Cyberman №7 — Reality and Technology — Consciousness Illusion, How Tech Is Changing Your Personal Reality, How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind and a song by Portishead
Welcome fellow Cyber people.
Every week, this newsletter will bring you a few interesting articles about contemporary human beings, machines, and interactions between them.
It will be curated to bring different perspectives to these subjects, to ask important questions and maybe suggest a few possible answers.
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This week we will look at how people experience reality and how is technology affecting this perception.
I am going to offer you a different pill, which — if it works — will convince you that your own consciousness is a sort of illusion, a fiction created by your brain to help you keep track of its activities.
“Again, the experience involves acquiring information (about sounds, substances, textures or the state of one’s body), identifying objects, forming beliefs, sensing opportunities for action, generating expectations and reactive dispositions, and the triggering of memories, associations, and emotions. Again, this involves access to consciousness. Sensory signals are routed to specialist processing areas of the brain, and the information extracted is then globally broadcast to other mental systems that produce the various effects. And, again, there seems to be more to experience than all these sensitivities and reactions.”
…
“For science finds nothing qualitative in our brains, any more than in the world outside. The atoms in your brain aren’t colored and they don’t compose a colorful inner image. (And even if they did, there is no inner eye to see it.) Nor do they have any other qualitative properties. There are no inner sounds, smells, tastes and pains, and no inner observer to experience them if there were. It is true that cognitive scientists talk of there being representations in the brain. “
The Unsettling Ways Tech Is Changing Your Personal Reality
From the existential dread caused by a low phone battery to the identity-nudging power of online ads, the evidence is mounting that interaction with technology has peculiar and, in some cases, pernicious effects on how people think and feel.
“Even when you think you’re focused on a task and performing it, having a distractor that captures your attention very briefly can fundamentally change what you thought you were perceiving.”
…
“Consumers who knew they had received a targeted ad reported being more interested in the advertised product, and even changed their self-perceptions to be more in line with what the ad implied about them”
How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind
When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite.
“Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities, and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.
And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.”
…
“Cornell professor Brian Wansink demonstrated this in his study showing you can trick people into keep eating soup by giving them a bottomless bowl that automatically refills as they eat. With bottomless bowls, people eat 73% more calories than those with normal bowls and underestimate how many calories they ate by 140 calories.
Tech companies exploit the same principle. Newsfeeds are purposely designed to auto-refill with reasons to keep you scrolling, and purposely eliminate any reason for you to pause, reconsider or leave.”
For the end of this issue listen to Roads, live performance by Portishead
in Roseland New York:
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