The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

The philosopher Michael Polanyi analyzed this moment when we achieve competence with a probe, and in doing so found that he had to use the word “attend” in a new formulation: you are now “attending from” the sensations in your hand to the objects at the probe’s tip; the sensations themselves you are only “subsidiarily aware of.” In this way “an interpretive effort transposes meaningless feelings into meaningful ones, and places these at some distance [i.e., the length of the probe] from the original ones. We become aware of the feelings in our hands in terms of their meaning … to which we are attending.” This meaning is located at the tip of the probe. The probe itself becomes transparent; it disappears. You are no longer engaged in an interpretive effort. The crucial fact that makes this integration of a prosthetic possible is that there is a closed loop between action and perception: what you perceive is determined by what you do, just as when we make use of our own hands. Let us go a little deeper into the mutual entanglement of action and perception.