I recently finished Cyberia by Douglass Rushkoff, and in it, Rushkoff discusses the paradigm shift of the supposed grounded, objective reality essentially losing its footing as humanity begins its exploration into digital consciousness, as virtual space acts as an entirely unique dimension to the one in which we presently inhabit. As such, it operates on entirely different rules. It is as though laws of natural sciences like Physics are of little importance in a digital ecosystem and more abstract, philosopical or sociological ideologies such as metaphysics, abstract mathematics, and religious or spiritual ideas have a heightened applicability. We can most directly feel such a change from its parallel in the shift from an industrial society, marked by technological dominance in the forms of physical engineering, to an information age, marked by technological dominance in the form of largely ideological technology.

From this, Rushkoff’s Cyberia, then, poses some incredible questions, most importantly “Where is this new technology going to take us?” and “How objective is objectivity?” First and foremost, the former question is so pivotal to understanding just how important the virtual age is, and as it is such a complex question to tackle, I won’t go into it. (Rushkoff’s Cyberia spends its length chiefly concerned with finding its answer, so I recommend reading the book to examine that.) Rather, I’m much more interested in the latter question: “How objective is objectivity?,” or, in other words, “How do we define reality?”

So, I start by thinking of our definition of objective reality based on our senses, but similarly, we know that biologically, our senses have to work off of approximations of reality (such as reasonably having a discrete rate at which information is processed, so, for example, time is approximated as continuous in the brain from discrete measurements), so we know that our senses are not as good of a barometer for understanding the underlying nature of reality. Instead, our senses are not much more than exactly what they are: a system for perceiving the working reality necessary to live our lives effectively. What this means isn’t necessarily that what we perceive physically isn’t the “true reality,” but rather, that what we perceive is not guaranteed to be the “true reality,” and this “true reality” may be something beyond our physical or biological perception.

Furthermore, I think that this is just indicative of the failures of perceiving the world as a human being. Another interesting point that Cyberia brings up is on viewing the world under the context of ego (in particular, Cyberia was interested in how the use of psychedelics broke free from this context). Many things that we take as axioms for how the world works, like gender roles, physical perception (like hearing sounds and seeing colors), identity, etc. fall apart when the ego is removed, and the destruction of these axioms ripples out in a fractal-like manner (as the book describes it, where fractals in Chaos theory are uber-sensitive to initial conditions and recursive such that these changes persist and grow over each recursion) to affect all kinds of great conclusions about how we perceive the world.

I think, in an odd way, this is why I would like to see the world from the perspective of a dog.

Note: This post is currently unfinished for some reason. Check back in later to see if I ever ended up coming around to finishing it!