise some control over how you think, and what you think. That means being aware and insightful enough to choose what you pay attention to, and choosing how to construct meaning from experiences...Freedom." The job really requires attention, awareness, discipline, effort, and a real ability to take care of others.”


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Translated by: Philosophical Now