From: david@c-cat.UUCP (Dave)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: John P. Barlow Article in Microtimes Magazine Pt. 5 of 5
Date: 24 Jan 93 23:36:13 GMT
Organization: Intergalactic Rest Area For Weary Travellers


                                Jaron Lanier

Since the Sumerians starting poking sticks into clay and claiming that 
the resulting cuneiform squiggles meant something, we've been living 
in the Information Age.  Only lately did someone come up with a name 
for it.  I suppose that was because we quit making anything else of 
value.  Before that, they just called it civilization.    

Indeed, one could make a pretty good case that consciousness, as we 
define it, arose simultaneously with the ability to communicate its 
products symbolically.  (See The Origin of Consciousness and the 
Breakdown of the Bicameral Brain by Julian Jaynes for related 
conclusions.)

The Sumerians had a pretty clear perspective on what this stuff was 
good for.  The preponderance of their runic tablets turn out to be, on 
translation, calendars, inventories, and mnemonic devices for such 
data as one might need to remember but which was too trivial to merit 
conversion into the other storage form of the era, epic poetry.  They 
didn't use it to describe anything.

Perhaps they recognized that even the most mundane experience 
would beggar any effort to describe it if one were serious about 
creating a genuine simulation.

The Egyptians didn't have any such illusions either, but, in addition to 
keeping track of cubits and high water, they found symbols useful for 
their elaborate liturgical purposes.  With so many dramatis personae in 
the pantheon, some method was required for sorting out each one's 
ritualistic preferences.

The Greeks, as was their wont, expanded the envelope further.  To the 
previously established (and sensible) uses for writing, they added 
commentary, philosophy, calculation and drama.  

Still, they restrained themselves from attempting to simulate 
experience on paper (or whatever it was they wrote on).  One might 
argue that drama was an effort to do that, but I think that the likes of 
Sophocles probably just found it easier not to have to personally teach 
his actors all their lines. 

As early as the 5th Century B.C. we hear the first warnings that 
information might constitute an abuse of experience.  Socrates 
suggested that writing things down might damage your ability to 
remember them in their proper, full-bodied form.  (An admonition we 
know about since Plato went ahead and wrote it down as soon as 
Socrates was hemlocked out of the ability to stop him.)

It wasn't until the 17th Century that things really got out of hand.  
Cervantes wrote Don Quixote and fiction was born.  From that point, 
any experience could be plucked from its holy moment in time and 
pressed like a flower in a book, to be reconstituted later in the 
imagination of the reader.   

The thin, alphanumeric trickle that is language was suddenly thought 
to be a acceptable surrogate for the boiling torrent of shapes, smells, 
colors, sounds, memories, and context which amalgamate in the 
cauldron of a human skull and become there something called Reality.  
No longer did one have to "be there."  One could read about it and get 
the flavor well enough.    

This absurd delusion is now universal.  The only reason anyone 
believes it is that everyone does.  

I, on the other hand, began to have my doubts around the time I 
started trying to create some of this magical information myself.  
Sometime in the 4th Grade, I began to write about the things that 
happened to me.  For awhile, the approval others showed my efforts 
was enough to inspire their continuation.

Gradually, however, the effort became painful.  The inadequacy of my 
word-replicas for experience was increasingly clear.  I tried poetry.  
This seemed to work until I realized that it did so because a poem is 
about itself and thus has no "real thing" to be compared to.

Writing about something continues to cause me nothing but anguish.  
The symbolic tools are hopelessly mis-matched to their three-
dimensional analogues.  For example, the word "chair" is in no way 
like any chair.  

Nor does it begin to imply the vast range of dissimilar objects to which 
one might apply it.  You can hop it up with adjectives... "big red 
chair"...or additional phrases... "big red chair that Washington sat 
in"...but the result is usually bad writing without much advancement 
of your cause.  I mean, "the big, deeply red, densely-brocaded, 
Georgian love seat that Washington sat in while being bled by leeches" 
is still, for all its lugubrious mass, not a chair.

And if it were, it wouldn't move in the way that real things do even 
when they're standing still.  Words just sit there.  Reality vibrates and 
hums.  I have a pet phrase for this element of the mismatch:  Using 
words to describe an experience is like using bricks to build a full-
sized, operational model of a fog bank.

Perhaps it was a subliminal recognition of this fact that caused 
America to fall in love with statistics.  As a descriptive tool, numbers 
are even worse than words.  They are very purely themselves and 
nothing else.  Nevertheless, we now put everything from flowing 
water to the human psyche into these rigid numerical boxes and are 
especially straight-faced as we claim it fits in them.

In doing this, we usually follow a rule I call, with characteristic 
modesty, Barlow's Law of Real Numbers.  This states that the 
combination of any two speculative numbers by any arithmetic 
operation will always yield a real number.  The more decimal places 
the better.

Computers have hardly been part of the solution in this area.  We pass 
our measuring grids over pulsating reality, shovel the results into our 
machines, thrash them with micro-circuits, and pretend that what 
floats up to the screen is "real."

Horseshit.

What computers can do, and have done to a fare-thee-well, is to 
provide us with a hyper-abundance of such processed lies.  Everything 
from U.S. News and World Report to Penthouse is now a dense thicket 
of charts, tables, graphs, and %'s.  All purporting to tell us something 
about what is.  

But it's all just information.  Which, apart from the fact that it's not to 
be confused with experience,  has several problems which Jaron Lanier 
succinctly enumerated for me: "The first problem is that it's in-
formation.  The second problem is that it's linear information.  And the 
third problem is that it's false information." 

Or, as we say in Wyoming, "Figures don't lie, but liars can figure."

Virtual Reality is probably not going to cure this nonsense any more 
than television, its one-way predecessor, has done.  The global supply 
of words, numbers, statistics, projections, analyses, and gossip...what I 
call the DataCloud... expands with thermonuclear vigor and all the 
Virtual Reality we can manufacture isn't going to stop that.

But it may go a long way toward giving us means to communicate 
which are based on shared experience rather than what we can 
squeeze through this semi-permeable alphanumeric membrane.  If it 
won't contain the DataCloud, it might at least provide some 
navigational aids through it.

Maybe it can scratch our eyes, blinded by information, back in again.


      
  



There you are. I noticed a few mac characters which would make ascii, but
otherwise it seems to have made it.
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