Ch 3 C - Collateral and Conflating

Social media platforms provide a pervasive context for advocates and builders to promote their optimism and hope. The lack of accountability in the absence of regulatory guidelines allows for this technological context to be ambiguous in its purpose, influence and results in human life. Therefore, social media has become a prevailing tool used by human collectives and persons to serve their own goals, regardless of how self-oriented and centered their goals. Even with good intentions, this serving process is consequential for humanity, because in one way or another it inflicts collateral harm and damages on surrounding contexts—as deepfakes were noted earlier.

A growing collateral consequence of social media is observed in adolescents’ interactions with social media. The issues revolve around their brain development and mental health. Trends have indicated a large increase in youth citing feelings of loneliness, isolation and lack of purpose. The collateral impact is that young heavy social media users are twice as likely to be depressed—a consuming condition resistant to any optimism and hope for a better future, which becomes readily redacted by social media. Their human condition evolves subtly yet unmistakably in what technology advocates for building humanity.

Perceiving collateral consequences, whether local, regional or global, often eludes detection by many human eyes. Even when detected, the bias of human lenses readily ignores these consequences or simply accepts them as part of the cost for building. Consider, for example, how many collectives and persons ignore or accept the collateral damage of the current war in Gaza? What compounds human perception is when these consequences have the appearance of being good or a moral imperative. This is the subtle bias evolving when the underlying human condition is conflated with beliefs and practices that are upheld as important for human life. Consider further the contradiction this creates that evade human eyes, perhaps your own eyes.

The lesson before us teaches how conflating interacts with the collateral to create inflection points. This is critical to learn, because those inflection points serve to affirm and justify the means of the human condition that are used to achieve the end advocated to build for human life.

The fact that war and similar conflicts have consequences is a given. To the extent that these consequences are fact-checked will make evident how far and deep the collateral consequences have gone. What is also painfully revealed is the purpose behind all this, which may or may not be agreeable depending on who or what advocates this purpose. Less obvious are the collateral consequences that evolve from what would be considered normal for situations and circumstances in human life.

Think about the purpose of human progress that has evolved since the invention of the wheel. The lesson plan for this purpose centers on technology. The purpose of technology has been to help us be more productive in our work by facilitating it and helping become experts about it. In this purpose, advances in technology have made life more convenient and efficient. The by-product of this progress has evolved with either an intended or unintended purpose:

Technology has replaced workers on the job—for example, robotic substitutes for assembly line workers—as well as rendered the remaining workers less creative. Technological development, notably with AI, has resulted in less human thinking—now considered unnecessary or inadequate compared to AI. Beside replacing jobs, creativity, and thinking, the sum of technology simply replaces humans in their qualitative nature.

The purpose of technology has evolved and keeps evolving with these collateral consequences. With the development of AI still an open question, how far these collateral consequences will evolve is also unknown. This has been an arguable issue peppered with an optimistic-pessimistic dynamic, which we still need to learn from to qualify any advocacy and building on a technological basis. What rarely enters into this lesson is a deeper discussion of what underlies the purpose resulting in collateral consequences; this requires a sensitivity and awareness that few possess in a tech culture, which speaks to its limits and constraints.

The problem is not technology in and of itself. Behind technology are the human creators, producers and users of technology, whose underlying nature is programmed into technology by and with their human condition. As useful and well-intended as technology could be, it inevitably bears the image and shaping of its human progenitors. Their human condition is inescapable, even when the purpose of technology is misinformed and thus used unintentionally to produce collateral consequences. Therefore, for example, what generates AI will always be under the negative presence of the human condition and its reductionist nature, whereby technology labors in reductionism’s counter-relational purpose. This ubiquitous condition of the modern cyberworld teaches those with open eyes about the need for qualitative sensitivity and relational awareness in order to address this human condition. Even AI with sentience is unable to generate this sensitivity and awareness to make a difference about collateral consequences evolving from its purpose.

Eyes vulnerably open then bring to light that the most consequential collateral impact on human life encompasses relationships. This consuming consequence has evolved through human history from political, economic and sociocultural activities, which have blocked relational connections and broken relationships even among those having close associations. Along with the loneliness many feel in the midst of all their contacts on social media, many hearts feel alone in churches and in their family. Yet, the distance experienced in relationships eludes the eyes of those lacking relational awareness. In addition, eyes without qualitative sensitivity remain in the dark about the defining presence of the human condition, whose determining counter-relational work evades humanity at all levels of human life. Simply stated, the quantity of associations has become the pretentious state for the quality of relationships.

The darkness of collateral’s purpose prevails as long as its consequences are not illuminated at the heart level. Getting to this depth, however, is no simple process, notably when human life operates shrouded from the outer in with the paradigm of anything less and any substitutes to mask the existing condition in an explicit or implicit masquerading process. In the darkness, human collectives and persons are initially misled by masks of pretension, then are duped with deception, which the human condition subtly propagates at their core, even by default. This compounds the problem and makes any resolution a pessimistic journey in the darkness.

How the nature of collateral outcomes is perceived is relative to the eye of the beholder. What that eye beholds is always subject to bias that distorts its existential condition. That bias is ongoingly subjected to conflating, which subtly renders collateral consequences in a favorable perception to misinform, mislead and effectively blind the eye of the beholder.

Have you experienced extreme weather conditions where you live? In 2023, the global community experienced the hottest year ever recorded. What’s your opinion of global warming? My wife and I live in Southern California, which has the strictest air pollution rules in the U.S.; yet, we suffer from pollution levels that have never complied with federal health standards for ozone—the darkening conditions of smog. Given the collateral harm and damage from existing environmental conditions, how arguable do you think climate change is?

For many, the environment has become an ethical or moral problem that affects all human collectives and persons, as well as the planet. Related collateral consequences are tethered to the globalization of the economy. Companies and businesses build positive images by conflating with these issues to appear eco-friendly and ethical. For this purpose, certificates are awarded by a collective known as B Corps (short for “benefit corporations”) to businesses that pay to be regularly evaluated on standards of environmental and social responsibility set by B Lab. Certified companies pledge to B Lab that they will become “forces for good” and “consider people and the planet alongside profit.” This process, however, has been arguable about how the standards are monitored; and a large number of celebrity-backed and luxury brands have embraced the cause to wear this badge of honor.[1]

Good intentions notwithstanding, this business policy conflates their business activity with perspectives of good and bad/evil, right and wrong, in order to validate their standing (or image) in the surrounding context. For what purpose? And who are the primary beneficiaries of this force for good and the consideration of what’s right?

The beginning of the human condition was enacted by conflating the knowledge of good and evil, under the assumption that their human eyes would be opened and become like God. The purpose of conflating evolving from this beginning has never changed; and it continues to be the means of deception that is subtly used to pursue one’s self-interests and concerns—even when it contradicts one’s well-being and reduces the welfare of others. This human narrative counters humanity at its core with collateral consequences that keep devolving from an intractable human condition, which could be wearing a badge of honor or even appear to be like God.

The lesson to learn is that conflating’s purpose is to generate a virtual reality, which distorts the truth by blurring the line between good and evil, right and wrong, in order to deceive the eye of the beholder with darkness to simulate light. This lesson continues to teach how the eye become captive by what it beholds.

At the onset of the human condition, persons were captivated by what they saw. What they beheld appeared good and thus a beneficial resource to make them better. When “good” and “better” come into focus for the eyes, who would refuse it? The issue, however, is that what their eyes perceived as good and better were in existential reality merely illusions. That is, what was advocated and built were illusions of light that held captive the eyes of these beholders, which in reality composed their human condition with darkness.

Consider what the eyes of eminent scientist Carl Sagan beheld: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” And he goes on: “The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.”[2]

The harm or damage of collateral consequences evade the eye of the beholder when the lens is distorted by illusions of light. Sagan spoke to some of these illusions. They result in a perceptual bias that is unable to distinguish the darkness from the light, or good from bad, right from wrong. This binary perception no longer functions in the eye of the beholder when the negative is conflated with the positive to neutralize the negative presence of the human condition as if it were not consequential to human life.

Learning the playbook of the human condition is a life-long education. Present life has a nexus to the past that leads to the future. The human condition playbook has a diversely conflated history with evolving chapters of collateral consequences that users are unaware of, ignore or accept as part of the path to the future. This human past, our human past, becomes disconnected with our present and future when unjustified assumptions are made about our roots. This includes widely presuming that our branches in life have the right roots to keep growing in the future. The conclusion reached presumptively justifies the use of the human condition’s playbook, which unavoidably recycles the nexus of its past with the future that rotates in the present.

Basic for the human condition is how it transposes humanity to define identity and determine human function based on an outer-in process. Scientists typically also are engaged in this process to guide their thinking. This condition then evolves without knowing and understanding the depth of humanity at its roots from inner out. The lesson from the human condition is that when something is not understood, human collectives and persons turn to their assumptions about it. This opens the door to a darkened life, which relegates the present to instability and renders the future in uncertainty. In this condition, what evolves causes confusion and deception to blur or even blind the perception of the qualitative-relational nature of humanity’s roots. What this eye beholds doesn’t go deeper, even if it acutely perceives conditions from outer in. This perception generalizes to what the eye beholds in surrounding contexts and condition, even in the universe. This has evolved to make ambiguous the most elemental condition for human life: light.

It would seem obvious that light is apparent when present. Yet, this is based on just the quantitative characteristics of light, which are assumed to have clear distinction from darkness. The problem with this perspective is learned from the underlying human condition’s conflated history. In the past, when the light has been embodied in its qualitative fullness, the existential reality was that the light was not recognized and understood. Even though the light clearly shined in the darkness, it eluded those in the darkness. How so?

First of all, the problem should not be confused with the function of the human brain. As long as the brain receives sensory connection from the eye that is not impaired, the brain’s sensory function will record the light. The deeper issue revolves on how the eye of the beholder interprets what it perceives. In this process, the brain essentially becomes rewired by the beholder’s perceptual-interpretive lens, the framework of which defines and determines how and what one sees.

Is Carl Sagan’s perceptual-interpretive framework apparent to you in the following: “What do we really want from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such thoughts into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe—which seems truly pointless—but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science.”

Right now as I’m writing this, we in Southern California are deluged by an atmospheric river that dropped double-digit rainfall in just two days for one of the worst storms ever experienced locally. The total amount of rain is the equivalent of half a full year’s normal rain total. Climatologists attribute this extreme weather condition in part to climate change. Certainly, everyone in Southern California perceives this storm, but equally certain is that not everyone interprets this extreme weather as a result of climate change. In other words, what the eye beholds about the weather is subject to interpretation by the defining perceptual-interpretive framework used to determine what’s seen—just as with the perception of light.

Interpretation is the overshadowing inflection point created by the interaction between conflating and the collateral. What the eye perceives is no longer adequate to define what the eye sees. Under a new normal for human contexts, the eye of the beholder is determined by one’s interpretation. On the one hand, as subjects with free will, humans are always interpreting, contrary to an object operating as a robot. On the other hand, human interpretation is not the basis for human life, though an interpretive consensus could produce a culture, a perceptual-interpretive culture. When this culture becomes the norm in a human collective, its interpretation is formalized as the perceptual-interpretive framework for that context. Consider now your specific interpretation of any issue. Can you identify a cultural source for your interpretation? Then, can you define a particular framework that your interpretation belongs to?

For example, in these divisive times of partisan politics, our views (interpretations) of related issues should bring to the forefront their cultural source and the framework where they belong. Shift over to social media. Would you say that social media has a distinct culture on how to interpret what’s seen on its platforms? Do you think there is a common framework for these interpretations? An interpretive culture and framework can be explicit or implicit, but nevertheless they readily create a system and structure for the eye of the beholder to be joined in a like-minded collective.

Another compelling global inflection point is experienced in the globalization of the economy. Its collateral consequences are widespread, yet persons, peoples, tribes and nations are directed not to interpret these consequences from their place of origin—which would certainly expose their inequity—but from an economic culture under the framework of the expansion of resources earmarked for the general population. This interpretation causes confusion and deception, because the globalization playbook (similar to the human condition playbook) blurs and even blinds the perception of the unequal results and inequitable consequences of this global economy. Overlooked, ignored or reinterpreted is the cost that the majority of the global population has incurred for the benefit of a minority to accumulate, which never shows up in the balance sheets of an economic culture.

The hermeneutic dynamics evolving from all this imposes colored glasses on the eye that darkens its perception of what’s beheld. Any interpretation by the eye results from the bias of the colored glasses tinted by a specific issue such as the above. Bias is the rule in human contexts and not the exception. Under its prevailing norm, bias is the ruling reality of what human collectives and persons perceive, for example, as good-bad, right-wrong. This prevailing condition is the perceptual-interpretive framework that keeps evolving in a diversely composed perceptual-interpretive culture. No one is immune from this culture, thus its influence shapes the framework of any and all unknowing and unsuspecting human collectives and persons.

Therefore, collateral consequences are amplified with a darkened view of everyday life. In this fog, critical thinking incurs major collateral, which also blocks the human heart from understanding the roots of the human condition underlying the issue or problem conflated by bias.

The rule of bias has been a major issue recently on college campuses. The war in Gaza has precipitated waves of protest biased by antisemitism and Islamophobia. This has created a hostile climate and made campuses a threatening context. Biases are conflated with free speech to justify infringing on others’ civil rights, no matter how collateral the consequences. So far, no significant solution has emerged to bring factions to cooperate in order to overrule the rule of bias. Appeasing such biases is not the solution, nor will the rule of law superseding the rule of bias be resolute. Yet, if any context operates with critical thinking, what context would more than higher education, so why is it absent?

The absence, or at least the suspension, of critical thinking on college campuses is a prime lesson on the collateral consequences of a darkened perspective. With this interpretive framework, even the darkness can be misinterpreted as the light. Such illusions are the source of misinformation evolving from convoluted thinking that pervade the eye of beholders, in order to define the so-called light and determine its function in human life such that contexts like college campuses become the platform for the human condition playbook—challenging educators to be reeducated by its lessons.

Once again, a darkened perspective blocks not only the knowledge of elementary critical thinking but also the essential function of the human heart from understanding the underlying roots of biases planted by the human condition. Given this existential reality, it should not be surprising that a definitive solution has yet to be found in higher education; and it will continue to elude the perception, evade the interpretations, and thus escape the grasp of these contexts until a hermeneutical critique suspends their bias to take them deeper into the nature of the human condition and learn its A,B,C &Ds.

That’s the recurring scenario to be expected from the human condition’s playbook; and this is the inevitable default condition of humanity in the absence of a transforming change.

[1] Reported by Jie Jenny Zou in “Inside the battle over BCorp certification, the business world’s do-good badge of honor”, the Los Angeles Times, 12/27/23, A1.

[2] Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994).