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wolven7I've often lamented that people are often incapable of or unwilling to understand that that which they can do in the imagination they can bring to "reality," but today I'm sturck with the question of Why? We are so willing to let our conceptions do fantastical things, to take myriad twists and turns in the service of the things which we use to govern our everyday lives, but we can't approach them immediately? And these things are, themselves, blurred combinations of thought and matter.
To understand the notion of digitised matter, think of the physicality of sound converted into discrete packets of information, read as light, encoded into plastic, decoded and read by light, and turned back into sound. Think of CDs. Think of MP3s. Think of what I am doing, right now. I am typing. As I type, I hit keys, with my fingers, and there is a long, understandable chain of conversion whereby these actions are converted into what you are or will be reading. Every day we do this. Every time we sit down at a computer or swipe a bus pass, or access our phone's contact lists, or think about things.
So when we do things that seemingly defy physics, or causality, or logic, creating paradoxes of thought and meaning, and we use those paradoxes to better access... Phones. The Internet. Computer networks. Why is that okay?
But if someone confronted you with the brute force expression of those, in the physical, I Touch It With My Hands "reality," so many would balk. Why?
Damn things.
To understand the notion of digitised matter, think of the physicality of sound converted into discrete packets of information, read as light, encoded into plastic, decoded and read by light, and turned back into sound. Think of CDs. Think of MP3s. Think of what I am doing, right now. I am typing. As I type, I hit keys, with my fingers, and there is a long, understandable chain of conversion whereby these actions are converted into what you are or will be reading. Every day we do this. Every time we sit down at a computer or swipe a bus pass, or access our phone's contact lists, or think about things.
So when we do things that seemingly defy physics, or causality, or logic, creating paradoxes of thought and meaning, and we use those paradoxes to better access... Phones. The Internet. Computer networks. Why is that okay?
But if someone confronted you with the brute force expression of those, in the physical, I Touch It With My Hands "reality," so many would balk. Why?
Damn things.
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Just sent this to dad.
Date: 2010-09-09 03:25 pm (UTC)As to the why, I think the disconnect is one of the immediacy itself. Very few people would be willing to fly if airplanes were made of unbreakable glass (yes, those few would think it was totally rockin', but they'd be few). The fact that you are in the sky can be deeply unsettling. A better example: our country's at war, and most people are more or less okay with this. But some dude comes through your front door with a pipe and things are very not okay.
We have a self-defense child-brain, and that brain 1) declares The Unknown dangerous and 2) ignores most of what it can't see. In my opinion, that brain is the one causing your problem.
Re: Just sent this to dad.
Date: 2010-09-10 12:01 am (UTC)