Thinking and Technology

    According to Aristotle [Nicomachean Ethics. Book VI], the rational soul has two thinking drives: one is a calculating action (to logistikon), the other a scientific impulse (to epistemotikon). The calculating aspect is the way humans deal with contingent matters (things that could be otherwise) while the epistemic aspect deals with necessary questions (things that could not be otherwise). Calculating leads to practical thinking while scientific thinking leads to theoretical knowledge. Following this basic distinction, we can say that what today we call technology falls in the first category, calculating, whose realm is the practical matters of life. 

So technology is practical thinking, a knowledge embedded in everyday life. On the other hand, science or theoretical knowledge studies necessary objects and relations, the foundations of all knowledge, that are not directly related to everyday life thinking, but is its support, as is the case with philosophical and pure mathematical thinking. The distinction is important in order to understand the separation of these two realms. Technology is founded on theoretical thinking (epistemological thinking) but not the inverse, so we cannot expect that technological thinking solves epistemological questions: Technology can neither make clearer the truth of objects and relations nor unveil the meaning of our life and the Cosmos. The realm of technological thinking has very clear limits within the scope of our thinking force.

To understand technology we need to answer questions such as: Is all technological thinking mechanical? Has epistemological thinking mechanical traits? What is the foundation of mechanical thinking in relation to human nature and life in general? What is the machine component in physiology, emotions, and general thinking? What human thinking is not repetitive and machine-like? Are we in control of the mechanical processes that we design? Do we really control our mechanical thinking? To what degree are we alienated by our machines? Are machines ethically responsible? Is all practical work alienating? 

It is interesting to notice that the vital force in our bodies works mainly in an unconscious manner. It is not only that the autonomic nervous system does not require our attention, it is rather the fact that all that goes well inside our bodies happens basically unnoticed. However, this does not mean that a physiological system acts like a machine, for evolution implies a set of interactions between life and environment altogether different from the one established between machine and its surroundings. Machines are not environmentally mimetic, but life is. All too often we mistake the model for the thing modelized. Our theoretical models of Nature are helpful oversimplifications that can never be mistaken for Reality. Nature is not an object, humans are not objects. We don’t have and could never have a Science of Reality, for Reality is not an object. We can never know the Real, we simply can be the Real, just being fully human.

The human thinking force operates in different levels of semantical complexity. On the one hand, there is mechanical thinking, which is a kind of mineral-like producer of rigid thoughts, a sort of mineral mind that performs operations based on distinct discrete entities, like the integer numbers, with clear-cut simple mental identities closed to the environment. But we also have vital processes of thought, with much more fluid identities of its elements. These include the processes know as allegories, metaphors, and morphisms in general. This level requires a semantical complexity unknown to the mineral thinking of formal logical calculus, or of our simplest syllogisms. Vital thinking proceeds by association, but also but, and most important by a constant act of suspending identities: the whole is taken for the part and the part for the whole. Vital thinking is closer to what we call magical thinking. The likeness of forms, or even of attributes produce exchanges of identities, physical proximity, and distances are extrapolated to other types of relationships. 

    Consider for a moment Gongora’s famous metaphor: “(…) juntaba el cristal líquido al humano por el arcaduz bello de una mano(...)”, that we could translate as "(...) the liquid crystal joined the human crystal by the beautiful pipe of a hand (…)". The sentence is describing the action of a girl drinking water. The liquid crystal, water, joins the human water, saliva, when the girl drinks water taken with her hands. Such a thought adds different semantic layers and transfigures the scene, the very common scene of someone drinking: the mechanical has been vitalized. When we read Gongora actions are projected into another space, a very human space, even in its extreme transformation, showing to us a legacy of images and worlds of meaning that open up for us a new emotional dimension.

    There is also a third kind of thinking force operating in us that surpasses in complexity the vital and the mineral-like forms of thinking, for it includes them and recapitulates them in a higher setting, and ads something new. We live in complex social structures, built upon complex narratives of identity that include complex and sophisticated emotions. Those structures of thought, let’s call them purely mental, require the previous ones but it operates with them in terms of harmonic forms, constructing mediating processes, inter-human, human-environment, human-cosmos. It is a self-conscious force of thinking that at its highest peak operates with identities and differences in an aesthetic fashion. Purely mental thinking is a force of integration and balance. Finally, there is a fourth kind of thinking force that supposes the emergence of a yet uncommon form of thinking. At its simplest expression, it operates based on what we could call “intuition”. The term is not so good for it is semantically very ambiguous. It is not intuition as a kind of fuzzy and imprecise feeling. It is neither intuition in Kantian terms, as information obtained through the senses. It is rather understanding by continuity of being. I understand life because I am life, and such an understanding is not purely based on the information of my senses, nor is the result of my inferences, neither in the intellectual social structures that provide me with a narration of identity. I understand myself by being myself. As a condition for intuition, there are two forces that are needed for its opening up: freedom and love. These are thought to be moral constructions, but even if we can find involuted forms of these human forces in previous stages of Life-Intelligence, they are organs of a clear and powerful form of thinking, that we may call “supramental”. Thinking itself then transforms into a new sense-organ. What senses are for our dealing with physical forms and matter, supramental thinking is for our dealing with new dimensions in our being. 

    When we deal with technology we have to bring into the picture all these considerations. It is too narrow-minded and dangerously naive to talk about human evolution in terms of technology. The need for an urgent discussion of technology is the symptom of a more than a century-long crisis. The problems faced are not only deeply rooted but also affect most areas of our social constructions. The unbalanced of our narratives of identity in relation to our economic actions is only speeding up a change of Civilization, unfortunately, through a catastrophe.