6: Further towards connectedness 2004
Chapter 6 of my 2005 PhD Thesis ‘A Journey of Integration’
Further towards connectedness 2004
The experience of writing Hello World: travels in virtuality, which involved confronting what Arthur Kroker calls ‘the will to virtuality’¹ and beginning to understand its allure, has guided me away from any hope of early clarification and towards other kinds of ‘surprises’, many of which I expect to arise more directly from the mind and the flesh than from the machine. This is not to say I have given up my passion for computers, not at all, but it does mean that I am expanding my thinking into areas I would not have considered five or ten years ago.
Near the start of this essay I quoted from the hacker Jude Milhon ‘Let’s see the ultra-violet polka-dot flowers that hummingbirds see, and smell ’em like the bees do. And crank up the sensorium all across the board.’² I was excited by that when I read it in the late 1990s. A computer-mediated conjunction of species, merging our sensorial experiences and sharing the space of the world with other beings very unlike us — perhaps alien, perhaps android, perhaps simply avian — is an intriguing possibility. And earlier in this essay there is another reference to the experience of what we might call ‘birdness’: Clarissa Pinkola Estes writing that ‘Understanding a bird comes…
