Saturday, October 16, 2010

Virtual Reality

Kate Distin.  The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment.  Cambridge University Press, 2005.  ISBN: 0521606276.

Reading Distin after Lotman and Uexkull drove home the idea that we all live in in two worlds.  One of these is almost completely outside our ken: we cannot see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it, or even think about it really (except to think that it exists).  The other is knowable: we can see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it, and think it.  The first world is the "real" world.  The second world is a sensory projection (the human equivalent of the self-generated universe of Uexkull's tick).  The first world becomes intelligible to us only as our senses receive impressions that it projects into the second world, where we can feel them.

How does the mind fit into all of this?  It provides a holding place for sensory data, a kind of personal library where sensory impressions are recorded for consultation and comparison.  Over time, it accumulates enough information to help us "see" the second world coherently.  (Babies just experience stuff without knowing what they experience, while older children have an idea about what it is that they are experiencing, how it will respond to specific actions, etc.)  Distin describes this process as the acquisition of memes, which bind together in the mind to form a complete map of everything we experience (see, hear, touch, smell, taste, think).  These memes bind to one another into complexes (A goes with B goes with C, and so on) of information, creating a world-map we use to navigate through the virtual reality that our senses project.

All world-maps are "deficient" in some way, because none of them sees everything from every available point of view: this observable relativity is what makes it possible for us to realize that the first world, the world we cannot know, exists.  So no meme or meme-complex, no idea or ideology, is ever sufficient to tell anyone all he or she needs to know about reality, which is larger than the mind's ability to grasp (exceeding the capacity of the entire human sensory apparatus).  Confronted with infinite reality, our human world-maps are no more omniscient than that of Uexkull's tick.  The most we can ever do is conceive provisionally correct ideas: we cannot know all there is.

7 comments:

  1. The metaphor that comes to my mind by way of understanding the above-described concept is one of religion & its relation to God. God (whatever a person perceives him/her/it/them to be) would be the "real world," and religion would be the ideology or meme-complex held by a person or group as a means of understanding the world (God). No religious doctrine is quite the same as another in its understanding, and none can really be totally right or complete.

    ...Am I on the right track, or is my metaphor waaaay off? At any rate, I admit I have never thought about how something as mundane as the world I inhabit (or, at least, the small corner of it) could still be "unknowable": at least, I haven't ever thought about it quite this way. I find it fascinating, and shall have to roll it around in my head for a few days.

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  2. Kirsti, I think your metaphor is fine. What I am arguing for (practically) is a change in what it means to "know" -- from my perspective, there is no absolute knowledge (for human beings, anyway).

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  3. What is an "absolute" knowledge? A trick question, since if it doesn't exist one cannot know what it is. But, pain, surely, is as close to an absolute as we can get...what I mean is, when one is strapped to a rickety table, somewhere just barely south of the border, and when some scruffy drug-runner is sawing one's arm off so as to satisfy god knows what vendetta and/or hatred of tourists--well, in this case surely we can claim a kind of absolute, namely that any otherwise healthy human will come to know intolerable pain at this point. In any case, aren't these all word games, Joseph? It seems to me that most of these matters can easily be talked of but should probably, if with difficulty, be passed over in silence (I'm following, slavishly, Wittgenstein on this), at least in the end, anyway. We can debate and argue and wonder about knowledge, but the death-cold bite of that saw speaks a truth we will all instantly recognize.

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  4. You (and Wittgenstein) are probably right about the silence, Sean. But I like crazy talk. Hence this blog, where I talk myself out of illusions (like the illusion of absolute knowledge).

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  5. I like the new background. And the old Joseph.

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  6. Not that I don't like the young Joseph. My bad. Must have been me in the future typing that last one. Hopefully all the Josephs will forgive me.

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  7. Ruth, I am glad you like the background. As for me, I think I am still fundamentally the same as I ever was. The only thing that has changed is my access to information: today (by dint of experience in the school of hard knocks) I know more about problems with Mormonism specifically and religious fundamentalism generally than I did ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was largely uninformed about the history of Joseph Smith, the nature of homosexuality, or the nature of my own morality (including my sexuality, which I was very scared of). My life had some great moments back then, and some really bad moments.

    The process of investigating the bad moments led me to new information, which eventually resulted in a re-orientation of my outlook on life. Now I am much less afraid of some things (sexuality for instance) even as I am obliged to confront some new fears (like the fear of taking anyone in a business suit seriously). I don't repudiate who I was entirely: I see that I am still the same person, even as I realize that I was never as much defined by statements of belief as I used to think I was. I have traded my old bad moments for some new ones (worrying about paying the bills instead of having wet dreams) and have learned not to expect people to give me more than they are humanly capable of (no one can tell everyone how to escape from every problem out there; ten years ago, I was asking "prophets" for information about life that they did not, and could not, have).

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