Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

When a new invention is brought into the world there are several processes which have to happen in order for the invention to be joined with humanity. Here, we will look over the nature of technical objects, how we relate to them and build up an intuition of how to use them, and how they ultimately fade into the background of our perception. It should be noted that the inconspicuous equilibrium which these objects fall into leads to our taking them for granted, and subsequently to taking future inventions for granted as well, because the grafting of a new invention happens quickly and is often painful and inconvenient so that we like to forget the process of becoming acquainted with a new object. We train our gaze on the future where we have mastered the object and rendered it such an extension of ourselves that we perceive it just about as much as we perceive an arm or a leg when it is being employed in its usual activity. This is why I think it is important to linger on the freshness of a new object and to bring to light a series of processes that hide from us in plain sight on a regular basis. It may be surprising that this is an area apparently neglected by and large, considering that humans are the tool makers of the Earth. But, when we consider the biological purpose of our tools, namely to quickly become intuitive expansions of our organs and faculties, we see that it is actually an intended feature that we take tools for granted and aim to accelerate out of the awkwardness of learning to use a new tool, and to forget that awkwardness much in the same way we forget the process of learning to walk or to speak or to manipulate objects with our hands. In a way, this philosophy of technology runs counter to our biology, to the perception of our tools which was designed and furnished in us by Nature. But, as is fitting of evolution, a time comes when we need to use our adaptability to intentionally run counter to these perceptive modes, which have brought us so much profit, in order to keep up with the changes effected in our environment by our inventions, lest our strongest asset of flourishing becomes our fatal weakness. As it happens, many people today likely spend more time around human-made objects than not. In fact, a study carried out by the Weizmann Institute has concluded that the total amount of human-made materials surpassed the amount of organic material on Earth in the year 2020 (Elhacham et al. 442). As our environment increasingly becomes technological and artificial, there comes a time at which our taken-for-grantedness should be disturbed, and the light which we used to throw on nature with our minds through the aid of our tools now should be thrown back on the tools themselves. Now let us turn to the project.

When we first encounter a new object there is a process of grafting, where the new object has to be integrated into our perception of the world. There is also the process of grafting the object onto the external systems which currently exist, but we will look at that process later. For now, we will keep separate the integration of the object with perception and the integration of the object physically. When an individual begins grafting a new object into their experience, the first thing that happens is a recall. The individual, encountering something novel and unfamiliar, has no recourse other than to appeal to memory and to supplement the present perception with already experienced images of other objects and actions. We say here that the process of recall happens before the process of direct perception, counter to what most people would think. Because, in our reasoning, it seems more likely that we would first perceive an object, and then that perception would be stored up as memory. And though this may be the case broadly speaking, since we do seem to undergo this process, especially as children, we can appeal to experience, especially as we get older, to see that this is not the case. As our memories and experiences with objects grow, we build an index of successes and failures which we turn to for aid in situations that are new. The more that new objects and experiences resemble ones we have lived before, the more accurately our past experiences map on; the less similar the encountered object or situation is, the lower the fidelity or resolution of the memories we apply to it. We may also need to abstract from many different memories and combine these abstractions together when one is not sufficient to appear similar to the novelty before us. But the rule is that, especially as we age, we tend more and more to apply a memory image to understand a new object or experience, and this we can clearly see when we explain a new thing to anybody. We invariably explain it by analogies of familiar objects and concepts that we have encountered before. 

For example, at some time we may have described a pencil as a quill that needs no ink; or we may have explained a car as a metal horse; an email as a digital letter; a calculator as a computerized arithmetician, and so on. We even can find evidence of this in the names of many of our inventions. We have names which include the names of other similar objects that would be familiar, such a caulk-gun, staple-gun, glue-gun (the gun is a common one), needle-nose pliers, claw-hammer, drain snake, torpedo level, etc. It is very common (at least in English) for the names of new tools to borrow the names of other tools or objects that they resemble. The more unique tools, either by virtue of their specific function or their early appearance in history, tend to be named by function or by the verb that they act out, such as a saw, a wrench, or a hammer. With these tools that embody the more general functions, we see naming conventions tend toward creating variations on these names by including differentiating qualities or the names of the inventors. Hence, we see something like a screwdriver (it drives screws) give rise to variations of itself physically and then linguistically such as a flat-head screwdriver and Phillips screwdriver. These examples of the variations on the screwdriver, and others like it, are cases where the familiar object referenced is extremely close to the new object being named, so that the name actually focuses on differentiation. But in other cases, we can see examples of appealing to more remote and lower resolution memories of familiar objects to try and render the new object more familiar. This is seen in cases like the drain snake, which we often just refer to as the snake. Or when we collectively converged over time on calling a display control device simply a “mouse,” due to the outline of its appearance being vaguely similar to a rodent. Another example which relates one  technical object to another is the keyboard. First, we note that the keyboards on our computers are named after their likeness to the keyboards of pianos and harpsichords. But the key part of keyboard refers to the key in the sense of a small piece of material that fits into a slot and by torque or leverage controls a mechanical movement. These etymologies are a kind of evidence of our tendency to approach a new object by thinking of it in terms of a familiar object.

We experience this application of the familiar to the new on an individual level and also when explaining to others how an object is used. Most of the process of teaching someone to use a new tool involves looking for objects and actions that are familiar to the learner to help them grasp the new object. Or else it is battling against these memories being called forth that are preventing the learner from grasping what is distinct about this object — “Use the stylus as a pen, and the touch pad as your paper, except your writing is up here on the screen.” The truth is that when we first encounter a new object, we do not really perceive it. At first, we perceive something nonsensical, something blurry, maybe even something negative. We cannot notice all of the contours, all of the mechanisms, symbols, and so on. We then immediately appeal to our memories, and we cover up the new object with the old. We begin to see something, but not the object as its own being. Hence, we often go through a period of trial and error, where we use the object in ways that we have used more familiar objects, and learn by degrees what aspects of our memory collide incompatibly with the actual present abilities of the object. Once we have used a new object as an analogy to describe an even newer object, we may be able to say the object has become integrated into perception and has become familiar and understood as its own being. In other words, this is a marker for when an object has become grafted successfully and has gone from the process of being joined to our perception through our intellect to being intuitive. 

But this intermingling of memory with our perception is not a fault. It is this self-deception which allows us to learn and to broaden out into our environment and to use more and more objects for more and more actions. It is this feature which allows us to pick up any pen or pencil and begin writing without a second thought — we do not have to relearn to use the pen or pencil every time we pick up one that we have not used before. It is what lets us drive our neighbor’s car, use bathrooms around the world, and generally allows us to build intuitions and habits around any kind of object. But this faculty of inserting memory into perception can sometimes work almost too seamlessly, and the blindness of present objects which it causes can lead to misunderstandings and misapplications of objects without ever being discovered. For example, as you read these words on this page, the only reason you are able to read so easily and so quickly is because instead of seeing the words directly as they are on the page, you are engaged in a continuous recall, which works by taking up certain words and letters as kick-starters to the process and then finds by experience which words and letters are likely to flow next. You are not seeing many of the letters of this little treatise but instead are using memory to predict which letters should be present to make sense. And this “making sense” is precisely the process of rendering something familiar. To make sense of something is to fit into and integrate it with the rest of one’s experiences. Granted, if you were perceiving this text directly, you would never misread words, especially not in the way of supplanting one word for another. And this happens so easily and goes so unnoticed that the only cue we have to this kind of memory-induced misperception is that the text loses coherence over time until we go back and reread and discover our mistake. So it is with objects. We perceive aspects of old objects superimposed perfectly onto our new objects, and as such we are able to make many correct guesses and inferences, but just like with misreading, we are able to simply see something in an object other than what is there. But, just as our reading experience begins to fall apart after encountering such a mismatch between our recalled image and the text that is actually on the page, we can discover our blind spots toward objects when they are not functioning the way we intended. We may discover we were holding it wrong, or missed a button, or did not see that this or that feature could be tweaked with a slider and so on. 

As we gradually move through this process of trial and error, and as we build up an index of lived experience around the new object itself, we rely on those more remote memories less and less. The object begins to individuate itself from other objects and other experiences, and we learn the intricacies and specifics of mastering this object. For a brief period after the initial shock of novelty calls forth aspects of remote and abstracted memories, we do perceive the object more directly, though not completely, because now instead of relying on memories of other objects, we are bringing forth memories we have built of the object itself. This is why we do not perceive the true, gradual, and continuous wear and tear of an object, but only notice how worn out or dirty something has gotten all of a sudden. But again, this period of vivid and updated perception of an object is brief. This is when the acquisition of an object feels most fulfilling, when we have made some sense of it and are now just practicing our mastery of it. This mastery consists in rendering the object totally intuitive or habitual and making it just as well an extension of our body or mental faculties. In a way, once an object has become individuated in our mind as it grafts onto our perception, it again begins to deindividuate into the background. As we render objects more and more familiar and intuitive to use, they begin to become synonymous with the function we use them for. Again, a kind of blindness creeps in, obscuring the object from our sight. But this blindness is different in kind from the first blindness we described. 

This second blindness we will refer to as taken-for-grantedness. It generally refers to the feature that, in this state, we accustom ourselves to the contours and details of the object such that our habit and memory are able to ignore these details and focus on the end to which the object is a means. When we take technical objects for granted, we more or less make the object synonymous with the completion of a task, and we allow our habits and familiarity to unconsciously pilot most of the manipulation of the object toward our goal. For example, when we write we cease to notice the pen. We take the pen for granted, and we focus our attention on the words we wish to write. For this reason, too, most of us who have driven vehicles often have had the experience of arriving at our destination without remembering driving there hardly at all — always a shocking and concerning experience, but a testament to the sophistication of our habitual actions. 

Though this experience of taken-for-grantedness is the way we are designed to merge with our tools for the sake of more easily completing our actions, the role of the philosophical technologist is precisely to roll back this second blindness, to stop taking objects for granted, and to attempt to linger in that usually short space of perceiving an object in all its detail and as its own object. The philosophical technologist also tries to escape the first blindness by noticing these details, and most of all by understanding what is novel and distinct in a technical object. The middle period between the two blindnesses is the zone of perception where analyses of a technical object are most full. This requires the technologist to sometimes appear foolish by refreshing the wonder in utterly mundane objects. For instance, when a lamp has become mundane and taken for granted, one no longer plugs in a device, and turns a switch in order to illuminate the bulb which lights up a room; one merely “gets the light.” The technologist observes the one “getting the light” and sees in this phrase and automatic reaction to entering a room a misperception, namely the second blindness — a useful blindness, but a blindness nonetheless. Likewise, when observing a new object, the technologist may understand the analogies to past objects and they may inevitably draw these analogies themselves, but these will always be mere analogies, strictly speaking. For example, when we hear the term “online banking,” the technologist does not understand this as a bank that is accessible online. The technologist understands that this is a new object, and the only referent available to grasping it initially is in the memory of a physical bank. In this way we see that the perspective of the philosophical technologist exists in a narrow gap and is a perspective that is always being paved over by memory images. Moreover, these memory images are the most natural and unnoticed illusions which always populate our perception. In this way we see that the business of retaining the more or less direct perception of an object in all its detail runs counter to our natural mastery over matter and our ability to expand the horizons of our possible actions easily and quickly. In experience, holding this perspective of objects can be uncanny and overwhelming when we realize that we are constantly surrounded by, using, and wearing objects that have almost entirely faded from our sight and slipped beneath our attention. But as the world becomes even more saturated and the kinds of objects we make become more novel and distinct, the ability to navigate these blindnesses becomes more important. 

Works Cited

Elhacham, Emily, et al. "Global Human-Made Mass Exceeds All Living Biomass." Nature, vol. 588, no. 7838, 2020, pp. 442–444. Springer Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5