I am having some on off thoughts.
Created | Updated Mar 11, 2005
Some of my ideas live on the internet. They are all housed there together with millions of trillions of other ideas. What you are reading is an example of this.
Unlike ideas which are stored on paper (a book for instance) where they are put in a static fairly permanent form and normally coded in a way that I can interpret their meaning immediately, on the internet these ideas are stored as a series of ON and OFF states which in their native form don’t mean anything to us.
Also unlike my mental or inky ideas these are brought to life not by us but by other ons and offs and not necessarily by the same ons and offs every time. Therefore when someone, including myself accesses these ideas they may not be exactly the same as the last time they were accessed. For example yesterday my ideas had a green background. Today the background is blue.
So how are you experiencing this idea. Are you having the same visual experience as I did when I first created it, don't reply, as you cannot be sure.
If it survives the test of time will it still look and feel the same in 100 or 500 years time, or will a future DNA consider today’s ON and OFFS as somesort of ancient dead quaint language and therefore find it to difficult presenting it in it’s original form.
Now besides a bit of moss and a slight discolouring what cavemen and ancients Egyptians put down on cave walls and ancient scrolls look more or less the same now as they did then. Although having said that, even if the original is in pristine condition we may still not be able to interpret them properly, but at least it is presented to us in its original form.
Future generations may well have the same problems with us. Will they be able to interpret our ons and offs. I am sure that they won’t, I mean there are already trillions of early ons and offs in the world today which are impossible to interpret, and we are only talking about a few decades.
Hold on, I am going a bit off the rails here. My basic point here is that our ideas are increasingly being blogged into ON OFF states which cannot be interpreted by our brains alone and even when displayed to us in a human readable form we still cannot be sure that what we see is what was thought.
Still, I suppose that we can rest assured that all the really important ons and offs will be taken good care of. Umm, I wonder if Samuel Pepys Blog would have been found in time and considered important enough to have been taken care of.
Ps: I am off now as I am on to something really enlightening.....
Considering the trillions of lights (which are either on or off) that there are in the world (car headlights, indicators, break lights, taillights, street lights, standby leds, Christmas lights, etc)
In theory we may all be part of a very important beings' Blog storage system. - Now can this be the answer to the meaning of life?.
So think about it next time you flash your headlights, open the fridge or press your Caps Lock.
Unlike ideas which are stored on paper (a book for instance) where they are put in a static fairly permanent form and normally coded in a way that I can interpret their meaning immediately, on the internet these ideas are stored as a series of ON and OFF states which in their native form don’t mean anything to us.
Also unlike my mental or inky ideas these are brought to life not by us but by other ons and offs and not necessarily by the same ons and offs every time. Therefore when someone, including myself accesses these ideas they may not be exactly the same as the last time they were accessed. For example yesterday my ideas had a green background. Today the background is blue.
So how are you experiencing this idea. Are you having the same visual experience as I did when I first created it, don't reply, as you cannot be sure.
If it survives the test of time will it still look and feel the same in 100 or 500 years time, or will a future DNA consider today’s ON and OFFS as somesort of ancient dead quaint language and therefore find it to difficult presenting it in it’s original form.
Now besides a bit of moss and a slight discolouring what cavemen and ancients Egyptians put down on cave walls and ancient scrolls look more or less the same now as they did then. Although having said that, even if the original is in pristine condition we may still not be able to interpret them properly, but at least it is presented to us in its original form.
Future generations may well have the same problems with us. Will they be able to interpret our ons and offs. I am sure that they won’t, I mean there are already trillions of early ons and offs in the world today which are impossible to interpret, and we are only talking about a few decades.
Hold on, I am going a bit off the rails here. My basic point here is that our ideas are increasingly being blogged into ON OFF states which cannot be interpreted by our brains alone and even when displayed to us in a human readable form we still cannot be sure that what we see is what was thought.
Still, I suppose that we can rest assured that all the really important ons and offs will be taken good care of. Umm, I wonder if Samuel Pepys Blog would have been found in time and considered important enough to have been taken care of.
Ps: I am off now as I am on to something really enlightening.....
Considering the trillions of lights (which are either on or off) that there are in the world (car headlights, indicators, break lights, taillights, street lights, standby leds, Christmas lights, etc)
In theory we may all be part of a very important beings' Blog storage system. - Now can this be the answer to the meaning of life?.
So think about it next time you flash your headlights, open the fridge or press your Caps Lock.
