Advancing Reality, at the Expense of its Distinctions

Computer technology is growing new appendages, e.g., 3-D, haptics, sound, collaborative, high trust, time-based. Each of these enriches the capability of automation to model the real world and interact with it. With these computer capabilities we come closer to making the computer disappear into the landscape. Computers took our world and first made it 1-space (command line), then moved us into 2-space (motif, OS2, windows), now we are moving beyond flatland. Virtual Reality, High Fidelity Simulations, Gaming & Virtual Worlds are creating hi touch computed environments. These environments will take us beyond 3-D and cause us to blur the boundaries among concepts normally separate, like media vs education, or work & play, or advertising vs eduction. A feeling of immersion, in a computer-based environment, entails mastering the combination of these recently enablable factors to recreate our real world experience.

A Tolerance For Ambiguity

As the shift happens an interesting personal litmus test takes place. Some will pass through the shift, while others will be asked to stay. In a conversation with a friend recently an idea occurred to me. He has had a number of successful careers, first as a guitarist, then as a designer of spacecraft, and now as a software avante garde. He was wondering why he made it through paradigm shifts that trapped others. I noticed a theme running through the variety of solutions he had developed - a tolerance for ambiguity. Others were deeply engrossed in their point of view, but he explored multiple points of view. The more deeply invested, involved, or otherwise glued to a framework on is, the more difficult to see outside it. A healthy skepticism for whatever paradigm in which one sits will make it easier to escape it when its limits are found. This skepticism of complete solutions and tolerance for the ambiguity it assumes both appear as mileposts on the journey through a breakneck cognitive evolution. Given the complexity of the natural world, it is likely that the limitations we see in our explanations for it are indicative of the cognitive limitations we own. As we develop cognitive tooling, like computers, we are able to decomplexify the natural landscape. Innovation of those tools and mastery of them will be the guiding principles as we surf the n-space that is the natural world with its constantly reconfiguring set of factors.