Of course, I can’t resist one last little thing:

This has all been extracted from some sort of precursor entity that’s all around us and which we don’t usually notice.

At heart, I think we are that precursor entity. Everything else is just noise.

This is how I see it: the world is full of forms, which is stuff that other people have thought and made. This has all been extracted from some sort of precursor entity that’s all around us and which we don’t usually notice. The mind is a superb machine for doing this. If I have a mind, with some diligent practice I can begin see patterns in the soup and start to extract forms. Nowadays everyone’s stuff is available to everyone else in the economy. Our cup overfloweth. If I’m not careful I start thinking that the stuff in the economy is the sum total of existence. In fact my mind’s real purpose has been obscured by all the noise. Though of course there are still patterns in the noise to be found because the noise represents the underlying soup. But the noise is not the soup of primary experience.

:-D

This is how I see it: the internet is full of information, which is stuff that other people have thought and written. This has all been extracted from some sort of precursor entity that’s all around us and which we don’t usually notice. The computer is a superb machine for doing this. If I have a computer, with some diligent practice I can begin see patterns in the soup and start to extract information. Nowadays everyone’s information is available to everyone else in the net. Our cup overfloweth. If I’m not careful I start thinking that the information in the net is the sum total of existence. In fact my computer’s real purpose has been obscured by all the noise. Though of course there are still patterns in the noise to be found because the noise represents the underlying soup. But the noise is not the soup of primary experience.

I’d very much like to think so, with the right practice.

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I guess we are running out of obvious words to describe this stuff! I think all I’m trying to get at is the limitations of the Net. It’s training wheels (thanks for that vision!); it’s ‘give-a-man-a-fish’ science. I honestly have quite a low opinion of most of the information in the net. Though clearly there is a practically limitless amount of it.

With regards to what your’re saving, I guess I mean:
pattern (you) = ocean = chaos = information (me)
information (you) = wave = order = meaning (me)

information’s there, whether we can extract it or not, only once we make sense of it does it have any meaning.

But we’re describing the same thing here, just using different definitions for the words. The process involved is either case is the same, and it’s a fascinating one (for which I have you to thank, since we’ve been talking about this since back on Ted’s FROH blog!)

In this case though, can we watch whales in their natural environment? Or can we only see them when they’ve been caught in our nets?

And when you do catch a fish it isn’t quite the same as watching the whales in their natural environment…

The internet is just that: a net, which pulls information out of sea of pattern like a net pulls fish out of the sea. What’s important is not the net or the fish, but the sea.

I get it! The sea is there regardless of the net, and the information is there regardless of the Net. That’s genius. I’ve been having a little back and forth lately with a friend on Twitter about how insights/ideas/memes seem to happen to people at the same time, that the information comes from somewhere “out there” and that it finds appropriate receptors/minds to download that information to. And the internet is the way we put this together. It’s a net for both catching and for communicating.

Also, just saw these articles this morning:

On the 40th anniversary of the first internet connection, a look back on how a flash of insight and a 20-minute meeting got it all started.

Netbooks Are Only Part of The Solution

The internet is just that: a net, which pulls information out of sea of pattern like a net pulls fish out of the sea. What’s important is not the net or the fish, but the sea.

Having said that, peer-to-peer networking is a deeply cool technology which seems to have been largely forgotten. Apple still do it, despite their recent borg-like tendencies, and I once worked at a site with an Apple network in which every machine was both server and client. Then a PC came for a particular application, which wouldn’t play along, and all of sudden we had a server, and everything was gone. Funnily enough, peer-to-peer always felt more private than client-server. Having to deal with a server always feels like a kind of violation, a sort of ‘please sir, can I go to the toilet’ moment.

*

This also runs through my head: :-D

On a silent summer evening
The sky’s alive with light
Building in the distance
Surrealistic sight
On Echo Beach
Waves make the only sound
On Echo Beach
There’s not a soul around

From nine till five I have to spend my time at work
My job is very boring, I’m an office clerk
The only thing that helps me pass the time away
Is knowing I’ll be back at Echo Beach some day

Echo Beach
Far away in time
Echo Beach
Far away in time…

But if you’re reading this tomorrow…

With the creation of the internet, computers discovered the world of forms. Enlightenment must be the Singularity

I see what you mean, computers looking at floating files of data on a sea of information (which is really nothing BUT files of data, one big data set in all). The metaphor’s running deep here…

But computers work as both the means of creating/storing/presenting that data, as well as accessing/updating/relinking that data. Without computers, there’d BE no internet. It is dependent on the existence of those very computers that look to it as forms, there’s no separation there.

The singularity/enlightenment, in this case, would then be computers that act as both Personal Computer and Server, a truly distributed field where all the computers can access all the other computers equally at all moments. Each computer would be a holographic representation of the entire internet, because the entire connected net of other computers would be accessible instantaneously from that one computer. The whole internet reflected in a dewdrop, so to speak.

Do that, make the computers something that can be carried on a person at all times, that can interact with each other wirelessly in real time regardless of distance, and make file exchange near-instantaneous, and bam, thats it.

That’s augmented reality, the noosphere, McLuhan’s Global Village/Tribal Echoland, and the singularity all at once (because computers are made conscious THROUGH humanity, not in spite of it). Plus my own idea of having computers acting as external memories, so that our minds can be turned toward other pursuits (training wheels).

Pretty damn cool Speedbird. Thanks for helping bring that one to life. I’ll try to write my thoughts up on this a little more coherently this weekend.

And with Darpa’s plans for a space based internet, it just might happen…

I have to admit, a book is not a book until it is read…

This is why listening to vinyl is a sacred act… ;-D

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Basically I’m trying here to get my head round some pretty deep experiences I had at an early age, involving the standalone machines we had back then. Each a microcosm, a fragment of the hologram through which the world could be seen. Each a way-of-seeing. Each also a book, printed identically. Communication with a community of users without any exchange of data, how cool is that? The beginning of a wave of distributed processing, which has ebbed back to centrality and will presumably flow back to distribution. In a way, they have passed. In a way, they were always timeless.

I think what I need is sleep, seeing as we’re AAH!! hours ahead of you guys over here. Darn those pesky timezones…

So a ‘complete’ digital system can be analogue, like a bubble. And a complete analogue system looks like a digit.

Exactly what I was trying to say, just much shorter. Very taoist as well. Within the black there is white, within the white there is black.

And now I’m leaving the office. Picking up groceries, laundry, then home…

If something makes sense as a whole thing, wouldn’t that make it analogue to itself, but digital within any larger system? One person is a whole thing in itself, but a person + anything else immediately becomes a binary (and hence digital) system.

Yet with dependent origination, nothing is ever simply on it’s own, so the binary/analogue separation breaks down. This is what Suzuki Roshi’s getting at, I think. The only true THING is EVERYTHING.

This seems like the old “wave” vs “ocean” argument (or wave vs particle, if you prefer). Really, the basis of everything is the analogue, but to have any thing, that whole has to become digital to a certain degree. “Through measurement, we shall conquer the earth”, to paraphrase the other part of Descarte’s dream…

Once your computer opens to the world and people start prodding around in it, I agree, you’ve lost any kind of hermetic computer-as-such. It becomes much more a wave-on-the-ocean, it’s the half of the internet that has a more thing-like-tendency (while the other half of the internet is a more fluid-electrical-wash). It’s a gate now, rather than a terminal point.

It’s a lot like the Tao, in that sense.

But the internet as a whole is a thing-in-itself, and that’s what you are accessing through the medium of the computer-particle-gate.

In a way, with the creation of the internet, computers reached enlightenment. Heh. :)

I have NO IDEA if that makes any sense, even to me :-D

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>> As for completion, it seems like to complete something kind of leaves out the analogue aspect. Only in the digital are things every truly completed. As for “published and be damned”, wouldn’t that go against the idea in your jet engine analogy? Or maybe I’m misinterpreting something. Course, with both “yes” and “no”, no reason you couldn’t have both the jet engine and completion…

This is where my brain starts to hurt and I know there’s something near.

For starters, the evidence of my own eyes tells me that ‘Only in the digital are things every truly completed’ is just not true. ‘Jet-engine-ness’ to me means a system like an egg or an organism that only makes sense as a whole, that loses something when it’s broken down into parts or sequence. That to me is the very definition of ‘analogue’. Take the dependent arising away from the chicken and the egg, they both lose. When the writer finishes the book, and it is printed and bound, it becomes more than a document. It becomes less than a document, for it cannot be edited, it cannot evolve by itself; but I am sure that it has also become more than a document. A book, by being made into a book, has gained jet-engine-ness. It has a kind of spirit that is lost when a system is dispersed into digits. When I open my computer to the world and everyone starts prodding around in it, I find its spirit is gone.

Course, who knows when I’ll ever have the time to actually read it.

As for completion, it seems like to complete something kind of leaves out the analogue aspect. Only in the digital are things every truly completed. As for “published and be damned”, wouldn’t that go against the idea in your jet engine analogy? Or maybe I’m misinterpreting something. Course, with both “yes” and “no”, no reason you couldn’t have both the jet engine and completion…

>> ‘What path shall I take in life?’ – ‘Yes and no.’

When I wrote that just now it made perfect sense all of a sudden. It’s the question you can ask once you can see through the fog of infowar. And the answer is an allusion both to binary and to the state beyond binary that can contemplate /both/ yes-and-no simultaneously.

I still recommend that book, ‘Descartes’ Dream’, if you’re at all interested.

Infotech is becoming a tower of babble that’s never completed. I’m beginning to think there’s a lot to be said for completion, a kind of closing of the circle.

‘Getting information’ has ceased to be an issue, and the wise will move beyond it.

I agree, at least to a certain degree. Putting all our faith in it is obviously not so good, but I think the ability to source and make use of information will be much more important than the ability to store it. Even without the internet (assuming some kind of social collapse), we’ll still be able to store stuff for later.

Then again, there’s this. Maybe even a social collapse won’t stop the internet. DARPA wants space based broad band by 2012…

As for Descartes, the thing I’ll always remember about that dream is that he had it after he participated as a mercenary in the sacking of Bohemia, the kingdom of the alchemists. Never heard that part of it, though it is definitely interesting. ‘What path shall I take in life?’ – ‘Yes and no.’ I wonder what that meant..?

I’m reminded of Descartes’ famous fevered dream-vision in which an angel imparts to him the scientific method in its entirety. In the dream the words ‘Quod vitae sectabor iter?’ appear, followed by the answer ‘Est et non’. Roughly translated:

‘What path shall I take in life?’ – ‘Yes and no.’

If you believe McLuhan, then the way people use technology is inherent in the technology. But he also said that technology can change. And also that artists, not engineers, see technology the clearest.

Well. That actually makes a bit of sense to me. It seems to at first anyway, but damned if I can explain it.

“Primary experience” sounds a lot like Zen’s “original face”, especially with this: “an actual interaction with something, not a second-hand reading of someone else’s account.” But I think with Zen, the second hand reading is your own as well, in that you’re reacting to a memory or a thought, rather than reality.

And I know what you mean about the fluidity of today’s InfoTech, there’s a lot of stuff we’ve built on top of really quickly, which can get scary. I used to have dreams where I’d be in some familiar building, but I’d some how slip down a drain, or find an elevator, and go down and down and down, and it just continued forever, one vast building. Wish I could remember what it was I’d seen down there…

A wise man once told me that the only history that matters is ‘primary evidence’; that’s actual objects from the time in question. I discovered recently where this term comes from: the concept of ‘primary experience’: an actual interaction with something, not a second-hand reading of someone else’s account. I find infotech increasingly obscures the primary experience. Having said that, I do have clear memories of primary experiences of computing. These were always rooted in actual tangible structures; I mean, when I log on now my machine is a largely fluid ecosystem of operating-system-patches navigating an entirely fluid Internet of content. There’s nothing to get one’s teeth into. So I begin to wonder about regaining the primary experience of the machine: a standalone thing which we acquire, learn and love, and which ultimately ‘passes away’ (sorta) by being fully absorbed. Less of the kind of ‘rent-a-mess’ which we seem to be stuck with, which just begets bloatware.

It’s a common problem in our society, “I just want to GET IT. I’ll enjoy it later, when I have more time, but I’m busy GETTING IT right now; I can’t enjoy it LATER if I don’t HAVE it!!!”

Almost sounds logical when I put it that way.

But that’s the price for externalizing our memory. It’s nothing to do with the technology, it’s just the bad way people use it. And people will ALWAYS use things badly, no matter how fancy the thing is.

And I remember one wag pointing out that, the way computer use was going at the time, what the world actually needed was a ‘worn’ drive: write once, read never. Because that’s what happens to most files in reality.

Fast-forward twenty years, and I have my boss saying things daft things like, ‘Won’t it be brilliant in fifty years time when you’ll still have every photo you ever took on your hard disk?’ And I scream silently inside… :-D