From: jimruttshow8596
Psychotechnologies play a crucial role in shaping human cognition, offering tools that enhance and transform how individuals perceive, interact with, and make sense of the world [01:16:11]. They function as external, socially generated means of organizing and communicating information processing, akin to physical tools that augment physiological capabilities [01:16:52].
Defining Psychotechnology
A psychotechnology is analogous to a physical tool, but instead of fitting the body to enhance physical functions, it is designed to fit cognition [01:16:21]. It standardizes information processing in a way that is easily internalizable, widely disseminable, and capable of enhancing cognition across multiple domains [01:17:00]. A non-controversial example is literacy, which massively empowers human cognition [01:17:20].
Early Psychotechnologies and Cognitive Shifts
Shamanism
Shamanism, emerging during the Upper Paleolithic transition (around 65,000 years ago), is considered a set of psychotechnologies [01:11:40] [01:42:04]. These practices, such as rituals involving difficult journeys into caves, darkness, and flickering light from lamps, aimed to induce altered states of consciousness [01:12:35] [01:13:20]. This deliberate alteration of consciousness allowed for the connection of cognitive areas not typically linked, leading to enhanced cognitive flexibility and the emergence of art, music, and possibly calendars [01:13:35] [01:14:14].
Shamanism’s core function was to socially transmit practices for altering attention and salience landscapes, impacting various problem domains for the individual [01:17:32]. Modern mindfulness practices are analogous to this [01:17:44].
Language and Recursive Thinking
The development of fully symbolic and recursive language around 65,000 years ago is also considered a fundamental psychotechnology [01:11:40]. Language profoundly empowers cognition by permeating and rendering transparent many of its processes [01:02:02].
The Axial Age Revolution
Following the Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BCE, a “dark age” ensued for approximately 400 years, characterized by a fundamental societal collapse and the disappearance of cities and trade networks [00:50:55] [00:51:10]. This collapse created empty niches, leading to significant social experimentation and the emergence of new psychotechnologies that catalyzed the Axial Age [00:58:28] [00:59:55].
Key psychotechnologies of the Axial Age include:
- Alphabetic literacy [00:53:46] [00:58:14]
- Numeracy and coinage [00:53:50] [00:58:02]
- Rhetoric (Sophists) [01:37:31]
These innovations altered cognition by permeating the psyche in unforeseen ways, radically changing people’s self-awareness and the identities they could assume [00:53:57].
Second Order Thinking
The internalization of the cognitive power provided by literacy and numeracy led to “second order thinking” [00:54:15]. This refers to a more critically aware metacognition, capable of noting pervasive errors and patterns of self-deception [00:54:51]. It brought about the realization of the mind’s meaning-making capacity as a double-edged sword: a source of self-deception but also of self-transcendence and improved relationships with the world [00:55:07].
This period saw the promotion of new identities, roles, and perspectives on the world [00:55:29]. It gave rise to the “two-worlds mythology,” where an illusionary, suffering world contrasted with a “real,” better world achievable through enlightenment and self-correction [00:55:36]. This philosophical shift was a foundation for many of the world’s major religions and the invention of philosophy in the Western sense [00:56:50].
Psychotechnologies and Cognitive Flexibility
Psychotechnologies enhance cognitive flexibility, enabling “frame breaking” and “frame making” – crucial for insight [01:40:05].
Attention and Salience Landscapes
Attention, defined as a prioritization function, creates a “salience landscape” that foregrounds or backgrounds information, opening up “affordances” for action [01:14:32] [01:14:40]. Psychotechnologies like shamanism (and later mindfulness) directly manipulate this landscape, enhancing insight by disrupting inappropriate frames and constructing new ones [01:45:07].
The Nine-Dot Problem
The nine-dot problem illustrates how implicit mental framing, influenced by past experiences (like connect-the-dots games), can limit problem-solving [00:39:09] [00:39:26]. Solving it requires breaking the implicit “box” frame and making “non-dot turns,” which changes what is considered salient and relevant [00:39:35]. However, simply telling someone to “think outside the box” (propositional information) is ineffective; it requires directing how to use attention to alter framing, which is a form of procedural and perspectival transformation [00:40:15] [00:40:50].
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a psychotechnology that involves directing attention to break up inappropriate frames and create new ones [00:45:07]. It allows one to “step back and look at your mind” (meditation) rather than just “looking through it” (contemplation), becoming aware of mental framing and enabling intervention [00:46:18] [00:47:04]. This shifting of attention, including “zooming out” (breaking things into features) and “zooming in” (creating gestalts), enhances insight and cognitive flexibility [00:49:06] [00:49:26].
Psychotechnologies and Societal Impact
The rise of new psychotechnologies has continuously impacted societal values and behaviors and social and economic systems [01:00:57].
Self-Deception and Social Media
While psychotechnologies can enhance cognition, they also have the potential to enable self-deception. The “bullshitting” analyzed by Harry Frankfurt, which Socrates also criticized in the Sophists, involves prioritizing salience and persuasive presentation over truth [01:38:16] [01:39:20]. This can lead individuals to “bullshit themselves” by selectively directing attention to make certain (often false) ideas salient, disconnecting attention from a concern for truth [01:43:16] [01:43:52].
Modern social media platforms are identified as “gasoline on the fire” for such self-deception, exacerbating the availability bias [01:44:09] [01:46:15]. They are designed to grab and hold attention through unrealistic, pseudo-perfect images, leading to significant psychological strain and issues like anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia, particularly among young women [01:45:20] [01:46:30]. This highlights how psychotechnologies, when designed to exploit cognitive biases, can profoundly and negatively impact individual and collective well-being.
Cultivating Wisdom
Socrates’s emphasis on “know thyself” is not about autobiography but about understanding the “machinery of the self” and directing it towards a “wisening of oneself” [01:33:52] [01:35:06]. This involves cultivating virtues (powers combining skills, states of mind, and character traits) and the meta-virtue of wisdom, which seeks transformative truths that are both disclosed by and afford further transformation [01:36:42] [01:39:14].
The challenge of the meaning crisis, in part, lies in preserving the wisdom-cultivating capacity of Axial Age psychotechnologies while rejecting the “two worlds mythology” that scientific worldviews have largely refuted [01:03:36]. Understanding the true functionality of these “enacted metaphors” in a scientific framework is crucial for using them wisely and ethically [01:08:31] [01:08:52].