View Full Version : Hijacking Experience


heliocentric
09-25-07, 04:22 PM
Without experience, you’re quite literally nowt - ‘I think therefore I am’.
Experience allows us to function as the dogged survivors we tend to romantically think of ourselves as.
We use our experience to synthesise reality into a sub-divided chronologically driven survival-matrix, converting raw reality into a huge smelly, noisy, blinding phenomenal-factory of potential resources.

In fact if evolutional psychologists are to be believed the only reason we even have consciousness and phenomenal experiences in the first place is so we can effectively recognise and exploit the natural resources around us.
These days however (unless your name is Ray Mears) instead of using experience to exploit the available natural resources. We spend the vast majority of our time plumbing the available artificial resources of tabulated and archived information - lacing daily experience with information we believe will give us the edge tomorrow.

As a species now forever hooked on perverting and stretching the capabilities of our own minds. We’re probably no different from the programmer ‘hacking’ the software or the musician ‘circuit-bending’ the instrument in order to realise new possibilities beyond the intended purpose.

The pioneer circuit bender Reed Ghazala’s philosophy of circuit bending can in fact be applied just as easily to our periodic data-mining as it can to the fringe art of diode and transistor swapping.
“The role of hardware hacking in EM is - evolution. It is the force of speculation upon constants, a survival tactic as well as a special poetry. Bending the norm equals progress, and that is life.”

In other words – he who sees the new possibility in the hardware takes the next leap in evolution.
And as a species we’ve been riding the momentum of that high-jump ever since we first learnt to use our vocal chords to express ideas.......

full article below
http://culturespam.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/hijacking-experience

:)

Dan Dennett's Beard
09-29-07, 12:43 AM
interesting.
I wonder (as you say later on in the article) if you could infact use smell to create a visceral association with an event or experience. I suppose it's certainly possible.

store
09-29-07, 04:18 AM
Could the way forward in this revolution be chip implants in the brain controlling our senses.
but not allowing us to be controlled .

heliocentric
09-29-07, 12:48 PM
Could very well be, or more likely just direct genetic engineering.

I suppose once the technology is upto speed the skies the limit, its just a case of how big you dare to dream and all that.

Having dual or parallel 'selves' has always seemed attractive to me.
Some people claim now be able to think about two subjects simultaniously, although what evidence there actually is for it is still unclear.
But certainly one of the biggest limits of human experience is that we have to filter everything through a single 'self'. Which puts a huuuge cap on the amount of data you can piggyback onto daily experience.

That's projecting quite far into the future.
Conquering sleep, which obviously swallows up a phenomenal chunk of our lives, would actually be the simplest method right now to cram more information into our natural life-spans.
And contrary to popular belief, lack of sleep or dream time doesnt make you 'go insane' people who dont naturally produce the chemical involved in sleeping (Orexin i believe) litterally never sleep and lead perfectly well adjusted and full lives.

sisyphus__
09-29-07, 03:10 PM
Quite well said I didn't read the full OP.