Truly New

[arashiz]

I watched the documentary Moog a few nights ago, and there were a few things in there that really interested me. In it, Robert Moog discusses people's reactions when he first presented his synthesizers to the music community at large, and one phrase really stuck. "Don't you feel guilty about what you're doing

Comments

[cernunnos]

Ecclesiastes 1:9b "there is nothing new under the sun."
Written circa 250 BCE.

Yeah, I'd say it's safe to say there's room for new things, but as instigator_ash put it, things are coming faster and faster.

However, I welcome the ever-increasing, dizzying speed of science, and that has very little to do with my love of the technological singularity why do you ask?

[arashiz]

mmmmm, singularity. my favoritest arbitrarily defined event ever.

[cernunnos]

And definitely the most fun.

[stepping_stones]

Speaking of singularities, were we ever able to change our biology, we could give ourselves the ability to hear like bats, or see infra-red/ultra-violet/X rays. Umm... I thought I had more to say, but most of it actually clusters around augmented senses.

Ooh! Don't forget the device! (From Epilogue? NaNoWriMo2K5? Remember? You helped me with math?) One of the things that I didn't get to was that Victor left himself a back door so that he knew what all users were up to - imagine seeing someone else's sense data! When he opens the connection both ways so that all device users are slowly consumed by a collective intelligence, it leads to a renaming of them as a species: homo homogenus. (Pronounced "homogenous," but meaning "one single kind.") I think that would be a new kind of experience.

Also, if you've never read Dresden Codak, you should give it a shot. His Hob story arc is a nice 27-page comic, more or less, with a creamy center of meaning.

[instigator_ash]

We can already alter our biology to create new experiences. For example, LSD.

[stepping_stones]

Erm... that doesn't really alter your biology, so much as the chemicals upon which your biology is operating. At least, if taking LSD constitutes "altering one's biology," so does eating pizza. But yes, I agree with your point that drugs provide interesting experiences - though they're not exactly new.

What I was talking about was more along the lines of changing one's genetic architecture to support the hardware (ears and accompanying bones/muscles/membranes/etc.) and software (brain structures) required to hear like a bat hears. That would be awesome.