Читать книгу The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet - Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli - Страница 7

In searching for the law of prime numbers, for the secrets of great guitarists’ solos, or for the understanding of the human soul, 25 years ago, I reached what was – and still remains – the limits of computability.

Finding those limits is perhaps the unconscious secret goal of our drive toward technology. Whatever can be made digital is merely a model created by the mind, which the mind itself can reshape or destroy at any moment.

The mind is by nature dualistic, operating within the same binary logic as computers. The dualistic-binary attitude of looking at the world gives both people and computers a powerful discriminating tool – a tool to produce huge amount of data and to act on matter in powerful ways. Through this dualistic mind we can fulfill our highest “mission” – to be masters of nature, as assigned by the scriptures. But matters that are more than mental – artistic creativity, brilliant intuition, feelings of compassion, love, joy, peace, as well as experiencing spiritual states like a no-mind state of deep meditation – cannot be represented in digital form. Though information technology can point to or inform us about those states, more often than not it keeps us stuck looping at the informational level, actually distancing us from them.

As we reach the limits of technology, either it can stimulate our search for something further – jumping from information to consciousness-processing as Peter Russell (1995) defined it – or we can become hypnotized by the infinite forms information can be shaped into. Like a fascinating psychedelic vision, the digital realm can amaze us forever, but basically it goes no further than the mental level which originally created the technology.

My impossible tasks, seen in retrospect, were my self-inflicted koans. A koan is a question with no apparent answer given by a Zen master to a student. The very effort to find an answer is what transforms consciousness and eventually stops the mind. Staying in the unknown is not comfortable for the mind, but it is the best way to link the subject of the quest with our inner void. From this, greater awareness can arise. By contrast, much of the Web industry is designed to cut through, to deliver answers quickly – not in itself a bad thing, but which can and does weaken the drive of our inner quest.

Since the impossible tasks didn’t pay, I worked on more practical software and wrote about computer science. In 1982, with the UNIX internal architecture still a well-kept secret and without much documentation for the end user, two other students and I wrote a book about UNIX. We printed it with a low-quality dot matrix printer, and I felt like a technical Che Guevara fighting for the liberation of computer knowledge.