Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society
I found this article which had been published in sunday times and written by Steven Pinker
It’s was first published in the Edge where various scientists expressed their opinions on the subject. Here is the start of the article
Steven Pinker
In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.
Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?
Were the events in the Bible fictitious — not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?
Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?
Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?
Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?
Do men have an innate tendency to rape?
Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?
Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?
Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?
Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?
Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?
Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?
Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?
Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?
Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?
Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?
Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe’s nuclear waste?
Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?
Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?
Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?
Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?
Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions. Perhaps you are appalled that people can so much as think such things. Perhaps you think less of me for bringing them up. These are dangerous ideas — ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order.
I find what Pinker describes here very important and thought-provoking. He challenges us to think, not about anything, but about our own thoughts and beliefs. We all hold notions that we believe them to be self-evident. If you are an atheist you believe that the inexistence of god to be obvious, while if you are a christian you deny evolution in favor of an all-powerful god. Those who are against the death penalty perceive it as barbaric, while those who support it believe it is a good measure of retribution.
A lot of issues that Pinker addresses as examples in his articles are even more provoking than the ones I offered, because they have been correlated with nazism or other extreme ideologies. Differences between genders and races are clearly a taboo topic.
No, not this kind of Taboo
Of course Pinker does not say he supports any of those ideas. He simply expresses them as ideas that tick people off.
This debate raises a very important subject: the subject that societies throughout time have changed and what was once thought atrocious now is considered mortal and the opposite. Most people don’t live long enough to see a cultural revolution or a radical change of morals in a society. So, most of us live with the same concept of morals and truths about the world for our whole lives. Of course, many people change values until their become adults, but after that, very few express radical changes in opinions, a phenomenon that has lead to what we call "the generation gap".
Highlander has lived long enough to witness many cultural revolutions
Therefore, even truths that we hold self-evident could be entirely false. Even values like freedom that we all take for granted may have had a very different meaning centuries ago. If we take a moment and think about it, for its longest part, humanity has lived under totalitarian regimes (including kings or a noble super-elite) with little or no education and almost zero information. In the 20th public education could be said to be really widespread and only in the last ten-or-something years the information has started to become really free and instant, through the miracle of internet.
However, even though we cannot enter into the minds of people that lived a thousand years ago, the internet and the huge amounts of information channeled through it at continuous rates have brought a qualitative change to our era. And that, I believe, is the social metacognition.
Metacognition is defined by wikipedia as
"the knowledge (i.e. awareness) of one’s cognitive processes and the efficient use of this self-awareness to self-regulate these cognitive processes (e.g. Brown, 1987; Niemi, 2002; Shimamura, 2000). It is traditionally defined as the knowledge and experiences we have about our own cognitive processes (Flavell 1979)."
Through the plethora of information flowing throughout the societal structures, these systems (the societies that is) have started to alter the informational systems on which they are founded. Societies have always been structured upon certain sets of information (whether they hold some truth or not). By information I mean any:
1)Norms
2)Truths (history, truths about the physical world etc.)
3)Myths
4)Any kind of cognition that is transfered through social means and is not inherent in nature
What we have here is a dissolution of the informational structure of society through an overflow of abundant new data.
Information is everywhere. Information is everything
What I describe is (and I will explain in a few seconds how this is related with metacognition) is a procedure very similar to the following:
Let’s say that you have a very difficult equation to solve. Instead of going the "mathematical way" you just put random numbers and try to see what happens. Through pure chance, one of the numbers will eventually solve the problem (even if this takes a hundred years to happen). So, in our example, let’s see the society as a really big function. The data that enter the in the input of the function are innumerable. Some of them, are eventually going to fall on other notions of the world (informational constants as I like to call them) that will be mutually exclusive, therefore indicating an incosistency in the function. Some of these inconsistencies can be disregarded through the mechanism of social inertia. However, somewhere, sometimes, some chunks of information manage to infect the minds of some populations or small groups (or even of a single human mind), therefore resolving the inconsistency through the opposite manner: not by social inertia, but by social motion.
So, to conclude with my point, the overflow of information causes the social systems to reveal their incosistencies at their informational structure thus creating social motion.
And that’s where the social aspect of metacognition lies. Societies have started as a system to reevaluate their own values. Nothing, could provide this change, except for the internet, through which, people miles apart and of different civilizations exchange information, even many times without wanting it to, since information is not only passed on verbally. It can be passed on by the social norms that have been imprinted in the behavior and thinking of each person. They can be passed through the art, through music or through videos posted on Youtube.
A frog showing use of some metacognition by thinking about his own thinking
Those of you who are very observant will have probably already noticed that metacognition includes awareness. Therefore, by anouncing that a society can have metacognition I automatically suppose that it has awareness and therefore a conscience. This is the functionalist’s way of thinking (Functionalism-philosophy of mind) and is based on the presumption that if something can perform a certain function (in that case, the functions that a conscient being does), then we must presume that it has a certain quality, in that case, a conscience. I disagree with this view, but I don’t want to raise a metaphysical debate in this article.
To avoid this problem I’ll name this whole procedure as meta-informational social regulation, thus eliminating any notion of "self" or "consciousness" concerning the society.
(Note: I have consciously decided not to include the subject of memes in this thread. I believe the memes to be a complicated subject that deserves an entirely different post unto itself)
Now, someone might raise the question as to what is so special about this whole thing, since throughout history there have always been people with dangerous ideas. What made to me to raise the issue of meta-informational social regulation is that for the first time this procedure does not apply to individual people, but to society as a whole. If you take a look at the Edge you’ll notice the plethora of writers (and journals) that took part in the the Dangerous Ideas debate.
I find it positive that talking about such subjects has started taking somewhat of a mainstream root. By that, I don’t mean that I consider it positive to talk particularly about the subjects Pinker spoke above (some of which I consider them myself to be very provoking), but to think about the relativity of socal truths and values and think about questions that no-one dares to answer. There’s always a high probability that what you think can be totally false, but there’s also a slight probability that it could be the next great thing. Until then, keep thinking folks!
Further Reading:
What is a taboo question? or http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/08/what_is_a_taboo.html: Poses some criticism on Pinker’s article.
In Defense of Dangerous Ideas on Richard Dawkins’ page
December 21st, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Hi. Do you think that the internet can be seen now as the number one factor that will, let’s say, induce a new form of self-awareness, of the virtuallity of one’s self, as in the case of cultural anomism, or something similar?
December 21st, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Concerning your question, I don’t believe that we could say that the internet is self-aware or induce a new form of self-awareness on humans. The internet is a social object, and I believe that the core of my analysis is a sociological one. The psychological notions I have used, refer to the internet as a system. However, I don’t see if we can’t relate these notions to individual self-awareness.