About Human Nature & Communications Technology: a summary reflection
Published on 4.29.24 at garyborjesson.substack.com
Each of these weekly notes stands alone. That said, over the last ten notes I have been cobbling together a framework for thinking about the significance of communications technology in our lives and, specifically, in helping relationships. My overarching question has been, How does the medium through which we connect affect our alliances? In this note I tell a useful and likely story about human nature that also summarizes the gist of the series so far. This prepares us to consider telehealth generally, and online therapy platforms like Better Help in particular.
Whether we know it or not, behind our opinions about telehealth and social media are assumptions about human nature. If these remain unconscious, they affect our judgment without our knowing it. For example, if we believe psychotherapy is as effective via Zoom as it is in person, then we are assuming that physical proximity and our senses of touch, taste, and smell (and the brain centers associated with these) aren’t needed for therapy. Last week’s note, From the Top Down: starting with our heads, exemplifies the kind of work that can be done via teletherapy. In contrast, the note before that, From the Bottom Up: beginning with the body exemplified therapeutic work that depends on the therapist and patient being together.
This pairing of bottom-up and top-down reflects a self-evident principle of human nature: Human beings exist, each of us, for as long as we live, as a mind-body unity. However differently cultures and peoples may name this phenomenon, humans have awareness of an interior psychic life and an embodied life simultaneously.
Philosophically and scientifically, one can also express the principle of mind-body unity by saying that living things are complex—they exist as emergent wholes greater than the sum of their parts. (For a deeper dive on the science, check out the Santa Fe Institute.) Another philosophical way of putting this is that beings are ontologically heterogeneous. This means there’s no reducing form to matter, or matter to form; no reducing the field to the particle or the particle to the field; no reducing the mind to the body or the body to the mind.
The practical consequence of accepting that we exist as irreducible mind-body unities is that to flourish—to live our best lives—we need to develop and care for our minds and bodies. Again, this seems to be self-evident, but apparently it’s not, at least not if we look at how many of us live. The upshot is that we won’t resolve most mental problems by cognitive therapies or talk therapy alone, anymore than we will resolve them by physical interventions alone, whether by drugs or TCS, etc. We should be skeptical of claims that a purely mental or purely physical approach will be sufficient to cure what ails us.
I started this series by emphasizing the body because a great power of technology has been to liberate us from the constraints of the body. We can be halfway across the world from each other and meet by FaceTime. We can be separated by space and time and still connect and converse. (By separate in time, I mean asynchronous conversations: You texted me last night, and I replied this morning.)
The first note of the series, How Thick Is Your Presence?, used thickness as a measure of how much of us is present in the connection. Sharing a meal or a bed is on the thick end of the spectrum, while texting is on the thin end. I followed this with a note, How to Stop Making Sense, that spells out how technology thins the connection by reducing access to what’s gained through our senses and the parts of the brain-body that process sensation.
The next three notes in the series made these ideas concrete. In Coming to Our Senses, Doggy Style, I pointed out that dogs don’t do virtual relationships, and what this tells us, about them and us. In A (True) Dog Story I suggested dogs don’t lie (mostly) for much the same reason they don’t do social media. As far as we can tell, dogs lack our capacity to separate their conscious experience from its expression. Unlike us, they can’t experience an interior truth—I don’t like this person—while representing the opposite outwardly through speech and action—“Oh yes, I’d love to come over for dinner.” Humans lie all the time, which raises the thorny question of the note that followed, on whether lies are ever therapeutic. (They can be, but it depends.)
The unconscious has been lurking (that’s the kind of thing I imagine the unconscious doing!) throughout these notes on how the medium of connection affects the quality of our connections. As it would, since what’s unconscious in us has an outsize effect on how we relate to others. Communications technology that diminishes our access to the body thins the connection between us, thereby making us less conscious of the other, and by extension leaving more unconscious material unaddressed. The next three notes, On Making the Unconscious Conscious, What is Psychodynamic Therapy? and About Flight Distance, spoke to the significance of the unconscious as it bears on relationships.
In closing, notice this curiosity about human nature, which follows from having an inside and outside, a mind and a body. We flourish by attending to and integrating these sides of our nature, and often suffer from neglect of one or both. Our technology allows us to separate them—what is texting but disembodied mind?—but this separation is only possible because we’re capable by nature of separating them ourselves. For example, we can think one thing, and use bodily mouth noises to say another. Similarly, we can use our minds to separate from our animality and dwell (temporarily) in the realm of thought and speech alone. For better and worse. At best, say Plato and Aristotle, this is a mark of our divine nature. At worst, says the psychoanalyst, it sounds like a massive split.