Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

i want the sunglasses that make only girls under 30 appear naked. those x-ray ones i bought from a comic book for 1.25 don't work...

In these nerve-wracking times, I find myself frequently wishing for a pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.

/m

David, I don't think we as far as you think. I've visited this topic of "Augmented Reality" quite a bit on my website.

This will require the advancement of several things - precise location-aware devices using a combination of GPS, RFID and other radio sensors, increased graphical processing power available in a wearable device (a Teraflop by 2010 would be sufficient), a P2P decentralized repository of images and video data streams that can be composted to form a seamless real-time overlay hi-resolution image of what you are already seeing. Finally, with a combination of sophisticated imagine tools (like photoshop), this overlay image could be morphed any way you like it - and all in real time.

So yes,you could set up running filters, and even call it the 'Peter Max' Filter, and everywhere you go, things look like a Peter Max Painting.

When?

By 2015 at the latest.

Dude, we're there. Next time you're at Sunglass Hut check out the Peter Max-approved designer lines Peyote, Psilocybin and LSD.

Don't believe the universe-as-computer hype. Wetware rules.

This is a great topic to show how divergent our expectations re. near-future tech are. For me, Paul's explanation sounds good today, but will probably look a little primitive by 2007.

And as for "Don't believe the universe-as-computer hype. Wetware rules" ... dude, what lasting, significant differences between wetware and hardware do you foresee lasting beyond your lifetime?

E.g: last month, i took a rather strong dose of psilocybin and went to the Stedelijk (Amsterdam's main modern art museum). The visuals were beyond sublime, but what really made the experience rock was how thoroughly me mates and i had googled ourselves up for the experience: we had the manifestos of Kandinsky and Mondrian, and a thousand other bits of history and truth, allowing us to constellate a glass bead game that drew in other visitors and led to one of those hours-long group experiences of deep unity and love.

My point: without our google-work, i think the trip would not only not have been ecstatic, but may have even gone bad -- confronting that much tortured intensity with fungalized wetware without any net-facilitated 'celestial navigation' could be hazardous to mental health.

Back in Seattle, a painter-friend berated me for resorting to shrooms to "see the image alive, as it was for the painter while creating it." Now there's the real 'wetware-only' argument.

What significant differences between flesh and hardware do I foresee lasting beyond my lifetime? Funny you should put it that way since I think the answer is: Me. And you. Flesh isn't hardware running software. It's, well, alive.

That doesn't mean that there's no physical component to life and thought. Quite the contrary. So psychedelics don't prove anything in this regard.

So, here's a question for you: Can you see how, say, Picasso's paintings looked to him if you don't speak Spanish?

Dave, the concept of hardware as you know it doesn't have long to live. Technology will submerge into nature (or push us into super-nature), and sooner than we think. Flesh is matter running cosmic software (actually, matter is spacetime pixelated by cosmic software).

For me, the fact you mention that life and thought is at least partly physical, e.g. that psychedelics (or trauma) can so alter mind and senses, underscores how dependent we are on a life-matrix to exist as 'you' and 'me.' Our sense of the seperateness of ourselves and our works is also a concept about to become history. Where do we think all this googling is leading us, anyway?

I love your Picasso question... similar questions came up over beers recently, starting with the old saw that cubism began when Picasso brought tribal masks back from Africa. But to answer:

The relationship of seeing Picasso's work as he saw it to speaking Spanish is this: neither Spanish (nor any languages save perhaps Sanskrit) nor Picasso's works are direct, finished, complete. Spanish, a Picasso canvas, math -- all are placeholders in a massive project of convergence. Wyeth speaks beautifully of how his paintings are never what he originally saw and tried to encode on canvas.

Because we come after him, and because we can google, we have the possibility to see, perhaps even to feel, more in a Picasso than he himself could.

must ... put on ... Filter's version of "Trip Like I Do" ... ahhhhhh, better.

With judgment clouded by powerful envy of myles' museum style, I nevertheless cannot see any meaningful convergence between w/w & h/w in the offing. It's not a storage and speed problem. Granted that we may someday be able to sample sensory data along all five axes (contra today's audio-visual two), it does not follow that downloading the digitized sensorium of Picasso's consciousness gives us access to his experience. Digitizing sense data, which we might just be around to wave our canes at, is after all just Dolby x.y with smell-o-toucharround. Great for porn, but not the "new flesh" of David Cronenberg's "Videodrome."

I think the universe-as-computer trope is guilty of pretending data equals experience. Living is certainly part sensorium, and that part can perhaps be reduced to fungible bits. But living systems are also intentional - they strive to stay alive - and the experience of living lives in the webs between sense and intention. I can see better h/w simulating the wetware sensorium with arbitrary precision, tantamount to convergence. But about eros and thanatos, the residues of intention, we are far less wise.

Picasso's art was inextricably bound up with his personal experience of love and death in some holographic relation to his sense data (i.e., memory). This, I would argue, we are not close to modeling or understanding, let alone digitizing. On the contrary, every sentence devoted to universe-as-computer rhetoric diminishes our appreciation of messy wet stuff.

myles' Wyeth quote says it: even that artist's prodgious technical skills could not suffice to encode what he "originally saw", i.e., experienced. Likewise, myles', DW's and my experiences of "Guernica" are not only not greater - by dint of our coming later and having access to the record - than the painter's, they are not even commensurate with Picasso's experience, or for that matter with each other. No amount of googling or Berlitz or blogging will dissolve those wet walls - though we honor Art by trying.

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Ohmigod this is the best ...
I want you to trip like I do.
Can't you / Can't you trip like I do?
Can't you / Can't you trip like I do?

NICE Filter quote! Reminds of all the times i've tried to help bad trippers 'flip their trips' (which, in a gentler way, is happening every day now)

Thanks for the sweet reason, GB. I just don't buy it - i mean, i can't take any apparent technological form at face value these days. Are Googling, Berlitz, and blogs end-products, in any sense full and complete expressions? Or are they temporary tools for a certain stage in the building of something more?

Nature is building something through us. We think we know what we're building and what it's for (with our life-work as well as our tech-work), but then the frame jumps, the values flip, and we get yet another big surprise

Your points about eros, thanatos, and the irreducible soul of natural life are gospel to me as well - i'm as anti-Moravec as i assume you are. It's not that i don't believe in the wetware - it's that i don't believe in hardware or 'computers' as anything but a brief and ephemeral stage of wet evolution. Eros and thanatos have plans for our imagineering that we haven't imagined. Social revolution is about to go asymptotic the way tech has. Wiener's 'human use of human beings' hasn't really started yet

Data does not equal experience, true. My point about being able to understand a Picasso more than he could is based on my sense that personal experiences (and, in fact, persons) are not complete in themselves, but part of a larger process. As Life evolves, dimensionality of experience expands. The meaning of the Past not only changes, it becomes progressively more meaningful. This increase in the meaning of experience is what generates moral (biophilic)behavior. It's not that we, as individuals, can understand Picasso better. It's that there's more understanding of everything available - not just in our artifacts, but in our selves

If i worked in tech right now, i'm sure i'd have to accept the limits you've circumscribed. Just tell me this (taking a cue from Julian Jaynes): how do you think the hologram of biological memory evolves?