Interface Theory of Consciousness
On experiencing ideas and thought:
After a couple of years of meditating it hit me that I was never able to pinpoint when any thought I was having started. There’s never a “moment” I can point to, a feeling of “oh this is when I’m starting to think about that trip I took when I was 5”. I always seem to “wake up” in the middle of the thought.
One of the things I find most interesting about ITP is the idea that Consciousness in not necessarily an emergent property but rather a fundamental property. In other words, I can’t fall into the trap of thinking that consciousness is somehow “mine” and it emerges from “me”. Rather, I am myself a sort of rain-drop-in-the-cloud.
In this sense, interfaces that “mimic” life (like VR) are fundamentally flawed. They presuppose that there’s a sort of “objective” experience of life that can be copy-pasted, and in doing so subscribe to the somewhat naive idea that there’s an internal and external process of life which can be neatly severed and reproduced.
I sincerely hope that the failure of VR technologies pushes us into interfaces that are somewhat more “psychedelic” for lack of a better word: ambiguous boundaries, filters instead of categories, and connections instead of individuation. I think these alternative interfaces might match mine a bit better, and contribute to a general sense of wellbeing around technology and knowledge that is somewhat lacking these days.
On interfaces:
I’m sitting at a South-facing desk in the Dibner library. In front of me is large panoramic window that frames the top of the scrawny trees in Metrotech square. It rains occasionally.
I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon setting up this week’s little “word input” exercise. Having abstained from technology for most of this summer, the attempt at building something via keyboard feels stunted and forced. Nonetheless I’m happy with myself - I decided I wanted to implement a little vim-style plugin architecture for the thing and it works well; if I want more functionality in the future, adding it in will be easy. It’s a good architecture.
For a second there’s light outside the window and the buildings beyond the tops of the Metrotech trees are illuminated, enormous and impossible. And I’m reminded of how strange it is that we use this word, “architecture” for things as different as a skyscraper and a computer program. I bring up this distinction because, to me, the ‘feeling’ of the two is drastically different: the architecture of our world is a massive, awe-inspiring endeavor when looked at collectively; the architecture of our systems is, instead, a conceptual world mired with friction, anxiety, and chaos. Hand-waving a lot of specificity aside, I think this distinction has a lot to do with how far each set of these symbolic systems is from our actual sensorial reality. A building is tangible in a way that a compiler is not. Perhaps, tying this back to ITP, things “of” this world are closer to our interface than those that are fully abstract.
I bring this up in part because I’m convinced it doesn’t have to be this way. Distance or closeness to our interface does not have to necessarily mean pain vs. pleasure, function vs. friction; it’s just that it takes more effort to design usable abstractions when they’re farther from our immediate conceptual & sensory frameworks. The reason our systems - in this case technological - are so fraught with friction and anxiety and obscurity is because they were built by teams of engineers that personified the meme “this is why a liberal arts degree is sometimes a good idea”. I think the largest contributor to AI fanaticism is not actually the hope for a “better” future, whatever that means: somewhere under it all is the fervent desire that AI will fix the shit systems we’ve married ourselves to, from which there’s no divorcing without massive collective effort.
The idea that AI will somehow unleash our “true” creativity makes little sense - it’s not like we ever lacked hardware capacity for anything that we really wanted to do, individually or collectively (other than hyper-specific academic concerns, and even then, the limitation tended to be time, not hardware). We just got stuck with terrible (albeit long-running) conceptual systems that severely handicapped our ability to use technology as a true cognitive enhancer. There’s only so much you can do with files, folders, and compiled languages. And once you start building a castle on sand, you kind of just have to continue, hoping it won’t collapse on your watch.
I don’t think I’m making any real sense, but I guess my point is: yes, ITP (Interface) is fascinating and also empowering. OOO also was. They’re effective in an almost psychedelic kind of way - what does my commute feel like, now that there is no time? And yet my gripe and fundamental frustration is that the tools of agency in this society (our other interfaces), are still stuck in time, when there’s no reason they should. Great, there’s no space but I still have to remember what subfolder I put my plane ticket in.
I don’t know where to post the exercise so here is the link: