Month: April 2015

We now know that the people of around 40,000 years ago that are commonly known as Cro-Magnon were, genetically, human. Yet we know relatively little about their culture.

We have learned from the physical record that they buried their dead, that they practiced decorative arts, and perhaps that they played music. Their physiognomy indicates a fully formed capability for speech.

I wonder, thinking about those people from so long ago, what they would make of us, and we of them, were we to encounter each other. When I see busy New Yorkers walking down the street, dressed in their fashionable clothes, obliviously checking their texts, I cannot help but think that perhaps the differences are superficial.

We are, I suspect, just a shadow’s distance away from who we were 40,000 years ago. Our brains, our bodies, our emotions, our need for love, for laughter and connection, there is a good chance that these have not changed one whit.

As we boldly stride forth into the future, hoping to design shiny new media for the human of tomorrow, it might be good to keep this in mind.

It has been pointed out many times that movies are somewhat like dreams. They contain sudden shifts in time and place, impossible points of view, and a sort of eerily voyeuristic quality in which you feel present yet not present at the same time.

Of course there are many differences between a film and a dream. For one thing, dreams don’t have frames. There is no rectangle around the outside of a dream to delineate its boundaries. When you dream, you are completely inside the dream world. Wherever you look, the dream surrounds you.

Which might be one reason so many people are embracing virtual reality, now that it finally appears to be ready for practical wide-spread deployment. We all dream. As far as we can tell, people always have. Dreaming is one of the deepest traits we share with our fellow humans.

Perhaps the tug of fascination felt by so many toward virtual reality not is not the pull of the new or exotic, but of the deeply familiar.

Sally’s comment on my post yesterday raised an important point. The wonderful conversation I had yesterday was not so much characterized by talking, as it was by listening.

It was one of those conversations that consisted of each of us trying to clear our minds entirely of outside thoughts and distractions, listening very intently to what the other person was trying to say next, and then making sure that our own reply was a response to what they had actually said.

This is not something that I can do effortlessly. I need to focus completely to do it properly, and even then I don’t always get it right. But I usually know when I am getting it wrong, because the element of surprise is missing.

To paraphrase Alan Swann: “Talking is easy, listening is hard.” If you are talking to somebody, and you are not at all surprised by what they say in return, then there is a good chance that you haven’t really heard them.

Anyone who has played the game The SIMS is familiar with those little bubbles floating over the heads of characters in the game, showing their energy level, happiness, fatigue, hunger, and various other mental statistics. Eventually, if technology progresses in certain directions, we might be able to see similar bubbles floating over the heads of people in the real world.

But I’m thinking today about something a little less obvious. I spent several hours today in deep conversation with someone who always gives me energy. After our discussions, I generally feel wonderful — more open, more aware, more engaged in the human condition, basically more alive.

We all know people whose presence increases our mental and emotional energy, and other people who have the opposite effect. Given that we each only get a certain number of days to live on this planet, clearly a good general rule is to spend a lot of time with that first group of people, and and not so much with the second group.

Perhaps, as machine learning algorithms continue to advance, we might one day see bubbles over the heads of other people telling us how much energy we would give each other. In the long run, these little floating “cheat sheets” might help us each to live fuller and deeper lives.

On the other hand, maybe none of this is necessary. Sometimes I know, within the first second after meeting someone, which category they will fall into. And I suspect I would get it right pretty much all the time if I learned to listen better to my inner voice.

And that’s probably not something I need a computer for.

Having been required to navigate several awkward interpersonal encounters in the last few weeks, I think I can distill, into a few words, an appropriate response to such conflicts:

If the disagreement hinges on the other party asking you to compromise your deeply held principles, then never apologize. This is very important.

If the disagreement does not involve any compromise of your deeply held principles, then give in immediately, accept blame, apologize profusely. Send flowers and chocolate.

The questions I’ve been asking the last two days were intended to get at something quite specific: The evolving relationship between advancing media technology and our experience of reality.

For a very long time, we didn’t need to think too much about the choice between “media” and “reality”. They were clearly different from each other in so many ways. Reading a novel is very different from making love to one’s partner. Each of these experiences brings something to your life that the other clearly does not.

For the first half century of the computer age, interactive media was, on a visceral level, no match for reality itself. The touch or caress of another human being, the deep emotions shared when two people look into each others’ eyes, there were the province of reality.

Sure, we would play our video games, watch our high definition movies, immerse ourselves in one cyber-enabled fantasy or another, but at the end of the day, we understood that it was all make believe. The real human being lying right next to us has the power to touch our souls that goes beyond the reach of mere technology.

But what if we are nearing a cusp? What if the intensely vivid quality once reserved for physical reality begins to seep into virtual shared experience? I’m not saying that this will happen any time soon, but I suspect that it may well happen in our life times.

And when it does, we may need to rethink a lot of our assumptions.

Suppose we start from the point Sharon made yesterday in her comment, and iterate from there:

Suppose you could wander freely throughout the world, with no restrictions on you at all, in the company of just one companion, whom you really like. The two of you would be totally free to explore the world, but without other people.

In the other extreme, suppose the two of you spent your entire life in a room together. Your interactions with other people would be virtual, pure exchanges of information. You both could have a great variety of friends, unlimited social connections, unbounded intellectual stimulation. But all from within that room.

If you had to choose one of these scenarios, which would you choose?

As I wrote yesterday’s post about walls, I realized that there are some complicated questions here, centering on the nature of freedom.

Suppose you could wander freely throughout the world, with no restrictions on you at all, but you were completely alone, with nobody else there. You would be totally free. But what would that freedom be worth?

In the other extreme, suppose you spent your entire life in a room. Your interactions with other people would be virtual, pure exchanges of information. You could have a great variety of friends, unlimited social connections, unbounded intellectual stimulation. But all from within that room.

Which would you choose?

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
      — Robert Frost

Time spent in shared virtual reality has changed my view of walls.

Until now, I always thought of a physical wall as something that creates limits. You walk up to a wall, and then you can go no further. Specifically, a wall prevents you from getting to what is on the other side of the wall.

If you are wearing a virtual reality headset and you walk up to a physical wall, it is still true that you cannot go through the wall. But the meaning of the wall is now different.

After all, why do you want to get to the other side of a wall? Because there is some place out there that you are interested in visiting, perhaps somebody you want to see or talk to, or some event you wish to attend.

But in VR, all of the meanings become scrambled. You can see people, talk to them, attend events, wherever you are. A wall — I mean a physical, immutable wall in the real world — becomes not a barrier, but merely a guidepost.

You walk up to that wall, you see it and feel it and touch it, and then you say “Ah, this is useful. I will use this to navigate, to help me orient myself on my way to where I want to go next. Maybe to visit a colleague. Or to drop in on a neighbor.”

After all, as Robert Frost once said, good fences make good neighbors. 😉

I’ve been trying to make some sort of excuse in my mind for Indiana. I don’t like to believe that people are just plain evil.

I have been listening hard to Governor Pence, parsing his words, trying to be fair, to see the other side, to make sense out of his statements that this law has just been blown out of proportion.

But hell, I come from a Jewish family. We’ve been here before, and this kind of “logic” is way too familiar.

Excuses are made, explanations are offered, people want you to see their side. They don’t want you to think they are being evil.

But in the end there is no excuse, and there is no religious exemption for discrimination.

This is just evil.