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Ashley Boehm

Introduction to Philosophy

Philosophy of Technology Project

11-30-2017

In this world full of masses of technologies and a worldwide accessible internet, there is

no way to avoid the technologic incline in our furthering generations. As we continue to grow

and prosper as a human race, our surroundings continue to grow with us as well. As mentioned

in class before the last exam, we had talked about the cutting edge break-through of technology

and its outward or external change that it brings. Technology today is overpowering and

everywhere you may go. Some people living today cannot go without having a phone in their

hand, or a laptop at their fingers, or even a speaker that will do exactly what they ask it to do for

them. Some of the technology that we have around and use today just shows how lazy we as

humans have become throughout the years. We now have technology that does anything you can

think of, just to get us out of tasks that we may not feel like doing ourselves. My stance on

technology is not completely one sided, but also does not have a balance between if I believe it is

a positive effect or a negative effect on our species. If I were to pick a stance on what I feel about

technology, I would choose that it is more negative than positive. Although certain technologies

have really good benefits and can be positive, I believe for the most part technology have

negative effects on everyone that uses it. Technology itself has changed the human race in a way

in which we don’t act as ourselves anymore; it takes away our uniqueness of being ourselves

because we can see how others behave with the touch of our finger. If I am to use the example of

phones and social media, because that is what is most relevant in my generations life today, I
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believe that social media and phones in our pockets make us into different people that we are not

destined to be. Social media shows us what other people are doing and how they act and talk, and

therefore has an impact on us. We become different from our roots and our “autochthony” when

we involve ourselves in worlds that are on the internet. Aside from technology that is on our

phones and the internet, I believe that as a population we have become very lazy because of the

technological reforms. We have created technology that can do exactly what we can as humans.

Recently, a robot has been made that can walk, talk, and even do a flip off of a platform all by

itself; this is just too excessive of a technology to have. Our day and age is bound to be

completely different even in the next 5 years. With the improvements that have come upon us

just in my lifetime, there is destined to be a big change in technology and how the human

population acts in the very near future.

Martin Heidegger’s book, Discourse on Thinking, was a bit harder of a reading at first in

the way that he had written his stance and examples. Heidegger talked about many different

topics, but the ones that overtook the conversation and related to my thoughts were the ideas of

“calculative thinking” and “meditative thinking”. As humans, we have lost our sense, time and

energy devoted to meditative thinking, and have been relying on our calculative thinking more

often. Calculative thinking does not always have to deal with numbers or computers or adding

machines, such as calculators or anything that we may use at our time. Calculative thinking can

be thought of, or made most sense when thought of, as the kind of thinking that doesn’t take

much background for supposition, and goes around the “investigation” or the “planning” that we

think about in our daily lives. “It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time

more economical possibilities” (Heidegger, p. 46). Calculative thinking can come off as the

thinking that people have already thought about, or the thinking that makes it easier and handier
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for us to not have to think our own ways. As I said before, technology has made us as humans

into lazier people, who rely on other things to get our work done for us; this goes under my

observation as relating to it. On the other hand of thinking, Heidegger talks about the other side

of thinking: meditative thinking. One quote from the reading that really made me think about this

type of thinking was “…. Man is a thinking, that is, meditating being” (Heidegger, p. 47).

Heidegger explains after his definition of meditative thinking that it can be thought of as away

from actuality and loses touch with everything else. This can be understandable, only if you

believe in calculative thinking and rely on it. Meditative thinking doesn’t come as easy to us as

does calculative, but it indeed takes more effort. It is from our “rootedness” that we are

meditative thinkers and we should emerge from our roots into the above with heaven and the

clouds. To me, meditative thinking is very valuable, but not impossible. As technological

humans, we find that there is blurry vision in finding the ways to this thinking. It is harder for us

to realize that there are other ways to think about things, rather than what is already given to us

and we do not need to settle on or give any thought to it of our own. If we are to stick to our own

roots and think for ourselves, this would become meditative thinking. We can stay clear and stay

free of technology at any time we please, it is just the willingness to step away and have minds of

our own, rather than roots of another.

Thoughtlessness and flight from thinking go together just as calculative and meditative

thinking go together. “This flight-from-thought is the ground of thoughtlessness” (Heidegger, p.

45). Thoughtlessness is the “cheapest” and easiest way for us to think today, as we forget it

shortly after. This requires no energy expenditure to our actual thoughts. Thoughtlessness for us

as humans proves to us that there is a thought process in us that we know we can use and we

know is at our roots, but we become “loose” from it. Flight-from-thought goes hand in hand with
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the idea of thoughtlessness because man continues to go with this as fly away with the

thoughtlessness idea, but we do not want to admit it. As humans, we have lost our purposes of

becoming our own persons and doing our own good in the world. By thoughtlessness and not

thinking for ourselves, we are going away from our rootedness and prospering into something

that we may not be. What it seemed to me that Heidegger was trying to get across by using these

concepts was that man today has changed, and mostly because of technology. These factors of

technology that we have in our life, as well as others with technology in our lives, impact our

lives in a negative way. As I said before, not all the ways that technology impacts us are

negative, but the stance I get from Heidegger’s writing is that he is also against it. We need to be

more of meditative thinkers rather than calculative thinkers. There is a mystery in technology in

which we don’t know the significance it is going to have on us in the future as it increases.

Therefore, our rootedness is threatened by the atomic age. A quote that I really enjoyed in his

writing stated “…it is one thing to have heard and read something, that is, merely to take notice;

it is another thing to understand what we have heard and read, that is, to ponder” (Heidegger, p.

52). To have calculative thoughts, we take notice of things and are only thinking about those

things in the moment and not in depths to where we remember the details of them or even

remember them at all. To think in a meditative way, we ponder these thoughts and information

that we are given and are able to make our own stances on things and realize them in detail.

As I ponder and write this paper, it makes me realize how much technology has an

impact on my life. No technology that I use on a day to day basis has a terrible impact on my

life, but it also does not have a direct positive impact either. The only way technology today

impacts my life positively would be in the way that I can communicate with family or work on

classes and making myself better. Other than these basic positivity’s of technology, it really does
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not have a huge effect on my life. On a day to day basis, I check social media on my phone or do

assignments on my laptop, but neither show a negative impact on me. If they were to, it would be

the social media side of technology. Social media can be addictive and constantly have you

looking at your phone to see what other people are up to, rather than doing things yourself and

not worrying about them. Technology has led me to be more of a calculative thinker, or even

thoughtless, in the way that I only fully understand and ponder things if I am truly needing to. I

usually, with most things, just notice them, identify them, and let them go in one ear and out the

other very quickly. Instead of this, and reading about Heidegger’s stances, I believe that the

human race as a whole should understand what he is saying and go back and realize our

rootedness and our meditative thinking potentials; this would, I believe, make the human race

healthier in the way of thinking. Instead of being followers in this generation, we could all

become thinkers and leaders of our own ways into Ether.

Hubert Dreyfus liked to dwell on the study of telepresence and how it affects us today.

Where Descartes comes into play is when he says that the world around us and our bodies are

never actually directly present to us, but we can only directly experience what is in our own

minds. He also says that there is a mind and body connection, and this access to the world is

indirect and we experience things by representations. He discovered the connection of nerves to

the brain and came to the conclusion that everything is a representation in the brain and the body

and that our access to the world is indirect. Ponty tries to understand and make a different

understanding of the direct presence of ourselves in the world. This is where he describes that we

have a need to get an “optimal grip on the world”. “When grasping something, we tend to grab it

in such a way as to get the best grip on it” (Dreyfus, p. 54). He goes on to explain that when we

are looking at something, we look at it as a whole as well as its small other parts that put it
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together. We find the best distance that we can interpret and understand it. We are fully present

in the world when we come to a conclusion or are trying to grasp something to get there, we are

not only looking at it in a way that our nerves are transmitting it and it is not real, but a

representation in our minds. We are looking at it in a way that we can directly understand it and

all of its counterparts that make it a whole. If you think of an example of trying to learn

something in class, for example, trying to study for a philosophy exam, you are not going to only

look at it and think that what you are seeing is only a demonstration. You are going to look at it,

and only to directly understand it, you will grasp it and learn in detail what it means and be able

to explain it as a whole, as well as its counterparts. This is how Ponty gets me to understand fully

what he means by this grip on the world we must take.

What Dreyfus moves on to talk about is the differences in learning styles that we have

today with the technology that has been made through the years. To start, the insights of David

Blair had made me nod my head the whole time I was reading it. As a student who has taken an

online class, as well as classes in person in an actual classroom, I can understand where he is

coming from with his thoughts on teleteaching. When in a classroom, there is full focus as well

as questions that can be answered and explained for everyone, even for the people who are too

nervous to raise their hands and talk. “At the other end of the attention spectrum, I can often see,

again, peripherally, when students are bored or sleeping or chatting amongst themselves”

(Dreyfus, p. 58). Teachers can tell when people are getting the lesson and who is not during the

lesson by seeing them and moving around, as in Ponty’s examples, and seeing the ins and outs of

what people are understanding. If someone is bored or sitting in the back on their phones, you

can tell that they either are not understanding it, or are understanding it and just not paying

attention and can make a change to what you are doing yourself as a teacher in the room. If your
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means are to teleteach, then there are different realms of things that you are going to have to deal

with and get passed because of this. Getting a grip on what they need to learn and what they are

understanding is hard through online teaching because everyone is forced to learn at the same

pace and keep up with what is going on in the lecture. As a student that has taken classes online

before, it is harder to understand the material and get the professor to explain it properly, or even

know if you are understanding it because you do not have that contact with them that you would

in a classroom. One thing that made this subject clearer that was talked about in the book was

when Dreyfus brought up the examples of going to a movie theater versus going to an actual

theater for a musical or play. “Presumable, the actors, like good lecturers, are, at every moment,

subtly and largely, unconsciously adjusting to the responses of the audience and thereby

controlling and intensifying the mood in the theatre” (Dreyfus, p. 60). The actors on the screen

do not get feedback of what the audience thinks while they are acting. Immersion in a situation is

lost when you are not present in the moment. Having a real life teacher in front of you makes you

more emerged into the situation and lesson, while having them on a screen makes you more out

of it and want to put it off because there is no push to do better or pay attention. Barry Lamb

talks in the same sense that you cannot fully tell what is going on in the field by watching film, it

is the real life experience that helps you get better. I can relate to this because we would watch

film before and after our basketball games in high school. You can see what you did wrong or

could have done, but that is totally different from practicing it and seeing it happen in front of

you. To conclude, I believe that face to face interaction and learning is a way better method than

on-screen learning. When someone is in front of you and there is a situation that you are emerged

into, you can interpret for yourself and others can shift to details that they are seeing in the class
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as well, which makes you in-tune to look for more details, or get a grip on the world around you,

as Ponty had said.

Between the two authors, they make a clear distinction and help me to come to a

conclusion on not only the technology around us and how it is affecting us, but how our thoughts

can change how we use these. As I’ve said before, we do not know the significance of the

technologic increase, as said in Heidegger’s book, and this leads into what the future may hold

for us as a human race. As said in Dreyfus’s book, “…we will stop missing this kind of bodily

contact, and touching another person will be considered rude or disgusting” (Dreyfus, p. 68). In

this reform of technology, we never know how we may change as humans, and how simple

things such as giving someone a hug may be considered in the future. By losing our rootedness

and autochthony, we have come to a type of thinking that is not our own. We believe that

technology has all the answers we are looking for out there and we do not need to think for

ourselves, or meditatively think. Along with technology that Dreyfus talks about, Heidegger

makes the point that we fall into slavery with technology, even when we are trying to find the

goods and bads in it. We could go to war with technology and how it is changing us and how it

changes the way we think, but we always have the decision whether we want to stop using it and

walk away from it. This is how the two stories go together from my point of view. Heidegger’s

rootedness thoughts and meditative thinking goes together with the technological reform in

Dreyfus’s eyes by the fact that our bodies are working quietly in the background of how we

interact and our reality of things. We, as a human race, need to come to our senses of thought and

how technology could ruin us.