Technology, Culture, & Philosophy

So while reading the 3rd and 4th chapters of Slack and Wise's Primer, I was struck by how similar many of the terms and ideas were to the ideas i studied in a philosophy class. I guess I'll take the time to discuss how some of these questions of our relationship with technology fit into a broader philosophical spectrum.

First off, the class, called Freedom and Determinism, was a study of how we perceive our own free will, and whether such a thing actually exists. We read a lot of conflicting viewpoints about many small details, but the perspectives usually either fell into a Determinist or Libertarian category. The determinists were those that believed there was no free will and that each event is a direct cause of the effects that came before it. The libertarians generally argued that we somehow enact our own self-causing free will to create causal events, making us causes rather than effects. Both of these viewpoints have major issues, much like the perspectives in our reading.

Determinism is much like technological determinism in that it strips the power away from us agents and manifests it elsewhere. In philosophical determinism, past events and conditions directly cause new effects which then serve for future effects while we adapt to these events. We have no free will because there is no point where you could choose and have a meaningful impact; your choice was predetermined by your past and context. Similarly, technological determinism makes culture the recipient of technology's change. Technology causes widespread effects throughout culture just by its nature, and we can only react to it and make new technology, which will just change us further.

In reading Chapter 9, I was further struck by the similarities to philosophical concepts. Soft determinism is a philosophical viewpoint that is serves a similar purpose to the tech & culture viewpoint of soft determinism. In the study of free will, it is a sort of bridge between hard determinism (we exert no control and context controls everything) and libertarian free will (we somehow create free choices despite causality). It states that determinism holds and we are controlled by the past, and that free will is just the absence of constraints on our choices.

While there are obviously differences between the viewpoints in the two fields of study, I found it interesting how they were linked by similar terminology and ideas. And hopefully I was able to impart a little bit of philosophy and have it make sense.