I have to put something out to get the writing cogs turning again. Here are some stray thoughts which have been in my head ever since I read “Speed” by Oliver Sacks, from his posthumous book The River of Consciousness. There, Sacks discusses the importance of brains interpreting the world in the speed that most of us do. I summarize what I find most interesting from his essay (that a speedy brain changes what we do, not merely the speed of what is done), and apply that observation to the speed of fake news traveling through social media and the speed of progressive change through liberal institutions. I admit that there are obvious dangers of trying to use biological analogies to make normative statements about anything, especially politics—we must allow analogies to break down where they do and be conscious of how we might be trying to draw (misleading) motivated conclusions.

In the Brain:
Conditions of Different Neurological Speed

Sacks describes patients with Tourette’s syndrome and Parkinson’s disease as people with neurological differences in the speed at which they perceive and react to the world. Touretters can be quick, but if they try to slow down to act at a “normal” pace, tics emerge. Tics may be understood as actions that are performed by bypassing the moderating filter of the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal area which helps us self-regulate is too slow in comparison to the rest of the Touretter’s speedy brain, and lags in producing an opposing signal that would have prevented the tic from spilling out. The Parkinsonians have the opposite problem. They tend to experience time too slowly, to the point where they may slow down to the point of being catatonic. They may be awoken from their slumber with a the drug L-DOPA, which helps the Parkinsonian patient produce their lacking neurotransmitters. But be careful—too much L-DOPA and the Parkinsonian patient may exhibit the sped-up symptoms of Tourette’s. Similarly, the depressants sometimes used to treat extreme cases of Tourette’s can make the Touretter exhibit the slowing symptoms of Parkinson’s.

Our neurological speed affects the speed of our experiences: We may imagine the experience as though the world were a video played at 1.5x or 0.5x time. More interestingly, this affects the kind of things we do in reaction to what we experience. The actions of a person who experiences a sped-up or slowed-down world are different than those of a person in the ‘normal’ range of perceptual speediness. Underexcited neuroreceptors, and your reactions to the world around you will be slow. A tossed ball may hit you in the face, and others will remark about how slowly you walk. In contrast, if your neurons are on edge, ready to sprint a signal through your brain, then the slower, mediating parts of your brain will not always be able to get there in time to block the speedy signal. A tic jumps out, quite literally by instinct.

Before reading Sacks’ essay, it didn’t seem to me like neurological speed should be able to affect the kind of things we do—I had always thought it should only be allow us to perform actions and experience the world faster or slower. Certainly, for Parkinsonian patients, a slower world makes their actions slower without changing much the kind of thing they do. Parkinsonians may become too slow to keep up with the rest of the world, and their slow actions may be unable to reach completion before the rest of the world has moved on. Their actions are differentiated from normal cases by their slower speed, but not of the kind of action the patient performs.

Much of the philosophical interest for me lies on the speedy, L-DOPA/Tourettey side. With Tourette’s or an excess of L-DOPA, people’s actions aren’t only faster, they’re different in kind. That is, compared to a “normal”-speed brain, the actions aren’t merely faster, they are different reactions altogether. The accelerated consciousness “tends to be exuberant in invention and fancy, leaping rapidly from one association to the next, carried along by the force of its impetuousness.” (Sacks, 51)

It’s well-represented in media how a tic might be a detriment, but it’s also not unusual for people with Tourette’s to report that they enjoy the reaction speed their mental state provides. More associative reactions might result in clever witticisms or make it easier to pump out written words (to my envy). The Touretter might also feel like it is part of who they are, and not want to take medication to suppress that part of themselves.

It seems like a “superpower” how those with Tourette’s can sometimes move twice as fast without loss of precision (Sacks describes people capable of plucking flies out of the air by the wings). Why, then, have humans evolved to process and act at the relatively sluggish speed that we do? Sacks ventures a guess as to why the “normal” experiential speed for humans is evolutionarily useful. If our brains were considerably slower, we would be in more danger of falling rocks and predators; if considerably faster, we would sometimes lose the mediation of our prefrontal cortex. Even though we could react faster to obvious threats, we would be less capable of preventing ourselves from following through on intrusive thoughts. “Dangerous impulses such as putting a finger in a flame or darting in front of traffic, usually inhibited in the rest of us, may be released and acted on before consciousness can intervene.” (Sacks, 53) If our reactions are too quick, we could lose much of what makes our actions well-integrated in the space of reasons, and thus much of what has made humans so evolutionarily successful. [1]

On Social Media:
“Technology doesn’t change what we do, but it makes us more efficient at how we do it.”

I’m not sure where I first heard this statement, but it’s been stuck with me for at least a couple of years. And if you’re following me from my previous section, you might be catching on to why I think this statement is false (or at least missing some crucial nuance).

I am not denying that there are obvious benefits to technology; by no means am I a Luddite or a Kaczynski. In fact, I think that this statement has been mostly true for much of human history, with few exceptions. For example, how we transport things has become more efficient, transitioning from horses, to cars, to planes, to spaceships. But what we transport hasn’t really changed: people and supplies. Communication too has become more efficient, from spoken word, to written letters, to telegrams, then telephones, radios, T.V., and the internet. Consistently, we’ve communicated data (generally for entertainment and productive coordination) but how we communicated it has become faster and more efficient.

But therein lies the problem: Our communication has become so efficient and so speedy that the normal ways we had of filtering out detrimental data are failing us. False and misleading news, so long as it is enraging or appealing, spreads extremely quickly on social media. The traditional news media (who, at their best, are gatekeepers for truth) are replaced by feed algorithms that prioritize engagement and ad revenue. Fact-checkers are incapable of keeping up with the large flow of false-but-appealing statements, and their corrections often get a far smaller audience than the offending headlines. Indeed, the frictionless ease of sharing and liking headlines might even run up against the speed of our rationality—our brains can send a signal to share or like without going through the normal processes of scrutiny that we might have given if there was more friction involved.

Fake news slowly degrades our ability to productively coordinate as a civil society. It can play into far-right politics which rely on a cynical stance toward the information that has been mediated and made more precise by institutions (e.g. journalism, healthcare, climate change research). The slow and expensive process of truthseeking and consensus-building through institutions of science, media, and conversations are bypassed in favor of quick and cheap social-media campaigns that can conjure up a patchwork (but effective) voting bloc. When we can’t politically coordinate around fixing an agreed set of issues, we end up coordinating around the personalities/identities we superficially identify with, to the benefit of those who thrive in the filter-free communication ecosystem. When the only “issue” that matters politically is that people feel like their identity—often led and represented by a political personality they identify with—is winning, fighting valiantly, and making them proud; then it is in the favor of opportunist politicians to craft messages that disregard facts in favor of rallying cries.

This isn’t to say that the speed and spread of the internet is always bad. Real and important news and plans can be distributed quickly and by anyone with a blog and social media account, people can become more connected with others with similar interests around the world, and where would we be without internet memes. But our filters haven’t kept up with the speed and efficiency of our communication, just as the Touretter’s prefrontal cortex is too slow to block some of their tics. We need more efficient news filters (e.g. better algorithms, widespread norms that allow individuals to determine which things are safe to share), or we might need a slower set of communication tools (e.g. more design friction that encourage skeptical norms, or a return to a communications system that emphasizes blogs and smaller interpersonal communication networks).

In the Government:
The Speed of Progress

Is gradualism good? Liberalism finds value in slow and moderate change, for similar reasons to what I have been discussing so far. If progress is gradual, the argument goes, we don’t run the risk of blowing up hard-won institutional processes that keep our government working. Problems arise when the institutional process itself is morally bankrupt. In the cases of racism, sexism, poverty, and the like, it seems right to demand the quick removal of institutionalized rules which benefit one group arbitrarily over another. These rules, however, are so built-in to the way the government works, that any quick changes would not be moderate enough to be considered gradual. The main worry for liberals is that any process that would be effective at efficiently rectifying these obvious moral injustices would, in other situations, allow the efficient passage of thoughtless and dangerous decisions. Sometimes, acting by instinct is the best and moral course of action; most other times, we would have preferred a reasoned thought-process.

By that reasoning, liberals will champion gradualism: “The founders needed to compromise on slavery to pass the Constitution,” they say. Would a more just society exist today if the founders had not compromised on slavery in the Constitution? Did the Americas need the foundation of the Constitution to make slavery illegal three-fourths of a century later, or to pass women’s suffrage another three-fourths of a century after that? Was everything else in that time valuable enough to merit all the injustice? These are empirical questions we will not know the answer to, and moral questions which—in my thinking—would probably rule against gradualism.

For the same reasons it is evolutionarily beneficial for humans to make decisions at the speed we do, people claim that the friction in our Madisonian system is largely responsible for the stability of the United States government. The question, however, is not “How do we maintain a stable government,” it is “What values do we believe in”. Admittedly, if we don’t have a government, then we can’t have a government for the people—but if our government isn’t for the people, then what good is it for?

Conclusion

I sometimes hear that “We can’t talk about designing a good democracy by only talking about its institutional structure. We also need to talk about the moral content decided on by that democracy.” My hope is that this post shows how institutional design and moral content are sometimes indistinguishable. The speed of decision-making, which seems to be purely an institutional quality, can have an enormous effect on the content of the eventual decisions. Particularly, this post is about when decision-making advances to a speed that bypasses traditional filters and checks, and how this can result in actions which are often undesirable. (Though, like some people with Tourette’s, we may find that this speed is something we like.)

With enough speed, tics can bypass the prefrontal cortex, false/misleading news can bypass institutional checks for truth, and opportunists can bypass democracy’s traditional standards and norms. Institutional qualities have obvious effects for morality, and a clear separation between structural design and moral content cannot easily be made.

[1] I would add that hiding our instinctual emotive reactions is also useful if we want to lie, or even simply withhold information, “Yes, the food you cooked is delicious!” “Can you tell if I am bluffing?” Especially around competitors or antagonists, these are extremely helpful capacities to have. The evolutionary benefit is clear. (Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, 2013, p 373)