Response on Techno-Transference, or ‘A Firm Grasp of Metaphorical Weather Patterns’

In discussing techno-transference, Agnieszka Piotrowska refers us to Lacan's ‘structure of reality’ and ‘the architecture through which we perceive, attach, and symbolically constitute the world’. The phrase jumps out at me because it can also be applied to an observation made more than fifty years ago by the Soviet neuropsychologist A. R. Luria which suggests a material basis for this structure. Higher forms of conscious activity, he says, are always based on external devices, like the knot we tie in our handkerchief to remember something, the note we write so as not to forget an idea, or a multiplication table for doing arithmetic. These external aids or historically formed devices, he says,

are essential elements in the establishment of functional connections between individual parts of the brain, and…by their aid, areas of the brain which previously were independent become the components of a single functional system. This can be expressed more vividly by saying that historically formed measures for the organisation of human behaviour tie new knots in the activity of man's brain.1

This is to introduce a social and historical dimension into the nature of human consciousness that is missing in the neurological model which he pursues through the rest of the book. But if he neglects to pursue his own insight, this is also true of the subsequent development of the science. Its implications, however, are enormous. Consider: Since this was written, when AI was just beginning, all Luria's examples have been transferred to consumer electronics and connected to the internet, tying new knots in our brains. If adult brains are rewired this way, then what is it doing to children who adopt these devices while their brains are still highly malleable? Might they not be particularly susceptible to techno-transference? Is this why adolescents spend so much time on their smartphones? Do we not see all around us the perverse signs of damage to mental wellbeing, even children taking t