Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1991 17:24 EDT From: GAVAND01@ulkyvx.bitnet Subject: Cyberspace and action To: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu Message-Id: X-Envelope-To: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu X-Vms-To: IN%"hlab@milton.u.washington.edu" Status: R Virtuality is not primarily a sensory phenomenon. It is fundamentally a system of actions. Typically one will participate in a technological virtual reality to have his or her senses, his or her reality of the world, acted upon. Regardless of any pragmatic applications that might be developed to serve this expectation (or to pay the piper!!), the greatest potentials for VR development will be found by orienting ourselves toward elemental cognitive acts by which we create stability and order in a dynamic virtual world. Imagine total virtual space as a body of water into which we may sink certain vessels, and thus, be able to define individual volumes of water without, however, destroying the idea of a continuous mass of water enveloping all. The enveloping space may be called cyberspace; the sunken vessels constitute a particular virtual world. Vessels feed the participant's imagination through new sights and sounds, actions and events. The participant finds his or her pleasures or utilitarian needs filled by relating to and interacting with the vessels. Like a fish unaware of the water surrounding it, the participant is inattentive to cyberspace, per se. As the "primordium" out of which participant sensory experience may come, cyberspace is a system of interlocking and intersecting actions, a continuous functional pattern, and as such is intangible and invisible. Action constructs the functional forms of imagination and are primary over the geometries among its vessels. Therefore, stationary models for space or categories of substance and quality are inadequate for exploiting the potentials of cyberspace. A better model views cyberspace as an extensive continuum with fractal structure. Four-dimensional cyberstructure, for example, provides excellent conditions for empirically experimenting on cognition, if the mental is operationally defined as a temporal activity that is a reaction from, and integration with, spatial experience, as Alfred North Whitehead did. The elasticity of virtual space lends itself well to this operational approach. Where the laws of the physical reality do not apply, temporal activity can be spatialized as virtual matter (that is, information is reified). Mind is often said to have a temporal, but not a spatial, character; now, VR technologies can, at least in their potential, present cognitive contents directly as virtual forms. But to do so, we must first perceive the interactive frame in at least five dimensions. NEXT STATEMENT: "VR does not mean we will eventually transcend symbols to communicate." Gary Van Den Heuvel "This is not a simple matter of linking University of Louisville concepts, but of a double and indivisible Louisville, KY affirmation: in affirming anything, the GAVAND01@ULKYVX mind affirms itself. And even further: PROFS: GAVAND01@ULKYVM it is for the sake of thus affirming TELE: (502) 588-7830 itself that it makes any affirmation at all." FAX: (502) 588-7557 -- Daniel Essertier