Crustose lichen: Connecting consciousnesses (Tan Le's Headset), Avatar agency (e.g. Rorty example), Communication, Language, Virtual Worlds

Harbin ethnography:

... Thus agency, imagination and the milieu originating out of the 1960s give form to ongoing, potential generation of countercultural Harbin, as well as cyber-hippy, avatar agency.

Not only can these digital, communication technologies via the internet make possible connecting consciousnesses (e.g. Tan Le's “Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves” TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html, and Andrew Junker's Brainfingers - http://brainfingers.com) – as well as make potential avatar agency (e.g. in the Rorty example above), and now potentially in virtual worlds, they also open the possibility for developing, digital communication creativity and innovation via computer languages. Using Tan Le's headset, one could conceivably be creating virtual objects, or mentally articulating words which are then digitally represented, directly with one's mind in real time in a virtual world, together with other end users, even while on psylocybin in mushrooms. For example, in virtual Harbin, with your brain on a headset, you could be building the Taj Mahal, while I create the Ganges river, streaming from the infinite distance of way over there, coiling around, kundalini-serpent-like your Taj Mahal, and streaming off into infinite timelessness up there some nowhere. While I have suggested that languages' emergence in human primates (vis-a-vis Professor Terrence Deacon's “The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Brain and Language“ (1997)) is perhaps the starting point for these current, remarkable, digital developments in communication processes, especially virtual worlds like OpenSimulator and Second Life, the influence of human language, vis-a-vis the expressions of virtual, now digital, beyond-the-significance-of-signs' signifiers can now become a Harbin melody in the form of virtual Harbin. Vis-a-vis virtual Harbin, a kind of New Age, digital, Om oasis, from one's home bathtub especially – for the relaxation response - and with a brain-computer head set, the ongoing generation of virtual worlds with actual Harbin as a seed, becomes possible, similar to the way Vedic traditions (in India) have imagined (which Upanishad, or Veda, and heard about at Harbin?), now instantiated in multimedia (Packer and Jordan 2001 – e.g. interactivity, integration, immersion, hypermedia and new forms of narrativity) forms, especially in virtual worlds. The implications, digitally, for western philosophy in terms of understanding, with veracity, ideas, knowledge generation and representations of reality, and thinking, vis-a-vis epistemology, metaphysics as well as ontology – in the one now - are linguistic in terms of new kinds of narrativity, vis-a-vis the creative and generative possibilities of words and language, and, for example, especially metaphor (Rorty 1989:48), currently mediated digitally, - with the possibility for ongoing conversations about anything that finds form, for example, in a virtual Harbin, - emerging, as it does, out of the milieu of the radical 1960s.

What's new about communication in digital, virtual worlds on the internet, vis-a-vis this ethnographic history of actual and virtual Harbin Hot Springs, are the qualities of communication possibilities in multimedia virtual worlds, now making possible brain-to-brain, bodymind-to-bodymind, and so consciousness-to-consciousness communication with headsets, all in real time, via a distributed, worldwide, communication network ,as conversation, - giving new significance to the concept of virtual. ...











(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/10/crustose-lichen-connecting.html - October 19, 2010)