Ch. 6 The Flight From Reason & The Cult of Instruments (3/9-3/15)

Hannah

Weather permitting, leave the house, go outside to the street and look around. How much of what you see would have existed if humans had not designed and built it? How much that "just grew there" would look different if humans had not cultivated and encouraged (or polluted) it?
Look at the sky. If you can distinguish stars from planets, can identify some of them, etc., try to forget this knowledge and imagine how the sky looks to very intelligent animals without human science. Then look at it again with your knowledge of astronomy back in focus.
If a meteor passes, how does it make you feel when trying to see without scientific glosses? How differently do you feel when you allow yourself to remember what you know of meteors?
Go back inside and discuss this:

If all TV shows about the police (about 20 a week in most areas) went off the air and instead we had an equal number of TV shows about landlords, would this change the average American reality-tunnel?

In how many ways would the reality-tunnel change?

What would Americans "see" (or remember) that they now tend to ignore? What would they become less aware of? What would they become much more aware of?

Try to figure out why there are so many TV shows about police and virtually no shows about landlords.

Who decides this? Why have they decided it this way? (Attempt to avoid paranoid speculations or grandiose conspiracy theories, if at all possible.)

Hannah

Exercise 4 is so important right now in our society where we are all tapped into the hive mind with greater intensity. I imagine in the past, with smaller communities and limited information sources, we experienced a similar funneling of perception dependent on our environment as we do today. But now, we are connected on a much larger scale, all the time, and the content we are seeing and reacting to influences entire nations of people. This book seems to be teaching critical thinking applied to the instrument that uses critical thinking! It goes one step beyond, and I think it is so important to teach this kind of meta-consciousness of our own perception to younger generations raised in AI.