The Psych Student

Illustration by R. Jay Magill

Life’s hard knocks is currently keeping me from further studies, hence the crickets you may hear around this blog for the last while. It’s really quite infuriating. The above illustration is  is very representative of depression’s triggers, though. Six of the above depicted items feature into my life as of late, which has led me to put schooling and much else on hold while sorting things out and deciding how much a single life can actually hold.

(Via: PonderAbout.com)

So it’s been a while since I’ve last posted here. As my next module in my project to transform my BA into a BSc in Psychology continues now with Open University’s DXZ222, I’ll be doing a course entirely online.

While the blog has been a little all over the place beofre, reflecting the “exploring psychology” module I did last, I’ve started finding my area, and the Psych Student will be more focused on my fixation on human machine relations. Programs have their own psychology. Are we being destroyed simply molded by this fact?

Douglas Rushkoff new book, Program or Be Programmed asserts: “Computers and networks are more than mere tools: they are like living things, themselves. Unlike a rake, a pen, or even a jackhammer, a digital technology is programmed. This means it comes with instructions not just for its use, but also for itself. And as such technologies come to characterize the future of the way we live and work, the people programming them take on an increasingly important role in shaping our world and how it works. After that, it’s the digital technologies themselves that will be shaping our world, both with and without our explicit cooperation.”

This means we are no longer exclusively concerned with human psychology, but with the psychology of programs and what their design can tell us how they will impact our own interaction with the world. While we must continue to understand the human mind and use artificial constructs such as virtual intelligence to form models that help us better understand the human experience, we must know also study and understand machine intelligence for its own sake.

"A Plenitude of Paths" by FeatheredTar postd on Flickr with a Creative Commons use license.

According to biologist Anthony Cashmore’s theory on human behavior, there was no way I wasn’t going to write this blog post. Taking his work to its logical conclusion, it was environmentally and biologically predetermined that I was going to write this sentence and choose these words to do it. When I pause here and there to think about which word expression to use, I’m actually experiencing the illusion of free will. Really? Read the rest of this entry »