reply to Parker's note · Jul 8, 04:18 PM
| Original note can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=68630395152 “You see, there’s something to be said for someone who can deliberately cause harm to themselves. … Only those who are willing to tear themselves apart to overcome reality itself have succeeded in psychological evolution. That’s our greatest strength, the ability to completely ignore the world around us. … [O]ur psychotic nature is what makes us stronger. Only when you’re confident that you could kill yourself and others for no reason whatsoever are you truly alive.” Welcome to VideoDrome. Long live the New Flesh! “Technology may prove helpful with this. I can’t wait to see a virtual reality. One in which we can take pain, experience death, and have no physical repercussions.” I’ve always had a bit of a flinch reaction to the concept of virtual reality. We live in a virtual reality right now, as does every animal with the simplest nervous system. When a stimulus activates the ligand paired to the receptor of a sensory neuron, objective reality ends and virtual reality begins. The instant something in the external world is represented by ionic impulses in an organism’s neurons, that is the instant we are talking about virtual reality. You see this text not as it is, but as it is represented in your head, unfaithfully, after a long chain of ligand binding events, action potentials, and downstream processing. The fact that these symbols are being converted into a voice in your head is one of the highest evidences of the virtual reality you are experiencing – these letters mean absolutely nothing. Your brain synthesizes a meaning for them. This is virtual reality. “In the end, I hope you’ve learned to hold a bit more respect for the society emerging from the internet. Here YOU are, on facebook, a social networking site, slowly being detached from reality as you read this. Slowly pretending you’re hearing my words, though it’s nothing more than a quantum-electrical effect. … This is your world right now. … Do not confuse it with reality, but do recognize that it has a major part of it. You can’t suck water, but you sure can get close. I remotely manipulate the reality of your computer screen, making letters appear on it, and one day I may be able to infect… or affect, your entire world. Words and images for now, but what if it becomes everything you see and feel? Scary. A shift from one world into another is upon us.“ I have vast respect for the society, or the organism, rather, that is emerging as a result of humanity’s exponential increase in real time communication. As I have said, the sole function of a nervous system is to create a fluid virtual reality in which an organism may integrate input and formulate a response prior to executing an action. Now that your brain is synthesizing the input for my virtual reality’s integration, we are moving ever closer to the point where we will function as a single organism rather than as fragmented and isolated consciousnesses. This is easier to comprehend if you think of it as a natural progression up the tier of complexity. On the lowest level is a simple quantitative representation of reality within a nervous system, where, for example, there may be a 1:1 ratio between stimulus intensity and action potential frequency or some other simple mechanism for representing data input within the nervous system. One level up incorporates various interneuronal circuits to analyze this input and attempt to reconcile it into a consistent view of reality. The principal is the same, only instead of the external world supplying input, it’s a matter of neural circuits supplying input to other circuits. One level above that, and meta-analysis arises. At this level the interneuronal circuits feed into a higher layer, which keeps watch over their analysis, adjusting how the organism views the world and exerting some conscious control over the operations of the mind via modulation of feedback loops between the various circuits and layers. That is the level humans have now. Earlier, when discussing the ability to control ones own perception of reality, we were talking about mastering this level.The superorganism to which I am alluding is an extension of this pattern, in which the neural circuits doing the feedback just happen to sit inside other people’s heads. We do it already using primitive communication. The internet, however, is facilitating the evolution of true superorganismal behavior on humanity’s part. Think of the progression into web 2.0 – people are increasingly demanding the ability to share their experiences and thoughts in real time with everyone they know, and mutually want to share in the experiences of others. I’m talking about a hyperextension of this phenomenon. As more and more sensory information can be shared, as thoughts can be more instantly and accurately communicated, as bandwidth and speed improve, it will seem less and less like individuals communicating, and more like the communication of neural circuits within a single entity. This would be a good time to review Sperry’s research. I have a good blog about it that you can find on here, but I’ll give a condensed version. He severed the corpus callosum of cats (and later people) to see what happens when the left and right hemispheres of the brain can’t communicate. He then blind folded one eye of the cat and taught it to respond to a shape. When the blindfold was switched, all training was lost. The two hemispheres of the brain, when severed, behave exactly like two indipendant individuals. The internet is a reverse of this experiment, constructing an artificial corpus callosum between individuals, allowing data flow between lumps of grey matter that were previously isolated. |
— Alexander J. Hartman
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