On Stupefied Computer Users, the Nature of Consciousness
and the Energy Crisis

There are thousands of clever people across the country today earning
social admiration and sometimes good money providing consultation to
computer users baffled by the nature of their systems. These gurus all
anchor their profits, social or financial, on a key point of
understanding, the secret of the Inner Circle, which they have mastered
to greater or lesser degree. They understand the difference between an
interface and a generator.

Alfred Count Korzybski famously once wrote, in his discussion of general
semantics, that the map is not the territory. It is similarly true that
the interface is not the system. Whether in information representation
or in matters of core substance and the generation of physical
realities, it is a key point of stupidity to be bemused by the hijinks
of the monitor to the point where you confuse it with the substance of
the system. Computer consultant know that the world is not made up of
folders and icons, and that error messages are often completely wrong,
generated not by the error they cite but by some other condition
altogether. They know that the significance of a file name means
nothing to the machine behind it, but that the trivial comma you want
to include in it can be a deal breaker--not because it is a comma, but
because it has been defined at a low-level architecture as a forbidden
combination of bits. The user sees AOL buttons where the Priest sees
switches, parameters, NOR gates, and algorithms. The user is bemused by
his interface and its encoded representations, while the Priest knows
somewhat more of the actual machinery generating the symbolic blips on
the screen, and is not fooled that they have any of the meaning in
themselves that they are supposed to induce in the mind of the user.
And thereby hangs a tale.

This difference is so fundamental that it colors our politics (think
Terry Schavo, or the State of Texas suing the people who brought out an
energy drink called "Cocaine" because it had an offensive filename). It
may also play a key role in the ineptitude of our learning systems (why
Johnny doesn't understand Darwin) and our obsessions with Newton and the
King James translation of the Bible.

One of the critical arguments arising in the current crop of discussions
about the human mind and the consciousness is the premise that
consciousness derives, and must obviously derive, from wet-ware -- the
softly wired intricacy of the human nervous system. The logic runs
along the line that "All human thought that we know of has come from
human beings who are alive. Therefore human beings who are alive
(meaning operating a running body) are the source of consciousness. All
human bodies which are alive use nervous systems as their signal system.
Therefore thought must come from nervous systems, specifically from the
brain."

This is interestingly similar to the computer user who says the machine
doesn't want to allow them to open a folder, probably because it was
named with a dirty word or had a misspelled title. This sort of
rationalization is badly entangled with a confusion about the semantics
of the interface and the actual ground-truth architecture of the
generator on the other side of the interface.

The possibility that the brain is not a generator but an interface seems
too mind-boggling and different, as a paradigm, to even allow
constructive thought to occur from it. But it is a shift in perspective
as simple as learning not to believe the words in a folder title or an
error message as intended, but to see them as artifacts of a different
sort of process altogether. The difference between the computer guru
and the bemused user hinges on this distinction, and so does the
difference between a genuine understanding of thought and the sort of
logic used by the ex-machina rational of the neuro-anatomist. The
counter argument of course is that if you remove part of the brain, the
organism appears unable to think certain thoughts; it loses memory, or
vocabulary, or focus. If you stimulate parts of the brain, suddenly
certain memories or capacities seem to be enhanced. In a computer, if
you pull the VRAM, the monitor will be unable to tell you a lot of
things, too. If you kill certain pixels, only certain thoughts, based
on their locational mapping, will be visible to the user. Change the
scan rate and the world will look blurry and incomprehensible, resulting
in "stupidity" or "coma" on the part of the user as far as that role and
that machine are concerned.

The body, as a whole, is also a sturdy interface to what we think of as
the material universe. We have, as a species, acquired painstakingly
detailed lessons about how to interact with gravity, solidity, cold
things and hot, poisons and foods and masses and liquids through long
experience, going back millions of years. Giving this pre-dispositive
legacy, it is little wonder that the framework of mass, velocity, time,
duration, light and three-dimensional spaces seems surely and
irreversibly proven in our minds to be a territory, not a map, and the
core system in which we operate. But the body itself is, perhaps, an
interface as beguiling and bemusing as a point-and-click information
interface is to a computer user. Focused on a small section of the
measurable EMF spectrum, unable to handle sound frequencies above
birdsong or temperature levels below freezing, it is a very narrow-band
device indeed. And just as a monitor cannot tell you why your system is
painting the screen blue or flashing "General Error" messages, the body
cannot tell you much about how the space in which it measures itself as
existing is being generated. And therein lies another tale.

If in fact the body is an enthralling interface to the territory of
space time, we are faced with the same basic problem as the socially
dysfunctional ubergeek. Does he break out of his Jolt and Google habit,
and go downtown to see what real folks are up to? Learn to talk human?
Discover "real" relationships independent of Facebook or "Ars Technica"?
Or does he retreat into the reclusion of his cybernetic operating
center?

Your call, dude.

But think on this. If i is possible to un-confabulate the measuring systems of the body, and the architecture of space itself, it is possible the zero-point energy matrix that seems to (theoretically, at least) populate the thin skein of spatiality as it wavers in and out of existence can itself be ordered around, or engineered, or otherwise put to service. Although this may seem arrogant or inordinately hypothetical at first blush, so did Harvey's circulatory system and Galileo's earth orbit around the sun.

The subject of spationics is waiting to be born; with it, we could find the ultimate renewal of the human adventure.