See Idiocracy. That would almost be a quote from the lawyer.

It is a matter of understanding the physical wiring and how statistical populations emerge from that. You might call them ‘movements’. They have their own sense of right and wrong and not only won’t understand a different movement, they physically can’t at large.

@Eolirin: That’s close. Reinforced feedback strengthens the connections, but co-incident events cause them. Thus, much of what we think has a superstitious quality and if someone is skilled, they can manipulate that effect. From political races down to the local bake sale, the connotative/denotative relationships are sold as facts. Total immersion is to the human brain what a network node is without Trend Micro.

It isn’t new information, but it isn’t useless. Awareness is not trivial. It’s vital and it has to be developed. For the philosophy 101 crowd, the quote is, the enemy is sleep. Don’t bother to Google it. The indices for this are garbage. And so it goes.

As a matter of fact, there is a lot an individual can do by coming into contact. To take a snapshot of the symbol/sign/signal set. Some would call that the dominant memes but that term is more pop than science. It is immersion one would avoid because then the wiring effects become moreorless fixed as, for lack of a better term, habituated thinking.

The practices of eastern meditation, zazen, etc., as the next generation of Hinduism evolved precisely to unwire the brain from immersive meditative techniques (worship of divinities). The mind isn’t capable of absorbing totality. To use a database metaphor, without an index, it becomes goo. The quality sought is fast signal recognition to determine engagement. There are ways other than total immersion to do that but the trick is fast recognition with minimal information and slow/fast reaction triggers. A matter of training.

That’s all make believe, dude.

Although perception is reality, I’m not obligated to share yours, bro.

As it is, you just come off like you’re trying to sound cool as Philosophy 101 students are inclined to do. I know (or rather, I hope) there’s more to it than that, so tell us more about how these ideas you have presented should change the reader’s decision-making process in that area.

The current set of data on the internet is predominately two-dimensional in its content and organization. In the medium term, as inter-operability between the real world ™ and virtual spaces becomes more tightly integrated, the desire and need for three-dimensional organization of data will rise. This would be the same kind of data as is on the web now – user centric asynchronous communication, but in a consensus reality mirror world that kind of data could be tagged onto any object or location in 3d space.

As examples, the line at Rubio’s for burritos is backed up? Tag the store with comment. The photocopier on the 3rd floor is out of ink? Tag it with a comment. If all this information were surfaced through a virtual world interface, we’d be swimming in a sea of asynchronous data.

The nice thing here is have the opportunity for incidental asynchronous contact. Maybe a stranger tagged your car with a comment that it’s got cool tires.

Plus, I prefer an epistemological treatment of the philosophy of perception as such treatment more readily complies with my Sartrean existentialist orientation.

That’s all make believe, dude.

Sadly, this isn’t particularly useful information. That theory in particular applies to *all* sensory input, not just culturally related ones, and that means that you can’t be outside the process period. You can go down different paths by avoiding coming into contact with various concepts, but this also isn’t particularly useful, because all things being equal, the source of the conditioning is mostly irrelevant. You may have more or less impact on existing systems, depending on how compatible your own conditioning is when you smack up against them, but this isn’t inherently a good or bad thing.

Honestly, the most useful thing you can do is come into contact with as many different and incompatible “attractors of culture” as possible, rather than trying to studiously avoid them. Integration of disaparate systems is vastly more useful than being able to operate outside the influence of any given one. There’s always SOMETHING that’ll establish that echo chamber; you can’t get away from that. Better to embrace it and then force the echo chamber to include as close to a total world view as the human mind is capable of comprehending.

[...] just have been reading a very insightful and touching post by Raph Koster on his website. One can consider his post to be a meditation about the notion of “virtual space”. A key [...]