How Is My iPhone Changing Me? | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Joshua Hochschild analyzes how smartphones and digital technologies reshape our brains, habits, and sense of self by leveraging neuroscience and AI-driven behavioral design, warning that these tools commodify our attention, erode agency, and pose deep spiritual and ethical challenges that demand more than technocratic solutions.

This lecture was given on September 19th, 2024, at East Carolina University.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. 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. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

This project/publication was made possible through the support of Grant 63391 from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

Keywords: AI-Driven Behavioral Design, Agency and Attention, Digital Media Ethics, Neuroscience and Technology, Philosophical Psychology, The Shallows, Smartphone Addiction, Spiritual and Ethical Challenges, The Social Dilemma

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.3	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:22.5	temistic institute.org.
0:25.0	How is my iPhone changing me?
0:27.3	I have a subtitle Neuroscience and Timistic Psychology.
0:33.0	Technology changes us.
0:35.8	Electric light bulbs and gas lamps before that, automobiles and gasoline
0:40.4	powered farm equipment, gunpowder and steam locomotion, clocks and the printing press,
0:46.3	bronze and iron, these technologies took hold because they helped us achieve what we wanted
0:52.7	and created opportunities for new things we didn't know we wanted.
0:57.8	In and through that, they also changed our patterns of behavior, our relationships, family dynamics, and economic institutions,
1:05.8	the nature of political authority and social status, and our very sense of self.
1:12.6	These technologies changed what we wanted, and they changed the we that was wanting. This isn't a new or controversial
1:19.7	observation. Plato and the Fadris has Socrates remark that the very invention of writing
1:25.0	had psychic and social costs. We are used to promoting
1:29.3	writing as an essential skill of a well-developed soul, and Plato used it to great effect.
1:34.3	But Socrates argues that as a tool for reminding, writing weakened the faculty of remembering,
1:41.3	implanting forgetfulness in our souls. He warned that after the advent of writing, people will seem to know much,
1:49.0	while for the most part they know nothing, filled not with wisdom,
1:53.0	but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
	...

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