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The lost world of physicality

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Re: The lost world of physicality

#61

Post by boredguy8 »

This passage seems relevant as it points at the contours of what I take to be the underlying 'problem' that the OP hints at with the litany of questions. It's also an interesting background from which to approach the writings of people like Kurzweil. There is, it seems, a deep desire to escape our bodies. The drive is present in many religions and it is present in futurism of diverse sorts. Lastly, the final sentence seems especially relevant at a time when it seems that most 'misfortunes' get transformed into 'moral failings'.

From the essay "Really Bad Infinities", in the journal parallax, written 1999:

In ‘Body Fluids’, an essay as remarkable for its prescience as for its rigour, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille ask in the context of what we have come to know as safer sex discourse in the AIDS pandemic:

  What will we say to those who ignore advice and continue to make contacts
  known to be at risk? Will we treat them as irresponsible, to be lectured to,
  put under observation, and converted? In that case, our future scenario is
  assured: that of the child in the glass bubble, for whom the outside envi-
  ronment means death; that of the obsessional struggle against all unmonitored
  contact as potentially the source of death.‘
Much has happened in the fourteen years since Stengers’s and Gille’s essay first appeared. We have learned, for example, that the pandemic is interminable, that we are, and will be, in what we call our being, of AIDS (with the full force of the partitive: we belong to AIDS as its ownmost), and that we can therefore no longer think of the future as the restoration of a putatively uncontaminated past; we have learned, perhaps, that so-called safer sex is not a state of being, and that latex is no guarantee of immortality; we, some of us, have learned the hard way (there being no easy way) the existential irrelevance of both hope and despair; we have learned that the fact that we both are and possess bodies means that our bodies are our unavoidable exposure to danger, that there never is, has been, nor can be a place of safety; more, that the fact of our embodiment is the fact of our utter nontranscendence, our finitude. And we have had to live the future scenario of which Stengers and Gille warned us in 1985; absolutely nothing has happened to deprive their question and their warning of their cogency, for we have seen technical advice pertinent to our pleasures pressed into the service of a thoroughly authoritarian, albeit thoroughly stupid, moralism. Indeed, safer sex discourse, including not only verbal admonition but an entire range of material and institutional practices, has become an essential part of an entire scientific medical technology of social control such that all illness, disability, and death itself have become essentially moral failings rather than misfortunes.

Re: The lost world of physicality

#62

Post by estel »

jgrahamc wrote: post #5
scrrr wrote: post #4

Not sure what the paragraph about talking to children has to do with the rest. But I've been seated next to children that traveled alone before so perhaps it's just your perception? Often if we feel uncomfortable with something, we make others uncomfortable, too.

No, I was referring to this: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/06/british_airw... (see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_sex_discrimination_poli... ) The point of the children paragraph is that many things are leading people to keep children indoors (fear of men, fear of the Sun) and this combined with a virtual world means that they are more and more cut off. At least, that's the hypothesis. Look…

Whilst I don't disagree that there is a widespread culture of fear in many communities, I'm not convinced that this has manifested in a significant trend of parents not allowing children to play outside. Do you have any data for this?

Re: The lost world of physicality

#64

Post by bricestacey »

pointyhat wrote: post #26
rsaarelm wrote: post #21

On the Kindle every book is Twilight. What does this even mean? Text is already digital (made solely from a discrete alphabet), all about setting up a completely artificial virtual reality of sorts, and not fundamentally tied to any specific physical medium. Strangely, I nevertheless don't see many of these types of essays condemning novels on the same breath as social networking and video games.

I think it means that everything is mediocre crap. (bar 1984 which goes missing).

I wonder if anyone making that claim actually owns a Kindle. After buying a Kindle, I am reading a lot of older texts that are out of copyright and are far superior to most of today's crap.

Re: The lost world of physicality

#65

Post by giardini »

mixmax wrote: post #49

Some six years ago I bought a boat that I now live on. This means that I'm in daily contact with other people around the harbour that also live on boats. These people are outside a lot, get a lot of exercise (if you've ever owned a boat you'll know how much physical work must be endured to keep it ship-shape), and generally don't sit much behind copmuterscreens. I've noticed that there are quite a few people that liv…

But such anecdotal observations are often subject to "survivorship bias": you see only those who have survived and not the 30-to-70 year olds who tried and died:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Re: The lost world of physicality

#66

Post by [deleted] »

lukev wrote: post #45

The trend away from physicality began long before the internet. In fact, the ability to spend mental energy and effort on non-physical things is quite possibly one of the defining features of humanity itself. Stories, religion, relationships, philosophy, basic societal concepts such as "ownership" or "justice"... all of these are abstractions from physicality. The invention of writing allowed us to make these abstrac…

[deleted]

Re: The lost world of physicality

#67

Post by ctdonath »

lukev wrote: post #54
ctdonath wrote: post #46

"On the Kindle every book is Twilight." Struck me in church, standing there reading the Bible from an iPad, that the value of sacred texts may fade or alter, being indistinguishable from any other momentary array of pixels upon a slim universal reader. Being naturally physcial-focused, my toddler children may come to not grasp the "specialness" of some books - where I want them to learn value beyond bits and pixels.

But the specialness of any book is precisely related to its contents, not its physical manifestation. The Bible is thousands of years old, and yet even the oldest physical copies begin to crumble after a few hundred years. Teaching a reverence for physical objects is in a very real sense untruthful... the ideas they contain are what should (or ought) to matter.

It's not the reverence for physical objects I'm getting at. It's that digital content is ethereal, easily lost amid the terabytes ... while physical books bring a substantial reality to the content. Ideas can be lost in the deluge of limitless content; physical manifestation thereof requires choosing and limiting which content will persist.

I think nothing of adding hundreds or thousands of books to my digital reader, and think nothing of forgetting any of them therein. I select and prune with care which ideas and content will fill the limited capacity of my hard-earned hand-made physical bookcase, keeping only the greatest ideas and making that concentration of what matters accessible to the young minds who are growing to peruse them.

Re: The lost world of physicality

#68

Post by masterzora »

Hisoka wrote: post #25

A side effect of losing touch with the physical world is that it wrecks your brain. You begin to feel isolated from the rest of the world. What doesn't help is the growth of cities, and overpopulation. We start to view other people as competitors and enemies. Have you ever gone through some days when you encounter many people, whether it's in a commute, or whatever and ask why people are so useless in your life? What…

Have you ever gone through some days when you encounter many people, whether it's in a commute, or whatever and ask why people are so useless in your life?

No, never. They all fascinate me, instead.

Try this: next time you're in a rush somewhere stop for a minute and look at the people around you. Try to figure out their stories: who are their families or friends, why are they out right now and where are they going, what do they do for a living or in their spare time? You'll rarely, if ever, guess correctly, but it really helps to remind you of the human factor of everyone around you.

We RUSH and STRESS to go to places for 40 hours we hate, to work on stuff we don't like, with people we don't care about.

This seems to be the case with far too many people, but it doesn't have to be.

Re: The lost world of physicality

#69

Post by heynk »

glhaynes wrote: post #58

Fisking mode on, devils-advocate-to-some-extent option engaged. I think that the world of TV, computers, video games has caused us to lose our connection with the physical world. Add on top of that fear: fear of letting children play in the street, fear of chemistry sets, fear of ultraviolet light. This combination means that people (and especially the young) spend hours indoors away from the physical world immersed…

Thanks for pointing out some of the more anecdotal evidence from this article. I wish there was some data to compare things instead of it seeming like 'things were better in the good old days.'

One thing that is for certain is that obesity is a huge problem for younger generations. Part of that may be from less physical activity, but it is also no doubt due to recent food innovations that taste better, are cheaper, and are way worse for you.

Yes, kids these days text more than they talk on the phone, which is more than they probably talk in person. But if you look at it from the broader picture, plenty of aspects of life are the same as they've always been. For high school and college kids, the 'epitome of fun/social' is still going to parties. We have better/more porn to watch, but the end goal will always be to have sex with real girls. Sure, some kids grow up behind a computer and become very socially awkward, but were there really no shy and awkward kids before computers?

Action sports have taken off in the past twenty years, where 'physicality' is the center of it all. And its due to no small part of technology, which creates better equipment and increases exposure to actually make the sports more physical than they ever were.

The kids are still alright. Look at what kids still value as 'cool.' Not the video gamers, but the athletes. Being fat will never be 'cool.' Real social activities are always regarded as more fun then online chatting.

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