> Dave said: "Here, to any extent, I depart from Gibson. With sufficiently advanced technology there comes a point at which the effort required to suspend disbelief is so small as to be negligible. I was reading a report on a paper a few months ago (I think in New Scientist) where the authors were suggesting that some on-line gamers have difficult perceiving the "real world" as actually being real when they come out of the games. This suggests that even with the relatively poor systems we have at present (compared with what we know will be possible in future since it only needs evolution, not revolution, in the technology), the barrier to suspension has already become low. Now I am not suggesting that we would be able to recreate exactly a particular person's experience of going to a particular concert - at least, without Total Recall type technology (and, despite the advances with fMRI technology we are a loooong way off that) - but I do think we will be able to have a pretty good shot at giving someone the experience of going to that concert themselves"
This is The Matrix, anything written by Philip K Dick, and before that, Plato in his Cave metaphor. It is essentially unprovable: "...If physically perfected artificial three-dimensional auditory environments were feasible, would the artificial product be as entirely realistic to perception as the real thing? If not, what ingredient is missing? If so, what would philosophically distinguish real and artificial? Is such a distinction necessary?" "...Plato's metaphor for humans' grasp of reality as nothing more than shadows on a cave wall, being constrained by the limitations of what is available to sensation, is relevant today; especially for artificial environments. It is an early example of one strand of thinking about perception as mediated by sensation, inevitably a poor copy of reality. Whilst philosophers are entirely comfortable with such thought experiments, there is no obvious pragmatic way to investigate such speculations. By definition, if an artificial environment is detectable as such, then it is imperfectly executed and the hypothetical position has not been matched. On the other hand, if the artificial environment were perfectly rendered, there would be no way to prove its artificiality." [ my thesis, some years ago] So, maybe the whole point of making artificial environments is not that we can perfect them, but that, in doing so, we come to understand more about the perceptually relevant constituents of real environments. So it's the journey, not the destination..? Peter Lennox _____________________________________________________________________ The University of Derby has a published policy regarding email and reserves the right to monitor email traffic. If you believe this email was sent to you in error, please notify the sender and delete this email. Please direct any concerns to info...@derby.ac.uk. _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
