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Algorithms and monologues: from fragmented communication to the loss of the sacred

I recently witnessed (by chance, without participating) a strange exchange at a social gathering in which one person brought up a topic and shared a very brief comment, and then another person spoke about another topic, unconnected to the previous one, and so on. It was seeing the flow of posts on Facebook in real life.

I clarify that this was not a programmed activity in which the participants were asked to speak in that way. It was a spontaneous event in an informal meeting in which concatenated, but disconnected, thoughts emerged and disappeared as quickly as messages on social networks.

There are, obviously, several examples of fragmented thoughts. For example, much of the material written and produced by the earliest Greek philosophers has only survived in fragments. And the same is true of most of the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are fragmented thoughts that were once complete.

Another form of fragmented thinking is one that is similar to collecting gold nuggets: each nugget is only a part of the total collected, but at the same time each nugget adds something of value (its own) to the total. Or, if you prefer, there are thoughts that are like pieces of a puzzle. When joined together, each fragment brings us closer to a better version of the final image.

But none of those elements were present in the exchange I heard the other day. There were no missing fragments, nor was there any attempt to generate anything of value or form a more accurate picture of the world. It was not a conversation, much less a dialogue, but a rapid exchange of micro monologues with no connection to the previous or the next.

This unconscious internalization of algorithms is not fun and very dangerous. This danger lies in leaving aside dialogue (dia-logos), a key element, one would even say essential, of the humanity of the human being because, ultimately, we are dialogic beings in all aspects of our life. We are not little messages, videos or “Likes”.

In an interview published on August 16, Dr. John Vervaeke expressed that “interconnected distributed cognition is accessed and personal wisdom is cultivated dialogically,” stressing that we should even seek “a dialogic relationship with the sacred,” i.e. , “to be able to speak with the sacred, engage in a conversation with the sacred.”

In fact, this philosopher and neuroscientist states, reason is “dialogical by nature,” so we must “try to recover dialogue” because dialoguing is “deeply embedded” in our “psyches and societies”.

It is painfully obvious that if we can barely converse with other people, even if they are next to us, that is because there is no longer an internal dialogue prior, simultaneous, and subsequent to the external dialogue. Therefore, little hope seems to remain that we could speak with the sacred, because the dialogue with the sacred is not unidirectional.

If dialogue is “immovable” of the human being, if we are “essentially dialogic beings” (Vervaeke), losing dialogue is losing ourselves.

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