The Flaw in the Robot

Before I ever properly awoke this morning (it’s 8:30 am as I write this but I was up before 7), I experienced the way the Internet distracts. A comment on another blog, signaled by e-mail overnight, got lost as I attempted to approve it—which led to a mesmerizing process of trying to discover why. I lost track of time.

Any kind of feedback system that appears to be alive captures the body. It’s much harder to find distraction just staring at an old-fashioned writing desk—although, as I’ve discovered, excessive disorder has occasionally captured me, now and then leading to an hour’s order-making, rising to such outrages as fetching a vacuum cleaner, etc. That’s the same basic process—but the computer is so much better at delivering distraction.

Now I am retired, so this happens with less resistance. A busy life in which the outer is constantly demanding attention keeps people focused on tasks; the utterly trivial has less power. But then the tasks themselves, however nobly sanctioned by society, can become hypnotic so that the day rolls on, like an avalanche. In retrospect, thus observed from a slightly surprised point in time in the evening, the surprise arising because true awareness, for the first time, has managed to fight its way to the top, the person marvels at the scene: the day seems quite like a dream in its turn.

What I want to note here is that consciousness is a deeply layered phenomenon in which many quite deliberate actions—not least rather complex thinking—can take place above the merely waking state. At lowest levels are, say, the routine of breakfast, then a kind of noodling. The noodling can become obsessive, as it did today. Above that layer daily routines dictate the thoughts, action, planning, and the like—but blinkered by the tasks themselves. In midst of those—say while driving—the day-dream-like process returns. The news on the radio milks us of reflexive emotings. Now and then the traffic patterns cause tension and attention—but not real consciousness. In a long active day, there may never come a moment when we are genuinely present. And that moment may not last. Making it last is, as it were, the important task of the day, given our mission here on earth. But, of course, that moment of wakefulness, self-awareness, itself appears, in the context of the flux, as an unwelcome distraction from the compelling urge to obey the demands of our reflexes.

The higher urge, one might say, is a flaw in the robot—which can do great wonders, intelligent as it is, without any help. Real awareness stops the machine. Goodness! If allowed to stick around, it produces shudders—as tensions in the muscles are released. And then what? What is there to do? It’s a puzzlement that rises as we glimpse the borderzone.