Axiomatic Technologies
When we know something, it can be hard to imagine what it would be like not knowing that piece of information
“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. By the mere fact of having come into existence, the most amazing novelty becomes in a few months, even a few days, a familiar and, as it were, self-evident part of the environment. Every aspiration is for a golden ceiling overhead; but the moment that ceiling has been reached, it becomes a commonplace and disregarded floor, on which we dance or trudge in a manner indistinguishable, so far as our feeling tone is concerned, from that in which we danced and trudged on the floor below. Moreover, every individual is born into a world having a social and technological floor of a particular kind, and is completely unaware, except through reading and by hearsay, that there was ever any other kind of floor.”
– Aldous Huxley
The notion that certain information or knowledge is self-evident, obvious, or the more philosophical term–axiomatic, has caused problems among human beings for as long as we have been dealing coherently with knowledge.
It should be useless to point out to you the fact that we get irritated when in communicating what seems to us as obvious, our interlocutor fails to just “get it.” Like, this is there for you to see, why wouldn’t you just see it and let’s move past this obvious point?
For instance, many religious people think that God is evident in nature. So, they don’t bother inquiring of the other fellow if he/she believes in God before pontificating with their moral scrolls. They carry an implicit assumption that you guys are on the same page and hence can proceed because you agree on the fundamentals.
On a secular front, “equal rights” and “free speech” are axiomatic. I know that because the debate about equal rights and free speech never clarifies; it just gets messier simply because it seems so fundamental that we should not be quibbling over it in the first place.
Axioms — or assumptions and consensus if you wish to call them so — are statements or propositions which are regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true.
What we call “axioms” are just pieces of knowledge that we have begun to take for granted.
A society functions properly because axioms underpin its habits, laws, customs, and shared practices. Society functions because it has a largely unspoken consensus; assumptions that everyone agrees and lives with without hair-splitting investigation and inquiry as to how they came to be or what they represent. The most popular axiom I can think of in this modern age is the very familiar words of the declaration of independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
But apart from society, for the individual mind, axioms are essential. And apart from the axioms that we inherit from society, we find, sometimes develop, our own axioms — individually. In this case, however, we don’t call them axioms so often. Indeed a better name has been given to this effect — some now call it a bias — called The Curse of Knowledge.
The curse of knowledge (or the curse of expertise) is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with other individuals, assumes that the other individuals have the background knowledge to understand.
This curse befalls us ever so often. For example, a teacher who has spent his last few years dealing with the complexities of his subject may find it hard to bring the students up to his current state of mind simply because he is foregoing the more simple thing that he assumes his students should already know. He will be surprised to find out that they don’t “get it.” Mathematics and Geometry for a fine example will include foregoing the derivation of say the Pythagorean formula and just inserting the values into the formula while assuming that the students know that ‘a’ is for the hypotenuse value, ‘b’ for the adjacent, and ‘c’ for the opposite angle.
Another instance. Take the game of Charades that you play at the family game night. You team up with a partner and you are to play from the category “movies.” So, there you are, miming, dancing, wiggling like a fish on land, trying to communicate to your partner what movie title is on the card you are holding. Let’s say the movie title is The Incredible Hulk. To demonstrate, you bulk up your arms to flex your muscles, you mime-shout, you mime-smash the table, and you mime-rip your shirt. But your partner does not just get it. Only after your time up did you then realise that your mate has never seen the Incredible Hulk. How pitiful. That is how we are when we are plagued by the curse of knowledge.
(I may have just again been subject to the curse of knowledge by assuming that you know what Charades is. We are all doomed by this curse, and for good reasons.)
The Curse of Knowledge happens when you take what you know for granted. That is, you see it as obvious, evident, and easy for everyone to know and grasp.
When we know something, it can be hard to imagine what it would be like not knowing that piece of information. In turn, this makes it difficult to share our knowledge, because we struggle to understand the other party’s state of mind.
The proceeding irritation on finding out that others do not catch on to these axioms often results in attitudes and actions that are essentially condescending, arrogant, and snidely.
When we argue vehemently, even aggressively, it is because we take our positions to be axiomatic that it puzzles us how the other person does not just get it. We sometimes resort to pelting our interlocutors with accusations of biases, undermining their ability to think critically, or just yelling at them to “read a book” just to explain why they don’t just get it. We hardly think that we are the ones at fault for taking things for granted. That darned curse of knowledge.
However, as it is with knowledge, so it is with technology.
Axiomatic technologies are simply put, technology that we take for granted. Technically, all abundant technology.
Axiomatic technologies are hardly about technology than it is about the attitude we take with them. The idea that this magical equipment that is a part of our lives like it has always been there and will always be here is the axiomatic disposition.
Technology is at its best when it is invisible.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The attitude we take towards hipsters who do things a little bit unconventionally speaks to this. In the age of streaming television, anyone who only sees movies on CD is unconventional. We will be surprised by them and poke them with sticks as if they were real-life neanderthals come alive in a museum.
But away from the fun side of this axiomaticness, the thought of doing life without them can easily send us into a panic. Take for example; the day Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp) had a little hitch. The panic that day was admirable and I secretly hope for a recurrence of a thing like that so that I can watch us all fidget a little bit. (I also want us to regain consciousness of the real world.) But until then, I regret to inform you that the world has gone online.
To test how much of an axiom a technology is, I always refer to The Wisdom of Solomon.
Living in a world without genetic sequencing and the possibility of conducting DNA tests, Solomon sat and watched two women of easy virtues battle one another for a living child. If you know that story, then you know how the judgment went.
Solomon gave the child to the more compassionate mother. And immediately, the logic of his judgment jumps out. We assume the logic is that the biological mother had to be the compassionate one. But I realised that whether she was the biological mother of the child was less relevant than the fact that she was the more compassionate one who could raise the child in a healthy way. That was Solomon dealing in axioms rather than deduction.
Fast-forward to our time; if faced with that case. Easy: declare that the women conduct a DNA test. Finito. And I think that is okay. Except of course: an increase in augmenting devices may somewhat lead to a decrease in the use of our natural thinking and observation devices; the brain and the eye. We may descend into pure technological surrogacy.
The advances on the laboratory side and the perfection of instruments have added much to our powers of diagnosis, but they have given some men the idea that they are everything and the use of one’s eyes and hands is looked on as old fashioned. The man whose first idea in an obscure thoracic case is to have an Xray plate taken and who cannot “bother” with physical signs does not deserve the name diagnostician.
Thomas McCrae; The Method of Zadig.
Having named Seneca’s Toys, it became clear to me that having a device around may prompt us to use it more than we need it. Is it then any surprise that we live in an upside-down world, where close families and friends learn of their loved one’s tragedy on Twitter at the same time as his unfamiliar, faceless, bot filled 150,000 followers?
Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(Seneca’s Toys)
It is an inverted world when people take to social media immediately to announce and “heal” from their “trauma” without taking necessary steps off the web to address what is going on in their lives. In fact, it is an offense to raise this objection; to tell them to keep this private thing private. Then you are a hater, possibly a victim-blamer, and who knows, a Nazi.
It is problematic when people have good news and their first impulse is to let it all out to the world audience. The internet has amplified our attention-seeking nature but also remember, the internet never forgets what you put there. But what I find more absurd is when people share their personal pain and trauma with their world audience and automatically think they are entitled to some coddling and sympathy. It is just absurd.
- Adino
It is indeed an inverted world to think that the very incoherent, infantile, balabluu, blu-bla, punctuation-plagued, chopped-up language of Instant Messaging is how you address people on more serious issues. There is a default setting now. Those technologies have become axioms. The other person just has to “get it.”
Because axioms carry the weight that everyone is in on the secret hence they –the axioms — need not be mentioned, anyone who tries to bring us back to that basic step, not to talk of contesting it, is not merely wasting our time but threatening our cohesion. We have to deal with such threats.
Still, there exists another issue associated with taking things for granted— and this is by no means a positive thing: we lose – or never develop – our sense of gratitude.
People who waited for weeks for their amorous letters to reach their romantic partners who lived in a different geographic location will with no doubt be more grateful for Instant messaging technology than those who were born into the climate, and who all they have known is Instant Messaging.
Long before the Uber age, people had no choice but to develop qualities like patience to get their results. But with the microwave, trust patience to dwindle in people; do not be surprised that they cannot wait. Do not even be shocked that they are nervous wrecks. Now we have devices; virtue can die. But it need not be so. (As an aside, virtues have served the timeless purpose of augmenting our incompleteness in both knowledge and abilities. A world with perfect men — perfect in all knowledge and ability — will be a virtueless world.)
To summarise my theory of The Wisdom of Solomon, I wrote in my note that “the overreliance on technological aid will eventually weaken the facilities that made the technology possible.” No wonder that dystopian fiction — written by men of insight and unfashionable secular prophets — portray high-tech societies inhabited by docile men.
And to end with a quote from Aldous Huxley (From "Variations on a Philosopher," Themes and Variations),
But the progress of technology is rapidly changing this relatively happy state of things. The modern dictator has, not only the desire, but also the effective means to reduce the whole man to the mere citizen, to deprive individuals of all private life but the most rudimentarily physical and to convert them at last into unquestioning instruments of a social organization whose ends and purposes are different from, and indeed incompatible with, the purposes and ends of personal existence.
Thank you for reading, here is your picture for the week:
PS: Jokes and memes rely on axioms (we call them “context” or “reference”) to be enjoyed.
For the sake of the ‘PS’ above, here, take a bonus meme:
Have a curious week.
"balabluu"
I understood that reference.