Welcome, everyone.
My name is doctor Steven Grundman.
I teach integrated studies in our doctorate in psychology program, and I'll be your emcee for tonight.
First, a few quest a few words about the question and answer period.
As questions occur to you during the lecture, please feel feel free to write them in the chat box or the question and answer box in Zoom.
If you're in the room, we'll be able to take verbal questions, afterwards, but feel free to take notes and be ready for that when we come.
There will be a short break after the lecture while doctor Bitch prepares his responses to your questions.
And for technical reasons, we will, only be able to accept quest questions electronically until just before the end of the talk.
Next, I'm happy to introduce the Newman lecture series itself.
The series now in its twenty third year is held into the sponsorship of Divine Mercy University.
As is our tradition, the series aims at building a body of learning discussion that is Catholic both in its breadth of research and in its dialogue with contemporary Catholic Christian thought.
And now I invite our president, father Charles Sikorsky, to open us in prayer.
Well, thank you, doctor Grundmann.
I just wanna welcome everyone here who's here present, but also who's watching us virtually, to the University.
It's great to have you with us.
And I think it's gonna be a really fascinating talk.
Over the years, I've been privileged to have several conversations with doctor Vince about this topic.
First, I didn't really understand what he was gonna talk about, but it's one of the most I think one of the most current challenges that the world faces, and he'll get more into that with the advances in technology and what happens to the human person.
Right?
And so, really, looking forward to it.
I think it's gonna be a a fascinating talk, and thanks to doctor Vitz for preparing this for us.
So begin with our prayer in the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.
Heavenly father, creator of the universe Mhmm.
And all things, especially human person, thank you for the gift of intelligence, will, creativity, and so many things that you give to each person.
Help us to use our talents in a positive way to serve you, to serve others, to serve the human person.
And we thank you for all the benefits that we've had through technology, and development.
It also presents, obviously, challenges that can put man not at the center, put the human person out at the center more as a servant of technology, the servant of our own inventions rather than using them to strengthen human life, to strengthen the human person.
And so hope that this conversation maybe gives us some insight how we can better use our talents to serve you, use it and use the inventions and creations that others have helped to make and advance in a positive way.
We thank you for doctor Vitz to be with us, tonight and for all he's done over the years to promote the study of psychology and its deeper meaning its deeper meaning that ultimately finds its purpose in you and your eternal plan.
I also wanna pray for all those who are suffering right now with mental illness or struggles, emotional problems.
Recently recent study came out from the CDC saying that suicide rates are going up both for young men and young women.
We pray for all those who might be struggling right now that they get the help, the love, and the assistance they need to to persevere, and to find what they need to help them live flourishing, happy, healthy lives.
We ask all these things in the name of your son, our lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Now please welcome doctor Klowicki who will introduce our speaker this evening.
Evening.
My name is doctor Lisa Kliewicki.
I'm the IPSD and the PsyD program director here at Divine Mercy University.
And tonight, I have the very great pleasure of introducing our speaker, doctor Paul Bitz.
As mentioned previously, the 22, 23 human lecture series celebrates the integration of Catholic Christian vision of the person with the mental health sciences, particularly through the life work of DMU's most influential scholar, doctor Paul Bitz.
Doctor Vitz has made an impact on contemporary psychology for over forty years.
Even before his groundbreaking publication of psychology as religion, the cult of self worship in 1977, which was not too much longer after I was born.
So that really is something.
The overall series will revisit themes important to doctor Bitz's legacy.
And I think one of the things that's important here about doctor Bitz is that not only is he an incredible scholar, but he's an incredible man.
He was our one of our very first founding faculty.
He taught our very first class in a in a, hotel room, right, for our students.
Was it Saturday morning?
Is it nine something?
Right?
09:00.
He would commute down from New York City where he was at NYU as well.
And, doctor Vince, every time I would see him on campus, he would always stop and make eye contact with me and ask, how are you doing today?
Right?
There's always a question, how are you doing today?
The next question he had was, how can I support you?
I thought, wow.
Right?
Here's a man of integrity.
Right?
A man who really takes people seriously.
He takes his scholarly work very seriously, but he takes to human relationship very seriously.
And that has always impressed me with him for the time that I've known him from the very beginning of my time here at, IPS, now DMU.
So doctor Vitz's contributions to the field are massive.
And to comment on his more than lengthy curriculum would take us all night.
So instead of hearing about doctor Vitz's work, I think we have something even better.
We get to hear from doctor Vitz.
So today, doctor Bitz will address analog and digital tech psychology analog and digital psychology and the challenge of transhumanism.
Doctor Bitz, it's yours.
Thank you very much, Lisa.
And good evening, and welcome everyone who's here.
I will do a lot of reading, so I'll be sitting down for much of it.
I I have to say this.
This is the first public presentation of this material.
Mhmm.
And so the result is it may be a little bit scattered.
I have to pare it down a lot.
There's more to it than what I can present in one talk.
So I have to edit things, pair it down, and I may be a little bit disjointed at times.
But please remember, there's a q and a session at the end of my talk, and you'll all be welcome to give a question to me or someone ask for clarification at that point.
Thank you.
Human beings have only two basic ways of representing information, knowledge, understanding, and meaning.
One is with analog codes.
The other is with digital codes.
Evidence for this claim, the two codes themselves, and their impact on our life and culture will be the focus of my talk.
In particular, the two codes will be shown to have very different mental and psychological effects and very different social and cultural effects as well.
However, first, we need to know what analog and digital codes are, then we will move on to their significance.
To begin, a code is anything that we can perceive and that stands for or refers to some other thing than itself.
An analog code is one that has some physical similarity or analogy analogy to the thing to which it refers.
The degree of similarity can be can vary.
More on this later.
But some similarity must exist between an analog code and its reference.
A common visual code of a person is a photograph of him or her.
By looking at the photograph, you can normally recognize its reference, assuming it's a good photo.
Even a bad photo gives you some knowledge of the subject.
However, the most elementary analog code of anything is our direct sensory perceptual experience of it.
Your nervous system constructs a representation of what you are looking at.
That is an analog code.
Whatever you are listening to and looking at or even touching.
This sensory or perceptual experience is technically a kind of neural representation or as I say code of the person, object, or thing being directly experienced.
These analog codes are assumed to be so close to reality itself that we don't mention them in our interaction with others.
I do not say when I'm looking at you.
I have an aware I have an accurate representation of you.
No.
I say I see you.
I see you.
I see them.
Although the codes are in our nervous system, they underlie all our conscious experience.
And this experience is understood as an experience of what is real.
These sights and sounds and other direct sensory and perceptual representations are our most elementary and most immediately meaning laden experiences.
But the important point is that these experiences, which are perceptual and sensory, are constructed and are therefore codes.
And so that's the basic analog code.
Analog codes can be visual or auditory, or they can involve the other senses as well, of course, touch, taste, and smell.
They are usually con continuous and connected throughout space to the rest of the surrounding environment.
When I see you, I I'm connected to everyone else in this room and it usually and there are no boundary conditions very clear when I look at a person.
There's always the context within which the analog, observation or analog code exists.
A digital code in contrast is discreet and has no similarity to its reference.
No similarity to its reference.
Indeed, digital codes are arbitrary.
For example, most of you have a Social Security number that refers to you.
This number has no physical similarity to you.
I cannot tell by looking at that code how old you are, your height, your weight, your sex.
I cannot even tell if you are alive.
And I can look at it, you know, Social Security code and the person could be dead.
How would I know?
Furthermore, most dir digital codes besides being discreet and therefore and also unrelated to the thing they refer to, they are part of a system that has rules for how the symbols are to be put into a correct sequence such as grammar and syntax rules for language, rules of logic or mathematics, rules for computer programs, or arbitrary rules for the way in which an organization writes its orders, pays its bills, and so forth.
The difference of analog and digital codes is hardly new that I'm making here, although the claim of the sensory experience is, I think, somewhat new.
But the two kind types of codes are familiar in computer theory and philosophers and psychologists have long made similar distinctions.
Now this distinction between analog and digital codes means means that the codes are qualitatively different.
They are independent of each other and refer to a different aspect of the reference.
It is true that an analog code can be transmitted in terms of the digital phone.
In other words, you can take a picture, put it into digital codes, transmit the digital codes to another actually, usually to another screen where it come where it's reconstituted as a picture.
But the point I'm trying to make is that when the analog code is put in it to a digital form, while it's in a digital form, you cannot know what it is.
You can't tell by looking at that series discrete zeros and ones or numbers.
Whether it's a photograph of a person, much less if it's of your grandmother.
In other words, it has to be reconstituted as an analog on a visual screen as a picture.
Then you can understand it.
And the opposite is true.
A digital code can be conveyed to you by a photograph.
It can be put into a pictorial form.
But you cannot understand it by looking at it.
By looking at the picture of a mathematical proof you don't know anything.
You have to know what the symbols stand for, what language it might even have been written in, and all the rules and logic of the mathematical system within which it operates.
So you can see a picture of it but, you can't do anything with it.
The same experience happens when most of us look at an unexpected foreign language.
We can't we can't deal with it.
It's written.
It mostly is treated entirely as a digital code for us, but we can't figure out what it means because we don't know what the syntax.
We don't know it's it's dictionary and so on.
In addition, for example, analog codes have no no way to talk about zero or true negation, things like that.
So there are aspects of reality that are only in the digital system just like as we'll see there are aspects of reality only in Anolon because the two are discrete, they're different, they cannot refer to the same information.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
It's a one way of summarizing that analog information is almost impossible to summarize even with words.
And if you do, you have to use words that have lots of images in their associative character.
In other words, you're bringing you're cheating.
You're not giving them just a digital word.
You're giving them a digital word that has lots of associations that are analog with it.
And those bring it in.
And those allow you to read poetry, for example, and, understand what somebody looks like when they're described in a novel and so on and why a sunset might be beautiful in terms of its description.
The analog and digital distinction is important in a way that's been summarized by an interesting, philosopher.
And I'll read it to you because it's gonna sort of capture the psychological differences associated with these two qualitatively different codes.
The analog is pregnant with meaning, whereas the digital domain of significance is relatively speaking rather barren.
It is almost impossible to translate the rich semantics of the analog into any digital form.
This is true both of the most trivial sensations biting your tongue, for example, and the most enviable situations being in love, for example.
It is impossible to describe precisely such events except in the recourse in recourse to unnamable unnamable common experiences.
But this imprecision carries with it a fundamental and probably essential ambiguity.
Analog symbols are not always clear as to what their meaning is.
For example, a clenched fist may communicate excitement, fear, anger, impending assault, frustration, good morning, or revolution.
You need to look at all the context to decide to figure that one out, and the context will also be analog.
The digital, on the other hand, because it is concerned with boundaries and because it depends upon arbitrary combinations, has all the syntax to be precise and may be entirely unambiguous.
Thus, what the analog gains in semantics or meaning, it loses in syntactics.
And what the digital gains in syntactics, it loses in semantics.
That's another way of talking about the qualitative difference.
We need both of them, but they're different.
Come sometimes we combine them, of course, in ways that make life more complicated, but that still doesn't that doesn't void the basic distinction between these two forms of of, code.
Here are some more differences between the two codes.
Digital codes, symbols.
Digital codes are discrete, like numbers or letters of the alphabet or ones and zeros in computer and machine language, while analog codes are commonly continuous along with our rather arbitrary boundaries such as photographs or drawings.
In a movie, although the edge of the screen is a boundary, this is usually implicit because the viewer is usually just looking at the center of the screen and not paying much attention to the boundaries.
And in essence, the boundaries is always floating around and changing.
I mentioned already that digital codes are found usually within a an organization that specifies all the details of how to what is to be connected to what.
What stands for, certain kind of, a certain kind of product perhaps that you bought.
One one stands for another kind.
What stands for how long you're gonna have it available and so on and so forth.
Well, of course, we have words in a legal document.
Each of those words you can only understand by knowing the legal precedence.
You have a terrible problem reading a legal document unless you know all of the the digital meanings of those words.
Same with the mathematical proof.
But we can look at a picture, and we can know what it's about.
We can't always tell its meaning as we've mentioned with the fist.
But we can tell, oh, that's a fist.
Now what's it mean?
You look for context.
But that's more building it up in more with more analog information.
Even then there's always the possibility of some ambiguity with an analog signal.
Types of errors that are made.
Digital errors are very few.
Digital systems are quite reliable usually.
They're sudden, but when they make an error, it's sudden, it's discreet, and sometimes very large.
You get a you get a a mistaken feedback from your tax report from the IRS, and it says you will be refunded $1,000,000.
That's a mistake.
There were bunch of zeros and ones in a row, and they put the one in the wrong place.
So it's a sudden digital disaster from the point of view of the IRS.
Digital you know, suddenly you're using your your phone and you press the wrong button and you call the wrong person.
Oh, disaster.
That's the last person I want.
I got them now.
You press the wrong lever in in in a in a factory and it whoops.
Guess what happens?
All the lights go out.
But, normally, they don't happen.
Digital errors are few, but when they can when they do happen, they can be disastrous.
Oops.
I'm sorry.
I've got I I I pressed the button for the atom bomb.
Analog errors are fairly common and are always small.
For example, if we're, I'm trading with you for I'm giving you a chicken for a bush of wheat.
Well, every chicken I can give will be slightly different from every other chicken, and so you can't count on them exactly.
They're always every coin, if we have a gold or silver coins if there some of them have been used more and so every one is slightly different.
There's slightly different values in each coin depending upon how much of the silver or gold has been worn off.
So you treat them as though they're all identical and and of the same value, but they're always slightly off.
Analog measures are always often given to small errors that can accumulate.
But when you're writing a digital one for a dollar, that dollar all those dollars are equal.
But if I give you a dollar coin, some of those dollar coins are worth more than others if you have to.
But we treat them for all practical purposes as equivalent.
But in fact, they're slightly different.
And if all I ever gave you were very worn silver dollars and you always gave me brand new ones, sooner or later somebody might notice the discrepancy.
By the way, animal, analog, coding requires for our experience differences.
That is our visual system and all of our sensory systems are set up to detect change.
And that means the more differences, the better.
As I look around this room, there are all kinds of different colors, shapes, etcetera.
And that's what makes this an interesting, audience if you will.
But digital systems want there to be as few differences as possible.
That's why machine language only has two.
One and zero.
They wanna have as few differences as possible.
They want everything to be more or less homogeneous.
The digital so digital systems want there to be one.
Analog systems want there to be many.
It's another way in which they're qualitatively different.
Okay.
Now I wanna talk about something that I call the analog to digital continuum and the analog to digital progression.
Historically, analog symbols have tended to move toward the digital.
They've become less analog over time, and eventually, in many cases, they become totally digital.
We can see this is, for example, in cave drawings, you might find, well, maybe a picture of a man like the one on a or maybe one like b.
Or you may find one like c.
Actually, c is rather like the Chinese character even today for a human person.
But you get to d, all analog aspects have been lost.
You look at it just a straight line, that's not going to tell you any of that as a person in any way at all.
You might get ahead of it from c only because you knew the the history of it.
But you wouldn't normally, if it was shown to you to begin with, think that was a symbol for a person.
They're the digits.
The when the digits were first made by discrete, you know, sticks, putting it in wet clay, They were like they all were on the right.
One, two, three, four, five.
And you'll notice that in each of them, they have the number of straight lines that the digit eventually came to symbolize.
The only example you might think is seven, which has if you look at the seven the one in the middle, the seven there, we've shortened it now today like the seven on the far left.
If you look at the far right, you'll see the seven as it's still found in European countries and particularly in the past.
And that seven has actually all seven separate lines to it.
My guess is that nine, they discovered that the the right side of it was irrelevant or redundant, so they ended up with nine with the left set of, lines.
But I don't in other words, even the digits themselves were once analog.
They're not they once portrayed the number itself.
But now thanks to all kinds of new technologies for making numbers, including moving from discrete sticks to script and feathers with ink and IBM machines and everything else.
We now have the digits totally, digital, totally without any reference to the the no connection to them.
Maybe people might think one is sort of like one still.
But in general, people think of all the digits as discreetly, unique and not not pictorial at all.
Now over time, how have these things changed?
I call that the analog to digital progression.
The biggest change that occurred in the Western culture was when we when when about five hundred or so years ago, the printing press was introduced, and we went from an oral culture to a print culture.
Print is much more digital because it than than it is.
Oral is always analog.
Oral is always something you hear and see in the presence.
The oral culture is a very analog culture.
It may have a few things that it writes up and so forth, but it's mostly an o an oral analog culture.
The digital culture becomes more and more abstract.
You can read something that somebody said without that person being there talking to you.
And the words themselves, you have to learn when they're written.
You have to learn what that written code for the words means in each language and so forth.
Is that clear?
And so when we went into the written word with the development of the printing press, especially, there was a little bit of the written word prior to that, of course, and, you know, it was written by hand and it was on scrolls.
You didn't really have books as we know that you had scrolls.
And that was digital, but it was very small compared to the rest of the culture.
And what's happened increasingly since the invention of the printing press that we've gone more and more digital, and our culture has become less and less oral.
And that means we've become less and less, analog, less and less directly involved with people.
More and more, I can sit by myself and lead in a corner.
I don't have to be with the group listening to somebody or with at least under one other person there speaking to me in the oral culture.
Now I can be all by myself and deal only with things that have no, analog necessary significance.
They may end up with a little bit by association and so on and so forth.
But you see the big change in the culture that comes with the introduction of print.
And that has been beautifully documented by Walter Ong, over it was some some decades ago.
And you can find the the whole movement slowly as he talked about the movement toward, the the written culture.
He did not use the words analog and digital.
Now more recently, we can think about things that have changed in our life, you know, or at least we can refer some of it into our own experience.
The animal to digital progression has certainly taken place in work.
It used to be you could almost always tell what a person did by looking at what the the clothes they wore and what they were actually doing.
They were digging a ditch, taking care of a child.
They were being a priest.
They were a warrior.
Whatever.
Now everything's much more digital.
All people do is do is sit and look at a screen, and they don't they can wear just about anything while they're looking at the screen.
And you can't tell what they're doing, whether that screen is about, you know, a mathematical proof or whether it's about ordering beans for tomorrow for your restaurant.
You can't tell what it's about.
The the job itself, because you're spending so much time looking at a screen, has become digitalized in that you don't know what the person is doing.
All these jobs have become homogeneous in terms of the activity of the doer.
That's in work.
Time.
Well, it's perfectly clear we've measured time.
In the old days, there were so many days or so many moons or so many years or summers.
Maybe you just told it was the year of the great tornado.
It was the year of King Henry the twenty fifth or whatever.
So you had analog understanding of time, the seasons, and so forth.
Now a day may be just a string of digits.
You know?
02/16/2023.
You know?
That's today.
There's nothing analog about it.
The we still have clocks with hands in them.
Hands still, and that's an analog thing.
And we can watch time move, and it even goes through two it goes through a day cycle and a night cycle, twelve two twelve hour times.
So that's still a little bit of analog left in our measurement of time even though we'll say it was 05:00.
But it's five of the clock.
But now we'll just say it's five.
And today, when the digits change, all you do is seeing things just strictly pop on and off.
Time doesn't move in front of you.
It just changes from zero to one or from something to nothing as a flip as a as a string of numbers goes on and off in front of you.
So our time now is almost completely digital without any of the associations of the older periods of measurement, much less our natural understanding of in terms of, you know, the seasons and the time of day is morning or evening and so forth.
Same thing has happened with food.
Our food has become much more digital.
You used to always know what you were eating by looking at the piece of meat or by looking at the vegetable.
Chicken nuggets, good grief.
I'm talking about a digital food.
You know?
And now you can have other kinds of nuggets.
You can have pork nuggets.
You know?
And that means that's a digitalization of food.
We buy them in little packages now.
You can't even touch them or smell them.
So you can't even it's a cheese.
You used to be able to figure it out a little bit by the smell.
But now they're all packaged in little sections.
And, of course, if you're not even going to the grocery anymore, if you're ordering online, you don't even see the actual item you buy.
You just see a picture of The one crucial piece of information you always get, however, is the price.
You get the digital name.
And it may be delivered in little packages and so, you know but in the old days, you used to go to a grocery and pick and snoop, you know, and look at and feel and it was just ripe and all of that.
But and that was just not very long ago.
I still remember my mother touching melons, trying to figure out whether they were ripe enough to get and smelling them and so forth.
But so all the analog aspects of a lot of food now have disappeared.
In fact, now if they're going to talk about, you know, meatless meat, That'll be a totally digital phenomenon.
They'll call it meat, but it's just as good as meat.
It tastes like meat, but it isn't meat.
So all of the notions of farming behind our food and things of that kind, all those images will fade as we digitalized our food.
Money.
We all know we digitalized money.
It used to be something like, as I said, barter, where you change the chicken for a little bushel of wheat or something like that.
And then you change the gold coin for something or silver coin, which had intrinsic value.
And then finally, you went to paper money, or in between, you had letters of credit.
Then you had paper money.
And then but the paper money was always it always had an analog anchor.
You you could always trade in.
I could I always remember when I was young, I could always take a dollar bill to the bank and get a silver dollar in exchange for it.
It.
So you could give a silver dollar as a birthday present or something like that.
Now there's no silver backing for currency.
There's no gold backing.
That was taken away a long time ago.
So there's no backing at all, so it's totally digital.
And most of the time now, they don't even wanna take paper money.
They only want the your you you know, they want your credit card digitally.
The last even a paper, which has nothing to back it, is no longer acceptable in many places.
You have to have it on your credit card.
And, of course, they won't take change.
You know, all of that.
So the last analog aspects aren't fading away in front of us with money.
Oh, our names most of our names, you know, are all our our first names used to mean something in Hebrew and so on.
Most of us don't know any about that now.
But our last names used to mean something, you know.
John Churchill.
Well, if any is from the church you know, we had last names that were originally given to us that were analog.
But you don't expect Tim Baker to be a baker anymore.
So we've lost the analog meanings of our original names.
We've lost the analog meanings of many original words.
The letters of the alphabet used to be pictograms pictures of something that stood for the sound.
The original letter a was a long pic was a schematic picture of an ox.
It meant the sound that oxes or cattle were supposed to make.
And then got abbreviated to an upside down v with a line across the top so that these two things were the horns, and it had two dots in it for the eyes.
It was the face of a cow.
Well, the Greeks started using it arbitrarily, and they didn't know the analog history.
So they changed it upside down and dropped out the i's and used it just to sound the sound for the measure the sound And the Greeks invented, therefore, the first digital alphabet because of that, which is probably why they invented some of the first other things in philosophy and so on, which was a very digital activity.
There are many other ways in which the analog to digital has transpired in our society.
Now I wanna connect the analog and the digital more clearly to the human being.
I have to go quickly now.
There is lots of evidence now that analog and digital can be connected to the two brain hemispheres and their functioning.
Analog functioning seems to be in the right hemisphere and digital functioning in the left hemisphere.
And this means that the psychology of right hemisphere mental processes and of left hemisphere mental processes represent the psychological environment that the person is in while they're processing in one or two of these modes the other of these modes.
Now I won't go into the details of this.
There's a wonderful new book.
Well, not that new now.
2009.
It's a book by Ian Gilchrist.
He's a British neuroscientist, and it's about the development of Western culture as the development of movement from right hemisphere activities to left hemisphere activities.
He's not a Christian as far as I know.
The secularist is a very powerful description of how our culture has moved from a right hemisphere culture to a left hemisphere.
I call I call it oral to to to, written or, analog to digital.
So I won't go into all the evidence that he gives.
The book is called, the master and his emissary, which means the master according to, Gilchrist, the master is the right hemisphere, and the emissary is your left hemisphere.
And the problem, according to Gilchrist, is that the left hemisphere has started to take over control.
And the left hemisphere is like the sensor, like the, you know, you know, like the like an apprentice that's taken over from the master.
And that this is causing many of the big problems we have today.
And he talks about the lack of meaning in culture today as the result of the digitalizing or, the left.
No.
He doesn't use that language.
The left hemisphere dominance in our society.
Okay.
So I just say now talking about it as analog and digital has some advantages.
First of all, analog and digital is something that's visible, and you can see it or hear it.
You can notice it.
You don't have to know anything about the brain.
It's observable for all of us, and we don't have to know where it's processed.
We do tend to think it has to be processed in different places of the brain, and that's as as sequential things are processed differently from spatial things.
And there's all I have there's now a neurological evidence for this and so forth.
I won't go into that.
But so now we have but now this whole movement toward digital toward higher and higher amounts of technology and toward digitalism, we now have that as our problem to be attended to.
Okay.
I'm trying to go too fast, but I'm at here are examples of right and left hemisphere.
The right hemisphere is continuous.
The left hemisphere is discrete.
The codes.
Spatial versus sequential.
Image versus word.
Holistic versus focus on parts, synthetic versus analytic, concrete versus abstract, metaphor versus consent, spatial performing such as sports, dance, and hunting versus sequential as in writing, math, proof, legal grief.
Imaginative, a priori logic and rules.
Parallel parallel processing, serial processing.
Implicit and intuitive versus explicit and defined categories, flow and change in the right hemisphere, stasis and fixed in the left, reality in the right hemisphere, virtual reality in the left, empirical observation in the left, theoretical prediction in the right.
Meaning is natural and strong in the right.
Meaning is superficial and weak in the left.
There are other differences, but I can't go into all of those that that are psychologically rich and interesting because I want to get to the crisis today.
And I call the crisis today, analog hunger in a digital world.
And what I'm arguing in here is that because of the digitalization of our lives, we've we have developed an analog hunger.
We need more and more to find the analog, and we have trouble finding it.
And the and I wanna focus on one major way where this analog hunger is showing.
And the major way is in the search for identity.
And we're all aware of how the identity search is common in the in the particularly the modern cultures.
Now what do we mean by identity?
Well, in the past, I wanna say here are the things what gave us identity?
In the past, look at the things that gave us identity in the past.
They were all analog things.
They were, first of all, a stable family, which would give you identity.
Who was your father?
Who was your mother?
Who were your siblings?
And the interpersonal interactions that you had with them.
But as the family became less and less stable and more and more dysfunctional, people's identity became less and less family based.
It faded in terms of the family based identity that a person could have.
We used to have an identity based on where we lived, our physical location.
Somebody who was the Maine Yankee lived in a different life from the Southern Bayou character who lived around the alligators down there in the swamps.
They had a different life, and they had a different physical location, and they had a different identity.
But now those two characters may, in fact, have the same life because they're all on the same Internet playing the same games together with each other, and there's no longer any contact with the physical world of their surrounding.
So we know the physical location doesn't identify us much anymore.
In fact, some people now have multiple passports that with different countries.
I mean, the whole globalization has gotten rid of even identity as being an American.
That doesn't that's not concrete enough.
It's not clear enough.
Our work I've already mentioned our work, which used to give us a stable identity.
You were a farmer or a carpenter or you worked for General Motors and you started there when you were 25 and then you retired when you were 55 and they gave you a watch and you you were a General Motors man.
You worked for the same company all your life.
Today, people move around all the time in terms of their jobs.
And we're even told to we're telling young people you're gonna have to redefine your job two or three times throughout your lifetime.
So the work that would give you an identity that was common, even if it was just street cleaning or just baking, I'm a baker, it gave you an identity.
Those have all faded.
In addition, what are other things that have faded besides our stable work?
A religious identity, which gave many people identity.
We all know that for many people that has faded.
What do they say their religious identity is now?
They say none, which is a way of saying that identity they don't have.
And what used to be a very important identity, I'm a Protestant.
I'm a Catholic.
I'm a Jew.
Okay.
So that's where a lot of so these have faded, and it's created the need for a personal identity that we haven't had before.
Now I do wanna say also that many of the digital systems create, an absence of identity.
For example, one of the things people have lost track with is their body.
If you spend your whole life as a child walking around on a on a cell phone, What are you doing?
You're not paying attention to the whole world around you.
You're you're hardly paying you may fall in a ditch even.
You're you're just paying all you're learning is pressing digits in that phone and what shows up on the phone.
But your body else why else wise has been shut down.
If you go to summer camp and you're supposed to learn how to swim and canoe and go out camping with a tent and make a fire and all that.
No.
But if you go with your phone, you'll spend your whole time with your phone in your room talking to your friends that are still back where you came from.
So you're not getting the physicality of the world around you.
It's been lost in the digitalization of that cell phone.
Let's look at some people now who are looking for new identities.
Now we know that people look for identity in new ways, because of the transsexual identity.
But I wanna show you there are lots of people looking for identity now that's and they're looking for trans species.
And to begin with, there are at least three groups of people who identify themselves as being partly an animal or maybe entirely so.
There there's one called other the otherkin society.
You can go on online.
I don't know.
Thousands of people are in other kin society in which at least part of them is part of an animal.
It's kind of an animal.
I'm I'm part wolf.
I'm a part cat.
Another group are the Therians.
The Therians are another entirely group, but they only allow you if you identify with a, a higher animal, a mammal.
You can't identify with a crocodile if you're a Therian.
And others identify that they're called furries.
Maybe all of you have gone to hear about the furries now.
These are people who identify with furry animals roughly.
But let's take a look at some of them.
I wanna show you now the first one.
This is a Frenchman who now calls himself a black alien.
Normal French face, whatever we wanna call it.
But look what he's once done.
In his identification, he's changed his nose.
He's put, bumps on his skull all over the place and colored his skin entirely.
That's in the search of identity.
He's upset that some people won't won't let them into their restaurant because some people don't wanna sit by him.
Here's a man who's identifying him as being a parrot.
He's cut off his ears, enlarged his nose, tattooed himself with feathers.
Oops.
Oh, here's a dragon lady.
The dragon lady, I think that this is the one, was born a man, transitioned to a woman, and then transitioned to a dragon.
Now let's look at this.
He said, at first, I was a he, then I was a she, and now I'm an it.
But you notice, as far as I'm concerned, a dragon has never existed, or at least we don't know what they look like.
It's a fictional animal for all practical purposes.
So he's decided that his identity is nonhuman.
Missing one.
Here's the, black alien, and he's cut off three of his fingers in his right hand because he wants his right hand the other two fingers to be more like a claw.
Oh, there's another dragon lady.
She's you know, she's cut her tongue in half.
Oops.
These are three men who wear dog costumes.
And all day they run around like a dog.
I know one of them is married.
His wife has it puts him on a leash for at least eight hours a day.
They try to eat out of bowls on the ground.
I have another dragon lady in there somewhere, but I can't seem to find one.
And that's the parrot man again.
So in that sense, transsexualism is just another example of the same thing.
At least they're staying human.
I have somewhere a picture of a cat woman as she walks around on the ground with some facial changes to look like a cat.
She said she said, I'm really a cat.
I was accidentally born in a human body.
So the transformation of the human body as we search for identity is, in this case, I I consider it analog hunger in it's showing itself in an incorrect way, in a pathological way.
In a smaller much smaller way today, many people are are have, tattoos.
And that's a way of getting a new identity.
And that's because the old ways have faded.
But in fact, the digital systems that we're in are pushing us more and more toward an away from natural identity, from analog identity in a natural sense, into an identity that we try to discover in some strange way, usually using digital systems.
Here are some other people.
Eric lives his life underwater with a latex tail as a merman.
The woman who says she is a cat born the wrong species and hisses at dogs.
A half naked web footed woman claims to be a mermaid.
A woman lived as a horse every day for seven years by trotting on all fours and eating grass.
Okay.
That's the identity crisis showing up in a pathological way, But it shows up in all kinds of other ways too.
Secessionism.
You want your local identity so you get away from the big nation state.
Many other ways.
Let's let me I I think one of the real fields of the gay life is that you get a gay identity.
You get a flag.
You get parades like they used to have for the Irish and the Polish and, Italians.
So you get an identity.
And particularly if, you know, if your identity in terms of, I think one of the things that's happened also that's very clear is friendships have declined.
And friendships are an analog thing.
They're developed through their actual interaction with another person.
And if we have digital friendships, we never met the person.
And what we have met is an image created by that person, which may be very unrepresentative.
Of course, we can have digital friends.
We can count them in terms of the number of likes, But that's a very digital understanding of of a friend.
You never know whether they really like you and etcetera etcetera.
And the number is not a measure of how much you're liked.
Although people seem to treat it that way because they're very upset if the number starts to go down.
And as I would say, one thing to keep in mind is that this crisis of identity is especially a problem for the young.
It's really the problem for the young.
Okay.
I will now just say a few quick quick words.
We could call the recent dominance of our society by things like Amazon and metaverse.
Is there a metaverse now with anyway, web anyway, Amazon, Google, all the rest of them is what I call digital imperialism.
They're controlling us more and more, these huge digital systems.
And that's caught gonna continue to cause us to have identity crises even more and more.
And the problem with it is this the the digital people the digital class seem to think that analog people are not real people.
Blue collar workers, people who are you know, people who you can still see what they do by what they wear and how what they're be how they interact with their environment are now looked down upon.
The the governing class is a digital class.
And the and and I I I could go into that for twenty minutes, but we don't have that twenty seconds left to do.
Okay?
And what are we gonna do about all this?
What can one do?
Well, first of all oh, by the way, we know there are negative effects from overuse of cell phones.
TikTok has a has negative effects, and people are quite aware of that now more and more and more and so on.
But what we have to do is figure out what are we gonna do with this digital imperialism.
And the first thing is we have to go back to the real, to reality.
And there's already a lot of people doing that.
Going back to the real can be involved in things like going back to really making things, you know, manufacturing, building things.
It can be going back to the land.
It can be women doing things like saying I'm gonna I'm gonna make quilts.
I'm gonna make, jewelry.
I'm gonna make real things for real people that I know.
There's a lot of sort of underground analog activity going on like that.
It can be people who, in extreme cases, decide to go off the the web because they're not going to deal with the digital system at all.
They're gonna they're gonna go back and live like people always lived fifty years or more ago.
That's one way to get more real.
One of the more and and there one other way to get more real is to, try the Benedict option.
Go back into communities of people of, of like religion and and, where you make your own food and where you help each other out.
And it's a community that's real, not a digital community that's made up of people communicating over vast distances who don't know each other.
So there are many positive ways where people are beginning to search for their analog, for the real as a as a as an answer.
But the negative ways, I've already mentioned some of those transsexual, trans species.
And there's another group that's even more extreme, and that's the transhumanists.
And this is a group that's been going for quite a while.
They have their own journal.
They have a large number of intelligent people, and they wanna leave the human being behind.
They want to create a new being which will be smarter than us, more developed than us, and for which if we're even allowed to exist, we might be their pets, be their lap dog.
The smart these smart new transhuman forms of life they're trying to create through artificial intelligence and other kinds of technology.
It's very big, actually, and they're very clear about it.
If you were gonna tell me that you were gonna develop a new a new technology that would get rid of all, all Jews or all white people or all black people or all Asians, we would all say that was hate speech, and rightly so.
But if you want to get rid of the whole human race, it's considered progressive.
And they really mean it.
They wanna get rid of our body, and they're very clear about it.
They want it's the body that gives us restrictions, and those restrictions are what alienate the the the left hemisphere and the digital system.
They wanna escape all restrictions.
They wanna escape your body.
And that's what the transhumanists are after, a a world where our body has been left behind.
Well, I think that's, of course, correct.
Not well, first of all, I won't go into it, but I think it's not possible.
But in any case, the the digital push toward more and more digitalization of the human could create a kind of upper class of hyper digitalized humans who control the rest of the society.
I can assure you that most of us for thousands and thousands of years were designed to survive in an analog way.
As hunters, as farmers, as cooks, as mothers, as fathers, we did things with our body that were important and which we were trained for and we were developed for.
And to get rid of the body is to get rid of who we are or to make us in that new society a very dangerous underclass.
But what's the ultimate answer?
Not just going back to the real.
We can't get rid of the digital.
We shouldn't get rid of the digital.
And here I wanna say this.
The digital has many good things, such as writing.
Okay?
Many things.
And so what I would like to argue is that the digital and the analog have to get back together again.
They have to be first of all, they have to tolerate each other.
Some people think the red and blue states are digital and analog.
We won't go with all of that.
The digital and the analog has they each have to tolerate each other, and then they have to learn to cooperate.
And let me say something about cooperation of digital and analog.
I would like to propose that all powerful and genuine creativity is the integration of the analog and the digital.
What I mean by that, take something like Newton's physics.
In physics, a theory has to be it's a it's an abstract left hemisphere digital theory.
But it's only a bit it's it's just a useless fantasy unless you can map it into empirical observable events.
And when you can make the mapping into the concrete and into the analog, that is a really creative contribution.
In a very simple way, a cook has an idea of about what kind of thing they want to make.
They have to map that abstract understanding of a pie or a stew or whatever into its concreteness.
Pick each of the pick each of the components.
And if they do a good mapping, they've created a new stew or a new pie or something like that, which is wonderful.
And at the very least, it creates something that's tasty.
That's a successful mapping.
In addition, almost all science is a mapping of abstract mathematical models into the concrete predictions that are justify it.
As long as it maps into something predictable, it's it's bringing the analog and digital together and integrating them.
Music is the same way.
An abstract concept is mapped into sound through the body making movements.
I'm going very fast now.
It's time to quit.
Let me put it this way.
Religions, at least the traditional religions of Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism, I call those religions now mature religions.
Why?
Because all of them have gone through the fiery critique of modernity, which has burned away a lot of their analog absurdities, their superstitions, falseness.
But they're now mature.
And if you look at the real a good religion, it always is an an integration of analog and digital.
I'll just now jump to the mass.
The mass is an integration of analog and digital.
The first part of the mass is mostly digital.
It's the creed I mean, it will be reading, from scripture then then a homily, then the then the creed.
There'll be some analog in there with some songs and so forth and so on.
Then the second part is is the Eucharist, which is a meal.
It's bow it's kneeling.
It's bowing.
It's eating.
It's drinking.
It is the integration of the analog and the digital together.
It is faith and reason in that integrative sense.
And this happens in Protestantism in different ways and it happens in Judaism in different ways as well.
But these three religions, I think, are mature, and they are potentially an answer for the the future where you could argue this, that since creativity is the integration of the digital with the analog, what this really means is that the the model of the growth of the digital and you can still continue growing digital, but the digital has to be in the service of the analog, not in the service of itself.
And the best example of that is, and the word was made flesh.
God's word became an actual observable, touchable human being at a particular time and place.
And all of the history of Revelation starting in from the very beginning is the history of God's of the abstract of God in the service of humanity by becoming concrete in an observable event on earth that that is proposed.
And the culmination of that in my judgment is the Word was made flesh and that's therefore a model of all creativity for all of us during our lifetime.
And that therefore, the faith offers an answer to this dilemma.
Partly, it will encourage people to reestablish analog life, but it will also recognize that the integration of analog and digital is the highest form of living.
Thank you.
Alright.
So, doctor Vince, you have, you have a handful of questions there.
Yes.
When you reach a point where you'd like to take questions from the room, we can do that as well.
But maybe we can respond to the to the written questions there first, and then we can open up, questions to the room.
Thank you.
Questions.
One, could code also be anything we can see and not just perceive, perhaps in the imagination?
Yes.
You can develop an imaginary code.
That is something in your imagination that you then use to refer to something else.
Can we say that analog is associative well, digital is disassociative.
To some degree, I think so.
But exactly how these two words are associative and disassociative are defined would be the issue.
But it sounds like there would be a way in which those two words could be appropriately used.
Question three.
I noticed in my work with children that those on the autism spectrum tend to be very good at computer studies.
Even Temple Grandin, writer about autism, noted computer expertise favored those like her.
How does this digital pervasiveness influence our affect affective nature over time?
Do we become more more on the spectrum as a society?
I know some schools which have introduced a subject, how to manage non digital time, as students were so overwhelmed by the digital world.
Do we need to introduce something like this in all primary, secondary, tertiary education institutions as a matter of urgency.
Okay.
Well, the first part is yes.
It is true that autistic children are more they have problem with interpersonal relations.
It's as though they do have a hyper developed left hemisphere and not quite so developed, right hemisphere.
And the problem is to get them more involved in understanding that people are not objects but are have feelings and emotions and intentions.
So to the extent that we become more digital, we do, as a culture, become more, if you will, on the spectrum, and we become less attentive to the personal relationships of people and emotions and things of that kind.
Second, nondigital time.
I wouldn't call it nondigital time.
I'd call it analog time, obviously, but, do we need to introduce something like that?
I think probably so.
I haven't thought of that.
But I think it would if you could find ways to introduce analog activities into, education that would be very helpful.
Let me mention one theory of education that does this very much, and that's Montessori.
And Montessori education has a heavy emphasis on the analog form of learning for its, students.
And so, there must be other forms of analog learning that could be introduced as well.
But you probably have to do it in a private system on your own.
But if you could develop ways to to increase the analog life of children who are otherwise being deprived by the digital influences in their life, I think this would be very helpful.
Is there an urgency?
It all depends on how urgent we think it is.
Fairly urgent in some ways, I expect, with the with the very young.
I noticed in our digital age, explanations of anything have to be short and direct.
So our consciousness increasingly wants instant McDonald type information aided and abetted by the Instagram and Twitter communication in short form.
So searches for identity often have little depth, ignore cultural history and context, yet influenced by media takes on a subject.
Do we do we oppose this by simply repeating the forgotten history, spiritual legacy, emphasizing the positive in our cultural memory?
Some media people violently do this, but isn't it enough in a digital onslaught?
How would you recommend addressing this?
Well, I recommend it some ways in terms of getting back in touch with the real real you know, learning real skills, learning to to cook with real items so you you don't just buy it and turn a knob on a on a machine to heat it up for thirty seconds and then take it out.
That's modern cooking.
That's digital cooking.
Even being too worried about calories is another digitalization of food.
The price, the calories, and how many milliseconds and what temperature you need to cook it.
And that's that's what we what we're getting in the digitalization of eating.
So what to do about it?
I guess, the returning to the real in many ways, How you could do this particularly with children would be one way to get real is to develop friendships.
One way to get real is if you go to summer camp and not allow the person to take their digital phone with them, which is exactly what some of the very high, executives in in Silicon Valley did with their own children.
They knew that if the child went there with their digital phone, they wouldn't enjoy camping at all.
They wouldn't learn to swim.
They wouldn't learn to play volleyball.
They wouldn't learn to go camping and hiking.
They wouldn't learn to make a fire outdoors.
They wouldn't learn to cook a meal on a fire camp.
Any of those things.
They'd just sit in their room and talk on the digital phone with their friends back no more than they came.
So they didn't let them.
They knew that would happen, and they knew that would be harmful.
I call people I have an expression for children, particularly, but people who don't have enough of the analog life.
I call them analog empty, and we need to find a way to fill the emptiness with analog activity that's solid.
That means bringing back everything from friendships to chores.
You know?
Hooray.
You know, doing things.
Everybody has to do something.
Bringing back for example, even eating at a the the family dinner table instead of as isolated and watching only a digital system that you're you why well, you're not allowing, let's say, digital conversations at the at the dinner table.
Look.
All of that this is an unexplored territory.
I I hope all of you will or most of you will find some ways to find analog substitutes that will replace people who have analog empty lives.
Are there any theoretical orientations that you would say tend more towards an analog approach?
Theoretical, well, all those that emphasize contact with the real, relatively speaking, engineers are more analog than theoreticians because they're always trying to make sure that the theory will fit the the particular physical landscape or something of that kind.
But, there's theoretical orientations.
I'm not so sure.
One thing I do wanna say is that completely analog life is would be a disaster.
Not only would you have to get rid of reading and writing and and anything that was a digital symbol, we would go back to the primitive life before that we had before them, which was very, you know, very analog, but filled with a lot of violence, filled with a lot of superstition.
By the way, analog, is given to super its its error is superstition or seeing meaning where it isn't there.
Real analog life, any one of your dreams.
It's not boring, but it isn't actually necessarily true in any important sense other than its literalness literalness.
You mentioned that artificial foods are digital.
Yes.
I would.
Does role playing in therapy constitute digital code?
No.
Role playing is an analog activity.
You are acting out something in the past.
In fact, that's one of the important things.
Role playing in therapy is an analog way to get back in touch with your right hemisphere and early memories and other experiences.
It's therefore an analog experience.
Being an actor is to being an analog person.
That doesn't mean all of you should be actors or actresses.
None of that, you know, necessarily.
But acting is a form of analog communication, and you have to be an analog internal processor to do it.
You mentioned that people are losing their religions and are thus losing their identity.
Could you speak to being spiritual but not religious?
Does that fit into digital analog or not at all?
I would argue that all real religion must have an analog component.
What happens when you go spiritual is many people who go spiritual, what they go into is not something that has a character except as they choose it.
They constantly choose what spirituality is, and they will change often from year year to year.
And one way to think about it is a pure spiritual being has no body, and we are bodies.
God made us with bodies.
And if we wanna get rid of our body, we are trying to say, I will make I will make my own identity.
And if the human species wants to get rid of its bodies, that's transhumanism.
In other words, the human species has decided to be God and to create itself.
Otherwise, as individuals, we can decide to be God and create ourselves.
And we have to be careful that even in spirituality by itself without an analog part to it such as the actual belief in Jesus or the meaning of the spiritual life and the, you know, the, spirituality is related to to spiritual practice.
Kneeling, praying, fasting, all of these things.
If it becomes pure spirituality, it becomes, like a pure spirit and nothing you become disembodied.
And to become disembodied is you, in that sense, use your own spirituality to create who you are, and you've created yourself without a body and therefore have rejected God's creation of you with a body.
Questions from the house?
Anybody have them here?
And we also have three, three additional questions that you can also select from, but, feel free to pick and choose.
Questions from the floor?
Did you doctor Vince, have you incorporated incorporated St.
Thomas Aquinas faculty psychology into your work?
No.
If anyone would like to, I welcome it.
Could you speak of how digitalization may affect the military?
Digitalization digitalization of your enemy, which is what happens in the military, and digitalization of your own weapons makes it easier to kill other people because you're not killing a person that you know or met even if you're only killing their for example, one thing that's common today on the media is to see a a Russian tank that's just been blown up by some digital weapon.
They never show you the dead man inside the tank.
There were three young men or four, depending on the tank, that were cremated with that, destruction.
And that's true of every tank destruction.
They don't wanna show it to you.
In any case, digitalization makes it easy.
You're not killing another person.
You're just killing a number.
You're killing a a distant you you know?
Well, we're gonna we're gonna up the body count.
So I think the danger of digitalization is you don't think of what you're actually doing.
It's an easy you're you're you're not cutting somebody's throat.
You're just pressing the red lever.
That means means that a nuclear weapon goes off.
It's so much easier.
It's not so personal.
It's so abstract.
It doesn't have the meaning of killing other people that it wouldn't if you actually had to do it.
In the old fashioned days, if you had to kill somebody, well, you had to kill them.
And even with a rifle, you had to see them at a distance.
And you saw their dead bodies afterwards when you walked by or they saw yours.
But in any case, now you don't see any of it.
You can sit entirely in a outside of any visual experience of the battlefield and create destruction on another battlefield, which is bloody and kills lots of people, but it's just a just a different body a higher body count from this weapon now, so we'll go for that.
So that's the danger of digitalization in the military.
The loss of understanding that you're actually involved in the process of killing people and becomes much hard, harder when it's analog.
Would you care to comment on the framing of abortion as a movement from analog to digital?
There is modest evidence that abortion has been treated by those who are in favor of it in a digital way.
Why?
They they say it isn't a person.
It's just a a mass of tissue.
And so therefore, by saying it's not a person, they are digitalizing it.
And they're and they're talking about it as an abstraction.
But that would be the major way.
There might be other ways in which they turn it into a number of, the things, you know, some number that they then throw at you as being unacceptable.
But it is getting it is a way of denying the very one thing about a baby, a baby is sure analog.
A baby is about as analog as a human being can be.
It just sits there and wants to be fed and cleaned and hugged and talked to and all the right you know, it just it can't you know, it it has almost no digital life.
And, of course, that's one of the things about why some people might wanna be animals.
Animal if you if you become an animal, you if you actually you know, as an animal, you don't have any digital life.
You have only an analog life.
They have only their body.
They have no, functional, in our sense, digital left hemisphere.
They may have a left hemisphere in some sense, but they don't have the digitalization of life that humans have.
Digitalization seems to be a human convention.
Enough.
Thank you.
You've been great as an audience.
I can tell because I can see you.
I can hear you.
Please join me in another round of applause.
And above all, I can't smell you.
One one slide to pull up on screen here if we close.
As we conclude, please do note that our next Newman lecture will in fact be on a Wednesday night.
So as you're as you're preparing and thinking about it, please save that date, March 22.
We will be pleased to welcome virtually doctor Robert Enright on how injustices can fracture the personhood of the victim and how forgiving restores that personhood.
This concludes our evening.
Thank you very much.