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RealiTTY
Project: Polytopia
Project: Polytopia
RealiTTY is a series of dense, insightful media meditations on language, information, reality, technology and transhumanism by Miles Hingston.
Introduction
I hate to formalize things in this way, but this material is not designed to appease academic or scientific types necessarily because I choose not compete within the narrow boxes that they want to place people in, this will be discussed further in the next section. The nature of this material is purely speculative, but it does assume atleast some familiarity with the concepts described here. At the very least you do need to be open minded enough to challenge your perception of reality and entertain new ideas, a closed mind is a decaying mind.
To investigate anything is to admit prejudice, if I seek to prove the reality of my beliefs to other people then I betray my own doubts. To have an opinion on something requires me to overlook an infinite number of possibilities and to separate myself into the marginal and relative realm of rational thought.
As a final disclaimer, this material is in no way intended to be comprehensive and/or complete as it is very much a creative work and should be considered preliminary to your own further investigation. Information is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, do what you want with it.
Information and Simulated Reality
Digital physics sees everything as information, it provides a different way of describing what is happening at the quantum level. Seeing as the universe appears to be composed of elementary particles whose behaviour can be completely described by the quantum switches they undergo that implies that the universe as a whole can be described by bits. Every state is information and every change of state is a change in information. From this it can be said that the history of the universe is in effect a huge and ongoing quantum computation.
The Shape of Information
Information is like a "meta-substance" if you like (meta meaning beyond or above), yet it is embedded in the metaphor we choose to describe it by. Consider that the subatomic particles and quantum processes which scientists describe are what shamanistic and ancient cultures would consider spirits and deities.
Thoughts and Illusions
Think of the human brain like a radio transmitter/receiver, the brain is tuned in to a small spectrum of reality. It then further filters this in order to make our reality seem more congruent. My own experiences with psychedelics lead me to consider that there are different frequencies which the brain can tune in to and in doing so it is possible to pick up other "alien" realities, after all, all dimensions are occupying the same space. It is impossible for us to know an "objective reality", we are in a very real sense encased within a bubble, a cocoon, our nervous system is a buffer into the void of ultimate mystery, even science has it's limits in what it can explain phenomenologically.
Language and Reality
Saying that everything is information isn't very helpful for people who like to believe that there is a physical reality out there, it means essentially that the World is an abstraction, malleable by our interpretation and merely a collection of prevailing beliefs. Information as a linguistic object is a rather undiscerning metaphor. Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination, yet it is much more pervasive in everyday life than most people assume. Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
Symbolic Representation
Robert Anton Wilson once remarked that "we are trapped in linguistic constructs, the only reality we know is the one we manufacture". We are immersed within a culture of symbols, as Gothe said "everything is a symbol", this woeful abstraction and sheathing of the reality destroys the outer World and fills the inner World with emptiness. The more involved this internal representational system is, the more distanced we are from the reality around us. Other connections and cognitive perspectives are inhibited and substituted by the alienation of symbolic representation.
Meme Morphing Machines
A meme is a cognitive or behavioural pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one, because of this they are often called "mind viruses". For example looking both ways before you cross the road is a meme. In general memes do not work on your rational mind but rather they affect your unconscious, emotionally entangled, decision-making processes. Another way of thinking about memes is as ideas or neoligisms that distribute themselves through a population. In a very real sense we are a collection of other peoples' minds. Memes become the entrenched thoughts and behavioural characteristics of our personalities. Since ideas get fixed in our minds they become our reality, often for our entire lives.
Introduction
Reality is a battle of opposing metaphors playing out/in the canvas of the collective mindscape. — Miles Hingston (The Author)
I hate to formalize things in this way, but this material is not designed to appease academic or scientific types necessarily because I choose not compete within the narrow boxes that they want to place people in, this will be discussed further in the next section. The nature of this material is purely speculative, but it does assume atleast some familiarity with the concepts described here. At the very least you do need to be open minded enough to challenge your perception of reality and entertain new ideas, a closed mind is a decaying mind.
To investigate anything is to admit prejudice, if I seek to prove the reality of my beliefs to other people then I betray my own doubts. To have an opinion on something requires me to overlook an infinite number of possibilities and to separate myself into the marginal and relative realm of rational thought.
To arrive at the truth once in your life you have to rid yourself of all the opinions that you have received and reconstruct anew from the foundation, all the systems of your knowledge. — René Descartes
As a final disclaimer, this material is in no way intended to be comprehensive and/or complete as it is very much a creative work and should be considered preliminary to your own further investigation. Information is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, do what you want with it.
Information and Simulated Reality
Digital physics sees everything as information, it provides a different way of describing what is happening at the quantum level. Seeing as the universe appears to be composed of elementary particles whose behaviour can be completely described by the quantum switches they undergo that implies that the universe as a whole can be described by bits. Every state is information and every change of state is a change in information. From this it can be said that the history of the universe is in effect a huge and ongoing quantum computation.
The Shape of Information
Information is like a "meta-substance" if you like (meta meaning beyond or above), yet it is embedded in the metaphor we choose to describe it by. Consider that the subatomic particles and quantum processes which scientists describe are what shamanistic and ancient cultures would consider spirits and deities.
Thoughts and Illusions
Think of the human brain like a radio transmitter/receiver, the brain is tuned in to a small spectrum of reality. It then further filters this in order to make our reality seem more congruent. My own experiences with psychedelics lead me to consider that there are different frequencies which the brain can tune in to and in doing so it is possible to pick up other "alien" realities, after all, all dimensions are occupying the same space. It is impossible for us to know an "objective reality", we are in a very real sense encased within a bubble, a cocoon, our nervous system is a buffer into the void of ultimate mystery, even science has it's limits in what it can explain phenomenologically.
Language and Reality
Saying that everything is information isn't very helpful for people who like to believe that there is a physical reality out there, it means essentially that the World is an abstraction, malleable by our interpretation and merely a collection of prevailing beliefs. Information as a linguistic object is a rather undiscerning metaphor. Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination, yet it is much more pervasive in everyday life than most people assume. Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
Symbolic Representation
Robert Anton Wilson once remarked that "we are trapped in linguistic constructs, the only reality we know is the one we manufacture". We are immersed within a culture of symbols, as Gothe said "everything is a symbol", this woeful abstraction and sheathing of the reality destroys the outer World and fills the inner World with emptiness. The more involved this internal representational system is, the more distanced we are from the reality around us. Other connections and cognitive perspectives are inhibited and substituted by the alienation of symbolic representation.
Meme Morphing Machines
A meme is a cognitive or behavioural pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one, because of this they are often called "mind viruses". For example looking both ways before you cross the road is a meme. In general memes do not work on your rational mind but rather they affect your unconscious, emotionally entangled, decision-making processes. Another way of thinking about memes is as ideas or neoligisms that distribute themselves through a population. In a very real sense we are a collection of other peoples' minds. Memes become the entrenched thoughts and behavioural characteristics of our personalities. Since ideas get fixed in our minds they become our reality, often for our entire lives.
Wed, Aug 10, 2011 Permanent link
Categories: collective intelligence, memetics, information, semantics, language, computation, complexity
Sent to project: Polytopia
Categories: collective intelligence, memetics, information, semantics, language, computation, complexity
Sent to project: Polytopia
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