From: jwtlai@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Jim W Lai)
Subject: Re: Imagination vs. VR (was Re: More on MUDs etc.)
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 1991 03:54:32 GMT
Message-ID: <1991Aug16.035432.10529@watcgl.waterloo.edu>
Organization: University of Waterloo



In article <1991Aug15.184731.24222@milton.u.washington.edu> eliot@phoenix.
princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman) writes:

>To the topic at hand, whether VR can supplant language, via McCluhan.
>M. saw everything as media, including light bulbs: he certainly saw
>the computer as a medium. Through it, he said, man has, for the first
>time ever, been able to reproduce his own thought processes -- of course
>that's a long shot given the status of the AI program, but let's
>assume that it will eventually succeed -- and therefore man would soon
>be in a position to simulate his own consciousness, which has been
>private up to now. The ultimate medium, therefore, is that which 
>succeeds at TRANSMITTING consciousness -- roughly, "making consciousness
>corporately accessible" he says at the beginning of "Understanding 
>Media." This will involve a reversal of intellectual evolution through
>print and handwriting to language until a condition of tribalism --
>a collectively accessible "spirit," via technological simulation,
>obtains. So yes, the point of VR is to supplant language.

>It first becomes necessary to identify the medium itself as its
>content in order to take this step: that's why some people already
>have begun to question the idea of the "interface." Interface
>to what? The icon will disappear. Representations will disappear.
>There will be no symbols.  "Information" will be directly encoded 
>as perceptual structure. That's what it is to be auditory and
>tactile. A loud sound won't STAND for "a loud sound" -- it will 
>BE a loud sound because experienced in that way. Ditto other 
>constructions of perceptual function.

So how are abstract concepts transmitted in this proposed medium?  Even no
interface is an interface, the transparent interface.  Our environment is
the penultimate media, and our senses provide our interface.  How does one
perceive a matrix multiplication?  Ultimately, all symbols we use are
encodings of perceptual structures, since we have nothing else but our
senses to perceive what is around us.  (And speaking of symbols, what
of Jung?  I conjecture that a tribal view of the world will eventually
impose its own symbolism.  Consider how the term "Nintendo" has been used
recently.)

Personally, I think McLuhan underestimated the effect the symbology of
mathematics has had as a medium, as a language.  It is a tool for world
encapsulation and manipulation.  As long as such tools have utility, we
will find a means of using them.  This is why people who learn Chinese
or Japanese as a native language (with the thousands of ideograms) are not
unduly hampered in learning geometry, unlike what McLuhan conjectured.
Mathematics provides a language distinct from the spoken, closer to the
abstract, severed from touch.