The Internet of Us (22 page)

Being able to ask a good question, however, is not the core point. That's because the skill of being able to ask good questions itself hinges, at least in part, on a simpler (and less overtly verbally orientated) cognitive capacity: the ability to make inferences and draw out a position's consequences—and not just the actual consequences of, say, a given position on what causes apples to be tasty, but also the consequences of that position in certain counterfactual situations. This is precisely the skill that a good doctor employs when considering whether to administer a drug, or a lawyer uses when considering an argument. It is also, arguably, the skill a good mechanic employs when considering whether to disassemble a head gasket, or an apple farmer uses when deciding whether another farmer's advice is reasonable. And those who have the capacity to cognitively engage, should they have the requisite verbal and linguistic abilities, will know which questions they should ask in order to carry their inquiries even further.

Understanding, then, what the Greeks called
epistêmê
, is a multifaceted sort of knowledge. It involves knowing why and how but also knowing which—which questions to ask, and where we might go next. As such, it both comes from and involves procedural knowledge—skills.

Procedural knowledge generally comes from experience. You get skills through practice, through a relationship with the world. That's not to say you can't gain theoretical knowledge—knowledge of facts—from direct experience. It is probably the best and fastest way in most cases. It is just that you can also gain knowledge of facts by reading. But acquiring a
skill
requires at least
some experience. You can't
just
read about it. You need to do something, to practice, to try things out, to fail, to start again.

People can be trained to do something they couldn't do before. That is what we are probably thinking about when we suspend belief about poor Chuck. Drugs, after all, provide a temporary type of programming for one's body. And drugs can
change
your abilities—make you stronger, faster, less prone to depressive thoughts. But taking a drug to become faster is fundamentally different from learning how to skillfully run faster. Mastering a skill requires trial and error. Such experimentation is how one develops the perceptual and informational acuity—the ability to discriminate between what works and what doesn't—that is part of the package deal of knowing how to do something well. And that is why Chuck isn't (I know you'll be shocked to hear this) the most coherent of fictions. We might be able to acquire a certain level of skill by downloading—just by acquiring new basic abilities. But downloading knowledge other people have acquired via experience isn't the same as having that experience yourself, isn't the same as personal trial and error and creative adaptation in the face of circumstance. Downloading, in short, won't give you mastery. And it won't give you the understanding that comes with it.

To truly understand some things, you need to develop a skill; and skills require experience. Which means that understanding often does as well. That's a point that many of us already grasp intuitively. One sees this in the wellspring of interest in the last few years in organic foods, home brewing and back-to-the-farm movements, especially amongst those under thirty-five—the very demographic of people most heavily invested in, and used to, information technology. The underlying explanations for
such movements are of course complex, but part of the story is a shared recognition that doing something yourself—making or growing something—gives you a type of understanding that you would lack otherwise. That's also why many parents want their children to participate in activities that require hands-on experience. As one parent expressed it to the
New York Times
, “My partner and I saw that kids were spending too much time interacting with perfect interfaces. . . . We felt that we needed to provide an experience by which they could understand how perfection is achieved—and, more specifically, how that perfection is achieved by working through problems with your hands.”
²³

The relationship between experience and understanding tells us something important about the limits not only of neuromedia but of Google-knowing. Google can give us the world. And the Internet and Web 2.0 can certainly give us the information that we need to learn new skills—gaming skills, skills at Web interfacing. These skills can be useful in certain situations, and not just online. But we kid ourselves if we think that we can learn every skill we need simply by downloading it. We need to interact with the world outside our head to do that.

Coming to Understand as a Creative Act

Descartes was a late riser. His habit, when possible, was to stay in bed till around noon—musing. One day, according to legend, he was watching a fly zoom around above his head when, suddenly, he realized that he could track its position by measuring its distance from the walls and the ceiling. He understood how
to plot its flight path in space . . . and voilà! We get Cartesian coordinates, or so the story goes.

The story of Descartes' fly—and others like it, such as those about Newton's apple or Einstein's clock—are instructive because they emphasize that the moment of understanding can involve sudden insight. Such moments are often called “aha moments” and, in the psychological literature, are collectively taken to signify the “Eureka effect” (so named after Archimedes, who after a moment of great insight shouted “Eureka!”). Of course, most acts of understanding do not require the sudden novel inspiration that Descartes had. But all of them do involve some level of insight. Having such an insight is part of why understanding is fundamentally a creative act.

Coming to understand is a mental act in the same way that reflecting or deciding are mental acts. They are activities that your mind engages in. They take effort and increase the total cognitive load. Don't confuse the state of understanding and the act of coming to understand. One can be in a state of understanding, just as one might be in a state of decision (or indecision, as the case may be), without doing anything in particular, or even being conscious of being in that state. Your understanding in such a case is tacit or implicit. Much of what we understand we understand in this way (consider: you probably understand why the water you put in your freezer turns to ice, but you didn't think about it until just now). But in order to understand, one must first
come to understand
, and it is this coming to understand that is an act. It is no coincidence that even the terms we use for it, such as “grasping,” are often active.

To talk about creativity, or creative acts, is to open a Pandora's box of multifarious treasures that can soon get away from us. So let
me just say what I mean by it here: a mental act is creative to the extent that it generates novel and valuable ideas. As Margaret Boden, the cognitive scientist and AI researcher, has emphasized, creative ideas needn't be historically novel—like Descartes' new geometrical ideas—but they are psychologically novel to the creator.
²⁴
Thus, being creative isn't the same as being original. People can have ideas that are creative
for them
. As Boden says, “Suppose a twelve-year-old girl, who'd never read
Macbeth
, compared the healing power of sleep with someone knitting up a raveled sleeve. Would you refuse to say she was creative, just because the Bard said it first?”
²⁵
I don't think so, and neither does Boden. Creativity is relative to a person.

But creativity is not just novelty. If that were so, then too many thoughts would satisfy the criterion of being “creative” to make it worth talking about. Creative ideas are valuable to the person's cognitive workspace. They move things forward on the conceptual field on which they are currently playing. They are useful and fecund. They have progeny, and they contribute to the problems at hand.

Creative acts are also surprising in a certain sense. In cases of sudden insight, this leads to the “eureka” feeling. But creative acts can be surprising even if they do not necessarily provoke that “aha” feeling. Boden calls this their “impossible” aspect—that is, an idea is creative for a person when we
affectively experience it as novel
, when from the inside, it feels like it could not have been had prior to the moment of creation. Conditions were right, and the person suddenly “sees.”

Coming to understand why or how something is the case is a particular kind of creative mental act in the sense that I just described. That's because, paradigmatically, it involves generating new, valuable and surprising ideas. Which ideas? Those that
concern dependency relationships—how things fit together. The “grasping” of those relationships, which lies at the heart of understanding, is what makes understanding creative.

This may seem most obvious in the paradigmatic, historic cases of understanding, like Descartes' geometrical insight or Einstein's flash of understanding relativity upon seeing a clock. But what about less historically original acts of understanding? Consider again a child who comes to understand, for the first time, why 0.150 is smaller than 0.5. At that moment, the child is also having an insight—a realization of how things are related. Or consider again our student above, coming to understand for the first time why Lady Macbeth sees blood on her hands, or why sailing is more pleasant and efficient when the wind is not behind you. Each of these acts of understanding are creative insights for the person in question, even though they are in no way original.

They are also surprising—again, not necessarily in the “eureka” sense—because the person who comes to understand could not, relative to their past evidence and cognitive context, have understood it before that moment. If understanding is creative, then it is both active and passive. That's because the surprising or “impossible” aspect of creativity makes creating seem at once something we do (which it is) and at the same time something happening to us. The muse suddenly strikes. Realization comes in a flash. Understanding is like this as well. It involves insight, and insight, as the very word suggests, is the opening of a door, a “disclosing,” as Heidegger said. One acts by opening the door, and then one is acted upon by seeing what lies beyond. Understanding is a form of disclosure.

9

The Internet of Us

Technology and Understanding

I began this book by pointing out a paradox: our digital form of life seems to both expand and inhibit our knowledge, simultaneously. How can that be?

As I've argued throughout, the first step is to see that “knowing” does not name a single kind of cognitive process, except in the minimal sense that to know is to have a grounded sense of what is true. To know can mean being receptive, or being reasonable, or understanding. Yet that is only part of the story. The second point I've stressed is that our digital form of life tends to put more stock in some kinds of knowing than others. Google-knowing has become so fast, easy and productive that it tends to swamp the value of other ways of knowing like understanding. And that leads to our subtly devaluing these other ways of knowing without our even noticing that we are doing so—which in turn can mean we lose motivation
to know in these ways, to think that the data just speaks for itself. And that's a problem—in the same way that our love affair with the automobile can be a problem. It leads us to overvalue one way to get where we want to go, and as a result we lose sight of the fact that we can reach our destinations in other ways—ways that have significant value all their own.

When it comes to knowing in the receptive sense, our knowledge is radically extended beyond ourselves. By virtue of the technology in our pockets, on our wrists and in our glasses, you and I are already sharing information-producing processes. We are cognitively interconnected by the strings of 1s and 0s that make up the code of the infosphere. That is the truest sense in which knowledge is more networked now, and why it is not an exaggeration to say, as Jeremy Rifkin does, that the Internet “dissolves boundaries, making authorship a collaborative open-ended process over time.”
¹
In turn, this raises the possibility that digital humans' receptive abilities are not only more networked but that our acts of understanding may be becoming more networked as well.

In one really obvious sense, information technology is helping us understand more than ever before. That's because we also know in the receptive sense more than ever before. Google-knowing is a terrific
basis
for understanding in the way that reading a textbook is. You can't connect the dots if you don't have the dots in the first place. Moreover, neuromedia, and even existing digital media, increases our ability to make connections between bits of information. That's helpful to understanding, since understanding increases with inferential and explanatory connections between beliefs.