Note: What follows is speculative musing rather than reflective, considered judgment.
What does it mean to be self-reflective? What is the epistemological status of data? What do data have to do with our self-knowledge? Can there be quantifiable facts about self-hood? These questions make us think about what our self is and whether it has different aspects. They also make us think about what knowledge is like and what kinds or types of knowledge we might have.
Now one might wonder why these sorts of questions might be important. Philosophers, who are easily distraught by categorical confusions, false dichotomies and uncritical first principles, probably get a kind of perverse pleasure from finding these questions unanswered – I know I do. But, in the great ancient tradition of philosophy, why does this matter for living. These questions might not matter at all, but when people propose to be self-reflective about their lives, and when they want to find deeper meaning to life, these questions, perhaps, ought to be far more pressing. I found them both relevant and unaddressed in a recent post on the Good/Blog, “The Quantified Self: You Are Your Data” (http://www.good.is/?p=15247).
In the post, David Pescovitz tells us about a recent phenomena of self-improvement and self-knowledge – the quantified self. As Pescovitz puts, it a quantified self (Q.S. for short) is:
a person who embraces the technology at hand … for deep self surveillance and analysis. A growing number of individuals are using new sensors, social networks, online data repositories, open-access science journals, and sheer discipline to view their bodies, minds, and spirits through the lens of data.
Thus, the Q.S. seems to be about more than recording data about oneself for instrumental means. However nuanced or fine grained, I might record things like my daily eating habits (today, a salad, three espressos, duck a la orange, a second salad, pheasant stew, I lie about the desert and cheese) for dieting purposes. Exponents of the Q.S. want to record this kind of data, but they also seem to embrace a way of living or self-reflection through, in or by way of raw data. Some may even identify their lives with self-quantification. This means they must think about themselves in a certain way. Do they think themselves bundles of data, or do they think data reveal something fundamental about themselves. Why would the self be measurable, is there an intuitive mind/world or mind/body dualism that needs rejecting to support these views?
Now curious, I pressed on through Pescovitz review of the movement. Its vanguard seems to be two companion websites, the Quantified Self Wiki and The Quantified Self blog. From these sources Pescovitz draws out a veritable font of wisdom:
“Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved,” [Kevin] Kelly wrote on the Quantified Self blog. “So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. We welcome tools that help us see and understand bodies and minds so that we can figure out what humans are here for.”
Further:
Now, as [Gary] Wolf [contributor at the wiki] has pointed out, the level of self-knowledge he and his Quantified Self kinfolk seek isn’t for everyone. The Quantified Self is a spectrum, and it’s up to you to find your own place within its potential.
The notion of a self as a spectrum is interesting, what makes a self-like a spectrum? If a self is a spectrum, how can I find my place within it? What kind of potential might this entail? Is this a spectrum of potentialities, rather than actualities, that have been quantified or does the spectrum entail some further potential – deeper self knowledge or self improvement, or perhaps knowledge of the purpose of humans. Perhaps because I do moral philosophy, I find these questions pivotal. Why should I dedicate my life to self-measurement if I haven’t really thought about whether this is meaningful. But, at least on Pescovitz’s retelling, the Q.S. advocates seem to elide these deeper questions.
To be fair, Pescovitz may make the Quantified Self (Q.S. for short) movement seem more absurd than it actually is. Although I think Pescovitz gets them about right, it is both interesting and fair to quote more fully from Kelly’s Quantified Self blog:
The central question of the coming century is Who Are We? What is a human? What does it mean to be a person? Is human nature fixed? Sacred? Infinitely expandable? And in the meantime, how do I get through all my email? Or live to be 100.
We believe that the answers to these cosmic questions will be found in the personal. Real change will happen in individuals as they work through self-knowledge. Self-knowledge of one's body, mind and spirit. Many seek this self-knowledge and we embrace all paths to it. However the particular untrodden path we have chosen to explore here is a rational one: Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved. So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. We welcome tools that help us see and understand bodies and minds so that we can figure out what humans are here for. Suggested categories include:
Chemical Body Load Counts
Personal Genome Sequencing
Lifelogging
Self Experimentation
Risks/Legal Rights/Duties
Behavior monitoring
Location tracking
Non-invasive Probes
Digitizing Body Info
Sharing Health Records
Psychological Self-Assesments
Medical Self-Diagnostics
These people really are into self-measurement. So much so that while Kelly ostensibly embraces all means of self-discovery, he actually excludes all but his favoured approach – the only things that can be improved must be those which are quantifiable. This is why, I think, Pescovitz does not misrepresent Kelly’s position. But if this is his position, there are several problems. I fail to see the exclusive connection between the measurable and the improvable. I could, for example become obsessed with my own DNA. Thanks to modern science I probably arrange to have this measured, in a strange sense. More precisely I can have my DNA code recorded, though it is not really a quantity. But to what effect? I cannot change my genome, it cannot be improved. In so far as it represents a deeper me or is a deeper me, it seems a static me. In this case the measurable cannot be improved.
Similarly, I can measure my happiness and my anger. Again, this is a peculiar use of the term measure, but it does make sense. I can record how many times I was happy and I can record how many times I was angry. I can add all other kinds of emotions to my log. Through experience, I can probably qualitatively say that I was more angry when an article of mine was rejected than when a colleague gets the last piece of duck a la orange at lunch. I put this in the log too. But if I fly into a fit of rage over the lost duck, I may subsequently think I have an anger management problem. Did I come to this conclusion because of my self measurement, perhaps, but I think this, at best, is trivial. Here’s why. To think my anger management insufficient, I would have to think I get angry too often or disproportionately. How is it that measurements or recordings about myself can tell me this? I may use the data to confirm or to identify that I get angry inopportunely, but my criteria of inopportune anger are not derived from the data about my behaviour. Indeed, were I not meticulously recording each occurrence of anger – some perfectly justified – I could come to the same conclusion. I could feel guilt for berating my colleague about the duck I hungered for, my colleagues could put me on notice, or even have me fired for such an outburst. Many other possibilities are imaginable. But these phenomena aren’t like data and they aren’t like quantities.
Thus, Kelly’s notion that improvement and measurement are inextricable seems illogical. Obvious blind leaps of logic and explanation aside, the Q.C movement is inattentive to or naive toward those longstanding philosophical issues I mentioned above. Boiling down the epistemological and ontological position of the Q.S. movement, it seems to be the case that raw data is inherently meaningful, that human life can be reduced to a number of sets of data or can be made most meaningful if it is taken to consist of or be revealed by raw data, and that raw data provides meaningful solutions to questions about the real nature of human life and the actualisation of human potential. Whew.
I am oblivious to how the Q.S. method is supposed to tell us what we are here for, or what our particular purpose, or good might be. Should not Kelly discuss, at least, the possibility of a categorical distinction between facts and purposes? Should he not tell us, at least, how facts reveal purposes or how facts constitute purposes in the way he asserts?
This position also misses the sense in which data must be collected, organised and prioritised upon principles that are independent, or at least not entirely dependent, of those data. It is a tautological point, but meaning must must be given to this data if it is to matter for us. But from whence does this meaning arises? If I am right, the very answers which the Q.S. position hopes to obtain by way of deep or refined self-observation, must already be implicit or presupposed in their methodological position. In order to find truth in data, so to speak, they must already take their lives to be, essentially, data like.
Why these philosophical issues remain implicit, it is impossible to know. Perhaps this reflects a poverty of self-reflectivity amongst, a certain set of, apparently, well educated people. To take mere data to constitute or shed light on a dynamic, creative, rational and end pursuing being like man is, I think rather peculiar. The way in which they pursue increasingly variegated and fine grained data about themselves should be dissatisfying because it simply cannot really apprehend the deep and meaningful questions they want to answer. It looks almost like they are trapped in a false consciousness.
Hegel always believed the dialectical contradictions of most intellectual or moral outlooks also reveal further truths. This seems to be the case for the Q.S. movement. For the very fact that the observation of data is made central to the Q.S. movement – almost to the point of obsession – is predicated upon there being an observer/interpreter. Their practice belies their own epistemological and ontological commitments. As a matter of fact, data do not interpret themselves. Here is where the Q.S pheonomena gets interesting again. Although they aim to gain personal and particular knowledge of themselves, the interpretation of their personal data is referred to wider, inter-subjective judgments. Indeed, Q.S. devotees use social networking services on the internet to publicise their own personal data sets and invite collaborative commentary from others. This practice contradicts their data-centred epistemology – interpretation is actually more weighty than data. But it also demonstrates something else they seem to have overlooked about the self: man is a social being, and reaches out to find and discover himself in his social settings. Man’s individuality is not subsumed in this process, but confirmed and determined. Thus, philosophical contradictions sometimes reveal the most interesting anthropological truths.
Ben
