Res Cogitans in Western Culture

Our current vision on how digital apps should be developed and distributed is based on a series of false dichotomies. One of the most relevant and problematic is the idea that in order to understand human beings, one of the first methodological steps to take is to separate mental and bodily activities. This is not just a common scientific protocol to practice reductive neuroscience, but also a popular understanding to describe how humans behave, derived from Enlightenment philosophy.

In a nutshell it goes like this: first, we have ideas generated by the brain, and then the body obeys such ideas as if they were instructions. For example, my body needs water, so it sends some signal to the brain, and that signal is converted into the thought “I am thirsty.” The brain scans memories to check whether there is a source of water nearby. It remembers that there was a half full bottle on a table to my left, so it first sends another signal to my head to turn, eyes sends more signals, so that the brain detects the bottle, and then the brain sends another signal to the hand to grab it. Finally, I drink from the bottle until I am satisfied and then the brain sends another signal to leave the bottle on the table again.

What we have here is a protocol where our self is like a sort of pilot using our body as a sort of vehicle to make things happen in the world. The analytic philosopher Gilbert Ryle captured such a metaphysical protocol with his well-known metaphor “ghost in the machine.” However, this idea of a disembodied self is much, much older. Descartes developed such a position (Descartes & Sutcliffe, 1968) in a very successful way. In his search for absolute truths, Descartes started to doubt everything he knew and perceived to see if he could find some truth that was certain. So, following Descartes’ stance, I can doubt whether the computer in which I am typing this right now exists or whether the hands that seem to be doing the typing exist. I can also doubt the existence of any other person that might read these words, but I cannot doubt that I exist. I think therefore I am: Cogito ergo sum. It is the next deduction by Descartes which interests us most. He asked himself the following question: Although I do exist, what am I really? And his answer was: I am a thing that thinks, a res cogitans.

This is his argument in broad terms: I can doubt about the real existence of my body, but I can’t doubt the existence of my mind; therefore, the mind has to be completely independent from the body. We usually quote Descartes when presenting this assumption, because he was able to organize an argument in such an elegant and simple way. However, we can track this very idea back to Plato , which pervades Western culture, as well as our ideas about spiritual development, once it gained popularity among Christian thinkers who developed theological movements separating the body and soul (Bynum, 1995; Cooper, 2000).

Modern and postmodern, liberal and conservative twenty-first-century Western citizens are not above such considerations. Despite the fact that we now consider ourselves materialists and monists—in other words, we believe that there is no res cogitans and that everything which exists is material—we still conceive of the mind in opposition to the body. We see this demonstrated, for instance, in how popular science describes the advancement of neuroscience and the way we design tools and utensils.

The Disembodiment of Digital Technologies

This paradigm forms the foundation of how the internet and other related digital technologies were invented, coded, and used, in contradistinction to centuries old analog technologies, like hammers, pencils, or stone axes, which were made to be gripped directly by the hand, with no need for a mind separated from the body to make sense of the instrument. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (Heidegger, 1977) discussed at length how utensils were used in a pre-reflective manner. The ecological psychologist James J. Gibson (Gibson, 1979, 1982) coined the term “affordance” to defend a more inclusive way to understand the relationship between tools, the body, and the mind. Despite such philosophical efforts from Western thinkers of the twentieth century, it is not difficult to detect such a mind–body dichotomy in all that surrounds digital technologies. Our electronic gadgets and interfaces are designed with a res cogitans in mind.

Let’s consider the World Wide Web. During the 1970s and 1980s, the internet was used for exchanging straightforward scientific communications between universities (Leiner et al., 2009). However, when digital technologies gained popularity among the general public, one of people’s main interests concerned the possibility of disembodiment. In cyberspace, you could be whatever you wanted. The first entertainment platforms, the Multi User Dungeons (MUDs), attracted people by affording them the opportunity to be someone else. Sherry Turkle (1995) described at length the phenomenon and discussed some of its psychological implications. During the last decade of the twentieth century, the main source of internet entertainment was using MUDs and chatrooms to pretend to be someone else using text only. A fifty-year-old, balding, and divorced man could become an eighteen-year-old, lesbian; a serious literature professor could turn into an eight feet tall troll; and an old lady could spend most of her leisure time as a loving and furry teddy bear. The cartoon “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” depicts a dog standing on two legs while typing on a keyboard. It captured the zeitgeist and was frequently quoted in the early days of the World Wide Web (Palacios, 2011).

This idea was rapidly adopted by science-fiction writers. In the novel Neuromancer, William Gibson imagined a hacker that hates his body, and is only happy when he is connected to cyberspace (a term actually coined in the novel). He considers eating and bodily functions to be a chore (Gibson, 1984). In a more ironic way, Neal Stephenson developed a similar idea in a very detailed virtual world called The Metaverse, in which millions of people spend their leisure time, preferring it to the “real world” (Porush, 1994; Stephenson, 1992).

The idea of using the internet to become a disembodied self was rapidly adopted by contemporary artists, especially those coming from the world of performance art, who pursued the goal of giving the world “disembodied art.” The book Escape Velocity (Dery, 1996) described the movement in detail, presenting both its history and evolution, as well as its philosophical foundations. One of the major artists in the movement is the Australian performer Stelarc. He started his artistic career as an endurance body artist, and was one of the first to play with the idea of a disembodied self, cyborgs, and bio-art. In one of his performances, he connected his legs and arms to electrical stimulators. Then those stimulators were fed with data from World Wide Web traffic. In a weird and poetic way, Stelarc’s body adopted bizarre positions that were visualizations of what thousands of people were doing in the internet at that moment. Most of his art projects were built around his famous motto “The Body is Obsolete” (Smith, 2005; Zylinska, 2002). Following the zeitgeist, other performance or visual artists, as well as musicians and even fashion designers took this idea seriously and tried to create art from the perspective of disembodied experience (Borst, 2009; Stallabrass, 1997).

Later, the idea took shape in political utopias , when people began to dream of living in disembodied societies. Without a doubt, the most relevant text expressing this new direction was the Independence Declaration of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow (Barlow, 1996). In his manifesto, Barlow presented the internet as a new frontier, a pure digital space, just a click away from the miseries of the brick and mortar world. In such a brave new world, everybody could be what they wanted to be, and governments had no role, because people would be able to create their own laws. It was conceived as a real anarchist utopia inside your personal computer (Zalenski, 2002).

Despite the fact that this started as the project of a few activists, it won over the hearts and minds of companies, institutions, and individuals at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Consider, for instance, the virtual world Second Life . It was launched in 2003 by Linden Labs, and after a few months, everybody talked about Second Life, and how soon everything would take place in that virtual world (Warburton, 2009). Companies, universities, research centers, and professionals spent large, sometimes even obscene amounts of money to build replicas of their centers in Second Life (Boellstorff, 2015). The popular press devoted a lot of its coverage describing how people were actually making a living designing and creating spaces for Second Life . It was like Stephenson’s Metaverse, but without the irony.

This first radical paradigm of disembodiment started to fade as the idea of e-commerce developed (Krishnamurthy, 2002), and the World Wide Web became a place to take care of our daily affairs, like buying books, finding hotels, or meeting our high school friends on social networks. Digital technologies are no longer focused on building virtual, new worlds, but about connecting to online devices (Rogers, 2009). Now, previous ideas about disembodied selves and societies are less relevant and tend to be derided. We are proud to state that we left behind the metaphors of a virtual world and joined the “online” paradigm, which considers digital technologies as a means to interact with the real world, and not a tool to build a digital utopia.

Nevertheless, I want to argue that the main model driving how digital apps are designed is still a disembodied one. In order to show it, I’d like to describe how productivity tools are designed, from the initial development to the related hardware.

There are two main models for designing productivity tools: first there is a more scientific approach under the concept of quantified self . The methodology behind the quantified self (Swan, 2013) movement is also deeply Cartesian. According to such a paradigm, we unfortunately don’t have as much control as we’d like to have with our body, because we don’t have enough information about what we are consuming, how fast we run, how long we have been walking, our heartbeat rate, or the glucose level in our bloodstream. However, when the proper sensor is added and it is linked to some mobile device, we can have this information in real time and plan our actions accordingly. The ghost in the machine now has complete information and does not have to trust its senses, which, Descartes taught us, cannot be trusted.

Then there is a less scientific, more intuitive approach called “lifehacking.” “Lifehackers”—people who devise tricks to become more competitive, productive, and successful in life (Trapani, 2008)—present advice like listening to podcasts while you commute and, more worryingly, to read blogposts with your tablet while you wait for your microwave to ping (Vanderkam, 2012). The message is troubling: do not miss any opportunity to be productive, no matter where you are.

Interfaces are also moving toward a disembodied paradigm. Let’s consider all the hype and the hope surrounding text interfaces (Pierce, 2015). Programmers and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are elated with the idea that graphical interfaces are going to disappear and be substituted with plain text interfaces in which you’ll type or talk in plain English, expressing what you want so that the program follows your instructions, delivering your Uber ride, a pair of blue suede shoes from Zalando, or the pilot of that series everybody is talking about nowadays.

And hardware is also presented within this disembodied paradigm. Consider how Microsoft announced their new Surface tablets. In a very geeky campaign using stylish infographics, it suggested how great it was to be able to work while on vacation, watching your children playing, taking a vermouth with your spouse or even in the bathroom. The message was clear: thanks to digital technologies, you can overcome such nuisances like physiological necessities, holidays, family, or even space, in order to be more productive and innovative. Every second of your life can be working time if you want it to be.

And that disembodiment moves actually beyond digital technologies per se and can be seen even in food design. A good example is Soylent—the food product that guarantees you can have all your necessary nutrients to keep you healthy just by adding some powder to a drink (Carolan, 2011; Hurley, 2008). No need to lose your precious time buying vegetables, fish, or meat, cooking them, and then washing the dishes. The kitchen is obsolete, Stelarc would have said. According to Silicon Valley lore, the inventors decided to create the product when discovering that a fellow programmer had scurvy due to a diet of just coffee, coke, delivered pizzas, and instant noodles.

It is not difficult to see Descartes’ influence informing such ideas: our brain generates an idea, the computer receives our thoughts as instructions and acts accordingly. No need to physically engage with the computer in any way. No need for a non-representational, intuitive practice to make sense of what we can do with a specific interface. No affordances to create specific ways to interact with humans and machines (Aubé, 2015).

The Law of Amplification

Of course, digital apps are not responsible for their Cartesian bias, but they are not neutral either. In his book Geek Heresy, Kentaro Toyama coins the expression “amplification law” to describe the social effects of digital tools, arguing that social problems cannot be solved by technological means alone (Toyama, 2015). The amplification law states that digital technologies only take aspects of human behavior that already exist and help amplify them. This contrasts with the idea of technological determinism (Smith & Marx, 1994)—the view that technological inventions such as the printing press or mobile phones cause humans to change their behavior as a means of adapting to technologies.

To illustrate these contrasting ideas, consider the selfie (snapshots of oneself taken by a mobile phone and usually shared on social networks). Some thinkers like to believe we must blame our obsession with selfies on digital mobile technologies. However, if we consider Toyama’s amplification law, we realize that humans have always been narcissistic. The reason selfies were not common before was because taking selfies was not that easy. In the past, selfies were only available to talented painters or their rich sponsors and clients. When analog cameras were invented, taking pictures were likewise expensive, and you had no indication of how the snapshot would look before you developed it. However, now that mobile phones with selfie sticks make it extremely easy to take self-portraits, they amplify our natural desire to do so.

One common denominator among all the examples described above (lifehackers, Soylent, the Surface campaign, etc.…) is the need for time management. Time is something far away from us—a limited resource we need to control, so we must master it. But, is this true? Should this be the way we as humans interact with time? And, more broadly, should all digital technologies be disembodied?

Dōgen’s Practical Philosophy

Fortunately, we have several alternative paradigms. Key philosophers and thinkers of the last century have been frequently arguing against disembodiment. We have already mentioned James J. Gibson and his ecological perspective, as well as Martin Heidegger . In Being and Time, he argued that our human understanding of time is very different from the way that physics analyzes time. Other phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty challenged the ghost in the machine metaphor in his Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty & Smith, 1996). There are also alternative interpretations on how the body and digital technologies must interact based on Donna Haraway’s seminal research on cyborgs (Haraway, 1987), which has become a hot subject in gender studies (Lykke & Braidotti, 1996; Pilcher & Whelehan, 2004).

For this chapter, however, I’d like to build my argument from an Eastern perspective: the philosophy of Eihei Dōgen. Dōgen was a Japanese philosopher and theologian of the thirteenth century who, dissatisfied with the idea of Buddhism that was taught in his country, traveled to China to find Ch’an Buddhism , which later developed into the Soto school of Zen Buddhism—now a common school of Buddhism in the West.

At first look, the main problem that Dōgen faced seems like a technical question about Buddhism. It is usually expressed in the following terms: If everybody has Buddha Nature, that is, if everybody is already enlightened, then what is the point in practicing? Why spend so many hours every day in seated meditation ? However, when one digs deeper we find a phenomenologist avant la lettre who shared Heidegger’s main question: what does it mean to exist? (Heine, 1985)

Our main source for Dōgen’s thought is the Shōbōgenzō, a book that collects 95 fascicles devoted to many different subjects (Dogen & Tanahashi, 2011). There are several hermeneutical texts trying to discern the ultimate meaning of a specific sutra (Buddhist sacred text), as well as complex metaphysical discussions about what time or Buddha nature is. But, somewhat perplexing for a Western mind, those texts about abstract discussions share space with very practical instructions on how monks should properly dress and on the Buddhist way to clean yourself when you go to the restroom.

Dōgen’s message is clear. His philosophy is a practical one, and it is designed to cover all aspects of our life. For Dōgen, every moment in our life, every person, animal, plant or object is sacred and deserves our respect. Dōgen’s understanding was advanced for his time (Curtin, 1994). His text “Prostrating to that which has attained the marrow” is a very modern defense of the equality between men and women. It offers acerbic criticism toward the misogynistic Buddhist authors who said that women were inferior beings that couldn’t be enlightened (Butnor, 2014). Now, we need to engage Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty from the twentieth century in order to find similar interpretations of existence, time, or the relationship between the body and mind.

Dōgen’s solution to the supposedly technical problem I mentioned above—why do we need to practice if we are already enlightened—is Awakening. Awakening is not something that we train in order to get one day, like a bodybuilder lifting weights in order to develop better muscles; rather, it is a state that we reach in the moment that we practice. When we do zazen (sitting meditation ), we are already enlightened. That is because, while in zazen, we watch our thoughts without taking them seriously, without having to react to them. We forget our habits and prejudices and so we are one with reality. We are one with our surroundings and our time, without judging it, just accepting it as it is and staying in touch with it (Kim & Leighton, 2004).

Dōgen applies this idea of enactive existence to both practical and philosophical problems. In Shoaku Makusa (On not doing wrong), Dōgen argues that good and bad do not actually exist as separate things or essences. What we have is people who do good in a given moment, while others do bad. Being awakened just means recognizing that we don’t have a good or bad nature, but that we are what we do (we enact reality), and what we do in the present moment is the only thing that counts (Fox, 1971).

The idea that the mind is the only thing that matters was a common idea in Japanese Buddhism during Dōgen’s time, and it is still a common Western interpretation of what Buddhism is about. In contrast to this idea and to its reinstantiation in the ghost in the machine metaphor, Dōgen argued that how we use our body is as important as what we think. Body and mind form a unity. You can’t understand one without the other. Addressing subjects that were first analyzed by Merleau-Ponty and then by enactivist philosophers like Evan Thompson (2007) or Alva Nöe (2004), Dōgen argued that to properly understand the relationship between the body and mind, one has to consider the surroundings in which the action takes place or, as Dōgen more poetically says: when the mind and the body does zazen, the whole universe does zazen too.

As his commentary about the Heart Sutra makes perfectly clear, we are not talking here about an abstract, intellectual, philosophical understanding of such ideas; rather, we are discussing an experiential, intuitive access to such truths. Like Heidegger in Being and Time, Dōgen views a human being as a creature that lives their life from a pre-reflective perspective, not as a rational being processing everything using reason and logic.

In his poetic text the Genjokoan, Dōgen evokes the spirit of Heidegger’s famous simile of the hammer that repairs the roof of a log cabin. He argues that the only place in which things really happen is the present. Understanding the world is not a conceptual venture. It is a continuous process of being always in direct contact with the present moment, with what is happening now.

Perhaps Dōgen’s most Heideggerian text is Uji, which literally means “being-time.” In Japanese, uji usually means “sometimes,” but it is written with the characters for being and time, and Dōgen uses the coincidence of terms to develop his conception of time. In contrast to our idea of physical time which we feel we need to master, Dōgen says that time and existence are the same. When you feel as happy as a Buddha or as angry as a demon, Dōgen says, that is time. For Dōgen there is only this moment. Time is just this moment, and the only thing that matters is how we enact such moments. Understanding that time and existence are the same is, for Dōgen, the same as being awake (Heine, 1985; Raud, 2012). When one reaches that state, there is real understanding. “The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire word. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time” (Dogen & Tanahashi, 2011).

What keep us from awakening—or per a secular reading, what keeps us from being a complete human being—is the fact that we consider time and existence as something separated. We view time like space. We crossed rivers and mountains years ago, says Dōgen, and now we reside in an impressive palace and see those moments crossing mountains as alien to us. But, Dōgen says, there is a lot more: “At the time the mountains were climbed and the rivers were crossed, you were present. Time is not separate from you, and as you are present, time does not go away” (Dogen & Tanahashi, 2011).

Dōgen also argues that there are no essential, supramundane beings or time beyond our current events. In an elegant metaphor, he compares it to a spring. Spring flows as flowers bloom and the days get longer, but there is no separate “springness” that takes care of the world and is infused in plants and trees so they become “spring.” Spring is nothing more and nothing else than leaves sprouting, flowers blooming, snow melting and days getting longer and warmer.

Fake Alternatives

One could argue that we have advanced far beyond Descartes in our understanding. We live in a society that considers itself scientific. We don’t believe in ghosts. It is the brain that thinks, everything is material, and anything that exists in the world is subject to the laws of physics. There is no room in the twenty-first century for a res cogitans that is not affected by the material world. Paraphrasing Madonna, we could say that “we are living in a material world and I am a material being.”

But, is that really so? We might have discarded the illusion of dualistic ontology, but we haven’t abandoned some of its major conclusions, like the idea that the mind/brain thinks and that the body obeys. It doesn’t matter that we now reduce the mind to matter (the brain). There is still a functional dualism between the mind that thinks and the body that follows commands.

Neither philosophers nor neurologists are free of such delusions. Consider, for example, the popular argument against free will inspired by the Libet experiment (Libet, 1985). In a Libet type experiment, researchers get several volunteers to have their brains scanned as they undertake some menial task. For instance, an experimental subject may be invited to raise her hand whenever she feels like it. Consistently, results showed that the brain scanner indicated the part of the brain responsible for the motor system—that is, responsible to move the hand—had already been activated before the person said they decided to raise their hand. So, the argument states, free will is an illusion, the brain had already sent the signal to raise the hand before the person “decided” to do so.

There is still a lot of discussion about the real significance of such an argument (Dennett, 2014; Mele, 2008), though I don’t want to discuss it here. What I want to point out is how this argument, coming from supposedly rational, materialist neurologists, is based on Descartes’ dichotomy: there is a mind that thinks and a body that obeys. This argument against free will only holds if we adhere to such a simplistic explanation of what the mind is and how it works.

We can also see the dichotomy working in what David Chalmers called the hard problem (Chalmers, 1995): how can we scientifically study the subjective states of mind related to qualia , such as flavors or colors. Thomas Nagel captured this paradox in an elegant way in his famous paper “What is it like to be a bat” (Nagel, 1974). Nagel says, we can study a bat from a physiological point of view, and discover everything about the physics of bat sounds, how they ricochet against walls and trees, and how such sound waves affect the perceptive system of the bat. Still, we won’t know anything about how the bat perceives the world, or about what it is like to be a bat.

Consider how this is a “hard problem” only inasmuch as we think of the mind and body as separate structures. If we accept, as we saw in Dōgen, that thinking is a process that implies a mind/brain, a body, and certain surroundings, then the mystery rapidly dissolves. We can’t know how it feels to be a bat, because we are not bats. Period. Yes, it is that simple. We make it complicated. The only way to solve the “problem” is to realize that it was only a problem because the premises we used defined it as such. The solution, as Wittgenstein famously stated in his Philosophical Investigations, is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle (Wittgenstein & Anscombe, 1953).

How to Re-embody Our Digital Technologies

Some solutions and critiques to technological determinism propose fake alternatives, which even if they deny the model itself, do not challenge the main conclusions produced by it. See, for example, Wyatt (2007) on how technological determinism is present in most criticisms on the social effects of digital technologies. I do agree with the main critiques that Keen (2015), Morozov (2012), Pariser (2011) or Carr (2011) present to technological determinism, but when they propose solutions, those solutions still fall within the framework proposed by techno-utopists.

That means that both technological determinists and their critics accept that digital technologies are disruptive entities that are transforming our lives, but what they don’t agree upon is how to value their consequences. The belief in technological determinism creates utopians, like Perry Barlow , who consider that such social transformations will be good for humanity. Critics, on the other hand, think exactly the opposite. Therefore, most solutions proposed by techno-critics like Morozov , Pariser, or Carr are either about tinkering with digital technologies, transforming them toward more humanistic aims, or just outright banning them.

In any case, this is inconsistent with a critique of technological determinism. The correct answer has to be based on the law of amplification I described above. Digital technologies do not create new social rules and frameworks. Instead, they just help to amplify social tendencies that are already present in human societies. If we want to address the harmful effects of digital technologies, first we need some consensus on whether they are really that bad. Second, we need to address the social trend that is amplified by digital technologies and find some social, political, and economic measures to reduce it. If we modify Twitter in order to make life a lot harder for trolls, we may help Twitter attain a better public image, which may help increase its stock exchange value, but it won’t get rid of trolls. They will just move somewhere else to troll. We have to address trolling itself.

Why Dōgen?

Probably you are wondering why I brought a medieval Japanese monk back from the grave to discuss digital technologies. One of the reasons is that Dōgen is not that well known in philosophical circles, and I think that is really a shame. Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō has been largely forgotten for centuries. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, it laid unread in Soto Zen monasteries unnoticed to the rest of the world. In the eighteenth century, when the Japanese government, inspired by the West, forced every religion in the country to have a book as a basis for their religion, the Soto sect chose Shōbōgenzō. However, they required the Japanese government to keep it a secret book, such that Soto monks were the only people allowed to interpret the text. As a result, the text was not known even by the Japanese public until the twentieth century when the prohibition was finally lifted.

At the same time, Dōgen’s thinking was too advanced for his time, presenting a holistic philosophical system that combined practical and theoretical reasoning. It was very poetic and full of obscure metaphors. He also practiced pre-Joyce style games with words, jumping from Japanese to Chinese without warning, eliminating verbs from a sentence, using the radicals of an ideogram to make a common word to mean something completely different,Footnote 1 that way forcing the structure and meaning of language to transmit a new view of how to use language to transmit knowledge (Kim & Leighton, 2004). The main reason I decided to use Dōgen was precisely because his concerns and proposals had nothing to do with technology. The fact that the reflections of a Japanese monk in the thirteenth century can shed some light on understanding the major assumptions informing how we design and use mobile phones, time management software, or superfoods in order to minimize the time we spend eating, clearly shows that the problem is not technology, but our social habits.

We won’t become any more mindful, if we just remove the Facebook app from our mobile phones. Banning Apple Pay won’t help us redistribute the millions of surplus dollars that the 1% unfairly obtained and that the 99% deserve. That has already happened. When the teenagers of the anorexic pride movement found it difficult to distribute their pictures and memes in one social network, they just moved to another one.

In his poetic and moving text One Bright Pearl (Ikka Myoju), Dōgen tries to transmit a holistic understanding of the world where everything is interconnected and causality is described a systemic property of the whole, co-dependent apparition. In classical Buddhist terms: “this arises, that becomes.” To do so he states that our lives, the whole universe is just one bright pearl, even if we don’t realize it. Apps like Twitter, Instagram or Secret are One Bright Pearl. Websites such as DeviantArt, change.org, or Breitbart News are also One Bright Pearl. Improving the filters or the interface won’t change a bit the social realities that make them possible. If we want to re-embody our digital technologies and help to improve and develop the better angels of our nature, we need to transform our social, economic, and political habits. That’s why we wrote this book: to present a blueprint for change, to show that another world is possible.