The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet. Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli
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– but not less dumb. Concurrently, computer technicians changed from uniforms to casual or messy clothes, though their detached attitude did not noticeably change.
For my research on those series, I was a finalist in the Italian contest – which led to a personal conversation with the president of the Italian CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, National Research Council). He discouraged me from searching for the law of prime numbers as “a waste of time, something which centuries of mathematicians had already tried to find, but nobody could.” I might instead concentrate my energies on developing useful applications in the scientific arena. He introduced me to the reality that research was most welcomed by society when it could be translated into products and money.
What about the fun and enthusiasm I had doing that research? What about the almost mystical states I reached in diving into the mysteries of prime numbers? What about the development of my perseverance in pursuing such a task, even though (or maybe because) it was an impossible one? What about my capacity to tolerate frustration when my long calculations had been faulty from the beginning of the series?
I recognize now that some important inner qualities had been shaped as I chased those prime numbers. I had learned that the path is itself the goal.
Latin putare means “to prune,” “to cut,” “to clean.” In the etymology of “computer” lies its implicit goal: something to accomplish, to complete, a clear-cut result to reach.
Computing, that increasingly-present activity in our lives, has created what I call the “digitization of reality.” Computing wants answers – well-defined results cleansed of “noise” – and it wants them fast.
Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method which shaped Western science, sought a state of pure thinking, free from the body and from feelings – for in his opinion they would distort the scientific quest. He would be proud of contemporary technical developments which allow both scientists and ordinary people to interact with a machine through pure thinking. But if he could peek into this century, I feel he would miss the philosophical and spiritual attitude he had even as a scientist – which is left out of the technological race.
In our rush, everything which can possibly be automated and speeded up becomes digital. Everything which can be represented by bits and bytes is sucked into the digitizing mentality.
I too believed this, when it was time for university, so I went into computer science – partly to fulfill my need to write a program to find the law of my series. In time I stopped chasing prime numbers, but by then I was a programming enthusiast.
What did not change was my propensity for impossible tasks. Since I enjoyed playing the guitar, I wrote a program for creating chords and harmonies. Then, wanting to grab the secrets of guitarists like Jimi Hendrix or Carlos Santana, I translated their improvisations into digital form. After all, I figured, musical scales have a mathematical structure, so if I could decode and deconstruct their creations, then my software could produce amazing new melodies which I could then reproduce on my guitar.
There was still no affordable way to generate good quality sound from a computer, so as output (programming in C language for the UNIX operating system), I had a list of notes, their pitch, duration, and their attributes like sliding or bending – a sort of score I could perform on my guitar. Far from masterpieces, they were funny, like the caricature of a living person.
Meanwhile, I was working for the computer labs of the new computer science faculty in Milan, preferring to learn through practice rather than study for exams. There was a pioneering atmosphere in the very early 1980s – and many of the students later becoming entrepreneurs of the dotcom revolution in Italy.
The peak of impossibility lay in my plan to create an artificial intelligence system, written in the Prolog programming language, to explore people’s psychological patterns in depth – according to various models, both psychological and spiritual. It never went beyond a very initial idea.
The Limits of Technology
In searching for the law of prime numbers, for the secrets of great guitarists’ solos, or for the understanding of the human soul, 25 years ago, I reached what was – and still remains – the limits of computability.
Finding those limits is perhaps the unconscious secret goal of our drive toward technology. Whatever can be made digital is merely a model created by the mind, which the mind itself can reshape or destroy at any moment.
The mind is by nature dualistic, operating within the same binary logic as computers. The dualistic-binary attitude of looking at the world gives both people and computers a powerful discriminating tool – a tool to produce huge amount of data and to act on matter in powerful ways. Through this dualistic mind we can fulfill our highest “mission” – to be masters of nature, as assigned by the scriptures. But matters that are more than mental – artistic creativity, brilliant intuition, feelings of compassion, love, joy, peace, as well as experiencing spiritual states like a no-mind state of deep meditation – cannot be represented in digital form. Though information technology can point to or inform us about those states, more often than not it keeps us stuck looping at the informational level, actually distancing us from them.
As we reach the limits of technology, either it can stimulate our search for something further – jumping from information to consciousness-processing as Peter Russell (1995) defined it – or we can become hypnotized by the infinite forms information can be shaped into. Like a fascinating psychedelic vision, the digital realm can amaze us forever, but basically it goes no further than the mental level which originally created the technology.
My impossible tasks, seen in retrospect, were my self-inflicted koans. A koan is a question with no apparent answer given by a Zen master to a student. The very effort to find an answer is what transforms consciousness and eventually stops the mind. Staying in the unknown is not comfortable for the mind, but it is the best way to link the subject of the quest with our inner void. From this, greater awareness can arise. By contrast, much of the Web industry is designed to cut through, to deliver answers quickly – not in itself a bad thing, but which can and does weaken the drive of our inner quest.
Since the impossible tasks didn’t pay, I worked on more practical software and wrote about computer science. In 1982, with the UNIX internal architecture still a well-kept secret and without much documentation for the end user, two other students and I wrote a book about UNIX. We printed it with a low-quality dot matrix printer, and I felt like a technical Che Guevara fighting for the liberation of computer knowledge.
What’s Not Computable Isn’t Real
Writing for computer science magazines in the mid ’80s, I alternated technical articles with interviews of philosophers and psychologists about the inner and social implications of the computer revolution, including a column called “Loops” for Informatica Oggi magazine, the leading computer Italian science magazine at the time. My heretical column was scrapped by the publisher after only a few months because some readers complained that those subjects had nothing to do with computer science, and that they’d rather read “real” and “useful” information.
Turning the view 180 degrees toward the inner side, from what we can do with technology to what technology does to us wasn’t a very popular move. Anything that smells of the philosophical, the inner, or the metaphysical is still seen with suspicion by people into technology, who categorize those perspectives as “things which could even be interesting, but vague and non-scientific.” For the most part, challenging technology has become almost taboo in our culture. As Neil Postman (1993) contended: “‘The computer shows…’ or ‘The computer has determined…’ is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence, ‘It is God’s will’ and the effect is roughly the same.”
Technology seems “inevitable.” It is rarely considered that people who are sensitive to what technology does to us might embrace and use technology – though they do it from 360 degrees instead of looking just at the bright front side.
In advanced technological societies there is a reticence