Monday, April 03, 2006

Can hearing it later change someone's mind?

Consider this: if we attempt, having had no experience of it, to cultivate a plant, it is likely we will fail. At the least we will fail to make the most of what the plant could be. If we then read a book on gardening and make the attempt a second time, we may still to some degree fail but we will fail more intelligently and the knowledge contained in the text of the book will change our behavior in cultivation. What happened there? We uploaded some software. By mulling over pages of ten thousands of black marks, each bearing only the most minimal meaning as a phonetic building block, we have realigned our neural networks in a manner that causes our behavior to change. More importantly, it causes or catalyzes us to choose to change our behaviour, if you're still optimistic enough to believe we have free will. I think that's crazy: it blows my mind. It gets wiggier when you bring the electronic media into the picture: now this information is stored in arcane codes deluxe on a sea of silicon and wierd trace elements and copper printed green circuitboard, (just what the hell is that green board made of?); it exists as a billion billion series of quantum electron states, tricky and bewildering things if you know anything about quantum mechanics and the electron, believe you me. If text has the capacity to alter the human mind and if the human mind has the ability to alter physical reality (as everyone still optimistic enough to believe in free will believes it does, whether they realize it or not), then what sort of potential energy does this information contain? What is its form? Does it have anything to do with the configurations of the electrons marking places on the big boards in that computer off somewhere in my friends' house? Obviously the patterns of those electrons are relevant as they are specific to a particular piece of text (or in the case of my writings generally a peculiar piece of text); nonetheless we cannot begin to relate the energy represented in a piece of text as a motivator of change to the rather better understood phenomenon of electrons and silicon and germanium and other wierd transition metals and semiconductors and how they interact. They are obviously connected but we cannot sensibly relate them. Begging the question: how does the information retain its meaning when noone is looking at it? It's just hanging out there in "cyberspace," unobserved (and so in some quantum questioners' minds in a highly ambiguous state of being)... Where is the meaning? It's not in my mind anymore, at least not in a form I could readily communicate. It's not yet in your mind. But it's out there... Behaving like perfectly normal electrons. Not to be cliche but if the tree falls in the forest...

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

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