You gotta have knowledge about everything you surround yourself with? Will it lead to disaster if you don't know? — Raymond
Trust is implicated here. There is too much for any single person to know about technology. I trust the vaccines work. I trust the brakes on my car work. — emancipate
Harman defines real objects as inaccessible and infinitely withdrawn from all relations and then puzzles over how such objects can be accessed or enter into relations: "by definition, there is no direct access to real objects. Real objects are incommensurable with our knowledge, untranslatable into any relational access of any sort, cognitive or otherwise. Objects can only be known indirectly. And this is not just the fate of humans — it’s the fate of everything."[10] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Harman
Can anyone help me explore this idea and possibly give more "meat" to why this seems a very major problem? — schopenhauer1
I see it as a major problem that most of us have minimal understanding of how and what produced the items we use to live (survive, find comfort in, and entertain). I see this as a major problem in terms of our helplessness to a system that is beyond our efficacy. — schopenhauer1
as this knowledge is for the chosen ones only — Raymond
Being self-sufficient seems like it is an important quality of a mature human being. It seems to me that there is something fundamentally repulsive (pathetic) about not being able to take care of yourself when you ought to be able to. Not understanding the technology we use and being unable to live without it makes realizing this quality of self-sufficiency impossible. — _db
Our technology has advanced exponentially while the species has hardly evolved. This seems to me a fundamental problem. — NOS4A2
And speaking of cells, consider also that our bodies themselves are more complex machines than our spaceships or our computers. So even the caveman depends on that which he does not understand. He's just ignorant of his ignorance. — ajar
Although we've used technology of various kinds for millenia, it seems to me that only recently, relatively speaking, have some of us come to believe that technology renders us somehow divorced from "reality" and "being" or some-such in what strikes me as a hyperbolic, Romantic, quasi-mystical manner a la Heidegger with his talk of hydro-electric plants as if they were monsters, or our coercing the world to do what we please, summoning forth the power of the sun (I forget what he condemned so excitedly). He compared it to the peasant lovingly planting seed in Nature's bosom, if I recall correctly. There was a chalice too, I believe. Chalice good, coal bad.
Technology presents real problems, but I suggest some restraint when it comes to contriving metaphysical and epistemological horrors arising from the fact that we don't know how to make certain things. — Ciceronianus
Here I am using a computer in which I only know a vague understanding of certain things but for which the technology is well known amongst electronic and computer engineers. — schopenhauer1
What is it about this behemoth complexity upon complexity that seems to subsume ones own efficacy? It is pathetic our reliance but inability to know all of it.. But it is more than that. — schopenhauer1
Let's start in the inner workings of our brain and intuition. It's powerful.There is at least some form of power dynamics that comes from being excluded from that which we survive from. — schopenhauer1
All of it requires millions and millions of minutia-knowledge that I can never fully comprehend.. And even if I did, all the minutia that is adjacent to that , and to that, and to that.. What is it about this behemoth complexity upon complexity that seems to subsume ones own efficacy? It is pathetic our reliance but inability to know all of it.. But it is more than that. — schopenhauer1
You are ignorant in any highly detailed way, of your own way of being and survival. — schopenhauer1
As someone who works in the computer industry I can safely say that the technology is not well-known amongst the engineers that are thought to understand it. — _db
That is one of the things that is so fucking sinister about modern technology, nobody understands it in its entirety, nor can they manufacture it themselves. Every technician understands a part, and even then they don't need to understand it as much as they just need to know how to use it. And if a person were to come close to grasping all of what goes on inside a single computer model, it would only be by an immense sacrifice of everything else in their life. — _db
Well I think it certainly has something to do with Marx's notion of alienation, being reduced to a cog, a button-presser, the maintainer, etc. Humans did not evolve to do this sort of crap, it goes against our natural state of being. There's this blind, amoral force of technique that drags us along in its current of relentless improvement of efficiency, whether we like it or not. — _db
Let's start in the inner workings of our brain and intuition. It's powerful. — Caldwell
Is there something like the fantasy of an ideal adult that is frustrated here? Even our 'visionary' tech billionaires are riding on the back of a beast they can't control or understand. Some of us have tiny maps of the abyssal territory that are just a little less tiny than the maps of others. — ajar
Technology can only be used optimally to the extent it is understood. Or to the extent that it's use is directed and controlled by those that really understand it, I guess.... — Pantagruel
Check out the movie "Don't Look Up" if you haven't already seen it. It is a hilarious (and frightening) look at people enslaved by their own tech. — Pantagruel
our 'visionary' tech billionaires are riding on the back of a beast they can't control or understand — ajar
I just think there is a huge power differential regarding the people that know the technology and those that just consume it. I think it is this that is the real political-economic power in the world- who understands and can produce the technology. — schopenhauer1
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