timboucher

I’m often blown away by the excellent and thoughtful comments readers leave on the discussions here on this website. I wanted to promote this one by Svenson to prime-time though, because I think it cuts to the heart of some interesting ideas for further discussion.

I think the problem is that our philosophy hasn’t caught up with it all yet. In studying computer science, I reached the same conclusions, that its all metaphors, and the metaphors control us. Like what the hell is a web “page” or an XML “document”? There are no pages or documents here. We just rely on metaphors dating back to writing symbols on pieces of paper because the possibilities are too vast. Same with Object oriented programming. There are no “objects” in the bytecode, objects exist only in our mind, they allow us to see possibilities of what bytecode could do. They give us excuses, alibis, to do whatever we’re doing.

But that’s where the philosophy comes in, everything is like that in the end. Everything is a metaphor. All we experience is information, and how we parse it or objectify it controls us - becoming our reality for better or worse. I think when we’ve come to terms with this philosophical principle things will get a hell of a lot more interesting in the land of computers.

There’s a great Norman Brown quote, “Everything is a metaphor; there is only poetry.” So I guess in a sense, what I am looking for is a new type of poetry to describe the experiences of beauty which are now possible to us in this modern age because of the technologies available to us.

I wrote elsewhere: “All a new technology does is enable us to describe reality differently. When we begin to do that, we create new possibilities in the gaps in between the old and new descriptions.”

I love what Svenson is saying above because it doesn’t just apply to computers: it applies to everything. It applies to the human experience. We have a tendency to objectify the poetry which each of us lives according to, and then we go to war over whose poetry is the best.

• If you ever rode the subway and read that poetry they have up
• Moetry in potion
• From that stupid subway poetry crap
• Musk Seance
• autocarinsurance