It is my hope that by more formally publishing using this great substack tool - I can continue my efforts to provide good thoughts, ideas and contemplations. Further to that this is a platform where people can subscribe and help me to feed myself, my wife and anyone else in my family unit that needs help from time to time.
First of all - this is also me, an avatar. My friend Joo the golden retriever. A puppet - a virtual baby yoda but was there ever a real yoda?
Why Virtuality:
Well, firstly it’s a really interesting nexus of meaning because there is reality and there is whatever is juxtaposed against that. Altered reality, pseudo-reality but lets get down to virtual sound - what is that? What about virtual reality the older thing and virtual circuits that make virtual machines. There are scant differences between reality and virtual playgrounds in many of these cases.
One of the things I engaged deeply in was based on this point where I made a video mixer using a little computer called an Arduino, a touch screen, and a few parts [ethernet shield] + software that was shared for free. Its such a modern thing and yet already it seems outdated as it is from 2012 - i believe it started with me researching this black magic video mixer and finding the project on YouTube.
So that was fun - i had both a monitor but i could touch it and make video mixing decisions live. I already had so many computers 3-4 screens and an audio mixer filling up all the space. I was running a kind of live streaming TV studio with the cameras in a room upstairs. Oh and by the way I was in a fake Tibetan Buddhist cult called Rigpa but it didn’t seem fake because of it’s affiliate with the who is who of Tibetan Buddhism - but that is another story. The point was I had made something powerful for very small expense and just confidence that I could assemble this project. My technical friend Nick also helped me figure out the power and wiring for this as he was no stranger to electronics but this was likely something he also found quite novel and fun. Then again he never seems surprised by technology given that he works on satellites and even the rocketry behind launching them these days.
Virtual? No it’s just electronics but you know when you make a synthetic solution without physical controls it seems virtual - not the screen is understanding swipes. The screen is just interpreting touch which is now just accepted but touch and sensing touch used to be a human quality. Sensors bring the 5 sense fields into the world of software or even “artificial” intelligence … there it is again synthetic - or virtual intelligence. In fact ever since the very basic computers were first invented by Alan Turing he already foresaw the turing test - where you can try to determine if you are talking to a human or a computer based on only questions and answers.
With wires and electronic components we can create effects .. we can control lights that use voltage and voltage and charge can move around emulating a kind of a machine. Mostly because it’s not physically moving but that eventually real events come from these moving internal changes in voltage that we see it as “false” or magical - or virtual. It’s hidden in the wires or now the wires might themselves be virtual - you have circuits that emulate (recreate a simulation) of electronics called FPGAs - which I’ve heard of but never used. One day it will be normal to make things virtually. You might have a kind of circuitry that needs to be re-designed on the fly and reloaded because you can’t get to it - it’s in space for example. So is the circuit real or virtual? Its really strange - i don’t think it’s virtual - the fact that it can vanish and re-appear is just the nature of how you build it within another system.
Virtual sounds are based on real world physical objects that vibrate - strings, bits of metal and hammers, glass bowls, drums but you model what is the sound - what shape are the waves when you analyse them and how can you simulate that until it becomes indistinguishable or at least close enough that people just hear it as another kind of instrument. Virtual piano, real piano - are just different pianos and ever since the first hammond organ was in a court case if it was allowed to call itself an organ people were asked to distinguish between the pipe organs (vibrating columns of air) and an electronic sound that simulated this or was at least not so different. A large enough percentage of people couldn’t tell the difference and so Hammond organ could be sold as “an organ” and today we might call the older one the pipe organ and think of electronic instruments as the real organ … so far down the road we have come.
With the passing of time we lose the sense of difference between the image, the video and the real thing the recording and the real performance. The painting is almost always stylized but it can be ‘photo--realistic’ but we can tell. Now we have media that make it harder to tell and we spend so much time enjoying recordings that we may lose touch with the original.
Finally if we can simulate a circuit, if we can simulate a conversation with a real person, if we can create something robotic that looks and feels, even smells like a person then how far away are we from a virtual brain. It would seem to many people that it’s only a matter of time. So science fiction doesn’t just predict it - we have whole universes and fantasy histories of robots and artificial intelligence dominating mankind. We have people who believe we are already, in fact, living in a simulation due to the prediction that eventually we won’t be able to tell the difference and we are merely creating simulations inside the simulation to learn that such things are possible - and then figuring out that we are inside one now? Some people think they can convince you.
Psychologists often try to educate and shock people into seeing just how easy our senses are to fool and how addicted we are to sensory stimulation. How willing we are to fall prey to illusions and retreat withing games and simulations to find a more controlled way to live and experience life. We can meet people online and only know them via their online persona and avatars, or even virtual bodies they have designed within games.
So I think maybe I will take all my experiences of Buddhist philosophy, electronics, music, computer programming write for anyone else who enjoys looking for the thin edge between virtual and actual on whatever level it is to be wondered about each time I think on it. I hope this brings some value and is the fruition of my life’s experience. After all I haven’t even started to talk about what is unlocked when you go down a virtual currency rabbit hole and ask yourself “what even is money?”.