Daniel M. Harrison's Blog: Millennial Philosophy
May 16, 2016
I Feel Therefore I Am Not
Perhaps because (in addition to being an entrepreneur) I am also a writer, one of the subjects I spend a disproportionate time thinking about is thinking. The concept of thinking, the process of thinking, and the art of thinking in more efficient, right-minded, clearer ways overall is a topic which has always fascinated me the way stuff such as wrestling or football or cars typically attracts many other guys’ attention (none of those is remotely of interest to me at all, incidentally).
So what is the essential constitution of the Millennial mind? This is the question on every ad man’s mind right now, after all: where will it lead us?
While these questions are the foundational cornerstone of our future, in fact, none of them are really that much about the Millennial as an individual insomuch as they are about the effect that those living and working within the era of the Millennial generation’s increasing influence on society. That includes all of us, of all ages and demographics.
The simple answer is that the world right now is going one of two ways: either the pace of innovation will continue to accelerate so that productivity continues to surpass a large segment of the population, or that same burst of creative energy characterised the previous century is about to come to a grinding halt. In the case of the latter, there will remain merely the appearance of growth only, thus weighing down a newly unified society in something of a paradigm hypocricy.
For some, that’s the bright side. For if it continues full steam ahead, knowledge is likely to move at such an accelerated rate of progress that maybe only 20 percent or so of the moral values, scientific facts and artistic trends that are the standard-bearers of life as we know it today will survive the next century of human evolution.
The Millennial mind is an expanding mind, and this will naturally incline the world towards the second scenario, but even expansion can’t get there on its own: for that to happen, the conditions have to be just right to warrant expansion. Otherwise, our state is a contracting one or simply an oscillating one.
Millennial attitudes towards things might seem wildly different at times, but unless these ideas are accepted and integrated into the legal, political educational and economic fabric of our society rapidly, the very worst type of world is one that likely lies in the future. This world is best described as one where the majority of people are completely cut off from access to knowledge but believe themselves to possess it in abundance.
The risk of the transition we are undergoing now as a species resulting in the latter type of social order is much higher than we assume.
Some examples are the abuse of knowledge almost everywhere you look today, from advertising and PR campaigns to the ways in which we cynically manipulate the weak to bend them towards ideals and goals that are politically motivated to our own ends. It exists when we sentence someone to a punishing jail sentence for a crime that they were not fully cognisant of committing. It exists in our desire and propensity for winning – which is to say, for revenge and conquest (for winning is merely a reaction to some alternative experience).
There is a unique opportunity in the education of our young to reverse the possibility of negative attachment to knowledge. This opportunity lies in the fact that in the present day we live within a networked society – as opposed to one bound up from city to city linearly like a train track – while the present-day networks that we occupy are unusually open.
They will not always be this way, certainly: historically open gaps close and just as surely the network will become harder to gain access to and the intelligence required to do so manifold complex.
The solution to all this is quite simply both as easy and as impossible as it portends to be: it is to impress upon those with minds that are learning still the power of one’s soul, or spirit, or metaphysical nature before impressing on them the power of their brains.
The reality is that no culture can transition from one of limited intelligence to one of superior intelligence without a conscience.
Thus the adults of tomorrow will be many times superior to how those of my generation were at her same age (in fact, they already are). This adds a layer of complexity, for it is not in a total sense as if these children do not possess the same basic requirements. The requirement for understanding, compassion and ethics must always be instilled. What is more, many of these ethics will have to be lived to be understood, weighted in hard experience, all the more so for these citizens of the future will likely be making decisions on behalf of most of us in a way previous generations haven’t had to.
So what if, reading this, you are one of those who still has their entire future ahead of them, which is to say that you’re graduating high school now (or did so not so long ago that many of your friends from high school are still the same ones now)?
Then take it from someone who’s about twice your lifetime in age (which is to say, someone just young enough to still get it, and just old enough to have lived enough of it to know):
First of all, do yourself the best favor of all, and make sure you understand what it really is to feel about something or someone before you allow yourself the luxury of contemplating abstractly.
Then, equally as importantly, experience the pain of how it is to care for someone andlose them before you turn your attention to figuring out whatever is the cure.
Sometimes, this may feel like letting someone go without putting up a fight or like you are giving up an opportunity to succeed. But the person who does not want you is not yours to belong with, just as the opportunity you are not born for will only come to sentence your career to certain death later.
Ultimately, you must consider everything before you set out to create anything – this is true whether it be a relationship, a career or a work of art or science. Every creation, remember, has an unknown impact of some sort that you must feel the consequences of before bringing it into being.
This is the hardest path of all to take, and the one that will seem at many times pointless and irrational.
But ultimately, if you follow this path, yours will become the first generation to remove the mindless reality of the ideology we live are confined to now – the one founded on the absurd notion that justice can be subjectively interpreted and that one person has a higher market value than the next because an algorithm says so.
With right-mindedness enabling fabulous – miraculous even – innovations to aid you in performing the heavy processing, you can escape this zero sum outcome of win or lose, and live in a world where death is not a blind abyss but a comfortable, well-lived cooperation.
That’s a world that you can really call your own, and it’s one far from that of today, which will then seem like nothing more than the dying years of a late-druidic dystopia that lies somewhere far, far away in a soon-forgotten past.
So what is the essential constitution of the Millennial mind? This is the question on every ad man’s mind right now, after all: where will it lead us?
While these questions are the foundational cornerstone of our future, in fact, none of them are really that much about the Millennial as an individual insomuch as they are about the effect that those living and working within the era of the Millennial generation’s increasing influence on society. That includes all of us, of all ages and demographics.
The simple answer is that the world right now is going one of two ways: either the pace of innovation will continue to accelerate so that productivity continues to surpass a large segment of the population, or that same burst of creative energy characterised the previous century is about to come to a grinding halt. In the case of the latter, there will remain merely the appearance of growth only, thus weighing down a newly unified society in something of a paradigm hypocricy.
For some, that’s the bright side. For if it continues full steam ahead, knowledge is likely to move at such an accelerated rate of progress that maybe only 20 percent or so of the moral values, scientific facts and artistic trends that are the standard-bearers of life as we know it today will survive the next century of human evolution.
The Millennial mind is an expanding mind, and this will naturally incline the world towards the second scenario, but even expansion can’t get there on its own: for that to happen, the conditions have to be just right to warrant expansion. Otherwise, our state is a contracting one or simply an oscillating one.
Millennial attitudes towards things might seem wildly different at times, but unless these ideas are accepted and integrated into the legal, political educational and economic fabric of our society rapidly, the very worst type of world is one that likely lies in the future. This world is best described as one where the majority of people are completely cut off from access to knowledge but believe themselves to possess it in abundance.
The risk of the transition we are undergoing now as a species resulting in the latter type of social order is much higher than we assume.
Some examples are the abuse of knowledge almost everywhere you look today, from advertising and PR campaigns to the ways in which we cynically manipulate the weak to bend them towards ideals and goals that are politically motivated to our own ends. It exists when we sentence someone to a punishing jail sentence for a crime that they were not fully cognisant of committing. It exists in our desire and propensity for winning – which is to say, for revenge and conquest (for winning is merely a reaction to some alternative experience).
There is a unique opportunity in the education of our young to reverse the possibility of negative attachment to knowledge. This opportunity lies in the fact that in the present day we live within a networked society – as opposed to one bound up from city to city linearly like a train track – while the present-day networks that we occupy are unusually open.
They will not always be this way, certainly: historically open gaps close and just as surely the network will become harder to gain access to and the intelligence required to do so manifold complex.
The solution to all this is quite simply both as easy and as impossible as it portends to be: it is to impress upon those with minds that are learning still the power of one’s soul, or spirit, or metaphysical nature before impressing on them the power of their brains.
The reality is that no culture can transition from one of limited intelligence to one of superior intelligence without a conscience.
Thus the adults of tomorrow will be many times superior to how those of my generation were at her same age (in fact, they already are). This adds a layer of complexity, for it is not in a total sense as if these children do not possess the same basic requirements. The requirement for understanding, compassion and ethics must always be instilled. What is more, many of these ethics will have to be lived to be understood, weighted in hard experience, all the more so for these citizens of the future will likely be making decisions on behalf of most of us in a way previous generations haven’t had to.
So what if, reading this, you are one of those who still has their entire future ahead of them, which is to say that you’re graduating high school now (or did so not so long ago that many of your friends from high school are still the same ones now)?
Then take it from someone who’s about twice your lifetime in age (which is to say, someone just young enough to still get it, and just old enough to have lived enough of it to know):
First of all, do yourself the best favor of all, and make sure you understand what it really is to feel about something or someone before you allow yourself the luxury of contemplating abstractly.
Then, equally as importantly, experience the pain of how it is to care for someone andlose them before you turn your attention to figuring out whatever is the cure.
Sometimes, this may feel like letting someone go without putting up a fight or like you are giving up an opportunity to succeed. But the person who does not want you is not yours to belong with, just as the opportunity you are not born for will only come to sentence your career to certain death later.
Ultimately, you must consider everything before you set out to create anything – this is true whether it be a relationship, a career or a work of art or science. Every creation, remember, has an unknown impact of some sort that you must feel the consequences of before bringing it into being.
This is the hardest path of all to take, and the one that will seem at many times pointless and irrational.
But ultimately, if you follow this path, yours will become the first generation to remove the mindless reality of the ideology we live are confined to now – the one founded on the absurd notion that justice can be subjectively interpreted and that one person has a higher market value than the next because an algorithm says so.
With right-mindedness enabling fabulous – miraculous even – innovations to aid you in performing the heavy processing, you can escape this zero sum outcome of win or lose, and live in a world where death is not a blind abyss but a comfortable, well-lived cooperation.
That’s a world that you can really call your own, and it’s one far from that of today, which will then seem like nothing more than the dying years of a late-druidic dystopia that lies somewhere far, far away in a soon-forgotten past.
May 12, 2016
Redefining Feminism In The Millennial Generation
Back in the 1700’s, a major culture shock went through society as religious practices, observance of one’s political leaders and even the basic tenants of family lives changed in a heartbeat.
What didn’t change however was one basic social ideal: that men enjoy superior status to women. Despite all the changes to one’s daily lives and the liberalization of thought that defined this new era, women were still brought up to stay virginal until marriage, have children, and suffer the whims and whimsicalities of whatever capricious husband they ended up betrothed to.
Technology’s rise as a medium of creating virtual platforms wherein people interact with one another from across the world and through the barriers of culture is finally changing this. We are at a point in time where there is a shift in values going on today in a way that there hasn’t been since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Except this shift, rather than leave the second sex behind, is putting them very much upfront.
Not all of us are catching up at the same time, however. Already in China, 52% of senior board directors of public companies are women. This is compared to 25% for Europe and just a paltry 14% for the United States. This point is the subject of a discussion between the characters of my recently-released novel The Millennial Reincarnations.
Still, it’s probably a harder world in many ways for women that it ever was before. As psychologist Leslie Bell points out in her excellent book Hard To Get: Twenty-something Women And The Paradox of Sexual Freedom, women are stuck somewhere bound between the obligations of the past and liberated by the opportunities of the future:
"Instead of feeling free, twenty-something women are weighed down by vying cultural notions about the kind of sex and relationships they should be having in their twenties. Be assertive, but not aggressive. Be feminine, but not too passive. Be sexually adventurous, but don’t alienate men with your sexual prowess. Be honest and open, but don’t overwhelm someone with too much personal information. They are taught to seek out a comparative relationship of equals. But at the same time they are instructed … about irreconcilable differences between men and women."
With these dilemmas burdening one’s extended years of adolescence today, I sympathize grandly — even if I cannot empathize wholly.
The truth is, it may be time to redefine our idea of feminism. Feminism used to be about supporting women in the workplace and make large amounts of money. It used to be about making sure that young girls who excelled at high school could get into Harvard. It used be about respecting a woman’s right to say no to a man, despite her inferior physical strength.
Today, most men who have been raised properly know and respect these codes of conduct. We are happy to work for a woman (one is even running for President, after all); we actively spar with women in the classroom’s of Ivy League schools, respecting them as worthy opponents and not just as potential bedfellows; we don’t push it when the girl of our dreams says “not tonight, my friend” or even “in your dreams”.
At least, these are the generally accepted codes of conduct of intelligent society today.
And yet still, there exists a chasm of superiority that men hold over women. If we get a girl pregnant one drunken night, we can walk away from the painful decision to decide about terminating a life that hasn’t yet begun versus beginning our own in earnest independence. We expect — and even demand — that women are faithful sexually to us, but none of us can claim to have always fulfilled the same end of the bargain (let’s be honest). We tire at emotional outbursts, but regularly indulge our own desires as we please without conscience.
These differences contribute to a major problem for equal opportunity: men can be more reckless, which means, they can take more risks, and therefore, they can end up with more at the end of the day.
Rather than be about acknowledging that women are our intellectual and emotional — if not physical — equals, which is what Feminism used to be, the concept needs redefining. Today more than at any other time, we need to acknowledge the differences between the sexes and respect those differences, while still holding on to our previous notions of equality.
That involves asking some pointed — and long-overdue — questions:
Why should a girl be faithful to a boy physically one hundred percent of the time if emotionally she puts him at the front of her priorities when it matters? That’s how men have thought for centuries and they have been both wonderful fathers and husbands.
Why shouldn’t a woman rightfully demand money upfront when she decides to have the child of a man — whether they are married or not? It’s her who will have to care for the child if he leaves, after all.
Why can’t a girl insist that she receives income from her boyfriend, but doesn’t have to live with him? She is paid less, after all, at his expense (for it is he that is more likely to get the promotion).
In certain cultures, such as the Chinese one, there is much more acceptance of these types of practices and this way of thinking than in our own western one.
These cultures, it should be noted, are making startling economic, scientific, and yes, social progress on a scale we have not made in the west since the last time our values went through a renaissance in the 1700s.
It’s time we as men looked at the way we define ourselves and our expectations and become much more realistic about our responsibilities and our rights.
Your sister or your girlfriend is not a replica of your grandmother, she is the only hope we have of making it into the future with a vastly superior moral outcome than the one we find ourselves in today.
But that’s up to men to embrace Feminism and redefine it first.
What didn’t change however was one basic social ideal: that men enjoy superior status to women. Despite all the changes to one’s daily lives and the liberalization of thought that defined this new era, women were still brought up to stay virginal until marriage, have children, and suffer the whims and whimsicalities of whatever capricious husband they ended up betrothed to.
Technology’s rise as a medium of creating virtual platforms wherein people interact with one another from across the world and through the barriers of culture is finally changing this. We are at a point in time where there is a shift in values going on today in a way that there hasn’t been since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Except this shift, rather than leave the second sex behind, is putting them very much upfront.
Not all of us are catching up at the same time, however. Already in China, 52% of senior board directors of public companies are women. This is compared to 25% for Europe and just a paltry 14% for the United States. This point is the subject of a discussion between the characters of my recently-released novel The Millennial Reincarnations.
Still, it’s probably a harder world in many ways for women that it ever was before. As psychologist Leslie Bell points out in her excellent book Hard To Get: Twenty-something Women And The Paradox of Sexual Freedom, women are stuck somewhere bound between the obligations of the past and liberated by the opportunities of the future:
"Instead of feeling free, twenty-something women are weighed down by vying cultural notions about the kind of sex and relationships they should be having in their twenties. Be assertive, but not aggressive. Be feminine, but not too passive. Be sexually adventurous, but don’t alienate men with your sexual prowess. Be honest and open, but don’t overwhelm someone with too much personal information. They are taught to seek out a comparative relationship of equals. But at the same time they are instructed … about irreconcilable differences between men and women."
With these dilemmas burdening one’s extended years of adolescence today, I sympathize grandly — even if I cannot empathize wholly.
The truth is, it may be time to redefine our idea of feminism. Feminism used to be about supporting women in the workplace and make large amounts of money. It used to be about making sure that young girls who excelled at high school could get into Harvard. It used be about respecting a woman’s right to say no to a man, despite her inferior physical strength.
Today, most men who have been raised properly know and respect these codes of conduct. We are happy to work for a woman (one is even running for President, after all); we actively spar with women in the classroom’s of Ivy League schools, respecting them as worthy opponents and not just as potential bedfellows; we don’t push it when the girl of our dreams says “not tonight, my friend” or even “in your dreams”.
At least, these are the generally accepted codes of conduct of intelligent society today.
And yet still, there exists a chasm of superiority that men hold over women. If we get a girl pregnant one drunken night, we can walk away from the painful decision to decide about terminating a life that hasn’t yet begun versus beginning our own in earnest independence. We expect — and even demand — that women are faithful sexually to us, but none of us can claim to have always fulfilled the same end of the bargain (let’s be honest). We tire at emotional outbursts, but regularly indulge our own desires as we please without conscience.
These differences contribute to a major problem for equal opportunity: men can be more reckless, which means, they can take more risks, and therefore, they can end up with more at the end of the day.
Rather than be about acknowledging that women are our intellectual and emotional — if not physical — equals, which is what Feminism used to be, the concept needs redefining. Today more than at any other time, we need to acknowledge the differences between the sexes and respect those differences, while still holding on to our previous notions of equality.
That involves asking some pointed — and long-overdue — questions:
Why should a girl be faithful to a boy physically one hundred percent of the time if emotionally she puts him at the front of her priorities when it matters? That’s how men have thought for centuries and they have been both wonderful fathers and husbands.
Why shouldn’t a woman rightfully demand money upfront when she decides to have the child of a man — whether they are married or not? It’s her who will have to care for the child if he leaves, after all.
Why can’t a girl insist that she receives income from her boyfriend, but doesn’t have to live with him? She is paid less, after all, at his expense (for it is he that is more likely to get the promotion).
In certain cultures, such as the Chinese one, there is much more acceptance of these types of practices and this way of thinking than in our own western one.
These cultures, it should be noted, are making startling economic, scientific, and yes, social progress on a scale we have not made in the west since the last time our values went through a renaissance in the 1700s.
It’s time we as men looked at the way we define ourselves and our expectations and become much more realistic about our responsibilities and our rights.
Your sister or your girlfriend is not a replica of your grandmother, she is the only hope we have of making it into the future with a vastly superior moral outcome than the one we find ourselves in today.
But that’s up to men to embrace Feminism and redefine it first.
May 4, 2016
Digital Press Forum With Daniel M. Harrison For “The Millennial Reincarnations”
Q: You have new book that recently was released and it is called The Millennial Reincarnations. Tell us a little bit about the book if you will. Why did you choose the word Reincarnations?
A: The book is about a number of things. It’s about the choices – or the lack of choices – we actually make for ourselves today as a result of having the opportunity to make an increasingly abundant variety of them open to us. It’s also about the nature of spiritual belief and practice, and by association, to some extent at least, religious practice and belief, and how these concepts are becoming exponentially more bound to the concepts we discover in science, such as genetics. Finally, it’s about our obsession with scale and celebrity – the mass-media market if you like. Technology has driven all these events, fundamentally, and that’s why technology is a big theme in the book. By setting it between 1990 and the present day, I was able in many ways to mark the upward climb of the technology during the past 25 years in narrative form, which shows how remarkable it has been. Really, really remarkable. As a result, we as a culture, as a society – and in turn, as a new emergent adult generation – have changed. The term reincarnation is applicable here, not just because the characters are in a sense reincarnations of their earlier 90s past life selves, but because society is in a sense undergoing a reincarnation. That’s really what disruption is, at the end of the day. It’s a technological reincarnation, which is in turn, a millennial reincarnation in the contemporary sense of that term.
Q: What was your motivation for writing The Millennial Reincarnations?
A: I am not sure there was a specific motivation other than those general desires to share ideas and points in a more abstract sense than I might, say, giving a talk. But here’s one thing I will confess to: about 75 percent of the way through the book, I met a girl socially, at a friend’s house, who was really quite remarkably similar to several of the characters in the book I was writing. In many ways, it was as if she was these characters in combined, unified human form. I have had a number of things like this happen to me before – sort of premonitionary things, whereby you end up writing something that actually happens in some way – but never before had I met in the flesh what looked like, acted like, spoke like, and once I got talking to her, I discovered had a history so like many of the characters in the book I was writing! Anyway, the last quarter of the book was when I realized that the reincarnation theme was the real driver here, since I saw how these different characters were so completely interrelated. It was a fascinating and brilliant experience!
Q: What would compel someone to pick up a copy of The Millennial Reincarnations?
A: Someone with a desire to see the dark side of the wee hours in the most beautiful afternoon light you can imagine it bathed in.
Q: Are you hoping to enlighten the millennials and hopefully make them aware of themselves? Would a millennial even be interested in knowing how his or her own generation is perceived?
A: Of course, enlightenment is an important factor for any generation or person, and enlightening someone is the role of writing really, so sure, I would like to thank there is a benefit – however ancillary – someone gets from reading the book other than just sheer self-gratification. But also I think we are a generation not just with a little self-interest, but more or less with a self-obsession about all things us. So I think it’s inevitable that the book was going to be popular. It has gone to No.1 on Amazon already in Category Fiction, and it has only been out a couple days, which sort of backs up the point I guess.
Q: Tell us about yourself. What made you decide to become a writer?
A: I’ve always been writing, really ever since I can remember to be honest with you. I think writing is something you do in order to progress and further ideas, to experiment with them in a slightly more theoretical and maybe at times abstract sense than it's possible to do in real life. So I guess a lot of my rationale and drive to become a writer was really about expressing a lot of ideas, and perhaps some feelings, that I had about the world that I don’t see so many people talking about. Writing should be like that – it’s responsibility is to challenge the conventions of society really. And inform and educate.
Q: You mentioned somewhere in another article that the world is headed in one of two opposite directions: it's going to come to a grinding halt or speed up so much we won't recognise it, is what you said. What is your honest opinion of the direction we're headed in?
A: I think it’s fifty fifty, honestly. Either the acceleration of innovation and productivity that characterized the previous century will come to a grinding halt or everything is going to move at such an re-accelerated rate of progress that maybe only 20 percent or so of the moral values, scientific facts and artistic trends of today will survive in tact. And you know, it’s honestly the thing that scares me most of all - although of course there's tremendous upside in it for the winners. The other thing that scares me is how like the early turn of the 20th Century we are. At that point, no one considered war a possibility at all. It was all careers, money, economics that was the talk of town. And that is what ruined Germany, essentially, and then Europe. You see similar things happening in the Middle East and parts of Asia now. It’s frightening.
Q: In The Millennial Reincarnations, do you dissect the millennial mind and explain why they act the way they do?
A: No – because it’s a story. But it’s a very insightful story, so there are aspects of the millennial mind that readers seem to pick up on. A lot of people have told me, ‘Oh, it’s so interesting how you have a different take on millennials.’ I am not really sure what that means, to be honest! But that gives me a sense of the feeling in society that while there’s a lot spoken of about millennials as a culture, little opinion or insight is actually expressed in that dialog.
Q: Some typecast the Millennial generation as "too self-reliant and flippant in attitude". Do you agree with that assessment? Why or why not?
A: I definitely don’t think it’s a self-reliant generation. If anything it’s the opposite. That is somewhat the message in the book. The generation has a pile of cash at its disposal, but to what extent is it really in control of its destiny? More so than that of the baby boomers? No way. Then again, it’s not a dependent generation, emotionally-speaking. There’s much less marriage and attachment among millennials than there was in previous generations, so its independent in an emotional way. A whole cluster of people who are all ultimately dependently wealthy and emotionally detached – that’s the message in the book. Why that is is really because the boomers brought their kids up to be that way. Long hours at work and multiple marriages etc. brought about a type of emotional independence among the children of baby boomers, while the extra cash they had as disposable income became an emotional cruch in a way that no other generation alive today has used money. We use it as a kind of emotional form of support. That’s new.
Q: Why is escapism such a huge problem with this generation?
A: Well, it is not so much escapism as a lack of realism. This lack of realism is the result of all ideas – any idea and every idea – being encouraged by boomer parents who always felt that their own ideas were not fostered enough and were keen to emotionally compensate, I think. Many innovations are still in the nascent phase right now, anyway: as in, it's too early to tell if we're escaping something or building something. It's probably a bit of both.
It remains to be seen, for example, how social media will affect society. We will know when it’s just us – the Millennials – using it. Before that point, which is to say, with Baby Boomers still very active on social media, there are lots of positive and negative trends which will probably turn out to be more artificial. The positive side is the level of engagement. I doubt Millennials will use social media to engage as much as boomers do, which is sad, but it is what it is. The negatives though we’ll find get lost with the drop in boomers are far greater. They include stuff such as PR, sales campaigns, marketing and so forth. So by that measure, the effect of social media is probably more negative on balance as an influence today but eventually, that will change. If it doesn’t, it kill itself, simple as that. But it will, and ultimately it will become a more positive force. Then a neutral one. That’s the point its permeated all social levels.
Q: Why is The Millennial Reincarnations set in China?
A: Part of the book is set in China and other parts are set in New York. For one, the premise of the story is the return of the Mandate - the figurehead of the East who would return after 9 or 10 generations and restore order to China when the elite were getting out of hand. I find this a comparable example to how life is today everywhere. Think about it - in the United States alone, it's been, since the 1980s, Bush, Clinton, Bush, then Obama - who fought Clinton - and now it's Clinton fighting for the Presidency again. There is not a lot of difference between this sort of leadership cycle and the one in modern China, where the leaders are chosen by an elite circle and sold to the masses as the best possible bet. The Chinese don't get to elect their leaders, that's true, but with the kind of line up where two families are constantly in poll position in the largest democracy in the world for coming on 30 years, you have to ask yourself what sort of democratic model that is.
My point is not to get into the political argument for or against any of the candidates however, but rather to illustrate that over time, China and America have grown much closer together in the way they are set up and work, like it or not. China has broadly loosened it's cabal, while the United States has broadly tightened up its cabal. These synergies make the two places fertile ground for commentary, and sure, storytelling. Especially when it's storytelling of a more spiritual nature, as these sorts of political issues, once you get to the bottom of them, are fundamentally spiritually motivated. Policy is and has always been shoved into action by the will and desire of the human spirit. That's what makes it work. That's what makes it so powerful.
On a more basic level, I suppose too I wanted to set a big part of it in China as it's the obvious place today that you hear about all the time on the news – the boom-bust economy and so forth - but you don't really get a lot of exposure to much of the nitty gritty. At least the average reader doesn't. But how much do you really know about life there? I think most people would answer ‘almost nothing.’ And it’s a fascinating life to read about. In fact it’s a fascinating life to live. I share a lot of affection for it having grown up myself for many years in Hong Kong. That definitely influenced my decision to base part of the book nearby in Shanghai, which has a very similar social dynamic.
Q: What's next for you?
A: Sometimes I feel like the question is – ‘what’s not next?” First of all, I'll confess that I am always working on another book! But I have a lot going on right now outside of writing too - I have businesses to run, a couple huge negotiations in Asia that I am wrapped up in. I am giving aa series of talks on the concept I discovered called Factory Banking. I love doing those talks. Last year I literally spent the entire year travelling or riding out to some far-flung business somewhere in Asia to take a look at buying it. I expect it’ll be doubly-intense in the back half of this year, too, to be honest. I’ll accumulate a lot of air-miles this year, I know that much!
A: The book is about a number of things. It’s about the choices – or the lack of choices – we actually make for ourselves today as a result of having the opportunity to make an increasingly abundant variety of them open to us. It’s also about the nature of spiritual belief and practice, and by association, to some extent at least, religious practice and belief, and how these concepts are becoming exponentially more bound to the concepts we discover in science, such as genetics. Finally, it’s about our obsession with scale and celebrity – the mass-media market if you like. Technology has driven all these events, fundamentally, and that’s why technology is a big theme in the book. By setting it between 1990 and the present day, I was able in many ways to mark the upward climb of the technology during the past 25 years in narrative form, which shows how remarkable it has been. Really, really remarkable. As a result, we as a culture, as a society – and in turn, as a new emergent adult generation – have changed. The term reincarnation is applicable here, not just because the characters are in a sense reincarnations of their earlier 90s past life selves, but because society is in a sense undergoing a reincarnation. That’s really what disruption is, at the end of the day. It’s a technological reincarnation, which is in turn, a millennial reincarnation in the contemporary sense of that term.
Q: What was your motivation for writing The Millennial Reincarnations?
A: I am not sure there was a specific motivation other than those general desires to share ideas and points in a more abstract sense than I might, say, giving a talk. But here’s one thing I will confess to: about 75 percent of the way through the book, I met a girl socially, at a friend’s house, who was really quite remarkably similar to several of the characters in the book I was writing. In many ways, it was as if she was these characters in combined, unified human form. I have had a number of things like this happen to me before – sort of premonitionary things, whereby you end up writing something that actually happens in some way – but never before had I met in the flesh what looked like, acted like, spoke like, and once I got talking to her, I discovered had a history so like many of the characters in the book I was writing! Anyway, the last quarter of the book was when I realized that the reincarnation theme was the real driver here, since I saw how these different characters were so completely interrelated. It was a fascinating and brilliant experience!
Q: What would compel someone to pick up a copy of The Millennial Reincarnations?
A: Someone with a desire to see the dark side of the wee hours in the most beautiful afternoon light you can imagine it bathed in.
Q: Are you hoping to enlighten the millennials and hopefully make them aware of themselves? Would a millennial even be interested in knowing how his or her own generation is perceived?
A: Of course, enlightenment is an important factor for any generation or person, and enlightening someone is the role of writing really, so sure, I would like to thank there is a benefit – however ancillary – someone gets from reading the book other than just sheer self-gratification. But also I think we are a generation not just with a little self-interest, but more or less with a self-obsession about all things us. So I think it’s inevitable that the book was going to be popular. It has gone to No.1 on Amazon already in Category Fiction, and it has only been out a couple days, which sort of backs up the point I guess.
Q: Tell us about yourself. What made you decide to become a writer?
A: I’ve always been writing, really ever since I can remember to be honest with you. I think writing is something you do in order to progress and further ideas, to experiment with them in a slightly more theoretical and maybe at times abstract sense than it's possible to do in real life. So I guess a lot of my rationale and drive to become a writer was really about expressing a lot of ideas, and perhaps some feelings, that I had about the world that I don’t see so many people talking about. Writing should be like that – it’s responsibility is to challenge the conventions of society really. And inform and educate.
Q: You mentioned somewhere in another article that the world is headed in one of two opposite directions: it's going to come to a grinding halt or speed up so much we won't recognise it, is what you said. What is your honest opinion of the direction we're headed in?
A: I think it’s fifty fifty, honestly. Either the acceleration of innovation and productivity that characterized the previous century will come to a grinding halt or everything is going to move at such an re-accelerated rate of progress that maybe only 20 percent or so of the moral values, scientific facts and artistic trends of today will survive in tact. And you know, it’s honestly the thing that scares me most of all - although of course there's tremendous upside in it for the winners. The other thing that scares me is how like the early turn of the 20th Century we are. At that point, no one considered war a possibility at all. It was all careers, money, economics that was the talk of town. And that is what ruined Germany, essentially, and then Europe. You see similar things happening in the Middle East and parts of Asia now. It’s frightening.
Q: In The Millennial Reincarnations, do you dissect the millennial mind and explain why they act the way they do?
A: No – because it’s a story. But it’s a very insightful story, so there are aspects of the millennial mind that readers seem to pick up on. A lot of people have told me, ‘Oh, it’s so interesting how you have a different take on millennials.’ I am not really sure what that means, to be honest! But that gives me a sense of the feeling in society that while there’s a lot spoken of about millennials as a culture, little opinion or insight is actually expressed in that dialog.
Q: Some typecast the Millennial generation as "too self-reliant and flippant in attitude". Do you agree with that assessment? Why or why not?
A: I definitely don’t think it’s a self-reliant generation. If anything it’s the opposite. That is somewhat the message in the book. The generation has a pile of cash at its disposal, but to what extent is it really in control of its destiny? More so than that of the baby boomers? No way. Then again, it’s not a dependent generation, emotionally-speaking. There’s much less marriage and attachment among millennials than there was in previous generations, so its independent in an emotional way. A whole cluster of people who are all ultimately dependently wealthy and emotionally detached – that’s the message in the book. Why that is is really because the boomers brought their kids up to be that way. Long hours at work and multiple marriages etc. brought about a type of emotional independence among the children of baby boomers, while the extra cash they had as disposable income became an emotional cruch in a way that no other generation alive today has used money. We use it as a kind of emotional form of support. That’s new.
Q: Why is escapism such a huge problem with this generation?
A: Well, it is not so much escapism as a lack of realism. This lack of realism is the result of all ideas – any idea and every idea – being encouraged by boomer parents who always felt that their own ideas were not fostered enough and were keen to emotionally compensate, I think. Many innovations are still in the nascent phase right now, anyway: as in, it's too early to tell if we're escaping something or building something. It's probably a bit of both.
It remains to be seen, for example, how social media will affect society. We will know when it’s just us – the Millennials – using it. Before that point, which is to say, with Baby Boomers still very active on social media, there are lots of positive and negative trends which will probably turn out to be more artificial. The positive side is the level of engagement. I doubt Millennials will use social media to engage as much as boomers do, which is sad, but it is what it is. The negatives though we’ll find get lost with the drop in boomers are far greater. They include stuff such as PR, sales campaigns, marketing and so forth. So by that measure, the effect of social media is probably more negative on balance as an influence today but eventually, that will change. If it doesn’t, it kill itself, simple as that. But it will, and ultimately it will become a more positive force. Then a neutral one. That’s the point its permeated all social levels.
Q: Why is The Millennial Reincarnations set in China?
A: Part of the book is set in China and other parts are set in New York. For one, the premise of the story is the return of the Mandate - the figurehead of the East who would return after 9 or 10 generations and restore order to China when the elite were getting out of hand. I find this a comparable example to how life is today everywhere. Think about it - in the United States alone, it's been, since the 1980s, Bush, Clinton, Bush, then Obama - who fought Clinton - and now it's Clinton fighting for the Presidency again. There is not a lot of difference between this sort of leadership cycle and the one in modern China, where the leaders are chosen by an elite circle and sold to the masses as the best possible bet. The Chinese don't get to elect their leaders, that's true, but with the kind of line up where two families are constantly in poll position in the largest democracy in the world for coming on 30 years, you have to ask yourself what sort of democratic model that is.
My point is not to get into the political argument for or against any of the candidates however, but rather to illustrate that over time, China and America have grown much closer together in the way they are set up and work, like it or not. China has broadly loosened it's cabal, while the United States has broadly tightened up its cabal. These synergies make the two places fertile ground for commentary, and sure, storytelling. Especially when it's storytelling of a more spiritual nature, as these sorts of political issues, once you get to the bottom of them, are fundamentally spiritually motivated. Policy is and has always been shoved into action by the will and desire of the human spirit. That's what makes it work. That's what makes it so powerful.
On a more basic level, I suppose too I wanted to set a big part of it in China as it's the obvious place today that you hear about all the time on the news – the boom-bust economy and so forth - but you don't really get a lot of exposure to much of the nitty gritty. At least the average reader doesn't. But how much do you really know about life there? I think most people would answer ‘almost nothing.’ And it’s a fascinating life to read about. In fact it’s a fascinating life to live. I share a lot of affection for it having grown up myself for many years in Hong Kong. That definitely influenced my decision to base part of the book nearby in Shanghai, which has a very similar social dynamic.
Q: What's next for you?
A: Sometimes I feel like the question is – ‘what’s not next?” First of all, I'll confess that I am always working on another book! But I have a lot going on right now outside of writing too - I have businesses to run, a couple huge negotiations in Asia that I am wrapped up in. I am giving aa series of talks on the concept I discovered called Factory Banking. I love doing those talks. Last year I literally spent the entire year travelling or riding out to some far-flung business somewhere in Asia to take a look at buying it. I expect it’ll be doubly-intense in the back half of this year, too, to be honest. I’ll accumulate a lot of air-miles this year, I know that much!
May 2, 2016
I Feel Therefore I Am Not
One of the things that I enjoy most about writing is the exchange of knowledge and information that goes on in the process of doing so.
One of the best examples I can give of this arose as a result of a post I wrote on fellow Goodreads author Summer Lane's website Writing Bell last year on June 8. Here's the post:
"Perhaps because I am a writer, one of the subjects I spend a disproportionate time thinking about is thinking.
In a very real sense, the juggernaut of Descartes' central philosophy I think therefore I am is beginning to change.
Essentially, we are transiting from a world where thinking was the dominant article to one where the idea comes first. This has been a process that has been in germination now for at least a hundred years: the idea is now worth more than the thinking that dreams it up.
This was contrary to what Descartes thought, who maintained that the idea was just a "mode" - a kind of function that happened as a result of one's capacity to think. He was blunt about this, too: in one letter he wrote to Guillaume Gibieuf, a fellow thinker, Descartes maintained that "I am certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me."
There is good reason for this shift, and it has to do with the level of artificial intelligence that humankind has reached the threshold of developing. In Descartes' time, society was regularly famished by random hunger strikes; bridges randomly collapsed due to improper engineering; plagues ravished entire cities. In such a society, machines, technology and industrial processes performed seemingly miraculous tasks. Thus I think therefore I am a technological intelligence was the true path towards intellectual enlightenment.
Today, the reverse is true. What is it that separates us, we wonder increasingly, from the machines that compute at many speeds faster than out brains? In such a world as the one today, the emphasis is not on performing a task functionally, or skillfully as a process, but rather, on the intuitive and emotional interpretation that we as spiritual, meta-cognitive beings, have the superior ability to do. For it is quite simply, logically impossible for us to make machines "feel" the way this term is here being applied - for if we were able to do that, we would understand inherently our own mechanism of creation, which would cease to make us humans any more and would rather make us some sort of human deity (this after all, is exactly what self-mastery and enlightenment is all about).
Thus, I feel therefore I am not describes much better the next evolutionary stage of "being" to which we are headed.
So what is the Millennial mind then? What is the purpose of it and where will it lead us? Such questions are the foundational cornerstone of our future, but in fact, none of them are really that much about the Millennial as an individual insomuch as they are about the effect that those living and working within the era of the Millennial generation's increasing influence on society.
For the world right now is going one of two ways: either the acceleration of innovation and productivity that characterized the previous century are about to come to a grinding halt or everything is going to move at such an accelerated rate of progress that maybe only 20 percent or so of the moral values, scientific facts and artistic trends of today will survive.
The Millennial mind is an expanding mind, and this will naturally incline the world towards the second scenario, but even expansion can't get there on its own: for that to happen, the conditions have to be just right to warrant expansion. Otherwise, our state is a contracting one or simply an oscillating one.
Millennial attitudes towards things might seem wildly different at times, but unless these ideas are accepted and integrated into the legal, political educational and economic fabric of our society rapidly, the very worst type of world is one that likely lies in the future. This world is best described as one where the majority of people are completely cut off from access to knowledge but believe themselves to possess it in abundance.
The risk of the transition we are undergoing now as a species resulting in the latter type of social order is much higher than we assume. Some examples are the abuse of knowledge almost everywhere you look today, from advertising and PR campaigns. It exists when we sentence someone to a punishing jail sentence for a crime that they were not fully cognizant of committing. It exists in our desire and propensity for winning.
There is a unique opportunity in the education of our young to reverse the possibility of negative attachment to knowledge. This opportunity lies in the fact that in the present day we live within a networked society - as opposed to one bound up from city to city linearly like a train track - while the present-day networks that we occupy are unusually open.
They will not always be this way, certainly: historically open gaps close and just as surely the network will become harder to gain access to and the intelligence required to do so manifold complex.
The solution to all this is quite simply both as easy and as impossible as it portends to be: it is to impress upon those with minds that are learning still the power of one's soul, or spirit, or metaphysical nature before impressing on them the power of their brains.
The adults of tomorrow will be many times superior to how those like myself are now at her same age, but similarly, they will require real values weighted in hard experience when it comes making decisions of enormous import for all of us. What if, reading this, you are one of the protagonists - still with your entire future ahead of you, graduating high school now (or near enough ago that many of your friends from school are still the same ones now)?
Then take it from someone who's about twice your lifetime in age (which is to say, someone just young enough to still get it, and just old enough to have lived enough of it to know):
First of all, do yourself the best favor of all, and make sure you understand what it really is to feel about something or someone before you allow yourself the luxury of contemplating abstractly.
Then, equally as importantly, experience the pain of how it is to care for someone andlose them before you turn your attention to figuring out whatever is the cure. Sometimes, this may feel like letting someone go without putting up a fight or like you are giving up an opportunity to succeed. But the person who does not want you is not yours to belong with, just as the opportunity you are not born for will only come to sentence your career to certain death later.
Ultimately, you must consider everything before you set out to create anything - this is true whether it be a relationship, a career or a work of art or science. Every creation, remember, has an unknown impact of some sort that you must feel the consequences of before bringing it into being.
This is the hardest path of all to take, and the one that will seem at many times pointless and irrational.
But ultimately, if you follow this path, yours will become the first generation to remove the mindless reality of the ideology we live are confined to now - the one founded on the absurd notion that justice can be subjectively interpreted and that one person has a higher market value than the next because an algorithm says so. With right-mindedness enabling fabulous - miraculous even - innovations to aid you in performing the heavy processing, you can escape this zero sum outcome of win or lose, and live in a world where death is not a blind abyss but a comfortable, well-lived cooperation."
This post, it seems, inspired a renown journalist and cultural critic for the Italian national daily Il Figlio to pick up a copy of The Millennial Reincarnations, the book to which the post referred, and pen an article of his own highlighting the philosophical relevance of the book, in hindsight of having read the post at Writing Bell.
Here is Mattia Feraresi's article as it appeared in September last year in Il Figlio on the front page:
"Daniel Mark Harrison is an ambitious technology evangelist who has written a book (itself ambitious) that aims to upgrade the Cartesian "Cogito Ergo Sum" for something more applicable to the the Millennial era. The Millennial Reincarnations is a collage of stories set between 1990 and 2014, where the theme is not so much ideological as it is governed by the actions of the Millennial generation, in which the mentality of the generation is expressed at its highest level, which is to say, how it affects our entire society.
The final stage of enlightenment that will be conceived by this influential generation is, I Feel Therefore I am Not, Harrison argues.
Harrison's reasoning is this: thinking skills, a capacity for abstraction and basic computation, on which Descartes founded everything he wrote, is now a questionable skill due to the fact technologically it is easily reproduced.
There are machines that can "think" in a manner analogous to the Cartesian mode of thinking and to Descartes' notions of higher thinking, and in fact they do so more efficiently than any human.
So the problem has moved on from thinking being expressed as something of a mere Turing Test, lavishly conveyed in the movie "Ex Machina": if it is not the ability to think that is important though, what distinguishes man from machine? The answer is our ability to feel: and specifically, to feel sensations that can not be captured in an algorithm.
The sentient machine, however, is no longer an image from an old science fiction book. In Silicon Valley, there are legions of engineers sure it is only a matter of time before one is created, and even if they do not act like man or conceive of ideas in the way man does, life and the universe of feelings is no longer the great moat that separates man and a surrogate technology from his enlightened self.
I Feel Therefore I Am Not is then the paradoxical outcome of the doubt that even the sentiment captures the essential characteristics of the human, so that if the process of feeling proves replicable artificially then we would "directly understand our own creative mechanism, which would cease to qualify us as human, making some form of human divinity out of us instead (this, after all, is what we aspired the Enlightenment)," writes Harrison.
The interesting thing here about The Millennial Reincarnations is that it does not just line up the theoretical or moral dilemmas of man struggling with the prospect of a future post-human or trans-human self (which is not that new in and of itself), but the author instead explores the influence of this concept today, on how Millennials conceive of their work, the economy, their social bonds, their observance of the law, their sexual interactions, their accumulation of knowledge, as well as the criteria they use to make critical decisions about the kind of life they want and the aspirations they seek to cultivate.
Harrison carries out an investigation here into the possibility that there exists for this new Millennial generation a metaphysical dimension whereby the Cartesian existential paradox is ultimately overcome, with thinking as the more synthetic of senses and feeling being something of an essentially human quality. These are certainly not matters to be entrusted to an algorithm."
This has to be one of the most interesting, and I will dare to say, profound public discussions on Descartes that has been seen in years. Essentially, it's an open debate about the relevance of the Cartesian philosophy in the digital age, and about how maybe it ought to be refined after 400 years of being the absolute cornerstone foundation of academia and thinking in general.
Amazing stuff.
One of the best examples I can give of this arose as a result of a post I wrote on fellow Goodreads author Summer Lane's website Writing Bell last year on June 8. Here's the post:
"Perhaps because I am a writer, one of the subjects I spend a disproportionate time thinking about is thinking.
In a very real sense, the juggernaut of Descartes' central philosophy I think therefore I am is beginning to change.
Essentially, we are transiting from a world where thinking was the dominant article to one where the idea comes first. This has been a process that has been in germination now for at least a hundred years: the idea is now worth more than the thinking that dreams it up.
This was contrary to what Descartes thought, who maintained that the idea was just a "mode" - a kind of function that happened as a result of one's capacity to think. He was blunt about this, too: in one letter he wrote to Guillaume Gibieuf, a fellow thinker, Descartes maintained that "I am certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me."
There is good reason for this shift, and it has to do with the level of artificial intelligence that humankind has reached the threshold of developing. In Descartes' time, society was regularly famished by random hunger strikes; bridges randomly collapsed due to improper engineering; plagues ravished entire cities. In such a society, machines, technology and industrial processes performed seemingly miraculous tasks. Thus I think therefore I am a technological intelligence was the true path towards intellectual enlightenment.
Today, the reverse is true. What is it that separates us, we wonder increasingly, from the machines that compute at many speeds faster than out brains? In such a world as the one today, the emphasis is not on performing a task functionally, or skillfully as a process, but rather, on the intuitive and emotional interpretation that we as spiritual, meta-cognitive beings, have the superior ability to do. For it is quite simply, logically impossible for us to make machines "feel" the way this term is here being applied - for if we were able to do that, we would understand inherently our own mechanism of creation, which would cease to make us humans any more and would rather make us some sort of human deity (this after all, is exactly what self-mastery and enlightenment is all about).
Thus, I feel therefore I am not describes much better the next evolutionary stage of "being" to which we are headed.
So what is the Millennial mind then? What is the purpose of it and where will it lead us? Such questions are the foundational cornerstone of our future, but in fact, none of them are really that much about the Millennial as an individual insomuch as they are about the effect that those living and working within the era of the Millennial generation's increasing influence on society.
For the world right now is going one of two ways: either the acceleration of innovation and productivity that characterized the previous century are about to come to a grinding halt or everything is going to move at such an accelerated rate of progress that maybe only 20 percent or so of the moral values, scientific facts and artistic trends of today will survive.
The Millennial mind is an expanding mind, and this will naturally incline the world towards the second scenario, but even expansion can't get there on its own: for that to happen, the conditions have to be just right to warrant expansion. Otherwise, our state is a contracting one or simply an oscillating one.
Millennial attitudes towards things might seem wildly different at times, but unless these ideas are accepted and integrated into the legal, political educational and economic fabric of our society rapidly, the very worst type of world is one that likely lies in the future. This world is best described as one where the majority of people are completely cut off from access to knowledge but believe themselves to possess it in abundance.
The risk of the transition we are undergoing now as a species resulting in the latter type of social order is much higher than we assume. Some examples are the abuse of knowledge almost everywhere you look today, from advertising and PR campaigns. It exists when we sentence someone to a punishing jail sentence for a crime that they were not fully cognizant of committing. It exists in our desire and propensity for winning.
There is a unique opportunity in the education of our young to reverse the possibility of negative attachment to knowledge. This opportunity lies in the fact that in the present day we live within a networked society - as opposed to one bound up from city to city linearly like a train track - while the present-day networks that we occupy are unusually open.
They will not always be this way, certainly: historically open gaps close and just as surely the network will become harder to gain access to and the intelligence required to do so manifold complex.
The solution to all this is quite simply both as easy and as impossible as it portends to be: it is to impress upon those with minds that are learning still the power of one's soul, or spirit, or metaphysical nature before impressing on them the power of their brains.
The adults of tomorrow will be many times superior to how those like myself are now at her same age, but similarly, they will require real values weighted in hard experience when it comes making decisions of enormous import for all of us. What if, reading this, you are one of the protagonists - still with your entire future ahead of you, graduating high school now (or near enough ago that many of your friends from school are still the same ones now)?
Then take it from someone who's about twice your lifetime in age (which is to say, someone just young enough to still get it, and just old enough to have lived enough of it to know):
First of all, do yourself the best favor of all, and make sure you understand what it really is to feel about something or someone before you allow yourself the luxury of contemplating abstractly.
Then, equally as importantly, experience the pain of how it is to care for someone andlose them before you turn your attention to figuring out whatever is the cure. Sometimes, this may feel like letting someone go without putting up a fight or like you are giving up an opportunity to succeed. But the person who does not want you is not yours to belong with, just as the opportunity you are not born for will only come to sentence your career to certain death later.
Ultimately, you must consider everything before you set out to create anything - this is true whether it be a relationship, a career or a work of art or science. Every creation, remember, has an unknown impact of some sort that you must feel the consequences of before bringing it into being.
This is the hardest path of all to take, and the one that will seem at many times pointless and irrational.
But ultimately, if you follow this path, yours will become the first generation to remove the mindless reality of the ideology we live are confined to now - the one founded on the absurd notion that justice can be subjectively interpreted and that one person has a higher market value than the next because an algorithm says so. With right-mindedness enabling fabulous - miraculous even - innovations to aid you in performing the heavy processing, you can escape this zero sum outcome of win or lose, and live in a world where death is not a blind abyss but a comfortable, well-lived cooperation."
This post, it seems, inspired a renown journalist and cultural critic for the Italian national daily Il Figlio to pick up a copy of The Millennial Reincarnations, the book to which the post referred, and pen an article of his own highlighting the philosophical relevance of the book, in hindsight of having read the post at Writing Bell.
Here is Mattia Feraresi's article as it appeared in September last year in Il Figlio on the front page:
"Daniel Mark Harrison is an ambitious technology evangelist who has written a book (itself ambitious) that aims to upgrade the Cartesian "Cogito Ergo Sum" for something more applicable to the the Millennial era. The Millennial Reincarnations is a collage of stories set between 1990 and 2014, where the theme is not so much ideological as it is governed by the actions of the Millennial generation, in which the mentality of the generation is expressed at its highest level, which is to say, how it affects our entire society.
The final stage of enlightenment that will be conceived by this influential generation is, I Feel Therefore I am Not, Harrison argues.
Harrison's reasoning is this: thinking skills, a capacity for abstraction and basic computation, on which Descartes founded everything he wrote, is now a questionable skill due to the fact technologically it is easily reproduced.
There are machines that can "think" in a manner analogous to the Cartesian mode of thinking and to Descartes' notions of higher thinking, and in fact they do so more efficiently than any human.
So the problem has moved on from thinking being expressed as something of a mere Turing Test, lavishly conveyed in the movie "Ex Machina": if it is not the ability to think that is important though, what distinguishes man from machine? The answer is our ability to feel: and specifically, to feel sensations that can not be captured in an algorithm.
The sentient machine, however, is no longer an image from an old science fiction book. In Silicon Valley, there are legions of engineers sure it is only a matter of time before one is created, and even if they do not act like man or conceive of ideas in the way man does, life and the universe of feelings is no longer the great moat that separates man and a surrogate technology from his enlightened self.
I Feel Therefore I Am Not is then the paradoxical outcome of the doubt that even the sentiment captures the essential characteristics of the human, so that if the process of feeling proves replicable artificially then we would "directly understand our own creative mechanism, which would cease to qualify us as human, making some form of human divinity out of us instead (this, after all, is what we aspired the Enlightenment)," writes Harrison.
The interesting thing here about The Millennial Reincarnations is that it does not just line up the theoretical or moral dilemmas of man struggling with the prospect of a future post-human or trans-human self (which is not that new in and of itself), but the author instead explores the influence of this concept today, on how Millennials conceive of their work, the economy, their social bonds, their observance of the law, their sexual interactions, their accumulation of knowledge, as well as the criteria they use to make critical decisions about the kind of life they want and the aspirations they seek to cultivate.
Harrison carries out an investigation here into the possibility that there exists for this new Millennial generation a metaphysical dimension whereby the Cartesian existential paradox is ultimately overcome, with thinking as the more synthetic of senses and feeling being something of an essentially human quality. These are certainly not matters to be entrusted to an algorithm."
This has to be one of the most interesting, and I will dare to say, profound public discussions on Descartes that has been seen in years. Essentially, it's an open debate about the relevance of the Cartesian philosophy in the digital age, and about how maybe it ought to be refined after 400 years of being the absolute cornerstone foundation of academia and thinking in general.
Amazing stuff.
Millennial Philosophy
A Goodreads blog from the entrepreneur and the author of the international Amazon #1 bestseller "The Millennial Reincarnations" and the upcoming book "The Minority Collective" Daniel Mark Harrison.
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