View from the Precipice

LOOKING FOR JOY IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

by Roman Sympos

 

Back in January, in a “View” entitled “AI and Anger Management” (https://www.romansympos.com/anger-management-1) I addressed the issue of generative AI and our tendency to fetishize it, to think of it and treat it as though it were a real human being, with purposes, intentions, desires, and feelings. I got around to examining the fatal flaws in the assumptions underlying Alan Turing’s famous “Test” of whether computers can think (they can’t), and concluded with several questions about AI, the answers to which, I still believe, are all “No.” For example, “Does AI ever have to ‘manage’ its anger? Does it have any anger to manage?” and “Does AI ever get bored?” Last month’s “View,” "Alexa, What's the Meaning of My Existence?" (https://www.romansympos.com/looking-for-joy-part-1) was a spin-off of January’s. This month's sequel, "Alexa, Give Me Joy," includes a nod to the monthly essay on Aeolian harps that appeared in the inaugural issue of Sympos, published in July of last year, “‘Perform thy task untouched, alone’: Aeolian harps as home entertainment”(https://www.romansympos.com/perform-thy-task-untouched). Both items are available on the “Archives” page.

 

 

Part 2: “ALEXA, Give Me Joy”

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In Part 1 of this essay, “Alexa, What’s the Meaning of My Existence?” (https://www.romansympos.com/view-from-the-precipice) we examined the difference between “knowing how” and “know-how,” or what we might call brain-thinking and body-thinking. The first is cognitive, the second corporeal. We acquire the first by committing to memory what we’ve read or heard about the way to do something, and the second by doing it repeatedly, “according to the book,” until our bodies have been trained to do it without our having to think about it.

 

But isn’t “not-thinking-about-it” how accidents happen?

 

Not at all. When you stop thinking about what you’re doing (or rather, what you are letting your trained body do), you don’t necessarily stop paying attention to it. Paying attention isn’t the same as thinking about what you’re doing. It’s living completely in the moment and at the precise spot your body’s doing something. It’s watching to see that the task at hand is going as intended. In our analogy to learning a foreign language, it’s paying attention to the person you’re speaking with and listening to their response to see if you’re making sense, rather than thinking about the subjunctive.

 

At the same time, you are anticipating how to reply based on what’s being asked or implied, or where you want the conversation to go. You are inhabiting the moment’s full potential, or rather, letting its full potential inhabit you, and having the patience to let it show you where it wants you to go next.

 

Thinking as a disembodied form of intellection is your mind inhabiting some place and time other than the here and now, like back when you were just learning how to do what you’re doing and had to look at an illustration, or jumping to the future, when you’ll have to stop what you’re doing and start on a different task, like preparing dinner. That’s when you get “absent-minded” and prone to accidents—you miss the nail and hit your thumb or lose the thread of a conversation.

 

Know-how is trusting your body to show or re-mind you of what comes next. Or what might come next, depending on what you want to “say” at that moment.  It might not be what you planned to say before that moment arrived. It might even come as a surprise to you.

 

In short, know-how is immersing yourself in the moment of creation, or what the late University of Chicago psychologist Mihali Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.”

 

“Flow,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, is an “order in consciousness” that occurs whenever a person “must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else” (6). “Flow” relieves the self of the “social controls” and instinctive desires of everyday life— love, food, sex, status—which are serial, diffuse, distracting, and in the end, unfulfilling. Such desires create “psychic entropy” (39), or disorder, and feelings of anxiety or boredom because their aim is passive gratification, mere “pleasure” rather than the satisfaction of accomplishment. Flow arises from “autotelic” or self-directed activities that have no goal other than their own achievement.

 

If you’re looking for joy, flow is a good place to start.

 

The “elements of enjoyment” that characterize flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, include “a challenging activity that requires skills” (49), “the merging of action and awareness” (53), “concentration on the task at hand” (58), “the sense of exercising control in difficult situations” (i.e., a sense of mastery) (61), and especially “the loss of self-consciousness” (62)—not blacking out, but an unwavering focus of attention on what needs to be done rather than on the person doing it or the motives of the persons hindering it or the tools necessary to accomplish it, which seem, in any case, almost to move under their own power.

 

AI can tell you how to do something. It can even do it for you, saving you the time and trouble of learning how to do it at all. But it can’t provide you with know-how. For that reason, it can’t give you joy.

 

And, on some level, we are aware of this because, every day and in countless ways, AI is taking away our sense of mastery and the joy that comes with it.

 

Here’s an example, courtesy of Nick Zufelt, whom you met in last month’s “View from the Precipice.” He was the theme speaker on the topic of “Purpose in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” at a conference I attended in August. The article from which Nick drew his example was written by James Walsh for The Intelligencer and is entitled “Rampant AI Cheating is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast.”

 

“I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class—the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be?” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

 

It would be easy to focus on the word “think” in this passage. Writing your own essay, says this young woman, “you have to think.” When you let AI do the writing for you, “you just don’t really have to think.” Isn’t this what parents and teachers fear most about introducing Large Language Models and generative AI into the classroom? That they are destroying our kids’ ability to think, or in Nick’s terms, “supplanting” rather than “supporting” it?

 

Well, yes. But that’s true of nearly every new technology going all the way back to the invention of writing, which Plato, in Phaedrus, indicted for, in effect, “supplanting” our power to remember. Why bother to memorize all 30,000 lines of Homer’s epic poems when you can read them whenever you want? (Or have your literate slave read them to you?)

 

I’d rather concentrate on the word “beauty.” “There’s beauty in having to plan your essay,” says Walsh’s student. She’s sensitive, in other words, to the form of what she creates—its overall shape, its rhythms, patterns, balances and counter-balances, its arc and order of presentation—and misses the joy of mastery that once enabled her to impose some measure of control over these beautiful things, to make them her own creation, while motivating her to look for challenges that, ultimately, would improve that mastery. “You learn a lot,” she says, when writing your own essay. You learn how to create beauty.

 

This is what the joy of learning looks like when we stop confusing know-how with merely knowing how.

 

But why indict “Rampant AI Cheating” as the master criminal when, to judge by this young woman’s lament, rampant grading has been ruining education at least since the invention of the SAT in 1926, and probably long before? Students like Walsh’s are only following the script for advancement they’ve been handed by their teachers and parents and employers from their first day of kindergarten, and in some cases, pre-school.

 

Why do teachers grade their students’ work when the net effect is to deny them the joy of learning? Ask any half-dozen educators picked at random and they’ll tell you they hate grading as much as their students. Press a little harder and they’ll admit they do it only because they’re paid to. And why are they paid to?  Because our schools are charged, from Kindergarten on up through graduate school, with the task of sorting the desirables from the undesirables and ranking everyone in between according to their perceived aptitude for “success,” which mostly means, success at doing their jobs, or even finding any. School is modern society’s Human Resources Division.

 

This is how learning loses its autotelic joy, the gladness and excitement and sense of accomplishment that comes with mastering a skill and looking for challenges that will make you better at it just for the sake of doing it. Grading forces the innate joy of learning to give way to learning as a means to an end—“getting a good job,” “getting ahead in life,” “making money,” “building a career,” even “attracting a good marriage partner.”  Grading instrumentalizes learning.

 

But let’s back up: how is learning a bodily activity? It involves, proportionally, a great deal more mental activity than fielding a line drive or nailing a perfect ten from the diving platform. In fact, learning is often entirely a process of thinking, isn’t it?  Memorizing, understanding, imagining. . . . what do you have to train your body to do in order to learn that the square root of 2 is pi? Surely, when Czikszentmihalyi talks about “a challenging activity that requires skills,” he’s not talking only about stuff like woodworking or making omelets. Or, if you're Nick Zufelt, playing the guitar. If learning is a skill—and it is—then thinking about what you are doing is far from an impediment to achieving “flow.” It’s nearly all that learning, as we generally conceive it, consists of.

 

The most succinct answer to the question, “How is learning a bodily activity?” is “It involves a part of the body called the brain.” The question itself reminds us that when we say a physical skill requires “training the body to think for us,” the body in question includes the bundle or network of neurons in the brain that controls movement, as well as the nerves connecting that network to the muscle groups we’re training. That integrated neural network is the part of the body we’re training to think on its own, to the point where we no longer have to think about it.

 

Skills can be mental, then, as well as physical, and both, when mastered, can bring joy. But there’s no clear dividing line between the two and neither is an all-or-nothing proposition.

 

Memorization, for instance, is training a part of your brain to master the skill of recalling numbers, speeches, and events by repeatedly going over a mnemonic routine, like associating the initial letters of the items you want to remember with an acronym or, as the classical orators did, mentally placing the items in the rooms of an imaginary house. These techniques in particular involve visualization, an imaginary form of sensory—that is, corporeal—perception. You practice the mnemonic until you don’t have to labor so hard to call these items to mind.

 

But memorization may involve the body more explicitly and employ other senses besides the visual, as in a rhyme—“Thirty days hath September,” and so on—or a song, whose chiming patterns and repeating melodies make it easier to commit to memory. Often, especially at an early age, you begin by singing the song at the outset, along with a little dance: “Head . . . shoulders, knees and toes . . .”

 

The most common way the body is involved in mastering mental skills is, of course, manually, by writing down an idea in words or numbers or by drawing diagrams or illustrations to help in mental visualization, a crucial skill not only in memorizing, but also in understanding abstract relationships. Writing more than a sentence or two (I’m not speaking of copying) often requires revision and re-arrangement, “sculpting," as it were, your words and sentences and phrases as they appear on the page and smoothing out the seams between them the way a good mason would point a brick fireplace. I assume that Edith Wharton experienced many moments of joy when she was hard at work writing and revising and blocking out The House of Mirth, however difficult the challenges—indeed, precisely because those challenges offered her opportunities to experience the joy of finding just the right word or conceiving exactly how the next scene would play out. I’m just as certain that James Walsh’s student, if given the chance to do so without the Sword of Grading hanging over her head, would find joy in writing about Wharton’s book.

 

If you are lucky in life, the skills you are most eager to learn when you are young, whether predominantly mental or corporeal or balanced somewhere in between, eventually add up to a career or a profession that brings you joy, regardless of the income you may earn. But most of us are unlucky, or we make the wrong choices. When I was a teacher and advising undergraduates, nothing gave me a deeper feeling of dread than a student who came to my office and said they chose to major in something because it would give them more money instead of more joy. This is what comes of the instrumentalization of joy that begins with grading: a life of tedium, if not immiseration.

 

In any case, and in every case, the joy of mastering a skill is directly proportional to the difficulty of the challenges it presents at every stage of advancement and the opportunities it opens up, at every incremental step along the way, for more complex—more beautiful—forms of creative self-expression. Whether you are a pin-ball wizard or a chess grandmaster, a platform diver or a quantum physicist, a luthier or a basement bird-house builder, joy awaits you, but only if you refuse to settle for knowing-how and work at acquiring, and continuing to acquire, the know-how.

 

And Alexa can’t do that for you.

 

CODA:

 

Our current infatuation with Generative AI and the wonders it can perform fits perfectly into our modern obsession with efficiency. There’s nothing we love better than saving time and trouble, by which we mean, generally, doing things ourselves. Why shop at a bricks-and-mortar store when you can shop online without the trouble of getting in the car and fighting traffic and finding a parking spot and discovering the store doesn’t have what you want after all? It takes much less time to stay home and “let your fingers do the walking,” as they used to say in the Yellow Pages ads. (My apologies to Gen Z: the ads were discontinued while most of you were in diapers, so you’ll have to look it up. You know where.)

 

Our love of efficiency in general originated in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution as a growing attachment to and dependency on “labor-saving devices.” In the factory, this meant replacing wage laborers with machines that required fewer workers to operate them and turning those workers into parts of the machines they tended, doing the same elementary and repetitive tasks all day, every day, week in and week out.  “Labor” in the abstract, as a cost of doing business, was thus “saved” at the expense of the real laborers who were either put out of a job or reduced to automatons.  

 

In the home, labor-saving devices like the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner saved time and trouble for working class females (whether mothers or daughters) and money for upper class females. Servants could work more efficiently, which meant you could pay fewer of them to do the same work or, eventually, hire a cleaning service to stop by once a week.

 

Somewhere along the line, “labor” came to include the idea of doing anything yourself. We became consumers, not doers. We began searching for gratification instead of mastery, pleasure instead of joy.

 

In the first issue of Sympos, published in July of last year, I included an essay on the Aeolian harp, an oblong wind harp popular in England from the late 1700’s to the mid-nineteenth century, the period when the Industrial Revolution was beginning to pick up steam  (https://www.romansympos.com/perform-thy-task-untouched). Unlike the mechanical music boxes that appeared at about the same time, the Aeolian harp required no winding and its melodies were unique, albeit limited by a severely restricted sonic palette. Just place the instrument in a sash window on a breezy day and let Nature entertain you.

 

Until the advent of such devices, there was no way to hear music of any kind unless a human being played or sang it within your range of hearing. People made their own music. From kings and princes all the way down the social ladder to servants, peasants, and children, they acquired the skills to do so and found joy, and pride, in mastering and using them to entertain themselves and others.

 

Today, music education, along with arts education generally, is moribund in school districts throughout the nation, if not already dead. Hearing live music is a rare treat and seldom offered gratis. Even subway buskers leave their instrument cases gaping expectantly. And when was the last time you were asked to bring your viola da gamba to dinner?

 

None of us can pinpoint the day the music began to die. But the music box and the Aeolian harp were the first streaks of its bleak and dismal dawn.

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