Mazviita Chirimuuta

Like, we live in imaginative worlds and...

It's not so much the social media is always in our face.

Well, maybe it is people looking at the screens, but our way of thinking through our own life history and how we project and everything else.

There's a whole world that we're also constructing around that.

So I think we're co-creating this digital world and it doesn't work unless we're imaginatively and emotionally invested in this.

So my view goes back to this Kantian idea, which also goes back to this idea of human finitude, that there's something wrong with thinking that what you are as a knower is the kind of being that can float free of your environment and just regard it from above and take in all the information that's there as it is by itself without your impact on the world.

And my point is that we're not those kinds of beings.

We only acquire knowledge through this arduous process of interaction, which means that we cannot claim to have that God-Sci neutral view on things, but that it would be, it's a mistake about knowledge and about ourselves as knowers to think that that is an aspiration that makes sense for us.

Yeah.

So I think that's true in terms of what we pay attention to.

I mean, people that look at their phones instead of looking out the window when they're on a train, not looking at the people around them.

So there's this where our attention goes can be wherever the Internet wants to place us.

But the phone is still like a concrete physical device with little light emitting diodes that, you know, produce like photons in our retinas, right?

So I think it's about, again, I go back to saying it's about the imaginary around that, that in our minds, right?

this isn't just a device that just is showing images right now, but it's this portal to this other place where we can be disconnected or dissociated from where we are right now.

But I think that need to live in an imaginary to be disconnected is probably always there and manifests in different ways in human culture, through fantasy, mythology, all kinds of things.

Yeah.

I mean, this is something that I think becomes a question of ethics and phenomenology, the part of philosophy that really studies experience and what we draw from it in its own sake.

There's always an opportunity cost.

People, if you're looking at friends absorbed in one thing, then you're not absorbed in other things.