Thinking and Virtual Reality

It seems strange to juxtapose philosophy and computing, for how can the journey of self understanding progress by contemplating electronic computing technology? How can this pursuit be anything but a distraction from the Socratic task to know thyself? Curiously, the history of science reveals the reasonableness of their convergence striving to understand human beings as natural automata. If Plato's methodology for a science of rhetoric (leading the soul with words), as presented in Phaedrus, the history of modern philosophy in its struggle to understand the logic of intention, through Freud's investigation of dreams and slips of the tongue are any indication of the extent to which scientific philosophical production seeks to understand natural automata, whether they are referred to as soul, mind, cognition, neural activity, then we are a short step away from getting a green light to conjoin the study of ancient texts to the philosophy of everyday digital electronic computing. A brief meditation upon the metaphysics of information helps make this relation by revealing that the concept of representation implies computation, so too does information require a means to exist, if not a consumer to become informed. Once opened, this undiscovered territory lends itself to the nascent TCP/IP based worldwide virtual reality we call the Internet, for such texts contain a minimum of pictures and no sounds at all, and they are mostly static objects. What I am saying is that ancient written knowledge is the easiest for virtual reality generation machinery to process today for the very reason that it was for ancient virtual reality generation machinery to process when the invention of alphabetic writing caused a qualitative information processing performance increase over vase painting. The philosophy of computing can readily incorporate the long tradition of western thought, which it has shunned believing it began with the recent proliferation of electronic machinery. Let ancient texts be read by technologists. Ease resistance to the suggestion that thinking is virtual reality, and the mind is a computer.

The Link between Computing and Philosophy

Computing has been in the grasp of the individual for a long time when the truth of this fact is measured in terms of human lifetimes. However, the proliferation of (as in Gates' "ubiquitous") computing by artificial automata is new. I am suggesting we focus upon computing machinery rather than the phenomenology of symbols. Otherwise, we fall prey to the argument that philosophers have long contemplated computing by citing the critique of writing in Plato's Phaedrus. However, this computing was done by human beings, natural automata--the term used by John von Neumann--when they are speaking, reading, and writing. Therefore, it is not surprising that ancient thinkers merely fantasized about artificial automata, if they included them at all within the scope of their work on computing. That is not to say that a great deal of their work does not seek to understand the workings of the human mind. As a representative of ancient philosophers of computing, Plato's Socrates dared not venture into low level psychodynamics, but instead suggested beginning with the approach outlined in later parts of Phaedrus analyzing the ambiguity of words. You can imagine they wished they could comprehend the mechanics of the human soul, but knew better than to try. We come to an anchoring quote of von Neumann that will be a recurring theme of this meditation: "of all automata of high complexity, computing machines are the ones which we have the best chance of understanding." Suppose, then, that the Socratic maxim "know thyself" can be serviced indirectly by coming to know electronic computer technology.