For example, Britain’s national mapping organisation’s brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It’s called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that’s because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.
The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotions that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn’t work? How much that would suck? It’s amazing that it’s like… a thing.
Sight too (obviously, now that we’re thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be if you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I’m sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that’s emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That’s weeiird.
And yet on top of that, humans have worked out a way to send that information everywhere in a fraction of a second.
Lightning trapped in sand etc. I used to play a kids game called Turing Tower which shows how all logic operations can be replicated with little plastic seesaws and marbles. If you put the bits of plastic on the board in the right way you can see marbles falling by gravity performing binary addition. It blows my mind that that’s all that’s going on in my PC, just a trillion times the scale. I’ve worked in IT all my life and it continually surprises me that any of this stuff even works.
And because everyone’s glob of neurons is independent from each other, we have no way of conclusively determining if everyone’s glob interprets things the same way.
Really makes me wonder what cybernetics will look like in a hundred, a thousand(!) years. No-one can experience someone else’s consciousness. But if an artificial brain extension generated consciousness the same way we do and if it could be swapped between people safely. It might be the first time we have something saying, objectively, it has experienced being both of us in each of our brains and we see “red” the same way. The mind boggles…