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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
"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.