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

by Matthew B. Crawford

Sheba sits with Sarah (another chimp), and two plates of treats are shown. What Sheba points to, Sarah gets. Sheba always points to the greater pile, thus getting less. She visibly hates this result but can’t seem to improve. However, when the treats arrive in containers with a cover bearing numerals on top, the spell is broken, and Sheba points to the smaller number, thus gaining more treats. The interpretation is that the numerals, because they don’t look tasty, “allow the chimps to sidestep the capture of their own behavior by ecologically specific, fast-and-frugal subroutines.” They provide “a new target for selective attention and a new fulcrum for the control of action.”17

Among philosophers there is currently a quarrel about what role (if any) concepts—the kind you can state in language—play in skilled activities.19 On one side is Hubert Dreyfus, who says that when we are engaged in an activity that we are already competent in, anything so thoroughly mental as a “concept” doesn’t normally play a role. It can only get in the way and disrupt our “smooth coping.” By “smooth coping” he means a way of acting

where our responses to the things we are dealing with are elicited from us by the situation, without articulate thought. This is how you tie your shoes in the morning, for example. It is a skill you learned long ago, and has become automatic. Dreyfus offers this idea as a corrective to the view that our actions are always caused by prior “mental” operations.

On the other side is John McDowell, who offers what I take to be an important countercorrective to the “smooth coping” notion by emphasizing the role of concepts in skilled activity. We don’t shut off our thinking, the way Dreyfus seems to suggest. Though McDowell doesn’t mention the fact, I believe his emphasis on the role of conceptual thinking is especially necessary when the activity in question is dangerous, and there are contingencies that remain beyond your co...

The role of attention in the exercise of a skill is to pick out those features of the scene that are pragmatically significant and that therefore, taken together, define “the situation.” In the early stages of learning a skill, explicit propositional knowledge, stated in language for instructional purposes, plays a crucial role in directing attention toward its proper objects. Bathed with attention in this way, these objects then become available for integration with affect and action routines by the subconscious mind, following a close call.

Note that the role played by language implies that achieving competence—even in an activity as solitary as motorcycling—has an important social dimension.

You learn things from others by reading books, having conversations with other practitioners, or watching tutorials on YouTube. Gary Klein has famously studied the decision making of firefighters, and discusses their ability to discern when a building is about to collapse, allowing them to get out in the nick of time. Klein emphasizes their ability to integrate subtle sensual data and recognize patterns. But as far as I know he does not address the role of affect, nor the role that language plays (on my account) in priming the integration of affect with perception and action. Presumably, the more experienced firefighters try, at least, to describe to a beginner the peculiar sequence and combination of sights, sounds, and feelings that precede a building collapse, so that the beginner knows what to be alert to in the chaos of a burning building. If ...

The cohesiveness and ongoing association of a firefighting unit offer an advantage not enjoyed by most motorcyclists: they are under mutual surveillance and can criticize one another’s mistakes. They can also cover one another’s blind spots, offering up a third-person perspective such as “There was a large ember floating upward right behind yo...

material for a firefighter’s retrospective understanding of “the situation,” or indeed a collaborative reconstruction of it. His own ...

That is, the array of sensual data that count as pragmatically relevant for grasping the situation may be expanded or shifted through a kind of triangulation with others who were not merely there, but engaged in the same task, facing the same dangers. You debrief one another. The fruit of this conversation enters into your ongoing rehearsal of the experience. If this rehearsed version bears up, and jibes with further experience, it becomes internalized, available to the subconscious mind in coping with future situations. For experiences to become part of the secure, sedimented foundation of a skill, they must be criti...

Getting things right requires triangulating with other people. Psychologists therefore would do well to ask whether “metacognition” (thinking critically about your own thinking) is at bottom a social phenomenon. It typically happens in conversation—not idle chitchat, but the kind that aims to get to the bottom of things. I call this an “art” because it requires both tact and doggedness. And I call it a moral accomplishment because to be good at this kind of conversation you have to love the truth more than you love your own current state of understanding. This is, of course, an unusual priority to have, which may help to account for the rarity of real mastery in any pursuit.

Spiegel points out that when riding with limited visibility (which is usually the case), we tend to ride according to a “risk composite.” We are vaguely aware of some really bad contingencies, but we also know that the odds of these actually occurring are small. Our response, as folk statisticians, is to slow down a little bit, as though we are weighting the bad contingency by multiplying it with its unlikelihood, and thereby arriving at the appropriate speed. But this is self-delusion. Our reduced speed is nowhere near as slow as it would need to be to avoid the hazard if it should occur. (Then again, without self-delusion we’d probably never enjoy ourselves.)

art. As Spiegel puts it, the role for the conscious mind is “alert watchfulness, without meddling.” It is “an unstable condition, which degrades all too easily into either a complete lack of watchfulness or too much involvement.”

When this mental practice is lived, it doesn’t manifest as something beautiful for a bystander to behold, as road racing does. Rather, it becomes impressive only as a cumulative accomplishment in the life of the rider, measured in miles ridden without incident but including also some all-too-brief stretches of Márquez-esque transcendence.

Sometimes a verbal expression will serve as a “tag” for a particular feeling that an expert has become attuned to, an elusive state that he wishes to achieve. In these cases, the phrase will be mysterious when used as an instructional device for the novice. Spiegel gives the example of feeling your consciousness “flowing down through the contact patches.”

Unlike animals that live in the moment and merely cope with their world (however smoothly), we are erotic: we are drawn out of our present selves toward some more skilled future self that we emulate. What it means to be erotic is that we are never fully at home in the world. We are always “on our way.” Or perhaps we should say that this state of being on our way to somewhere else is our peculiar human way of being here in the world.

As we push out into the world, first as toddlers and then as tool users, we perceive it differently because we are now inhabiting it in a more determinate way, conditioned by the particulars of the skill and the implements we use. Through a skilled practice, the self has been brought into a relation of fit to the world. And this can be quite absorbing.

As we have already noted, embodied perception poses

a direct challenge to the idea that representation is the fundamental mental process by which we apprehend the world.

This bridge begins to take shape when we notice that the technological concept of virtual reality also expresses a moral ideal. More precisely, it expresses what philosophers call a metaethical position. That is, it carries with it a certain understanding of the underpinnings of ethics: a picture of the moral agent and how she stands in relation to the world beyond her head. Taken in this sense, virtual reality provides an especially clear point of contrast to the concept of the situated self that I am offering.

VIRTUAL REALITY AS MORAL IDEAL

Acquiring skills, we acquire new motivations; a new space of reasons for action.

As Thomas de Zengotita points out in his beautiful book Mediated, representations are addressed to us, unlike dumb nature, which just sits there. They are fundamentally flattering, placing each of us at the center of a little “me-world.”1 If the world encountered as something distinct from the self plays a crucial role for a person in achieving adult agency, then it figures that when our encounters with the world are increasingly mediated by representations that soften this boundary, this will have some effect on the kind of selves we become.

The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.

The creeping substitution of virtual reality for reality is a prominent feature of contemporary life, but it also has deep antecedents in Western thought. It is a cultural project that is unfolding along lines that Immanuel Kant sketched for us: trying to establish the autonomy of the will by filtering material reality through abstractions.

The challenge posed by cognitive extension to contemporary culture cuts deep, because Kant’s metaphysics of freedom is at the very core of our modern understanding of how we relate to the world beyond our heads.

The Handy Dandy machine would teach us that it is not essential to human agency that you understand how your choice is realized or that you in fact do anything to realize it. The intervention of magic allows the moment of choice to be isolated from the (mysterious) process by which that choice is to be made effective in the world. It is also isolated from what comes before choice; the options for action that you are to choose from are already there, presented to you without involvement on your part.

How we act is not determined in an isolated moment of choice; it is powerfully ordered by how we perceive the situation, how we are attuned to it, and this is very much a function of our previous history of shaping ourselves to the world in a particular way.

Moments of attending to the world are separable from the moment of moral choice, and indeed the freedom of the will depends on such separation. Experience is always contingent and particular, and for that reason “unfitted to serve as a ground of moral laws. The universality with which these laws should hold for all rational beings without exception … falls away if their basis is taken from the special constitution of human nature or from the accidental circumstances in which it is placed.” To be rational is, for Kant, precisely not to be situated in the world.5

Whether you regard it as infantile or as the highest achievement of the European mind, what we find in Kant are the philosophical roots of our modern identification of freedom with choice, where choice is understood as a pure flashing forth of the unconditioned will. This is important for understanding our culture because thus understood, choice serves as the central totem of consumer capitalism, and those who present choices to us appear as handmaidens to our own freedom.

When the choosing will is hermetically sealed off from the fuzzy, hard-to-master contingencies of the empirical world, it becomes more “free” in a sense: free for the kind of neurotic dissociation from reality that opens the door wide for others to leap in on our behalf, and present options that are available to us without the world-disclosing effort of skillful engagement. For the Mouseke-doer, choosing (from a menu of ready-made solutions) replaces doing, and it follows that such a person should be more pliable to the choice architectures presented to us in mass culture.

The basic thrust of these interventions is not something that Kant caused. But when dumb nature is understood to be threatening to our freedom as rational beings, it becomes attractive to construct a virtual reality that will be less so, a benignly nice Mickey Mouse Clubhouse where there is no conflict between self and world;

Kant tries to put the freedom of the will on a footing that secures it against outside influence—so it will be “unconditioned,” a law unto itself—but he can do this only by removing the will to a separate realm, from which it can have no causal effect in this world, the one governed by Newtonian causation. The fantasy of autonomy comes at the price of impotence.

With this comes fragility—that of a self that can’t tolerate conflict and frustration. And this fragility, in turn, makes us more pliable to whoever can present the most enthralling representations that save us from a direct confrontation with the world. Being addressed to us, these representations allow us to remain comfortable in a little “me-world” of manufactured experience. If these representations make use of hyperpalatable mental stimuli, the world of regular old experience may come to seem not only frustrating but unbearably drab by comparison.

These experiences hint at the cultural possibilities of engineering and design. The design of things can facilitate embodied agency or diminish it in ways that lead us further into passivity and dependence.

ATTENTION AND DESIGN

Disconnection—pressing a button to make something happen—facilitates an experience of one’s own will as something unconditioned by all those contingencies that intervene between an intention and its realization.

When roads look dangerous, people slow down and become more heedful. Consistent with this, the failure to recognize risks and appreciate them is found to contribute more than does divided attention to crashes among novice drivers.2 But there is a relation between these two: perceived risk increases conscious effort and focuses attention.

Emily Anthes writes that among traffic engineers, “in the last decade or so, a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous—narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.”4 Reporting the findings of Dumbaugh and of Ian Lockwood, a traffic engineer in Orlando, Anthes writes that having on-street parking or bike lanes makes drivers more careful, as does having buildings that come right up to the street, as this seems to give drivers the sense that others are watching them.

What was so deeply disturbing about the Toyota recall episode of 2008, I believe, was the revelation that there was software—convention, language, representation—involved in the brakes. This design problem of disconnection or arbitrariness mirrors a fundamental problem in cognitive science: the symbol-grounding problem.

In the computational theory of mind that prevails in conventional cognitive science, we are assumed to have internal representations of the world, and these representations are built on symbols that are meaningless in themselves; they “encode” features of the world in the same way a computer represents states of affairs with a string of zeroes and ones. The symbol-grounding problem is this: How can arbitrary symbols take on meaning? How do they acquire propositional content and reference, such that they say something about the world? The same question is posed in philosophy of language, since after all there is no necessary connection between the sounds we make and what those sounds mean. One

can refer the words to a lexicon, but the words used in the lexicon face the same problem; there seems to be an infinite...

Embodied representations, as opposed to symbolic representations, do not face this problem. This has implications for the design of automobiles and any other instrument-implement that we use both to perceive and to act on the world. As Arthur Glenberg writes in the article I cited earlier, “embodied representations do not need to be mapped onto the world to become meaningful because they arise from the world.” They are “directly grounded by virtue of being lawfully and analogically related to properties of the world and how those propertie...

A harder-edged car, without electronics mediating between action and perception, and in which mechanical noises are not fully damped out, preserves “cross-modal binding,” thought by some to be the key to our grasp of reality. Information that we pick up through different senses gets bound together, and coheres in our apprehension of some state of affairs in the world, because the...

This too is part of the time-locked stream of information, with varying time signatures, that makes our brains “bind” our various senses together and decide that this is not a dream or hallucination. There is indeed a “thing in itself” out there beyond our heads, revealed by coherent sensory patterns. But only if those patterns are preserved and conveyed to us.

Infants, and robots that take the learning process of infants as their inspiration, generate time-locked patterns of sensorimotor stimulation for themselves by poking at things, manipulating them, and so on. The sight of your own hand moving through space gets bound to the feeling of this action. The child develops an embodied self-awareness through learning the properties of objects. Different objects resist his body in various ways (light or heavy, soft or hard, slippery or sticky,

and so forth), yielding different time-locked bundlings of sensorimotor experience, corresponding to different classes of interaction. This has been shown to play a role in the infant’s learning of categories and formation of concepts. Commenting on this literature, Andy Clark writes that “the key to such developing capabilities is the robot’s or infant’s capacity to maintain coordinated sensorimotor engagement with its environment.”7 A driving experience that ...

figure out what’s going on, decide on some course of action, and enact it through the narrow interface of the keyboard or the data-glove, carefully monitoring the result to see if it turns out the way they expected. Our experience of the everyday world is not of that sort. There is no homunculus sitting inside our heads, staring out at the world through our eyes, enacting some plan of action by manipulating our hands and checking carefully to make sure we don’t overshoot when reaching for the coffee cup.8

Our embodied mode of existence has given rise to exquisitely sensitive capacities for detecting and negotiating the world, and a good design principle would be to try to exploit these capacities, rather than to sever the connections between perception and action, as the current generation of automotive engineers seems intent on doing.9

A person is “interested above all in that sector of his everyday world which lies within his reach and which arranges itself spatially and temporally around him as its center.” Relative to this center, one carves up the surrounding world at its egocentric joints: right, left, above, below, in front of, behind, near, far. The world within “actual reach” is basically oriented according to proximity and distance. This reachable world “embraces not only actually perceived objects but also objects that can be perceived through attentive advertence.”12 Thus it includes, for example, things behind you that are close but currently out of sight.