In principle, progress is intended to improve the quality of life via facilitating functions and processes. This facilitation, albeit being laudably successful in ameliorating external human functions, has—to a considerable degree—impeded internal ones, especially those pertaining to cognition. Through outsourcing cognitive-processing tasks to externally accessible ‘user-friendly’ technologies and gadgets, the faculties responsible for the same gradually cease to perform; since the delegation rendered the sought output/outcome. With the passage of time, they become altogether dormant.
To put it in perspective, let’s examine the effect of premature and abusive consumption of synthetic growth hormone (GH), more specifically human growth hormone (HGH), amongst athletes on the pituitary gland. In my own personal opinion, this is the perfect analogy for our point of discussion. The pituitary gland naturally secretes HGH, proportionate to the body’s requirement with respect to its stage of development. Should a young athlete indulge in abusive consumption of synthetic growth hormone; while his pituitary gland still functions perfectly [emphasis added]; and, the latter’s secretion of HGH is yet sufficient for the body’s need thereof; the brain would detect the external intake of the hormone, and accordingly signal to the gland to decrease its secretion for safety and conservation purposes. The signal shifts from a command to ‘decrease’ to ‘cease’—courtesy of our memory faculties—; as it has recurred over and over again for a period of time; hence, the gland’s ability to secrete the said hormone at requisite levels drops, due to prolonged desuetude.
Excessive, rather abusive, reliance on external technologies to perform our cognitive processes and functions—especially the most basic ones—has the exact same effect on our cognition. Think of how often you turn to your smartphone’s calculator to compute simple mathematics {adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying single-digit numbers}. The case is never that most people suffer from dyscalculia. Instead, it is that the computing function in one’s faculties has been put on dormant mode—since it has been disengaged over a great length of time. This is merely one implication of that infernal ubiquitous disease, oversimplification.
Admittedly, humans are intelligent creatures by design. Nevertheless, progress and automation have tainted the human intelligence (i.e. cognition) with the convenience of over-simplicity. By means of absolute dependency on technology, people are growing cognitively slothful—perforce turning into dysfunctional res cogitans (i.e. thinking things).
Though explicit answers may be furnished for a given inquiry, a great many individuals would still, unapologetically, make the abhorrent supplication for further simplification; even where that is not practically—much less, theoretically—possible. They would demand metaphysical explanations in a sentence or less, in a picture (to be fair, a meme would still do). It never occurs to them that by making such requests, they are sinning unpardonably against their state of being ‘thinking things’.
In summary, the human mind nowadays shudders and shrinks before any idea conducive to minimum cognitive activity, and further trembles upon the encounter of critical thinking stimuli. The masses used to read; then, to listen; but now, it’s all about visuals. They are incapable of handling what they call ‘the complexity of words’; and damned whosoever dares to mention numbers.
Thank God for Google! Without it, people, in the Age of the Imbecile, would have been lost in the labyrinth of their own minds.
