The apparent unanimous agreement with my position makes me suspicious that my argument somehow makes a strawman of Dreyfus’ position, but I can’t see it.
6 Comments
The irony is that it is a disembodied embodiment.
There’s is a huge difference between ‘being engaged with X’ and ‘being embodied in X’, which you seem to take to be the same thing (or, at least, you take the former to pave the way for the latter). I am engaged with Photoshop, but not embodied in it. I’m manipulating images on a screen. There is also a distinction to be made between ’embodiment’ and ‘virtual embodiment’. Internet/Software embodiment is the latter kind, which is pseudo-embodiment. The cursor stands for me in Photoshop: it gives me a location within the virtual space. This location is within a 2-D space, which is why it is virtual. It’s ‘as if’ embodiment. Too much equivocation on your part.
If there is equivocation taking place, it is Dreyfus that is the guilty party.
Dreyfus argues that the ability to acquire skills, and ultimately to discover meaning and relevance, is an ability of the body. He criticizes the internet for disengaging the body, which he thinks undermines our ability to form meaningful friendships online, and to understand the significance and relevance of the information we get online. The cursor may stand for me, but it is not part of my body, so it is not the kind of foundation on which to build skill and understanding.
His argument is really, really bad, particularly because he points to groups like the Extropians as paradigm Internet champions, and then criticizes them for being ‘despisers of the body’, as Nietzsche would say. Dreyfus is fighting against a Platonic/Cartesian position where the body is the ‘tomb of the soul’, and he thinks the Internet is trying to realize this Platonic ideal by disengaging the body. Dreyfus thinks this will ultimately fail.
So if there is an equivocation between being embodied and being engaged, it is Dreyfus who is making the mistake. But for the sake of argument I am willing to grant his assumption that skills and meaning and relevance require bodily engagement. I suppose my argument is a modus tollens: we DO develop skills and form meaningful relationships online, so Dreyfus must be wrong that we are disembodied on the net. And I want to extend this to all forms of interactions with technology.
Now Dreyfus doesn’t talk this way specifically, but he may very well agree with you and say that technologically mediated interactions are a kind of virtual (as-if) embodiment. And I think that is the general consensus among other philosophers in this area- Dennett and Haugeland would probably agree to that as well. But Dreyfus would take the hard line and insist that virtual embodiment is necessarily a deficient form of embodied engagement, and it is too weak support real human interactions.
But thats just stupid. I’ll continue after I catch my bus.
What the dizzle said. The dreyfus-did-it defense is unconvincing. For starters, Dreyfus would deny that we’re embodied on the internet. If you, somehow, convinced him that we DO develop skills and form meaningful relationships online then he wouldn’t be forced to conclude that we are embodied (which is good for him, since as the diz says, that would implicate him in an equivocation). Rather, he should give up the premise that skills and meaning and relevance require bodily engagement. As should you.
Also, I think I could do some fancy dancing to show that you’re actually affirming the consequent rather than modusing the tollens, but that’s neither here nor there.
Dreyfus’ gets his theories of embodied engagement from Merleau-Ponty and to some extent from Heidegger, and I’m not foolish enough to think that a YouTube video of some girl on a Wii is enough to refute this tradition. But he literally argues in On The Internet (and elsewhere) that it is a short step from disembodied engagement on the internet to rampant nihilism. My argument is simply that Dreyfus’ nihilistic predictions are wrong, so if he is right about embodiment then we have to rethink the way we are engaged with out technological environment. That still looks like a modus tollens to me.
Maybe Dreyfus isn’t worth taking seriously. I am trying to be as sympathetic with his position as I can because he is one of the most outspoken critics of the Internet, and I think it is worthwhile to at least understand the basis of his criticisms. Maybe I should look harder for criticisms from someone less crazy than Dreyfus.
If the correct conclusion to draw is that ’embodiment’ isn’t all that important, then I am perfectly happy with that conclusion. But Dreyfus aside, embodied cognition is quite popular, and I think it will take a lot more work on my part to mount an effective attack on that trend. I’m not sure how far I want to go in this direction. The embodied cognition movement is motivated by the same anti-Cartesian arguments against other worldly minds that Dreyfus uses here. To understand the mind we must understand its behavior relative to (and embedded in) an environment. That seems right to me; I simply want to extend the scope of the ‘environment’ out into technological space.
Are you wanting to argue that there can be disembodied cognition? I hope not. You should just redefine what counts as a body. Programs (software, Internet…) need hardware (chips, casings, wires, electricity) to run on. That’s program-embodiment. We have different bodies (made of different sorts of stuff, i.e., mostly carbon-based stuff) from programs (whose “bodies” are mostly silicon-based stuff). The question, then, is how far can the Cognition/Body-Program/Hardware analogy go. (Yes. I know you don’t think it’s an analogy. That’s just what you’re going to come up against.)
Is Dreyfus’ argument against the Internet trying to prevent a slippery slope to nihilism (i.e., in order to stop nihilism we can’t take the first step to Internet engagement, which means a requirement of embodiment), or he it positing the slippery slope? If it’s the former, you could just stop the slipping one step further down the slope (than he goes) at disembodied engagement. If it’s the latter, it’s probably not a good argument worth paying much attention to.
The irony is that it is a disembodied embodiment.
There’s is a huge difference between ‘being engaged with X’ and ‘being embodied in X’, which you seem to take to be the same thing (or, at least, you take the former to pave the way for the latter). I am engaged with Photoshop, but not embodied in it. I’m manipulating images on a screen. There is also a distinction to be made between ’embodiment’ and ‘virtual embodiment’. Internet/Software embodiment is the latter kind, which is pseudo-embodiment. The cursor stands for me in Photoshop: it gives me a location within the virtual space. This location is within a 2-D space, which is why it is virtual. It’s ‘as if’ embodiment. Too much equivocation on your part.
If there is equivocation taking place, it is Dreyfus that is the guilty party.
Dreyfus argues that the ability to acquire skills, and ultimately to discover meaning and relevance, is an ability of the body. He criticizes the internet for disengaging the body, which he thinks undermines our ability to form meaningful friendships online, and to understand the significance and relevance of the information we get online. The cursor may stand for me, but it is not part of my body, so it is not the kind of foundation on which to build skill and understanding.
His argument is really, really bad, particularly because he points to groups like the Extropians as paradigm Internet champions, and then criticizes them for being ‘despisers of the body’, as Nietzsche would say. Dreyfus is fighting against a Platonic/Cartesian position where the body is the ‘tomb of the soul’, and he thinks the Internet is trying to realize this Platonic ideal by disengaging the body. Dreyfus thinks this will ultimately fail.
So if there is an equivocation between being embodied and being engaged, it is Dreyfus who is making the mistake. But for the sake of argument I am willing to grant his assumption that skills and meaning and relevance require bodily engagement. I suppose my argument is a modus tollens: we DO develop skills and form meaningful relationships online, so Dreyfus must be wrong that we are disembodied on the net. And I want to extend this to all forms of interactions with technology.
Now Dreyfus doesn’t talk this way specifically, but he may very well agree with you and say that technologically mediated interactions are a kind of virtual (as-if) embodiment. And I think that is the general consensus among other philosophers in this area- Dennett and Haugeland would probably agree to that as well. But Dreyfus would take the hard line and insist that virtual embodiment is necessarily a deficient form of embodied engagement, and it is too weak support real human interactions.
But thats just stupid. I’ll continue after I catch my bus.
What the dizzle said. The dreyfus-did-it defense is unconvincing. For starters, Dreyfus would deny that we’re embodied on the internet. If you, somehow, convinced him that we DO develop skills and form meaningful relationships online then he wouldn’t be forced to conclude that we are embodied (which is good for him, since as the diz says, that would implicate him in an equivocation). Rather, he should give up the premise that skills and meaning and relevance require bodily engagement. As should you.
Also, I think I could do some fancy dancing to show that you’re actually affirming the consequent rather than modusing the tollens, but that’s neither here nor there.
Dreyfus’ gets his theories of embodied engagement from Merleau-Ponty and to some extent from Heidegger, and I’m not foolish enough to think that a YouTube video of some girl on a Wii is enough to refute this tradition. But he literally argues in On The Internet (and elsewhere) that it is a short step from disembodied engagement on the internet to rampant nihilism. My argument is simply that Dreyfus’ nihilistic predictions are wrong, so if he is right about embodiment then we have to rethink the way we are engaged with out technological environment. That still looks like a modus tollens to me.
Maybe Dreyfus isn’t worth taking seriously. I am trying to be as sympathetic with his position as I can because he is one of the most outspoken critics of the Internet, and I think it is worthwhile to at least understand the basis of his criticisms. Maybe I should look harder for criticisms from someone less crazy than Dreyfus.
If the correct conclusion to draw is that ’embodiment’ isn’t all that important, then I am perfectly happy with that conclusion. But Dreyfus aside, embodied cognition is quite popular, and I think it will take a lot more work on my part to mount an effective attack on that trend. I’m not sure how far I want to go in this direction. The embodied cognition movement is motivated by the same anti-Cartesian arguments against other worldly minds that Dreyfus uses here. To understand the mind we must understand its behavior relative to (and embedded in) an environment. That seems right to me; I simply want to extend the scope of the ‘environment’ out into technological space.
Are you wanting to argue that there can be disembodied cognition? I hope not. You should just redefine what counts as a body. Programs (software, Internet…) need hardware (chips, casings, wires, electricity) to run on. That’s program-embodiment. We have different bodies (made of different sorts of stuff, i.e., mostly carbon-based stuff) from programs (whose “bodies” are mostly silicon-based stuff). The question, then, is how far can the Cognition/Body-Program/Hardware analogy go. (Yes. I know you don’t think it’s an analogy. That’s just what you’re going to come up against.)
Is Dreyfus’ argument against the Internet trying to prevent a slippery slope to nihilism (i.e., in order to stop nihilism we can’t take the first step to Internet engagement, which means a requirement of embodiment), or he it positing the slippery slope? If it’s the former, you could just stop the slipping one step further down the slope (than he goes) at disembodied engagement. If it’s the latter, it’s probably not a good argument worth paying much attention to.