Slashdot Mirror
But To What Purpose?
A scientist writes that the way we humans evolved as hunter-gatherers is how we are still built. Another writes about the "intelligence of vision," noting that seeing takes up nearly half our brain and generates the structure of the world we take for granted. Another struggles to imagine how alien species might interpret our civilization, discovering as he does some of the presuppositions of our perceptual field.
We bring our built-in apparatus for seeing and perceiving to the world on a computer monitor, where we build a simulation in its image. Because that simulated space is fresh, we can still see the roadwork, but the infrastructure of the digital world is becoming as invisible as the infrastructure of literacy and speech. Chips are disappearing into every aspect of our lives - communication, transportation, physical environments, clothing, and - ultimately - ourselves.
The imaginary gardens on my monitor often seem more real than the trees in my back yard. Most of the time I don't even notice the real trees. We don't yet live in the world constructed by computers that way, but we will. The world created and disclosed by computing is becoming an essential dimension of who we believe ourselves to be. And who, therefore, we are.
Most of us who love online life remember the first time we tumbled into the rabbit hole, falling headlong into a domain as magical as Alice's underground. I remember downloading the first browser around ten o'clock at night. When I next looked up it was four in the morning. That knowledge engine rearranged data into forms that coupled effortlessly with my perceptual apparatus. It was a world of digital symbols filled with projections of my self as it moved among them, thinking it was leaving the room and extending itself "out there." The exploration was really, of course, inside the consensual space we agree to hallucinate together.
What is it about this domain that compels such a response? What seduces us to stay up all night, fooling around for hours as we build communal worlds or play with these symbols, using them as levers to turn gears in the "real" world?
The nexus between nested levels of symbolic reality and the field of human subjectivity, the extensible domain of human consciousness, haunts me. It is the point at which consciousness connects with any or all of those levels, which unfold like a pop-up book or - perhaps - spiral up like a fractal, open-ended, evolving, and free. From sub-atomic particles to machine language to top-level symbolic constructions called "culture," they fold into one another like steps in an Escher stairway, creating a world we half-create, as Wordsworth said, and half-perceive. And then believe.
This week I spoke with Joe McMoneagle, a "remote viewer" for many years in military intelligence programs. Called a "natural" by observers because of the detail of his best "hits," McMoneagle engaged in a disciplined kind of clairvoyance using structured protocols. (Remote viewing is the ability to be present in our consciousness to events or places at which we are not physically present).
McMoneagle discovered that the world is not what he thought it was. He had to reinvent continuously the images he used as maps of reality as his psychic adventures exploded the consensual reality he had been taught to believe.
The images of the world we internalize from life online also become obsolete each time we turn off the computer.
McMoneagle's exploration of the deeper levels of consciousness was like learning to dive. We are unaware of the ocean until we hear about it or see pictures of a reef. Then we go to the coast and look down into the water. Arriving at the land/water interface is crucial: we learn firsthand that oceans are real, find guides to teach us the rules, and practice.
When we dive for the first time, we're astonished. We learn to go deeper, stay longer, deal with real dangers. After a while, we're as comfortable under water as on land, and when we speak of the "world," we mean life under water as well as on land.
Symbols are like face plates on our masks, invisible themselves but enabling us to see. Symbol-making and symbol-using constitutes the technology of consciousness as tool-using constitutes the technology of a culture. Human physiology is a kind of technology too, as invisible as language, defining the way we evolved to gather and hunt.
Online life changes what we mean by "reality." McMoneagle has difficulty talking about "reality" with people who have not experienced what he has. He has to build a modular interface that somehow connects both his experience and the experience of someone who has never gone diving. In the same way, building a computer interface that lets ordinary users couple with the many levels of the digital world is more than "usability." It is participation in a revolutionary act of mutual transformation.
Computer codes are languages, mental artifacts, and modular units of shared perceptual worlds, all at the same time. McMoneagle's description of exploring the deeper waters of consciousness is a template for learning how to move with clear intentionality among the nested levels of symbols that fold into one another in the digital world. Remote viewing is a function of the intentionality of the viewer, not the so-called "physical" world. Nor is a computer network fully defined by chips, switches or code; the network is defined above all by the intentionality of the users.
It is easy to lose ourselves in the act of building simulations that our brains think are real and forget that intentionality animates the network like a ghost in the machine. Inside the domain of human consciousness - and we are always inside - we are bow, arrow and target. We define ourselves as a spectrum of possibilities, choose one, and do it. The symbols we think we use as tools disappear, the nested levels built of those symbols collapse, and we see in that moment our responsibility for what we are building instead of pretending we're merely technicians or just along for the ride.
Richard Thieme speaks, writes, and consults on the human dimension of technology and work. Columns and other writings are archived at www.thiemeworks.com
I have a Bachelor of Arts degree, double major in sociology and English. This sort of writing is prevalent and encouraged in the hallowed halls of Higher Education. When I first started my current job (tech writing, immediately after graduation) my manager had to reprogram me so I would stop writing like ThiemeWorks does.
Academic writing styles do not (at all) translate well into the real world. After being immersed in academia for 5 years, however, it took me a long while to unlearn what I had learned.
Ah...an analogy: academic writing is like deliberately obfuscated code. It does what it's supposed to do, but very few are going to read it, and even fewer are going to learn from it.
I'm out of practice when it comes to reading academic writing: this article actually hurt my head. I would recommend (highly) that Thieme work on loosening up his style and vocabulary if he wants slashdotters to read/understand his articles.
note: I am not saying that slashdotters are dumb (as I said, this thing hurt my head, too). It's just that you have to have a lot of practice in order to successfully wade through and understand highly academic writing like this. It also takes way too much concentration, which I, for one, am not willing to devote to a linux-related news site.
- deb
I admit it, I'm a sucker for lofty prose. I love cunning linguistics on most occasions.
/. has always served as a funnel for valuable content, and as a litmus test for the fluffy and politically correct press. Why contaminate it with a sanctioned version of the same?
But this tastes of a well thumbed dictionary, and pseudo-intelligentia posturing as content.
The article makes a good point, but it could have been summed up in a single sentence, and more clearly at that.
"Explaining a computer-lifestyle to someone who doesn't know, is like explaining colors to a blind person."
No faceplated divers, no spook-clairvoyants, no unnecessary verbiage and no over-inflated hyperbolic metaphor.
Really, do we need this drivvel?
I've written my share of English papers and critical essays. I know the amount of BS required for a B.S. This was a weekly writing assignment in a junior college.
I check in briefly but frequently from work. I look for "news for nerds - stuff that matters". This article was "posturing by an academic - stuff that's fluffy".
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Contrary to some posts, this was not a content-free article. So, rather than critiquing the over-academic writing style, I'm going to try to respond to the content.
We bring our built-in apparatus for seeing and perceiving to the world on a computer monitor, where we build a simulation in its image.
Stating The Obvious #1: "Look, ma, I can use my eyes and brain to look at a computer screen!"
Bogus Claim #1: What I see on the computer monitor makes up a "world."
No, Richard, what you see on the computer monitor is little glowing dots of colored phosphors. When you're using a computer, these dots are lit up in particular patterns by computer programs. When you're using a program known as a "web browser", those patterns are determined by the HTML code and graphics files stored on or generated by a computer somewhere, created by the web site designer.
That's a pretty narrow "world" there.
Chips are disappearing into every aspect of our lives - communication, transportation, physical environments, clothing, and - ultimately - ourselves.
Stating The Obvious #2: "Look, ma, there are a lot more embedded CPUs out there these days!"
Bogus Claim #2: I know the future, and it holds biochips.
"Ultimately"? Where does he get this prophetic knowledge?
This is nothing other than technological determinism. "What can be built, shall be built." Says who? If biochips happen, it will be because people first choose to research the technology, then implement it, then use it.
The imaginary gardens on my monitor often seem more real than the trees in my back yard. Most of the time I don't even notice the real trees.
This speaks volumes about Richard Thieme, but the trees in his backyard remain real regardless of whether or not he chooses to believe in them.
I suggest quite seriously that Mr. Thieme get up from his computer, walk into his back yard, and beat his head against the trunk of one of those trees, to refresh his mind on the reality of the natural world.
I will accept his claim of the "reality" of his imaginary gardens when he can serve me a tasty, nourishing, imaginary-garden-grown tomato from them.
We don't yet live in the world constructed by computers that way, but we will.
More technological determinism.
It's also patently false. None of us are going to live in any other world than the world we live in. Even Mr. Thieme, unless he figures out that tomato-growing trick, and how to relieve himself virtually in cyberspace.
Now, we may spend more and more of our time living in the world staring into computer monitors. This might be a good or a bad thing, and is certainly worth discussing rather than assuming. But it will not be a world "constructed by computers," it will be the world that has tomatoes and toilets in it, and it will be the world that either (1) just happened to coagulate out of a nebula about 4.5 billion years ago, or (2) was created by God, depending on which origin story you subscribe to.
The world created and disclosed by computing is becoming an essential dimension of who we believe ourselves to be. And who, therefore, we are.
Translation: Theime believes the internet is becoming an essential part of who he is. And he thinks that, because he believes it, it is so.
Of course, this overlooks the possibility that Theime might be mistaken about what is essential, or that it might be possible to be wrong about ourselves. Now, for a (hypothetical) new-agey, middle-aged journalist/writer this shouldn't be surprising. From a Christian priest, this is not quite blasphemy, but is definately apostasy. The essential dimension of who we are is found in our relationship with God, not in our relationship with a myriad of web pages. Either he's forgotten what he learned in seminary, or he should ask for his money back.
Most of us who love online life remember the first time we tumbled into the rabbit hole, falling headlong into a domain as magical as Alice's underground. I remember downloading the first browser around ten o'clock at night. When I next looked up it was four in the morning.
Stating The Obvious #3: "Look, the internet is an addictive time-waster!"
Yes, I loose track of time too when I'm surfing the internet or just this close to getting a program to work. Maybe I'm just dull, but I fail to see a cosmic significance in this fact.
That knowledge engine rearranged data into forms that coupled effortlessly with my perceptual apparatus. It was a world of digital symbols filled with projections of my self as it moved among them, thinking it was leaving the room and extending itself "out there." The exploration was really, of course, inside the consensual space we agree to hallucinate together.
Methinks he doth read Neuromancer too much.
I hate to break this to him, but a book is a collection of digital symbols that "couples effortlessly with the perceptual apparatus," and allows me to leave the room and extend myself "out there."
What is it about this domain that compels such a response? What seduces us to stay up all night, fooling around for hours as we build communal worlds or play with these symbols, using them as levers to turn gears in the "real" world?
Last I checked, while there is that hot tub in Ypsilanti, Michigan connected to the Web, there are very few levers turning gears in the "real" (why quoted?) world. Unless you mean psychological hot buttons that can be pushed. It seems quite a stretch to call email, Usenet postings, /. comments, or even a personal website "levers to turn gears."
(Levers don't turn gears anyway, gears or pulleys turn gears ...)
McMoneagle discovered that the world is not what he thought it was. He had to reinvent continuously the images he used as maps of reality as his psychic adventures exploded the consensual reality he had been taught to believe.
Statement Of The (Hopefully) Obvious #4: "The map is not the territory."
Anyone who is continually learning, who is growing in life, experiences the same "remapping" of reality as McMoneagle. Our maps get exploded as we learn that Mommy and Daddy aren't perfect, that there is no Santa Claus, that there are otherwise normal-seeming folks who believe in supply-side economics, etc.
What does this have to do with being online? Sure, this process can happen while you're logged on. It also happens when you're not, if you're living with your eyes open and your mind and spirit engaged.
The images of the world we internalize from life online also become obsolete each time we turn off the computer.
Horsefeathers.
Sure, it's theoretically possible for the entire look, feel, and content of the Web to change between now and the next time I log in. I understand the physicists also claim it's theoretically possible for all of the atoms of the chair I'm sittin in to tunnel Somewhere Else and for me to fall through it to the floor. I'm not worried much about either possibility.
Why? Well, why does every major browser have a bookmark feature? Could it be that there's enough stability in this online "world" that "landmarks" don't become obsolete every time?
I notice that Slashdot looks pretty much the same every time I visit, except for this week with Rob making so many changes. Even so, I expect (and am generally right) to find an article on "Changes to Slashdot" when the look and feel changes, to clue everyone in.
If everything I saw online became obsolete the second I turned my computer off, I'd throw it (or at least the modem) into the dumpster immediately, and stop wasting my time.
McMoneagle has difficulty talking about "reality" with people who have not experienced what he has. He has to build a modular interface that somehow connects both his experience and the experience of someone who has never gone diving.
Statement Of The Obvious #5: "People who have different life experiences will experience a 'communications gap' that needs to be bridged."
In the same way, building a computer interface that lets ordinary users couple with the many levels of the digital world is more than "usability." It is participation in a revolutionary act of mutual transformation.
Yes, but transformation into what?
McMoneagle's description of exploring the deeper waters of consciousness is a template for learning how to move with clear intentionality among the nested levels of symbols that fold into one another in the digital world.
This is simply backwards.
The "digital world" is, in general, a simplification of the real world. Anyone who can move with "clear intentionality" offline should be able to do so online as well. And I don't see much "nested symbolism" online -- symbols are generally a single level of indirection, with a one-to-one correspondance to what they represent. Consider "icons" (a word ripped from its religious root and stripped of most of its meaning). "Icons" are simply pushbuttons with pictographs. Contrast this with religious icons, which do contain "nested levels of symbols that fold into one another."
I have yet to see anything online that begins to approach the "exploring the deeper waters of consciousness" and "nested levels of symbolism" that is inherent in the Christian liturgy. Something that Thieme claims to have passing familiary with. I suspect the same is true of other human, offline systems of symbols that exist, but I'll leave it to those more familiar with those traditions to make the comparisons.
Remote viewing is a function of the intentionality of the viewer, not the so-called "physical" world. Nor is a computer network fully defined by chips, switches or code; the network is defined above all by the intentionality of the users.
If McMoneagle is more than a crank or deluded, then his remote viewing, though directed by "intentionality," must eventually ground itself in something outside of his intention. Otherwise, what's he viewing besides his own imagination?
Same thing with a network. First, the technological infrastructure must be there, and second, there must be real content out there, put into place by real people, or else all I am doing as a user of the network, no matter what my "intentionality," is staring at my navel. Or perhaps some other part of my anatomy.
We define ourselves as a spectrum of possibilities, choose one, and do it. The symbols we think we use as tools disappear, the nested levels built of those symbols collapse, and we see in that moment our responsibility for what we are building instead of pretending we're merely technicians or just along for the ride.
Up to the last paragraph, the iron determinism of technological advance and of a "new reality" has been trumpeted, and now all of a sudden we are supposed to see our "responsibility"?
This is nothing more than the television broadcasters' defense of "TV shows are crap because the public demands crap," dressed up in academic language and techno-mysticism and applied to the Internet.
Sorry, I'm neither impressed nor overcome with an longing to leave the real world for the virtual. In fact, planting a real garden sounds even better right now. And I'm even more eager for Sunday to get here -- it's Palm Sunday, and the nested levels of symbols are wonderful.
"very good writing"?? "very deep"?????
Well, it has an abundance of fluff and bluster, but have you tried to extract any *meaning* out of this article? This is a collection of "deep" words strung together in meaningless sequences. The guy doesn't actually say anything!
I think that this article has the potential to impress technical people (especially if they feel somewhat "inferior" to the post-modern intellectuals of the world who can talk in so much more sophisticated words), but to anyone who has done research or serious thinking about symbols, representations, and, heck, even alternate states of consciousness -- this is pure content-free handwaving.
I myself (having a fair amount of humanities background) can write pages of text like this with very little effort. And more, I bet I can write a Perl script that will generate similar texts which, with very little editing, would be of comparable quality.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.