9.12.2025
ownership as a techno-peasant
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Whats in ownership and what do i own? These questions are the reason this site exists, this small island thats mine in the sea thats all theirs. My music, apartment, car, phone, internet access, email, digital writing, photos, and every other cloud based service I use does not belong to me. Not only are our services and devices magical boxed with opaque mechanisms but so is our ownership of them. This site, while not explicitly belonging to me, at least is under my management and has transparent.

3.20.2020
consider agatha: musings about The Portable Computer
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Human Life has very suddenly become nonlocal. Most direct interactions between people are now interactions at a distance, with social distancing legislation requiring that nearly all people interface digitally and cooperate remotely. In this nonlocal society two of the heaviest-load-bearing technologies to support productivity and socialization are the Portable Computer and the internet. This report will be primarily focused on the former as it proceeds and partly constitutes the ladder. In an effort to understand how portable computing has made this transition to a remote society possible I will consider it through an active externalist account of cognition, or the view that human cognition naturally extends beyond the body and is partly constituted by our environment. I will argue that the portable computer’s ability i) to form a coupled system with the human user; and ii) to create real time simulacrums of other people makes it uniquely capable of supporting a nonlocal society in which digital interfacing and remote cooperation are keystones in societal maintenance. Beginning from a description of active externalism I will outline what it means for a feature of the environment to be coupled with a human cognition; how portable computers can extend our cognition and tend to form coupled systems with their users; how the connectivity between computers can further extend cognition; and finally how this highly connected network of Portable Computers operates in parallel with interfacing technologies to transforms remote cooperation. For this purpose I will characterize the class of Portable Computers by a) a small form factor which allows them to be easily used and moved; b) a display containing a user interface which the user might interact with through a keyboard or other implement; c) wireless access to other computers; d) wireless access to the internet; e) a rechargeable battery to use for power demands. Variations in user interfacing, form factor, computing power, memory capacity, connectivity, etc. are not of interest for present purposes, meaning that cellphones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches, and assistant enabled headphones are all fine examples of Portable Computers.
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Active externalism or the Extended Mind Theory (EMT) is based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. It begins from the functionalist premise: that the totality of human cognition can be described as an ensemble of structures with different functions. Pain, belief, desire, thought, and all spectrums of qualia, therefore, can be exhaustively described in terms of states of structures and the function that structure plays in the greater cognitive ensemble. Mental states, therefore, correspond to specific configurations of these cognitive structures (the activation of neural pathways, sensorial inputs, etc.) [2]. According to the extended mind thesis, as originally presented by Chalmers and Clark in “The Extended Mind”(1998), human cognition - or that ensemble of cognitive structures which constitutes cognition - extends beyond the cranium and is partly constituted by the environment. According to this position, the apparent separation between the mind, body, and environment is an unprincipled distinction. By a functionalist account of cognition this amalgamated system of an organism and its environment is a cognitive ensemble in its own right, since it is still constituted by an array of interpenetrating structures and functions: some of them organic and others inorganic. In this way the mind becomes extended and the environment comes to constitute the mind. As an illustrative example, consider Agatha. Agatha has suffered a stroke and experiences great difficulty in preserving her memory. Her friend Basilius has been more fortunate and can still recall past experiences with ordinary ease. They have both been summoned to Calliope’s home for a party. Agatha has written the address of the party and names of the other party-goers in her notebook. To remain organized she posts reminders and schedules around her house to serve her memory and to ensure that she arrives at the party on time and is well prepared. Meanwhile Basilius has kept all the details in his head. The Extended Mind Thesis claims that the only functional difference between these two cases is where Agatha and Basilius’ memory is being processed. In Agatha’s case her memory is served by her notebook and reminders, and in Basilius’ it is being processed internally. While the processes happening in Agatha’s and Basilius’ cognitive ensembles are not identical or even remotely similar, the way in which the two modes of memory guide current responses, support correct beliefs, and guide behavior is. Agatha’s mind has been extended to include her notebook and home as the source of her memory. One might even claim that her environment has become a part of Agatha, and constitutes a fragile extension of her organism which she wishes to protect as she might a finger or eye. Because external objects occupy an important role in aiding Agatha’s cognitive processes, her mind and her external aids come to constitute what Clark calls a “coupled system”, but only so long as those aids remain reliably and immediately accessible to her. If someone were to remove elements of Agatha’s environments, or as is more common with people like her: remove Agatha from her environment, one would expect a significant reduction in her cognitive function. Her environment has become an extension and a part of her cognition. Suppose that Calliope, after seeing how Agatha depends on her external aids, gives her an internet enabled tablet. With this tablet Agatha has the ability to a) store and record vast amounts of audio, photographs, video, text, etc.; b) navigate unfamiliar spaces and plan routes through difficult terrain; c) schedule reminders and organize her routines; d) access myriad internet resources such as Google, Wikipedia, etc.; e) connect and converse in real time with other people through social media, messaging apps, email; etc. As with her notebook and reminders, Agatha’s computer has become an extension of her organic cognition: serving her memory and outsourcing all manner of cognitive tasks [1]. To use P.R. Smart’s term, she has become a “Web-Extended-Mind” that can traverse the Web as a person with a car might the National Highway System [4]. So long as her tablet is accessible, its mechanical advantage (i.e. speed, memory capacity, etc.) and the informational elements of the internet (e.g. Google, Wikipedia) can serve as parts of the functional substrate that manifests Agatha’s mental states and cognitive processes [4]. Rowlands argues that improvements to the way we interface with our computers has been crucial in making their accessibility possible [2]. By tailoring the amalgamation of visual, auditory, and functional components that people see, hear, touch, or talk to as they interact with their computer we have made the experience of the computer more natural. The more natural the experience, Rowland says, the stronger this coupling.
In this case Agatha’s cognition is coupled with an external entity: a Portable Computer, to form a two-way interaction. As she confronts some task, a part of her environment - her tablet, in this case - functions as a process in a larger cognitive ensemble. Her computer has adopted some of the burdens previously carried by her brain: memory, scheduling, spatial navigation, and even belief. Agatha and her computer have become a coupled system, with each element in that system performing an active, causal role which governs behavior in a manner very similar to traditional cognition. One of the more novel consequences of this extension to Agatha’s cognitive ensemble is the new obsolescence of her locality. Her computer now allows the reach of her cognition to extend anywhere the tablet can wirelessly connect. Her cognitive ensemble is no longer confined to the space she occupies: Agatha can now traverse and participate in extensive social networks; stream live media being broadcasted from around the world; access enormous information hubs stored in servers a thousand miles away; and communicate via audio and video in real time with people in different time zones: all independent of her location. We extend our cognition into our computers and then connect these computers to a worldwide network of streams and nodes. In this way the Portable Computer makes locality almost obsolete, and can extensively extend our cognition. This also transforms the ways in which we remotely cooperate with others: for rather than simply communicating information, two internet enabled Portable Computers can, in a sense, share cognition by accessing shared files, using the same remote libraries, searching with the same search engines, downloading the same software repositories, or simply by using data from the sensors of the another computer. At this point even if the reader accepts EMT and the possibility of extensively extended cognition she might push against these claims about the uniqueness of the Portable Computer and argue that the Postal Service, the Telegraph, or the Telephone has already permitted this sort of extensive extension of our cognition. While it is true that these technologies have extended the range of our communications, I would argue that they do not extend our cognition. When we write a letter, send a telegraph, or even make a phone call we have already performed our cognitive tasks. These technologies are used as channels over which we communicate the outputs of these tasks and cannot on their own increase the cognitive advantage of its users. To illustrate this point consider two examples of human problem solving. In the first example Agatha is at her home and Basilius is at his, and they may only use the landline between their homes to communicate. Their task is to determine the best restaurant in town. Here they are each limited by their own cognitive capacities, for while they may communicate their processes to one another it is only the outputs of their cognitive processes that they are sharing. In the second example, Basilius and Agatha each have a tablet which they can use to access the internet, share documents, message one another, and ultimately determine a place to eat. In this example their cognitive ensembles are overlapping as they share certain “beliefs” (e.g. when they search “places to eat near me” they will get a similar list of results, etc.), memories (e.g. restaurant reviews, photo repositories, social media posts, etc. ), and other cognitive processes. Their cooperation in this task is more than the simple communication of information but constitutes the sharing of cognitive processes. This sharing of cognitive processes becomes more natural with software that creates the illusion of interaction with another person (or persons) rather than with a computer. When we interact with another person over the internet - in any medium - we are interacting with their cognitive extension rather than with the real thing. Video conference software works by tricking us into thinking that we are interacting with another human when we are actually interacting with another computer which is feeding us synchronised visual and auditory data which gives the impression of our interlocutor. The extent to which we can be fooled into thinking the person is there is a function of the fidelity their computer generated simulacrum (e.g. the quality of the video, the audio, the strength of the wireless connection etc.). Without software like video conferencing the experience of remote cooperation would be unnatural and the extent to which we can cooperate, read “share cognition”, would be severely limited. Twenty years ago the idea of a remote society - of a society structured under the requirement of keeping its people apart - would have been technically infeasible. Among the principal reasons it is possible today is the Portable Computer and the way we have learned to use it. Before we were required to transition to a nonlocal mode of living we had already become adept at extensively extended cognition. We were familiar with the interface of software mediated interactions, with how to navigate a surplus of readily accessible information, and with the phenomenology of a Web-Extended-Mind. Our Portable Computers were already a part of our cognitive ensemble and were well suited for the demands of remote living. The cognitive machinery required for remote cooperation and digital interfacing was well oiled and in need of little augmentation. Without this digital sharing of cognition, mediated by software which made our remote cooperation more natural, we could not have accomplished remote learning nor the delocalization of the workplace: for I believe that the ability to merely communicate the output of our cognitive tasks is insufficient for such things.
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[1] Clark, Andy & Chalmers, David J. (1998). The extended mind. _Analysis_ 58 (1):7-19.
[2] Mark Rowlands (2010). "Chapter 3: The mind embedded". The new science of the mind: From extended mind to embodied phenomenology. [3] Putnam, H., 1960. “Minds and Machines”, reprinted in Putnam 1975b, 362–385.
[4] Smart, P.R. (2012), The Web‐Extended Mind. Metaphilosophy, 43: 446-463. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9973.2012.01756.x
[5] Harkin, J. (2003). Mobilisation: The growing public interest in mobile technology. London: Demos.

1.20.20
The problem of moral luck, or why I stopped studying ethics
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The problem of moral luck is a durable one. Its durability arises from the tension between intuition and our experience as moral judges. It is intuitively plausible that a person can only be appropriately judged for something within their control. If I am coerced into stealing or trip into a waiter we feel that moral judgements should be withheld since I had no control over whether these actions happened. This intuition can be summarized by the Control Principle (CP), which states that an agent can only be judged for something which is under their control. While CP justifies withholding moral blame for actions resulting from coercion, obvious accidents, and involuntary muscle spasms, this intuition also leads us to the problem of moral luck. When we imagine the comprehensive set of factors outside of our control, then the consistent application of CP should suggest a lack of moral responsibility for any action affected by a subset of those factors. But in our ordinary practice of moral assessment we often judge people for actions significantly influenced by luck. Two equally inattentive drivers that both run off the road are not equally culpable if one happens to kill a pedestrian, despite the pedestrian’s location at that time being outside either agent’s control. We judge people for being drug dealers, despots, philanthropists, terrorists, soldiers, etc. despite the myriad coincidental and external influences causing them to be born where they were, into their family, with those genes, and with the course of their projects turning out as they did. This is the problem of moral luck that Nagel takes himself as having identified: when, in spite of the ungovernable factors which significantly influence an agent’s action, we continue to treat them as an object of moral judgment (Nagel 25). Moral luck can be further specified in terms of the types of factors that influence an agent. Nagel proposes a kind of moral luck according to which it is outside of an agent's control to have one character and temperament as opposed to another. Whether I am kind or unfeeling, munificent or miserly, exuberant, melancholic, or possessed in any other distinct or subtle trait which constitutes my character is beyond my control. These endowments manifests in how I behave and what actions I perform, which in turn determines my moral standing. The inference that seems to follow is that my moral standing is to some significant extent outside of my control, and therefore by CP that I am not responsible for anything that results from these constitutive variables. Among neighboring kinds of moral luck, this notion of luck in one’s character comes uncomfortably close to our own sense of agency and personal responsibility. Unlike luck in the results of one’s projects or luck in their circumstances, the idea of luck in who one is threatens our security in believing we are essentially good despite the unpredictability of an immoral world. Of all the implications of moral luck, constitutive luck is the most damaging to our own feeling of moral agency and the practice of moral judgment. The first part of the following essay will alleviate this concern by objecting to the coherence of constitutive luck. The second part will evaluate CP and argue that this incoherence arises from an unrealistic concept of control . Precisely what we mean by the concept of luck is not immediately clear. In his essay Moral Luck (1979) Nagel never explicitly defines his usage of the term, but implies the intuitive meaning that luck -- whether good or bad -- is that which is beyond one’s control. It is important for our present purpose to linger on this definition and explore its logic in greater detail than Nagel does. Expanding on the intuitive definition, I will use luck to mean the following: A state of affairs is lucky for an agent if it is one among multiple possibilities, whether it obtains or not is outside of that agent’s control, and they have some reason to prefer or disprefer it over another possible state. There are three important parts to this definition: 1) Luck implies luck for somebody: there must be someone on which luck rests or for which a state of affairs is lucky. Luck is contingent on an idea of persisting identity that exists external to the possibilities, and for which some possibilities are good or bad. Luck can not precede the person. 2) For one state of affairs to be lucky there must be another possible state: one cannot be lucky with regards to something that couldn't be any other way. 3) One can only be lucky if they had no control over the outcome (e.g. It isn’t luck if I weight my dice and roll ones because I had some control over that outcome happening instead of others). Having defined what is hopefully our intuitive concept of luck, we must agree on an understanding of “constitution”. What we mean by a person’s “identity” (or “personality”, or “personhood”, or “disposition”, etc.), refers to the sum over all their constituting traits. These include temperament, preferences, and tendencies to behave in particular ways under the influence of different feelings, environments, strong impulses, and social stimuli. Nagel describes this as “the kind of person you are, where this is not just a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities, and temperament”(Nagel 28). Some of these traits are contingent on who a person is and can be changed by acts of will (e.g. Though naturally slothful, I overcame my laziness and took up bobsledding), while other traits are essential to identity. These are the constituting traits that fix our identity and without which we would be an essentially different person. While our contingent traits are important to the conversation of moral luck, whether we identify with these traits or not seems more a matter of luck in the will one has than in their essential constitution, i.e. in the way one is. If we assume that one’s will can change over time without them becoming an essentially different person, then constitutive luck and luck in one’s will can be separated as distinctive (albeit overlapping) concepts. Constitutional traits are dispositional in nature, meaning they describe how a person would act in certain circumstances under certain stimuli, given knowledge of how comparable conditions were conjoined with past actions. We think of Ebenezer Scrooge as miserly and cold-hearted not because we think he is missing the “generosity-gene” or possessed of some physiological anomaly but because he behaves miserly and cold-hearted. When we blame Scrooge for his mean-spiritedness we are judging him as an agent, rather than judging the constitutive qualities that make up this agent. Nagel puts it quite well, observing that when “when we blame someone for his actions we are not merely saying it is bad that they happened, or bad that he exists: we are judging him, saying he is bad, which is different from his being a bad thing”(Nagel 25). Moral judgments about a person are not judgments about whether the constitutive qualities of an actor are good or bad, but about that actor themself as a moral agent. If one’s constitution makes up their personhood, and moral judgments are about that person--not the traits which constitute them -- then taking an agent as they are is a fundamental assumption we make when treating people as moral agents. If we consider the essential character traits of a person as additions that, by luck alone, may or may not have come to constitute them we stop treating that person as such. To think of a person’s essential character traits as results of a lottery is to stop thinking about the same person: they are that constitution; they have no identity before or beyond that by which they are constituted. So when we say “It was just bad luck that poor Ebenezer was born the mean-spirited miser he was. He didn’t choose his constitution, so he can't be responsible!”, what do we really mean? Are we referring to something before Ebenezer that could be said to have the good or bad luck to be instantiated with one set of traits rather than another? Of something that by definition lacks any constitution can we say anything about the luck it has in being allocated constitutional traits? If we agree on our meaning of luck and constitution then we agree that the original statement and successive questions are incoherent. When we think of luck we think of luck for someone, and we think of that person as essentially equivalent to a unique integral of constitutive traits. It follows that before we were “constituted” there was no identity to speak of, meaning any “luck” in that constitution being a particular way was not lucky for anybody. Our ideas of luck and identity are independently clear to us, but to marry them is not to produce a meaningful concept. We certainly can’t conclude from this that all moral luck is incoherent, since our intuition still leads us to believe in CP and we clearly hold people responsible for acts influenced by luck. But something about our intuition must be wrong, since it leads us to an incoherent requirement for moral responsibility. When we consider the cases of coercion, muscle spasms, or chance events we acknowledge a lack of responsibility. We certainly feel that a necessary condition for freedom and responsibility is the power to control our behavior, and since what the agent lacked in these cases was control over their actions we conclude the necessity of control. But when we extend this intuition to include aspects of constitution and identity we encounter the nonsense requirement of self creation. I believe this absurd implication follows from a faulty intuition about what we mean by control. When I pick up my water bottle I identify as having been the cause of doing so. If asked I'll say I controlled the movement, but what I mean is that I identify as having been the reason my body moved as it did. i wanted to pick it up, so i picked it up. i didn't consciously cause anything to happen in my brain or muscles, it just happened and i identified with it happening. if someone forces me at gunpoint to pick up the same water bottle i will move through the same motions but i don't identify as the reason for acting thusly: the man with the gun made me do it. if we understand control over an action to mean “identifying-as-the-cause-of” that action, then the requirement of control over one’s identity is no longer intuitively necessary. when we take control to mean something more than this, cp leads us to the incoherent requirement of self creation. as susan wolf writes in Sanity and Responsibility: “...we are tempted to go on to suppose that we must have yet another kind of control to assure us that even our deepest selves are somehow up to us. But not all things necessary for freedom and responsibility must be types of power and control. We may need simply to be a certain way, even though it is not within our power to determine whether we are that way or not”(Wolf 380). Our intuitions lead us to mistake the control principle as a requirement which extends to our constitutive characteristics, when in fact our practice of moral judgment (and our experience of control) follows from the individual as they are. We think we can imagine (and even worry about) the concept that Nagel describes as constitutive luck, but to be responsible for something “despite influences from an essential character trait I didn’t choose” is really just what it means to be responsible.