Notes
Generations: At 15, my interlocutor is a young Gen Z, according to the marketers who make up these categories; Gen Alpha is said to start in 2010. I was surprised to find that his opinions about kids and iPads were echoed in a Business Insider article. Then again, he is very online. One of the interesting questions to me is how kids my companion’s age find information and decode its value. How do cultural references and assumptions get disseminated, amid what seems like an ever-multiplying set of digital spaces and ways to connect and find things – and how does that alter how you figure out who you are in the world, and how you want to be?
Something my dad wrote: I want to caveat that any errors in my paraphrase are my mistakes of understanding, not his. My dad has spent decades studying philosophy of mind – consciousness, intentionality, cognitive phenomenology. His book Your Brain and You, which he wrote in order to make these subjects accessible to general audiences, explains in more depth the neuroscience and philosophical reasoning behind what I’ve summarized. (If you are interested, he has a website. I don’t mean this to be a promotion for buying the book – if you want to read it, let me know, I have a few copies.)
The key piece for me is this: “Our thoughts come to us like gifts from our brains… We really are dependent on processes that are completely outside our consciousness for the causation of intimate aspects of what we take to be ourselves. And we are not in control of what occurs to us in our inner speech, nor of at least some of our most general aims… But, on the other hand, these facts do not imply that we thoroughly lack control of our actions, our aims, or our attention.” And then later: “You are praiseworthy or blameworthy for what you do, but you are not blameworthy or praiseworthy for who (or what) you are.”
So: who you are in the world, and how you want to live, are two separate things. This distinction seems really important to me as we try to make sense of ourselves in the real world, the digital world, and the blend of the two that AI might represent – at the same time we face multiple global crises. I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger, which feels like a guidebook for this moment – funny, terrifying, incredibly smart. The weekly interview podcast Offline with Jon Favreau is great, too (and Naomi Klein was a guest earlier this year, if you want a sample of what’s in Doppelganger).
Things I just learned: One answer to my question about how culture gets made: the way that my social feeds – and also the front pages of major news publications – put headlines like the one about US-made white phosphorus munitions being used by Israel in Lebanon next to headlines like the made-up birthday of a truly amazing sort of animal; it feels strange, flattened. And at the same time, in which you can just totally miss stories like that of Amanda Zurawski, which I wouldn’t have been aware of if the Kate Cox story hadn’t made national news, or the existence of “mechanical turks,” which were incidentally mentioned in this excellent recent issue of
’s Intrinsic Perspective newsletter, but have existed for years.I’m also, of course, distracted by things I didn’t just learn. The catastrophic human suffering in Gaza, Israel, the West Bank. The barbed-wire spaghetti ball of American politics. Being a parent in these times. The year-end AMA episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast covered all of these topics – and, surprisingly, also touched on the self, compassion and humility. It’s worth your time.
You’re not listening: Guilty/not guilty. But my young companion really did express the two thoughts – that young people are powerless and ill-equipped to contribute to society, and that they are the ones who are responsible for saving it – within minutes of each other.
Thank you for being here with me. I’ll see you again in mid-January. I hope we are all getting to spend some time with people we love in the next few weeks.