How is My iPhone Changing Me? : Neuroscience and Thomistic Psychology
Adapted by the author for Sed Contra from the latest version of a lecture developed for chapters of the Thomistic Institute. Parts of previous versions of this lecture were adapted as print essays for The Public Discourse and RETURN magazine in 2022.
Technology changes us. Electric light bulbs, and gas lamps before that; automobiles and gasoline-powered farm equipment; gunpowder and steam locomotion; clocks and the printing press; bronze and iron. These technologies took hold not only because they helped us to achieve what we wanted. They created opportunities for new things we hadn’t wanted before.
In so doing, they changed our patterns of behavior, our relationships, family dynamics and economic institutions, the experience of political authority and social status, and our very sense of self. In changing what we wanted, these technologies changed the we that wanted.
This isn’t a new or controversial observation. Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, remarks that the very invention of writing had psychological consequences: as a tool for reminding, writing weakened the faculty of remembering—“implanting forgetfulness in [our] souls.”
Today our digital devices—especially portable devices, and their most popular applications, social media, combining communication with entertainment—are changing us. Increasingly we are aware that this is not accidental—that in many ways the devices, and the applications they run, are designed to change us, engineered specifically to capture and modify our sense of self, how we think, what we do.
Three years after the first iPhone release, Nicholas Carr reflected on how how his online habits changed his attention as a reader and writer. In The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains (2010), he turned to neuroscience to explain his experience. The way we interact with the internet, he wrote, “rewires our brains.” Websurfing “makes us shallow thinkers,” with interruptions, scrolling, and clicking break up our attention, preventing impressions from penetrating working memory into long-term memory. The abundance of stimulae presents too much “cognitive load”. The neuroplastic brain adapts, literally reconfiguring its patterns of activity, but as it gets easier to keep scrolling and “multi-tasking,” it gets harder to concentrate, remember, and contemplate.
“Devices, and the applications they run, are designed to change us, engineered specifically to capture and modify our sense of self, how we think, what we do.”
Compare Carr’s neurological account of online life to Andrew Sullivan’s essay about checking himself into rehab for digital addiction. In “I Used to Be a Human Being” (2016) Sullivan describes “a new epidemic of distraction” which “is our civilization’s specific weakness.” Sullivan saw the problem as spiritual: the “threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.”
Sullivan aptly drew on religious resources to make sense of this challenge. According to Sullivan, smartphones contribute to a loss of a cultural habit of Sabbath, “remov[ing]… the very spaces where we can gain a footing in our minds and souls that is not captive to constant pressures or desires or duties.”
I aim to bridge the gap between these two discourses, brains and souls, the neuroscientific objectivity of Carr and the spiritual interiority of Sullivan. My approach to how our smartphones are changing us is to follow Plato’s lead, and ask: what is this technology doing to our souls? I believe philosophical approaches to the soul help to clarify both the threat, and the limits, of technological attempts to manipulate, model, and mimic human cognition.
Engineered Addiction
Every major smartphone app, especially social media, is the interface for an artificial intelligence “algorithm.” Constantly processing everything it “learns” about you, it creates a virtual representation of you, testing hypotheses about it against your real behavior, and continuously updating the model.
The goal is not merely to predict what you will do, but, by presenting you with customized digital stimuli, to actually shape your behavior. A common misunderstanding is that social medial companies collect our personal data to sell it—as if the problems we face relate primarily to privacy and economic exploitation. But social media companies closely guard the data they collect: it is too valuable to sell. As conveyed in the 2020 documentary, The Social Dilemma, the data is the key to changing our habits.
In the words of Jaron Lanier, who helped design AI but now warns of its dangers, the goal of social media is “changing what you do, what you think, who you are.” Social media wants you, without any regard for your own good. Google’s former “design ethicist” Tristan Harris explains: “Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.”
It is not so much your data that these companies try to harvest, but your attention, as an entry to your mind and your will. In the documentary, Lanier clarifies the “product” of social media is “the gradual, slight imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception.” Harris uses more directly moral terms: “It’s seducing you. It’s manipulating you. It wants things from you.”
Manipulation. Seduction. It wants things from you. Do you recognize the language of temptation, of spiritual danger? Tech leaders have seen it, participated in it, engineered it, and profited from it. Yet they have also protected their children from it, and they are naturally horrified by it.
Many apparently feel guilt—and even seek absolution through activism and a new evangelization of responsible reform. If unaccountable powers use weaponized neuroscience in the form of AI algorithms to manipulate us, maybe we just need better oversight? Some of the participants in the Social Dilemma advocate greater government regulation of tech companies. Others believe we could design the algorithms better, or contrive a new algorithm to protect us.
Consider the history of Thrive Global, which offers employers a “behavior change platform” based on “a holistic approach” for managing employees’ “well-being and resilience.” The goal is to “use technology to create personalized, empathetic employee experiences.”
Thrive Global’s holistic behavior modification app is derived from a predecessor company called “Boundless Mind,” which bragged about technologically “programming” habits of “engagement and retention.” And that company had originally been founded as “Dopamine Labs,” whose website was unapologetic about the drug-addiction metaphor: “Keeping users engaged isn’t luck: it’s science. Give users the right [hit] of dopamine at the right moment and they’ll stay longer, do more, and monetize better.” Dopamine Labs claimed to be “build[ing] the future of web-scale mind control.”
Notice the progression: from “get them hooked” and “brain hacking” and “mind control,” to “behavior design and “behavior engineering,” and then to “behavior change” for “holistic” “well-being.” Rebranded from engineering addiction to cultivating virtue, the packaging has changed, and perhaps even the intention, but the method and control mechanism is the same. Habit-building algorithms as a technocratic solution: not to fortify the soul against manipulation, but to subject it to more palatable and profitable manipulation.
Neuroscience and the Soul
The Social Dilemma documentary conveyed the spiritual stakes of this technocratic manipulation with a vivid, imaginative personification of “The Algorithm.” The complex artificial intelligence that constantly monitors and stimulates a user’s social media behavior is depicted on screen by three figures each representing an essential interest of social media companies: Engagement, Advertising, and Growth. Together they scheme and conspire to attract, hold and deploy a user’s attention. This personified Algorithm is cold and calculating, yet not impersonal. The filmmakers’ dramatic sensibility makes plain: the threat is spiritual. The Algorithm wants to steal your soul.
Put another way: the Algorithm is functionally demonic. What it achieves through digital processing is exactly what C.S. Lewis depicts fallen angels doing in his famous portrayal of temptation, The Screwtape Letters: analyze your psyche in order to manipulate it.
Lewis’s book consists of fictional letters from master tempter Screwtape, advising his nephew and apprentice Wormwood. As Screwtape explains, demons don’t tempt by proposing devil worship. They don’t even directly plant thoughts and intentions. Demons don’t teach. They mislead and confuse, they distort our perceptions, they lead our attention astray.
“We have capacity to resist temptation, through exercise of our responsible agency.
The main work of Lewis’s demons is distraction. Screwtape describes the work of demons in words appropriate to the purpose of the social algorithms: “Your business is to fix his attention on the stream” of immediate sense experience. “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.”
Lewis was warning about spiritual temptation, but also offering encouragement. We have capacity to resist temptation, through exercise of our responsible agency. Such hope was possible for Lewis because, as he believed, human consciousness is not ultimately determined by biological mechanisms.
Lewis’s demons, like the manipulating algorithms, can’t directly access our will and intellect. They can only infer things about them, moving them indirectly through an uncanny ability to monitor our physical activity—heartbeats, eye movements, expressions. Observing our behavior, even the subtlest and most imperceptible physiological changes, demons can infer our fears, our desires, our intentions and thoughts. That is all they need to get our attention, to place temptations before us, to frame our decisions, and so to modify our behavior.
Modern neuroscience often assumes that agency and awareness are purely functions of physical processes. Some particular life functions clearly depend on, and are determined by, bodily organs—digestion, respiration, physical movement. And sensation clearly depends on sense organs. But fully to understand human life, we need to differentiate various cognitive powers or modes of awareness, some but not all of which we share with other animals. Human consciousness is not undifferentiated; it draws on and unifies many different powers: sensing, feeling, imagining, evaluating, judging, anticipating, wishing, guessing, remembering, calculating, intending, deliberating, wondering, contemplating.
We can control some of these powers more than others. We even experience responsibility to direct or exercise them. In Plato’s Phaedo, Simmias suggests that the soul is related to the body as a harmony is related to a musical instrument. But he abandons this hypothesis when Socrates reminds him that the soul’s powers can direct the body in a way that a harmony cannot direct an instrument.
Modern neuroscience often assumes an updated version of Simmias’s hypothesis, that all cognitive phenomena arise from bodily activity. Yet as Socrates demonstrated, there remain some pesky functions (used especially in pursuing empirical science!) not easily reducible to physical events. Deciding is not simply running a subroutine, but an exercise of agency, of will. Abstract thought is more than “processing information” but understanding concepts and affirming truth, comprehending realities that transcend whatever physical means may encode or communicate them. Even our memory is not mere retrieval of stored sensation, but an act of conjuring, inherently creative and akin to imagination.
The recent stunning success of artificial language generation highlights the limits—the literal un-intelligence—of merely processing signs without understanding what is signified. An algorithm playing out only in and through physical functions is no more capable of intelligence and agency than is a musical harmony. It is misleading to treat living and thinking as just so much motion in a machine. Mechanistic accounts fall short, and we can’t expect ever to fabricate a mind, only to simulate it—really only to simulate some of its functions, short of the powers of intelligence and agency that most make us human.
Spiritual Armor and Weapons
C.S. Lewis had confidence in spiritual resources for resisting the pervasive temptations now mechanized and monetized by digital technology. In describing his demonic characters, Lewis drew from St. Thomas Aquinas’s analysis of angelic powers in his Summa Theologiae. How can purely spiritual beings interact with, much less influence, the embodied rational animal? Aquinas’s answer appeals to classical distinctions of cognitive functions and their relation to bodily activity.
Strictly speaking our will and intellect transcend the body; as immaterial powers they can only be known directly by God. Yet observant human beings can sometimes discern our secret thoughts and intentions through their effects—subtle muscle movements, the direction of a glance, a quickening pulse, a flush of blood.
Angels, fallen and otherwise, observe these even better than any human being or analytic tool. While they can thus guess at our thoughts and intentions—which remain subject to our will—they have more immediate access to our imaginations and desires, as embedded in our bodily nature. So while demons can’t control our will and intellect, they can prompt us through our feelings and perceptions.
Temptation is not puppetry. Spiritual creatures can’t directly move our wills, but they can sway us in the manner of an orator, anticipating our preconceptions or provoking our passions. Temptation doesn’t control choice, but it modifies what we perceive as choiceworthy. Arousing passions of anger and craving, tempting spirits can make it easier for us to consent to what we otherwise would not.
So demons stimulate our behaviors through a craft akin to rhetoric. “The devil,” Aquinas reminds us, “is called the kindler of thoughts, inasmuch as he incites to thought, by the desire of the things thought of, by way of persuasion, by rousing the passions.” Demons assault us, then, by the same mechanism, and for the same reason, as the ever-adapting and insidious Algorithm: “In order to explore this inward disposition of man,” to discern susceptibility to habits, and then by manipulating attention, to develop those habits.
This sober realization, paradoxically, is a source of hope. Neither spiritual demons nor digital algorithms can directly violate our intellect and will. They seek them, but can never possess them without our consent. The defense against the new dark arts of Silicon Valley thus relies on the same tools as ancient spiritual warfare, especially custody of our attention.
Virtues are “spiritual armor” protecting us from assault, and it is vice that makes us vulnerable. Demons need opportunity to attack. Advising Wormwood on effective methods of temptation, Screwtape warns against letting his target engage in basic exercises of will and reason. Going for a walk, reading a book, even asking questions – these are all powerful human defenses against the distractions of the devil.
Individual acts of thinking and choosing for oneself, exercising self-awareness and taking responsibility for one’s actions and thoughts—these are the distinctive activities of the rational animal, and as such they are safeguards against the soul-snatchers’ designs.
I hope reading a philosophical essay can be an occasion for soul-strengthening too. Reflecting and interpreting require a disciplined focus of attention. Contemplating, wondering, asking why—such intentional human acts are, in the face of temptation, subversive and protective.
This can also give us new appreciation for the power of prayer, a spiritual weapon. More than any other deliberate activity, prayer activates and directs the soul’s various modes of cognition, ordering them and directing them to deeper understanding of self and union with God. The four phases of traditional lectio divina—reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation—each focus and direct the intellect and will, ordering them to God: receiving and interpreting words, considering their meaning and application, addressing God in specific intentions, and lovingly receiving God’s presence.
Or consider the classic retreat handbook, Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Its standard cycles of prayer repeat three steps, each demanding discipline over one’s attention: Composition exercises imagination and memory, recalling sins, visualizing oneself in the presence of other people, even imagining particular sensations. Analysis activates the intellect to conceive, understand, and assent to truths, reasoning about and contemplating their implications. Colloquy reflects on choices and principles of choice, resolving to make good decisions, exerting the will in acts of humility and love.
Such a method of prayer exercises the traditional Trinitarian powers of the soul—Memory, Intellect and Will. These are the three powers that digital algorithms seek to manipulate but cannot access without our cooperation, powers that the most advanced “artificial intelligence” may mimic but cannot possess.
By simply taking custody of our minds we experience the fundamental human agency that Simmias’s materialistic harmony hypothesis could not explain. By directing our attention, taking responsibility for what we give our cognitive energy to, we strengthen the very power that digital media is so eager to distract and consume. The cognitive powers that neuroscience thus finds most elusive are the powers that most protect us from the assault.
The age of digital media has unleashed a profoundly threatening human experiment. By drawing us to waste not only our time, but our attention, social media seduces us to waste our souls. Our brightest engineers have trained our most powerful technology to act with the psychological craftiness of demons. But like the hapless targets of Screwtape and Wormwood, we can begin to protect ourselves from the tempting distractions of technology by asking about it and recognizing it for what it is; by wondering about our nature and remembering who we are; we can go for a walk or read a book; we can philosophize and pray.
Prof. Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition.
