From: cg108dcn@icogsci1.ucsd.edu (appropriate parent)
Subject: Re: Cyberspace? Who needs it!
Date: 16 Jun 90 23:58:41 GMT
Organization: University of California, San Diego




  The point I meant to make before I got side tracked was that whenever people
talk about i/o, somebody always seems say that direct neural stimulation woul
d be the way to go for cyberspace.  What I meant to say is that if that were
possible, cyberspace would be a waste of my computational power.  I would
have to add an extra level of interpretation that was necessary.  With 
neural i/o you could have much more powerful interface.

  But this is a long way off.  From what I have learned about what is known
about the brain, there is still a whole lot more that needs to be known before
we can talk about going into someones brain and mucking with it in any way
that would be useful to i/o with out causing some serious damage.  So why
bother talking about direct neural i/o for cyberspace right now since it is
both a long way off and if it were possible, then the cyberspace concept
would be on its way to being outdated (when you are talking about cyberspace
as an interface for inforamtion manipulation.) 

So let's talk about can be done.

(in the following, when I say culture I mean the body of knowledge
accumulated and used by a given society and includes everything from hunting
and sewing to calculus and physics. )

The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that cyberspace or some
relative of it is going to absolutely essential to the continued developement
of human culture/science.  If you look back over our development, there have
been several key points, all of which dealt with informational bottlenecks of
some sort or another.  We developed language to overcome the boundaries of
the individual.  We were no longer confined to thinking only our own thoughts.
We could think about someone else thoughts, expand on them, learn from the
experience of others.  When we settled down and became agricultural, it
became possible for people to specialize.  No longer did everyone have to 
know everything about their culture to get by.  A person could forgo learning
about hunting and spend his time mastering other things.  We developed writing
when the information that we had was too big to allow a person to learn it,
use it and teach it in one lifetime.  Until we had writing all information had
to be passed along from the previous generation.  With writing, this was no 
longer the case.  Before writing, any part of the culture that wasn't learned
by the next generation was lost.  Also no longer the case after writing.

Now we stand at a point were, even if we specialize, we have just too much 
information to use.  It is getting to be difficult to learn enough about
a field to be able to make a contribution to it.  All around there is just
too much information.  In order to use and advance on what we know, we are
going to have develop some new trick for dealing with information.  This
trick must just be cyberspace.  

    Consider:   Auto mechanics can no longer service all cars, and usually 
specialize in on countries or even one companies. 
    Consider:  The University of Hawaii Med School recently changed its 
educational philosophy from having student memorize symptoms of diseases to 
instead teaching them how to research a disease.
   Consider: how much in the field that you work in can you say you really 
know.  In all fields these days you can spend several years studying and 
still come out know just a small fraction of what there is to be known...

so what do you think?

pdapkus@ucsd.edu