Summary: Week 2
This week we’ve been considering the themes of Being Human and Other Worlds (lifestream 04.10.2011 #5). Being somewhat of a gamer and virtual reality hobbyist, the notion of Other Worlds holds particular interest for me and seems to tie in well with the readings and discussions from last week. However my ramblings across the web while considering this topic have started to get me thinking about the nature of this reality and how we experience it. If all of our neural impulses are prompted by nothing more than electrical signals from our nervous system, then we are each of us living inside our own heads. Each of us is experiencing their own virtual reality and no doubt colouring it with the emotional or experiential baggage that defines us. When considered thus, we can actually make the astonishing claim that there is no such thing as one absolute definition of reality. Indeed the very reality that we experience can never be truly shared because the sharing must take place via our nervous systems. It’s almost analogous to the idea of different game play experiences due to graphics card irregularities or broadband speeds amongst gamers.
Considering all this, and if we really are just brains in meat vats (lifestream 01.10.2011 #1), experiencing the world through our senses (plus the technological prosthesis we attach to them, i.e. networks, monitoring software, information systems, etc), how can we ever hope to share a common culture, digital or otherwise? How can we be sure that our interpretation of anything is close enough to that which is experienced by another? How can we be sure that there even are other people? The unavoidable conclusion is that we cannot. But to admit to such feels almost like fatalism, and perhaps the only recourse is to swallow the blue pill, and stubbornly carry on creating and sharing in this (hopefully) common culture.
Some videos that have informed this contemplation:
What is real?
There is no spoon.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.