Philosophy Now – Issue 122 https://philosophynow.org/issues/122/Socrates_Memory_and_The_Internet Socrates, Memory & The Internet Matt Bluemink uses a Socratic argument to assess the influence of the net on our brains and our minds. “This invention, O king [writing],” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.” Plato, Phaedrus It’s funny, isn’t it, how a text written over two thousand years ago can be so relevant to the problems we face in modern society? In this particular quote from Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates is using a supposed dialogue between the Egyptian god Theuth (or Thoth), the inventor of writing, and Thamus, the king of Egypt, to explain to Phaedrus the dangers of writing, and the worrying effects Socrates thinks it has on human wisdom. Theuth believes that through his creation of letters he has found a way to preserve the memories of the Egyptians, and so he thinks that this will provide the Egyptian people with a wisdom that extends beyond their natural capacities. However, Thamus argues that Theuth’s new invention – his revolutionary new technology – will not help the Egyptians to become wise at all. Instead of granting them new powers of memorisation, they will delegate their memory to an external system, and so will lose their natural capacity for internal memory, which is the foundation-stone of knowledge. Their memories, and thus their wisdom, will degrade, as knowledge becomes ever increasingly stored in external symbols. Let’s fast forward 2,400 years, to the present day. Let’s imagine Theuth’s invention is not letters, but the internet. It’s quite startling how well the opening quote still applies. According to Socrates’ argument, the internet would be the single biggest means of collectivised memory loss in human history. The internet’s capacity to store memories is limitless, and although books have been shown to improve memory capacity, the tendency we have to rely on modern technology, in particular the internet, as a vast external memory bank, is leading us increasingly towards a loss of memory. In recent years modern philosophers in both the Analytic and Continental traditions, such as Andy Clark, David Chalmers, Bernard Stiegler, and Catherine Malabou, have been aware of this, and have been keen to look at the effects of memory externalisation on our minds and culture. Chalmers for instance notes in the Foreword to Clark’s Supersizing The Mind (2008) an idea that is apparent throughout Clark’s works – that the externalisation of memory through the use of objects can have a direct impact on how memory, and so minds, can be altered by interactions with the ‘external scaffolding’ around them: “A month ago, I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing phone numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with.” Similarly Stiegler writes in his For a New Critique of Political Economy (2009) that technology “causes our memories to pass into machines, in such a way that, for example, we no longer know the telephone numbers of those close to us.” The smartphone is a perfect modern illustration of how external objects can become part of our working memory processes. Attention & Memory