THE OPEN COLUMN: Technology, Society, Culture

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On many occasions in the past I have felt uncomfortable with the claim that we live in the era of knowledge, rationality, technology and primacy of empiricism. The source of this unease felt like a dissonance in some deeper insides of me. Postmodern philosophers prophet the decline of religion and the rise of rationality, professionalization, constant self-actualization, expert-dependence, pragmatism, dominance of market-like relationships (panmarket), cynicism and egoism, resembling a dehumanized world of characters from Philip K. Dick’s novels. One who claims we are leaving in romantic times would be considered out of mind, no doubt. Meanwhile if you type 'rational' in Google search you will get some 50 mio hits, when you write romantic you get some 200 mio hits. Of course it does not prove anything but you may find this fact curious, curious enough to consider some other clues that inspired my thoughts before it even occurred to me to make this awkward comparison. I encourage you to expand the list by posting comments below.

Let's start with a recent book by Antonio Damasio "Self Comes To Mind". Antonio Damasio has quite shaken the cognitivist community in 1994 with his classic piece "Looking for Spinoza..." where he wrapped up some years of research carried out with his colleagues on the role of emotions in human decision making, followed later by excellent experiments on emotional neuronal circuits by Joseph LeDoux. There are two main conclusions from this earlier work: (i) without emotions people can hardly take decisions, (i) emotional response to external stimuli precedes conscious, 'rational', appreciation and moderation of it, so that some reactions to emotional stimuli are carried out by our bodies automatically, unconsciously. What is more, some recent brain studies suggest (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/full/nn.2112.html) that some decisions that apparently are volitional are in fact determined at unconscious level as it has been experimentally showed that there is a significant time gap (10s) between spotting the pre-action activity in the brain allowing to predict the eventual behaviour before this fact enters the subject's awareness. Damasio in "Self Comes To Mind" goes a step further concluding that emotions, or rather the biological, primordial feelings underpin consciousness, in fact build up the self, so the way we experience the world and adapt to it depends on basic biological phenomena that are background for any conscious reflection. It seems therefore that we are not only primarily driven by heart and gut feelings in our everyday conduct, instead of by pure reason, but we are largely build up with the feeling of our biological bodies. Where is then alledged supremacy of reason over heart?

But should a geek care at all? Well, some AI researches (Sloman, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.63.1932&rep=rep...) claimed already 30 years ago that intelligence may not work without emotions and since early 2000s a couple of research groups emerged investigating into representation of emotions in artificial systems, rational agent systems in particular, trying to advance the classic BDI (Beliefs, Desires, Intentions) framework in which there had been no place earlier for feelings or emotions. Needless to say the topic of emotions and experiencing has been intesively exploited by computer games industry and is driving a large part of global economy at large, particularly the service sector, consumer goods and entertainement markets.

Changing the discipline, having a look on the list of the top selling books of all times on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books), most of which is modern literature, we will find out that the Report by Shere Hite is the only item that could be classified as non-fiction in the top 25, vastly overwhealmed by works of fiction, fantasy and parascience led by Tolkien's trilogy, and more recently published: Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code' and 'Angels and Demons', Rawling's 'Harry Poter' and Coelho's "The Alchemist". When we look beyond mainstream literature, there are many analogies that can be found to romanticism as well. Eberhard Alsen in "Romantic postmodernism in American fiction" points out that there are two major trends in postmodernistic fiction: a realistic and a romantic one, where the latter appears to resemble the XIX century romance. Curious, isn't it?

Although it is true that churches across Europe get more and more empty every day, is it noteworthy that buddhism turns out to be the fastest growing religion in the West, which cannot be explained solely by immigration, as for instance according to U.S.Religious Landscape Survey (2008) only 1 in 3 buddhists in USA claims Asian origins.

Do we happen to leave in increasingly romantic times? Shall we now turn to the classics of romantic literature and thought for inspiration? Or perhaps it is all just a puzzle, and the key to this puzzle lies in the proper framing of the problem? Evidently the dualist tradition makes the boundaries between mind and body, heart and reason, rational and emotional clear and sharp. The mind-body problem has been approached by contemporary philosophers, like J.R. Searle, by objecting dualism, noticing that the same reality can simply be described from different narratives: mental and physical that are not mutually exclusive. The dualistic tradition in considering the rational and the emotional is strong as well, which is mainly driven by classical and neo-classical economics. Perhaps the solution again can be found in questioning the traditional dichotomy between rationality and emotionality, dissolving the positivist-romantic problem in the integral spirit.

About the Author

Jan Kaczmarek