Dawn of the New Everything: Jaron Lanier Brand New

Description: Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist (who was the main innovator in the field of virtual reality), visual artist, composer of contemporary classical music, and author. He explains in the Introduction to this 2017 book, virtual reality is one of the scientific, philosophical, and technological frontiers of our era. It is a means for creating comprehensive illusions that you’re in a different place… And yet it’s also the farthest-reaching apparatus for researching what a human being IS in terms of cognition and perception. Never has a medium been so potent for beauty and so vulnerable to creepiness. Virtual reality will test us. It will amplify our character more than other media ever have. Virtual reality is all these things and more.” He observes, “Some virtual reality freaks think that virtual reality will eventually become ‘better’ than the human nervous system, so that it wouldn’t make sense to try to improve it anymore… I don’t see things that way. One reason is that the human nervous system benefits from hundreds of millions of years of evolution and can tune itself to the quantum limit of reality in special cases already… When we think technology can surpass our bodies in a comprehensive way, we are forgetting what we known about our bodies and physical reality… the body is already tuned in as finely as anything can ever be, when it needs to be. There will always be circumstances in which an illusion rendered by a layer of media technology, no matter how refined, will be revealed to be a little clumsy in comparison to unmediated reality. But that’s not even the best reason to think that our simulations will not surpass our bodies. When confronted with high-quality virtual reality , we become more discriminating. virtual reality trains us to perceive better… Our brains are not stuck in place; they’re remarkably plastic and adaptive. We are not fixed targets, but creative processes.” He notes, “virtual reality lets you feel your consciousness in its pure form. There you are, the fixed point in a system where everything else can change. From inside virtual reality you can experience flying with friends, all of you transformed into glittering angels soaring above an alien planet encrusted with animate gold spires… Most technology reinforces the feeling that realty is just a set of gadgets, your brain and our phone and the cloud computing service all merging into one super brain… is the technology that instead highlights the existence of your subjective experience. It proves you are real.” (Pg. 56) He explains, “Broadly, ‘haptics’ means sensations that come from either sensor cells in the skin or in muscles or tendons---generally meaning sensations reported through the spinal cord instead of a dedicated nerve bundle between a sense organ and the brain… Haptics includes touch and feel, and how the body senses its own shape and motion, and the resistance of obstacles… Haptics is at the very least how you feel that a surface is hot, rough, pliant, sharp, or shaking---and how you sense stubbing a toe or lifting a weight… It is the pleasure of sex that made us all… It is the business end of violence.” He recalls, “My intuition was that drugs weren’t for me. Simple. Am not judging anyone else… Some people called me a liar. Supposedly I evidenced having ‘seen things and known things’ that could only be accessed through LSD… I was the only person around the scene who had not taken drugs, so maybe I was the baseline. Maybe drugs made people straighter… I never tried ayahuasca:a plant-based psychedelic, so I will reserve judgement about what it does. I will say that I have never seen evidence of psychic links between people who use it, and I have been around people using it more than a few times. So I walk the tightrope I often talk about… where if you fall off to the left, you’re superstitious, and if you fall off to the right you’re reductionist.” He enthuses, “The visceral realness of human presence within an avatar is the most dramatic sensation I have felt in .virtual reality Interactivity is not just a feature or a quality of virtual reality , but the natural empirical process at the core of experience. It is how we know life. It is life.” He muses, “A new wave of journalists are looking to spherical video with a utopian glint. Oh, how this reminds me of the old days. I used to predict that the intensity of spatial video capture would create peace on earth. Amplify empathy. People would really see the awfulness of violence, of war, and we would not be able to stomach it. Peace would ensue. We shall see. The more intense a communication technology is, the more intensely it can be used to lie.” He recalls, “Despite the feeling of guilt, the rise of the Web also felt miraculous. I used to wax rhapsodic about it in my lectures. The first time in history the millions of people had cooperated to do something not because of coercion, profit motive, or any influence other than the sense that the sense that the project was worthy. Well, actually in retrospect, there was and remains an excess of vanity as a motive, but even so; what a remarkable moment to support a tough of optimism about our species! If we could fill the Web out of thin air, maybe we could solve our big problems.” Lanier’s book goes WAY too “in detail” about his life than I cared to know; the account of his startup company is more interesting (including the photographs!), and his general comments and observations (such as those quoted above) are VERY interesting. Some will love this book, and others will find themselves skipping over sections.

Price: 8.5 USD

Location: Rochester, New York

End Time: 2024-12-13T15:37:28.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD