I prefer to define it as “The Digitalization of Reality,” wherein more and more human activities are being translated into bytes. Work, communication, media, entertainment, friends, dating, sexuality, culture, shopping, politics and causes are among the growing number of human needs that have gone digital.

While the Internet was something which earlier we mostly visited, now we are inhabiting the virtual worlds full-time and engineer them according to our mental projections. The Cartesian dream of a mind without a body has almost been fulfilled (even though in his old age Descartes, in Passions of the Soul, affirmed that “the soul is jointly united to all the parts of the body”).

This separation has a long history of Western thought starting from the Judeo-Christian separation between body and soul up to people like the transhumanist Hans Moravec, the artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, or the singularity guru Raymond Kurzweil who want to download the biological human mind to a safer mechanical medium in order to achieve nothing less than immortality.

Technology itself is less and less “embodied” and physical. Technology is going toward Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and various wireless ways of communicating and even wire-free charging for devices. We have made even hi-tech tools withdraw physically from each other.

Weizenbaum, more than 30 years ago in Computer Power and Human Reason, described a typical computer programmer thus:

Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice…Their food…coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer…Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.

Brenda Laurel, designer of human computer interaction, notices differences in gender:

We have a class of people we call nerds who are radically uncomfortable with their bodies and their sexuality…When men talk about virtual reality, they often use phrases like “out-of-body experience” and “leaving the body.” These guys are not talking about out-of-body experiences in the way that some Eastern mystic or Peruvian Indian would. They are talking about it in the sense that if you slap a screen over your eyes you won’t have to see air pollution…When women talk about VR they speak of taking the body with them into another world. The idea is to take these wonderful sense organs with us, not to leave our bodies humped over a keyboard while our brain zips off down some network (Susie Bright, Sexual Reality, San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1992).

What was an attitude confined to technicians and nerds became “mainstream,” where most people are in front of a computer, TV or mobile screen for most of their waking lives, distancing themselves from a felt connection with their bodies, living in a purely mental world. Alexander Lowen, in Joy, wrote that in the more than 50 years since he began studying the human condition, he has seen a general deterioration in the bodies of the people who come to him; the bodies are less energized, less integrated and less attractive than those of the patients he used to see earlier. He writes that the old-fashioned hysterical patient that Freud wrote about is almost never seen. While the hysterical person couldn’t handle his feelings, the schizoid individual nowadays – dissociated from his body and living predominantly in his mind – just hasn’t many.

If technology is conducive toward the disappearance of physical reality, there’s a second philosophy which seems allied to the same goal. Several mystical traditions and spiritual teachers of the past and present consider physical reality as a dream – maya – as something to overcome in order to expand our awareness and connect with our deeper soul and with the ultimate. Physical reality is then something to be abandoned while advancing on our path toward spiritual enlightenment.

Shri Ramakrishna, in L’Enseignement de Ramakrishna, said that when a man becomes crazy for God, he becomes unconscious even of his body. Taking Chaitanya Deva as an example, Ramakrishna said that he “many times fell on the ground. He didn’t have any more hunger, or thirst, or even become sleepy. He completely lost the consciousness of his body”.

In Ramakrishna’s description of God’s crazy state we can see some similarities with Weizenbaum’s programmers. Apparently. Mystics abandon the body/mind in order to reach what is beyond the mind, while our society has relegated the body to a marginal role in order to give the mind the superior and controlling role.

Technologically-oriented people and mystics have another common point in saying that the world is unreal, an illusionary state. The former involve neurophysiology and psychology, while mystics talk about their first-hand experience in having reached a state where a broader awareness comes to the forefront, not depending on our body/mind filters any more.

But while virtual reality disconnects us from our bodies to give priority to the mind (considered the ultimate attainment of human beings), the spiritual paths toward awareness need to know, feel and live in the body as a source and object of knowledge before going beyond mind and body. In the spiritual path the body is seen as a whole body/mind entity, observed by a broader awareness. In that journey, both body and mind might be lost for a while, to be retrieved later. David Cooper in The Grammar of Living wrote: “We have to lose our heads to enter our bodies. There is a time for minds, a time to leave our minds and a time to recover them.”

The body in the spiritual path is a fragile bridge toward the ultimate which has to be crossed with respect and care, sensing and feeling it without rushing to overcome it, otherwise we risk falling into the waters, losing our minds prematurely as well. Some religions discouraged or prohibited a close meeting with our bodies, particularly in the monotheistic traditions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Being far from the sinful body was supposed to bring us closer to the divine incorporeal entity. But mystics – even the ones who came from those traditions – could not escape experiencing the body in its fullness.

The body can’t be ignored in our will to expand our awareness. Almaas (the pen name of Hameed Ali) expressed the connection with the body in the spiritual search for the truth in these terms:

As we get more present in our bodies, in our bellies, we can get closer to our essence which is truth, which is what makes us know what is true, what is false, not from logical deduction, or from the unconscious. You just know. You are close to that subtle sense which is truth. (A.H. Almaas. Elements of the Real in Man (Diamond Heart Book One). Diamond Books. Berkeley. 1987)

Eckhart Tolle expressed it in similar terms:

The most powerful anchor for staying present is to inhabit the body. That means to have some of your attention in the inner energy field of the body – to sense, to feel the animating presence that gives life to the body, which ultimately is consciousness itself. The physical body is a temporary expression of that consciousness, but the essence of it is the consciousness itself. So to connect with the physical body, and even as you perceive the world and interact with the world, to have some attention in the inner energy field and to feel the aliveness that is there in every cell and every organ as a single feeling. You are then rooted in your body, which becomes the anchor for staying present and for staying out of the mental noise (from Lynn Marie Lumiere and John Lumiere-Wins, The Awakening West, Oakland: Clear Visions Publications, 2000).

Feeling our presence and connection with our bodies works as well as the needed grounding for keeping our minds healthy in a technology-saturated disembodied schizoid condition. “The person who does not act in reality and only acts in fantasy becomes himself unreal,” wrote Ronald Laing in 1959, based on the observations of his patients, in The Divided Self (London: Tavistock Publications, 1959), while Marshall McLuhan wrote that, “By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms”. Through our technological race toward the digitalization of reality, we risk abandoning our bodies and split our minds as well, without finding anything superior for our soul to join, as is conversely contemplated in the Eastern spiritual paths.

There’s an echo of a deeper truth in the desire of replacing reality with a virtual one: the truth that the world as we see it is not the whole story. But through virtual worlds we might bend the distorting lenses of the mind even more, creating a further layer of illusionary maya. Instead of liberating ourselves from the deceptive mind, we liberate the mind from the “restrictions” of the body, coming closer to fulfilling the Cartesian dream. But the mind without a felt connection with the body doesn’t have support from our embodied intelligence and becomes compulsive in chasing every small bit of information which appears in our already-scattered attention, transforming our mind in servomechanisms of technology. Is it not a case that meditation techniques reinforce our concentration ability, usually giving attention to a part of our body or to our sensations.

However, even without any virtual technological life, the unreal can’t be avoided. Lila, the divine game played by the universal consciousness, has been playing the hide-and-seek game much before the human mind created a new hi-tech version of the game. Many spiritual teachers say that we live in a dream state, looking at reality filtered by the veil of maya which gives the mind many layers of conditionings. Perhaps lila is having fun in hiding even deeper, adding another layer by encouraging the collective mind in building its own virtual representations of reality. Ultimately, lila will become tired of playing and will reveal the true nature of reality, maybe through apparently hiding even more.

“To consider Maya, a deeper Maya is needed,” said Swami Nityananda, while Nisargadatta Maharaj said “Let the dream unroll itself to its very end. You cannot help it. But you can look at the dream as a dream, refuse it the stamp of reality,” suggesting that one be attentive and aware of recognizing the nature of the false. Since the real timeless soul (the atman) can’t be simulated or manufactured, Osho said that, “By going deeper and deeper into the artificial, science helps religion, extending the limits of what can be manufactured and thereby defining what the Atman is not”. What will be left from the limits of the artifice can be no more than the real.

In the Buddhist tradition there’s the metaphor of our illusionary ego as a thorn we have in our skin, where the Buddhist teachings represent a second thorn, useful in extracting the first one. Then we can discard both. Even an illusion can break into the ultimate reality as the Zen story, “No Water, No Moon,” where the nun attained enlightenment when the old pail broke and there was no more water in the pail, no more moon reflected in the water and, suddenly no more mind also distorting reality.

So the technological way of disconnecting from reality could be like the moon reflected in the pail which, once we become aware of the unreality of it (perhaps through the supposed big electromagnetic storm forecast in the next few years, which could block every electronic equipment), can break the mind free from any other obscuration?

I don’t know what the plans of lila are – and maybe there aren’t even any – as when kids are playing, but since the nun was carrying water, not Twittering, chatting, browsing websites, trading online or updating her Facebook page, she was present in feeling her body and her mind was probably empty for most of the time, in a state more receptive to be filled by Truth. In many spiritual paths the students are suggested to make repetitive actions, as cleaning the rice as a way to strengthen our presence and attention, taming the wandering mind. Those tasks would bore us to death, while we prefer instead, paraphrasing Neil Postman, to be amused to death.

When I learned to program, the most-used computer programming languages were C or Pascal, languages based on the structured programming paradigm where the development of the procedures and the program structure were to be planned carefully, sometimes with elegance. However, this type of programming made the management of exchange of information with external events or with other programs or procedures more complicated.

At a certain point programming languages developed into event-driven programming, where procedures are activated on the basis of the messages which come from other software or from the user’s inputs, for example, by a click of a mouse or an input through the keyboard. This type of programming first gained prominence when graphic interfaces like Windows appeared and later with complex Internet communication.

Therefore, the execution of software takes place as a rebound of an input between programming modules which are continuously affecting each other. This type of programming is usually based on object-oriented programming languages, which, at the end of the 1990s imposed themselves on the structured and procedural programming model.

We continuously interact with the Net and with other technologies like mobile phones, sending and receiving information in a pace increasing according to technological advances. Just as software responds to events, users have also started behaving in the same way, becoming servomechanisms of technology and an integral part of the galaxy of stimuli-actions.

We fit ourselves as one of the modules which respond to events. As inputs, we have myriads of information and sites, and as outputs we click here and there. This produces new information and the mechanism becomes self-fed.

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Quando imparai a programmare, i linguaggi maggiormente utilizzati erano il C o il Pascal, linguaggi che si basano sul paradigma della programmazione strutturata, in cui lo svlgimento delle procedure e la struttura del programma andava pianificata con cura e magari con eleganza. Questo tipo di programmazione tuttavia rendeva più complicato gestire uno scambio di informazioni con eventi esterni o di complesse interazioni con altri programmi o procedure.

Ad un certo punto i linguaggi di programmazione per computer si sono evoluti nel modello ad “eventi”, dove le procedure si attivano sulla base di messaggi che giungono da altre parti di software oppure da un input dell’utente, ad esempio un clic del mouse o un input da tastiera. In particolare questo tipo di programmazione si è imposto con l’avvento delle interfacce grafiche tipo Windows prima e poi con la complessa comunicazione di Internet.

Quindi l’esecuzione del software avviene come un rimbalzo continuo di input tra moduli di programmazione che si influenzano a vicenda. Questo tipo di programmazione si basa di solito su linguaggi di programmazione ad oggetti, che verso la fine degli anni 90 si è imposta sul modello della programmazione strutturata e procedurale.

Interagiamo in continuazione con la rete e con altre tecnologie tipo i cellulari, mandando e ricevendo informazioni ad un ritmo che cresce con l’avanzare delle tecnologie. Così come il software risponde agli eventi, anche gli utenti hanno iniziato a comportarsi come tali, diventando servomeccanismi delle tecnologie e parte integrante della galassia di stimoli-azioni.

Ci siamo inseriti come uno dei moduli che rispondono agli eventi. Come input abbiamo le miriadi di informazioni e siti e come output clicchiamo qui e là. Questo produce nuove informazioni e il meccanismo si autoalimenta.

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Since we spent a million years as human beings terrified by predators, any visual or audio signal representing a novelty is associated with something potentially dangerous. The reptile brain mechanisms get activated. This is one of the reasons why it is difficult to stay in front of a TV and ignoring moving images.

Every time there is a new stimulus, it activates the mechanism of reward. On the neuroscientific level this means that dopamine gets released in neural circuits which leads to the sense of well-being and euphoria.
To get a reward when there is a new stimulus is part of the survival mechanism of the species. If we give attention to the stimulus it improves our possibilities of survival, so we get rewarded with a release of tasty dopamine in our brain. Everything that facilitates the survival of the species is gratified – the reason why sex is a pleasant activity.

The events on the Net which activate the reward system and which anticipate reward are numerous: from new email announcements to announcements of new messages in forums to chat or Twitter messages to refreshed news sites to the arrivals of new articles in RSS feeds.

The stimulation of the amygdala is an integral part of every medium and the Internet has only multiplied the stimuli of the previous media, concentrating the textual, visual, auditory, and interactive channels in a single medium.

Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news. In order to balance the effect and to sell good news, it is necessary to have a lot of bad news. Moreover, the newspaper is a hot medium. It has to have bad news for the sake of intensity and reader participation (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

So news which are bad news, as McLuhan says, are “good news” for our addiction to novelty and for the stimulation of the survival mechanism with the ensuing reward mechanism. And, therefore, what is better than a catastrophe which attracts much interest and gets a large audience?

While we were beset by real dangers for million of years we now have a very comfortable life – at least in the West. In Korea, which has had fast development in technologies, the dependence on computers is treated with boot camps.

Our inner reward system makes us click repeatedly and produce new inputs from the Net. The mechanism is activated not only when there is a stimulus which rewards but also when there are stimuli that anticipate the reward. Therefore, a simple sound signal of an incoming email or of a message gives us a good release of dopamine even if it turns out to be a spam message.

As for any action which activates reward mechanisms, another mechanism comes into play: that of an addiction. As stimuli become predictable, the reward becomes less. The stimuli which previously provoked a certain neural activity, in time don’t give the same effects any more.

So, it is necessary to have a growing number of stimuli, more frequent, more intense, more varied. On the technological level it means more power and higher speed for managing an increasing number of events and a large number of open windows on the screen at the same time.

The brain, particularly the amygdala and hyppocampus, mistakes a continuous need of stimuli with survival. Therefore, it becomes difficult to remove oneself from the source of stimulation.

At a certain moment the novelty in our culture assumes the meaning of improvement, of advancement, of progress. Before the invention of the telegraph information could only travel at the speed permitted by the terrestrial means of that epoch, typically, at a horse’s speed. With the telegraph, information and its transportation became dissociated for the first time. Neil Postman affirms that just shortly after the historic demonstration of the telegraph by Morse the fortunes of newspapers ceased to depend much on the quality or the usefulness of the articles but on the quantity, the distance and the speed of dissemination of the information, setting the basis of the current model of real-time news and the race to be the first to spread them.

The need to always have new information prevents us from having a profound relationship with events. Every input is replaced by another in a short time. Staying with the same thing for a prolonged time does not satisfy our desire of novelty any more. After a little while we want to click something else. We do not want to engage in a prolonged and deep connection with the objects of our interaction, taking them as a slowing down of the flow of juicy neurotransmitters.

Blogs themselves, which were born as instruments for the expression of thoughts, are oriented to the last novelty, where attention is given only to the last article: the shorter, the better, so as not to strain the limited capacity of the reader to remain with the same thing for a prolonged time.

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Poiché come esseri umani abbiamo passato qualche milione di anni terrorizzati dai predatori, qualsiasi segnale visivo o uditivo che rappresenta una novità viene associato a qualcosa di potenzialmente pericoloso. Si attivano i meccanismi del cervello rettile. Questo è anche il motivo per cui è difficile stare di fronte ad una televisione, ad immagini in movimento, ed ignorarle.

Ogni volta che vi è un nuovo stimolo, questo attiva il meccanismo della ricompensa. A livello di neuroscienze questo significa che viene rilasciata dopamina nei circuiti neurali e questo porta ad una sensazione di benessere e di euforia.Ottenere una ricompensa quando vi è un nuovo stimolo fa parte del meccanismo di sopravvivenza della specie. Se diamo attenzione allo stimolo questo migliora le nostre possibilità di sopravvivenza quindi  veniamo ricompensati con un bel succo di dopamina nel cervello. Tutto ciò che facilita la sopravvivenza della specie viene gratificato, ragione per cui il sesso è un’attività piacevole.

Gli eventi in rete che attivano il sistema a ricompensa e che preannunciano la ricompensa sono numerosi: dall’annuncio di nuove email, all’annuncio di nuovi di messaggi nei forum, ai messaggi che giungono dai programmi per le chat o da Twitter, ai refresh dei siti di news, il subentro di nuovi articoli nei feed RSS.

La stimolazione dell’amigdala è parte integrante di ogni medium e Internet ha solamente moltiplicato gli stimoli dei media precedenti, concentrando in un singolo medium i canali testuali, visivi, uditivi, interattivi.

Gli avvisi pubblicitari sono “notizie”. Il loro guaio è di essere sempre notizie buone. Per equilibrare l’effetto, e per vendere le notizie buone, è necessario avere un mucchio di notizie cattive. Inoltre il giornale, in quanto medium caldo, ha bisogno di notizie cattive per accentuare la propria intensità e la partecipazione del lettore. Marshall McLuhan. Gli strumenti del comunicare. Mondadori. Milano. 1990

Allora le notizie, che sono brutte notizie come dice McLuhan, sono “buone notizie” per la nostra dipendenza dalla novità e per la stimolazione del meccanismo di sopravvivenza con il successivo meccanismo di ricompensa. E cosa c’è di meglio di una catastrofe quindi, che provoca interesse e fa tanto audience?

Mentre per milioni di anni eravamo immersi nei veri pericoli ora abbiamo una vita comoda, perlomeno in Occidente. In Korea, che ha avuto uno sviluppo velocissimo verso le tecnologie, curano la dipendenza da computer con campi di addestramento.

Il nostro sistema interiore della ricompensa ci porta a cliccare ripettamente ed a produrre nuovi input da parte della rete. Il meccanismo si attiva non solo quando vi è uno stimolo che ricompensa ma anche con gli stimoli che preannunciano la ricompensa. Quindi un semplice segnale sonoro dell’arrivo di una email o di un messaggio di chat ci dà una bella scarica di dopamina anche se poi si rivela un messaggio spam.

Come per ogni azione che riguarda i meccanismi di ricompensa, entra in gioco anche un altro meccanismo, quello dell’assuefazione. Man mano che gli stimoli diventano prevedibili, la ricompensa diventa minore. Gli stimoli che in precedenza provocavano una certa attivazione neurale, nel tempo non sortiscono più gli stessi effetti.

Dunque si necessita di un crescente numero di stimoli, più frequenti, più intensi, più variegati. A livello tecnologico più potenza e più velocità per gestire un numero crescente di eventi e un numero maggiore di finestre aperte nello schermo allo stesso tempo.

Il cervello, in particolare nell’amigdala e nell’ippocampo, scambia la sopravvivenza con il bisogno continuo di stimoli. Diventa quindi difficile staccarsi dalla fonte degli stimoli.

Ad un certo punto la novità ha assunto nella nostra cultura il significato di miglioramento, di avanzamento, di progresso. Prima dell’invenzione del telegrafo l’informazione poteva solo viaggiare alla velocità consentita dai mezzi terrestri dell’epoca, tipicamente alla velocità dei cavalli. Con il telegrafo per la prima volta l’informazione e il suo trasporto si dissociarono.

Neil Postman afferma che pochissimo tempo dopo la dimostrazione storica di Morse sull’uso del telegrafo, le fortune dei quotidiani dipendevano non più tanto dalla qualità o dall’utilità delle notizie ma da quante, da quanta distanza e da quale velocità le informazioni giungevano, ponendo le basi dell’attuale modelle delle notizie in tempo reale e della rincorsa ad essere i primi a diffonderle.

La necessità di avere sempre nuove informazioni ci impedisce di avere una relazione approfondita con queste. Qualsiasi input viene rimpiazzato da un altro in breve tempo. Rimanere con la stessa cosa per un tempo più prolungato non soddisfa più la nostra brama per il nuovo. Dopo un breve lasso di tempo vogliamo clicchare qualcosa d’altro. Non vogliamo entrare in una relazione prolungata e profonda con ciò con cui interagiamo, sentendolo come un rallentamento del flusso di succosi neurotrasmettitori.

Gli stessi blog, che sono nati come luogo di espressione del pensiero, sono orientati all’ultima novità, dove l’attenzione viene data solamente all’ultimo articolo, meglio se breve per non mettere a prova la scarsa capacità del lettore di rimanere con la stessa cosa per un tempo prolungato.

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