Virtual Reality:
Hey, my man Chris It's monday, the new school term has begun and I am listening to my swedish music, the sun is shining and I have time to answer to your last essay. What could be better than that? What you wrote expounding your original argument comes in the end to the old question whether knowledge or contentment is better. With all the ideas flooding our stupid and minor-capacity brains we have to choose what we want to expand further. In the future knowing exactly what you want to study might perhaps be more important than studying itself. Is it now better to know a lot and be sad because there is so much more to learn and what you learn makes you sad and a cynic OR is it better to know as little as possible and be content with that simply because you do not know more. I tend to the first one because I am already a cynic I guess and Sartre said "Du musst das Leben verachten, um es leben zu können" (or something like that). Although I do not fully agree with Sartre - for I love life - I think that being cynical helps you overcome bad things and incidents better and you can forget them better because you were already expecting the worst and could not be shocked. But I am off my lane now, back to duty.. You also said that development takes time and cannot be forced and I agree. But you must not see what is happening today as a forced development. Mankind will pick what it understands and drop what it does not understand, I do not think that the evolution of languages is speeded up, it is just now at a new heigth and there will be lows when the boom is over; which it will be ... for that I am sure.
You said a lot about the Filesharing topic so I just want to add some of my thoughts: You mentioned that Filesharing is replacing intellectual commerce, you might better have written intellectual exchange, for Filesharing is (still) free and not under the "pressure" of making money. However, I agree with you that it is absolutely fantastic. You remember our discussion about connecting our minds and the bionic interface? With Filesharing we can already get a feeling of the "everyone knows everything"-thing for we can exchange ideas and thoughts freely. The problem still is that the capacities we can exchange are very limited. The best fact about it is that in the moment it is free and you are right that sadly NAPSTER is coming back to the industry it has so long tried to be away from. I cannot agree with you that we only realize a song or a book. It is right that we only use impressions and environment and pre-texts but the act of reshaping is an act of geniality and worth being copyrighted. Sure, a lot of todays music is without soul and therefore not genial and a joke for example belongs to everybody and not to the person who has mentioned it first for jokes are common property (a court has said so) but there are things that must be copyrighted and that belong to the person who has made it. You are aiming at breaking down money-structures that are good to exist, little anarchist that you are. But that won't happen... (Not in the near future I think, huh?). Yes, Filesharing will bring back soul to our music but will people who make soul-music (you understand what I mean with that) still have the money to produce it? NO!! Making music consumes lots of money when you want to earn a living with it. It is not sure that the best music will be sold best as you can see with our video systems (Video 2000 against VHS) and computer systems (Windows against LINUX). You need money to make advertisements for your product and when you don't have enough money the other product, perhaps less in quality, will win. What saddens me is that filesharing-programs are already used to forward pervert or very illegal things. I haven't tried yet to get music from nazibands but I am sure you will get them if you want. There are also programs through which you can exchange movie-files etc. and these are already used mostly to exchange porno-files. This all saddens me a bit and underlines my theory that all good things can be turned into decadence..
But let me now come to an end with that and expand my views on our next topic. Of course I chose the second topic about virtual reality... aaah that is a topic I like. I begin: To what extent can virtual reality replace real experiences? In a while to one hundred percent I am sure. Let me expand on an example that happened to me. I once played System Shock, an egoshooter where a mighty KI got out of control and followed its own plans. This KI really was a genius, whenever I had prevented one of her evil plans (she was called SHODAN and female) she came up with another. I was only at the beginning aware of the fact that this KI was only programmed by the developers and then I was deeply drowned in the atmosphere of the game and got lost. When at the end I had killed SHODAN I stood with my fist before the monitor and shook it at her and then I realised that I really hated her. I hadn't slept well the two weeks I played the game and I felt a kind of relief having finished it. I had to play on and on until I had defeated her or I would not have been satisfied. This is to my mind a good example how computer games can evoke feelings in you. The problem now is: Of which kind are these emotions and I must confess that they are mostly of the "dark side". Undoubtedly the most common of feelings evoked is hate. Playing Counterstrike in the wrong environment leads to a lot of people yelling at each other, one feeling superior and one humiliated when one has killed the other. This is no good basis to start from. Yet there are also environments where gaming is seen as a sport and there it can have very positive effects trengthening the unity of the players and that too, when they are playing against each other. The second aspect is that in our ever faster world the games grow ever faster and you feel exhausted when you have played a certain time. There are not a lot of games where you could relax for a second. This contributes to "evil" feelings. It has been not often that when I played I laughed heartily but there still are some companies who make games for fun and not for adrenaline while I won't deny that some adrenaline is okay and also needed in a good game. The games need to make you feel a lot more diverse emotions when they want to be really good. That is where hopefully the games will go... Positive about games is the learning effect. Everyone who has played Counterstrike gets better reflexes and as a sideeffect knows the weapons in the movies :-). With me there is another thing. I can sit and play the whole day the most stupid game just to get it through. Your patience grows and your WILL to play on and what could be better than a strong will in these times? I must return to virtual reality and leave the games for virtual reality has some more positive things on it: Let's assume a person in a wheelchair. This person has never walked and could via virtual reality feel how it is, or a blind person could see, a deaf person hear. But for this, the technology has to evolve a lot more yet. Everything we get from the outside is transformed to electricity and stimulates a nerve. If we are able to stimulate the nerve where there is no "receptor" to the outer world (as in the wheelchair example) virtual reality might in the end overtake reality. Have you seen MATRIX? The same thing could happen. And from there the step to loading our brains in a computer is not very far but that still is very utopian... Let's conclude: I am optimistic. The computer industry develops games with a much higher amount of atmosphere and reality and, despite my contra-arguments, I think they're heading in the right direction. Virtual reality will be able to replace human experiences when all possibilities are calculated. The step, however, to become a virtual being is a step everyone should have a big problem to decide. This could be a new topic whether a virtual existence or a real existence would be better but perhaps there is not a lot to be said about it for it's just too utopian. I am looking forward to your answer for I am really interested in what you have to say about it.
cu Tef