The Internet of Us (4 page)

The first sort of knowing is the sort we do when we absorb information from expert textbooks or good Internet resources. The second is the sort of knowing we value whenever possessing reasons or experience matters. And the third is different still—it is the sort of knowing we expect of our most creative experts—even if those experts are more intuitive than discursive in their abilities. This is what I'll call understanding.

Understanding, as in our example, often incorporates the other ways of knowing, but goes farther. It is what people do when they
are not only responsive to the evidence, they have creative insight into how that evidence hangs together, into the explanation of the facts, not just the facts themselves. Understanding is what we have when we know not only the “what” but the “why.”
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Understanding is what the scientist is after when trying to find out
why
Ebola outbreaks happen (not just predict how the disease spreads). It is what you are after when trying to understand
why
your friend is so often depressed (as opposed to knowing that she is).

In real life, all the ways we have of knowing are important. But without understanding, something deeper is missing. And our digital form of life, while giving us more facts, is not particularly good at giving us more understanding. Most of us sense this. That is one reason we try to limit our children's screen time and encourage them to play outside. Interaction with the world brings with it an understanding of how and why things happen physically that no online experience can give. And it is why so many of us who use Facebook are still troubled by its siren song: it is a simulacrum of intimacy, a simulacrum of mutual understanding, not the real thing. The pattern of what people like or don't like tells us something about them—more, in fact, than they may wish. But it doesn't tell us why they like what they like. It doesn't allow us to understand them. Facebook knows, but doesn't understand.

As we'll see in more detail later, understanding not only gets us the “why,” it brings with it the “which”—as in which question to ask. Those who know, do. But those who understand also ask the right question—and therefore can find out what to do next. Asking questions was Socrates' special skill. It is perhaps for that reason that the Oracle of Delphi famously told Socrates that he was the wisest man in Athens. According to Plato, Socrates himself
said that all he knew was that he didn't know much. And maybe he didn't. But one can't read Plato without thinking that the Oracle was on to something. Socrates was a champion not of knowledge per se, but of understanding. That's the skill we need to remember now. It may sound trite but it is true nonetheless: we need to rediscover our inner Socrates.

Welcome to the Library

In one of his most famous stories, the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined what it would be like to live in a world comprised of a single, almost infinite library, containing a virtually uncountable number of books, ranging from tomes of incomprehensible nonsense to treatises on everything from politics to particle physics. In one way, the library seems to make knowledge easy; all the truths of the world would be at your disposal. Of course, so would many falsehoods. And if you lived there, the library would be all you knew. There would be no escaping its walls to find an independent check—no way, except by appeal to the library itself, of knowing which books contain the truth and which do not.

The story I want to tell is the story of how our culture is dealing with the fact that most of us are living in the library now—the Library of Babel, as Borges dubbed it in the short story by that name. It is a virtual library, and one that may indeed migrate right into our brain, should neuromedia ever come to pass. But whether or not that happens, the story I have to tell is an unapologetically philosophical one. As Borges knew more than most, our philosophies are part of what make up our culture, our form
of life, and we need to come to grips with them if we want to understand ourselves.

Even in a story of ideas, central characters have a backstory. The backstory of our ideas about knowledge is that they've grown up shaped by some very ancient problems, problems that the surging changes in information technology are dragging to the surface of our cultural consciousness and casting in new forms.

Compare, for example, neuromedia with an old philosophical chestnut—the thought experiment of the Brain in the Vat. It goes like this: How do you know that you aren't simply a brain hooked up to a computer that is busily making it seem as if you have a body, and are reading this book (and thinking about brains in vats)? If so, the world is just an illusion, manufactured for your benefit, and almost everything you think you know is actually false. This is the philosophical position known as skepticism. The skeptic's basic idea is that we can't ever determine whether what seems to us to be the case really is true. If so, then either we punt on knowing what is true, or punt on truth itself.

The Brain in the Vat is itself an updated version of Descartes' seventeenth-century story of the evil demon who spends all his time deceiving us. The idea is that all of our experience might be misleading. Descartes thought that even the demon (or the lab-coated evil scientist running the vat) couldn't fool us about everything: for he can't trick you into thinking you don't exist without your existing already. Nonetheless, it seems like he could trick you about almost everything else. If the illusion is so perfect, what further experience could prove to us that our experiences are illusory? Whatever experience it is (including Laurence Fishburne turning up in cool shades with blue and red pills in
The Matrix
) would just be
more experience
. It could be an illusion too. And that will hold no matter how hard we work at gathering data, how open-minded we are to new information, or how objective we are in considering the facts. If the world is but a dream, then so too is our best science. And if that is possible, then maybe we don't really know most of what we think we do.

Now think about our two stories—neuromedia and the Brain in the Vat—together for a minute. In some ways they are mirror images. The one puts the computer in your brain; the other puts your brain in the computer. The one appears to make knowledge easy, the other makes it impossible. But look closer and you'll see that they are more alike than they appear at first glance. They raise some of the same underlying philosophical questions. For example, in our earlier discussion, we were
assuming
that much of the information you'd be able to access through neuromedia is true. But how would we know that exactly? By checking neuromedia? Of course, we might ask someone else. But if everyone—or at least the people nearby—are also hooked up to the same sources, then it is not clear what we would really know.
In both cases, it seems, real knowledge—knowledge of what is the case as opposed to what we just happen to think is the case—is possible only by escaping the machine and getting to the world “outside.”

Yet what if there is no getting “outside” the machine? What if even “brains in vats” aren't real, and we are all just living a
completely
simulated life? That worry is closer to Descartes' original nightmare. Its closest contemporary analogue is the thought that you and I are really just SIMs. A SIM is a “simulated person”—simulated by a computer program, for example. SIMs
already exist. Popular Web-based games like Second Life, for example, have allowed people to create artificial “people” with SIM backgrounds, jobs, spouses, etc., for years. These programs even allow your SIM to continue to interact with other SIMs when you aren't actively playing the game, pursuing its career, relationships and so on. And that, as the philosopher Nick Bostrom has recently suggested, raises the possibility that the universe in which we live is and always has been a simulation run by a computer program created for the amusement of super-beings with superior technology.
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If so, then we aren't just wrong about whether, for example, we have arms and legs (as opposed to just being brains in vats). We are wrong about the nature of our universe itself: we might be living in a universe completely composed of information, whose underlying particles are really just the 1s and 0s of computer code.

Thought experiments like this show that ancient skeptical worries about knowledge are not only still with us, they are being made anew. But really, we don't need to appeal to SIMs, Brains in Vats or nearly infinite libraries to see that our culture is facing an intellectual crisis about knowledge. As we'll see over the next few chapters, the new “old” philosophical problems that make up the backstory of our form of life are actually far more immediate, more pressing, and less abstract. That's what makes them so unnerving.

2

Google-Knowing

Easy Answers

One day in the summer of 2014, I wrote down four questions to which I didn't know (or had forgotten) the answers. The challenge: to answer the questions without relying—at all—on the Internet. The four questions were:

1. What is the capital of Bulgaria?

2. Is a four-stroke outboard engine more efficient than a two-stroke?

3. What is the phone number of my U.S. representative?

4. What is the best-reviewed restaurant in Austin, Texas, this week?

Number 1, unsurprisingly, was the easiest. I suspected it was Sofia, and a map of Europe and a large reference dictionary I had
in the house confirmed it. (I was briefly worried about how up-to-date the information was, as the dictionary was almost two decades old, the map older.)

Question 2 proved more difficult. I had a (nonfunctioning) four-stroke engine, and it had a manual, but it said nothing about the newer two-stroke engines. Some boating reference books I had lying around were of no help. So I went to the local marina and spoke to a mechanic I knew. He was full of information, and had time to give me the basics. I even got to look at an engine. That was great, until I got home and realized I had not taken any notes. I was coming to think that I would make a very poor investigative journalist.

Initially, I had thought number 3 would be the easiest, until I remembered we no longer had a phone book (with the blue government pages). I started to call information, but then wondered whether they'd be using the Internet. Assuming the answer was yes, I stopped in at the local library. The kid behind the counter looked at me funny when I asked. He suggested, more than a little wryly, that I use one of their computers. I countered by asking whether they had any local phone books. They actually did—it was several years old, but still relevant. Mission accomplished.

It was question 4 that stumped me. I knew no one in Austin well enough to call for an opinion. I thought of calling their local chamber of commerce, but I didn't have a way to get that number. Besides, how would they even know the answer to such a question? My library in Connecticut didn't have copies of any Texas papers. Books might help, but the ones I looked at, such as
a few travel guides at the local bookstore, were not current enough. In short, I was out of luck.

None of this, I'm sure, surprises you. It is common knowledge that our ways of knowing about the world have changed. Most knowing now is Google-knowing—knowledge acquired online. But my little exercise brought it home for me, made it personal, in a way that I hadn't before appreciated, and I encourage you to try it yourself. It feels historic, something akin to what I imagine it must be like to dress up in period costume and live in a tent, as some Civil War reenactors do.

Just a dozen or so years ago the processes I went through to answer my questions wouldn't have seemed at all out of the ordinary. Research involved footwork, and many academics still doubted the veracity of information acquired online. But that battle is long lost. The Internet is the fountain of knowledge and Google is the mouth from which it flows. With the Internet, my challenge is no challenge at all; answering the questions is easy. Just ask the knowledge machine.

Speed is the most obvious distinguishing characteristic of how we know now. Google-knowing is fast. Yet as my exercise brings home, this speed is so dramatic that it does more than just save time. The engine diagram I can call up on my phone can be consulted again and again. I don't need notes—or need them less, and I can store them on the cloud in case I do. Elected representatives are easier to track down than ever before; I can send my opinion to them (or at least to their addresses and offices) any number of ways and in seconds. Thanks to Google Street View, I can see what Sofia and its inhabitants look like up
close and personal. And question 4—a question of a sort that probably wouldn't even have been posed before the Internet—is addressed by any number of sites giving me rankings and reviews of restaurants.

Not everything about Google-knowing is new, however. And that itself is important to appreciate. One humorous illustration of this came in 2013, when the website College Humor asked: what if Google was a guy? The ensuing video was hilarious and a bit disturbing. The questions we ask our search engines (“Hedgehog, cute,” “Bitcoin unbuy fast,” “college girls?”) seem all the more ridiculous (and creepy) once we imagine asking them of an actual person—like an amiable but overworked bureaucrat behind a desk. But it also reminds us of a fact about how we treat Google and other search engines—a fact that is obvious enough but often overlooked. We treat them like personal reference librarians; we ask them questions, and they deliver up sources that claim to have the answers. And that means that we already treat their deliverances as akin—at least at the level of trust—to the deliverances of actual people. Of course, that is precisely why the bit is funny: Google
isn't
a guy (or anyone, male or female); it doesn't create information, it distributes it. Yet this is also why it makes sense for us to treat Google like a person—why the video rings true. The information we get from the links we access via Google is (mostly) from other people. When we trust it, we almost always trust someone else's say-so—his or her “testimony.” Indeed, the entire Internet, including, of course, Wikipedia, Facebook, the blogosphere, Reddit, and most especially the Twitterverse, etc., can be described as one giant knowledge-through-testimony machine.