Monday, September 2, 2013

Time Distortion and Learning in Virtual Realities

In the film The Matrix, Morpheus and other red-pillers tell us about how being plugged in longer than others seems to change our sense of reality, personalities and perceptions. Indeed, if you were to ask the regular net user since the inception of IRC and those  who have successfully run a business on the Internet, they might tell you "it's all about the timing". In a place where mathematical logic rules and propositions inherit their futures from the study of vector fields, we have to ask ourselves the point at which imagination and reality begin to break down. At the cost of sounding like a hipster, the plugging in process seems to change the time scale at which our minds manage to process and learn new information and the rate at which it acquires knowledge.

Just like the "slumdogs" in India managed to learn biotechnology in two weeks with one computer connected to the Internet, we now see a boundary re-emerging in which humans are melding with the neo-agora and decentralized economics: the boundary of choice. Perhaps this is what Captain Picard meant when he was discussing how economies worked in his future:

We... handle our money systems differently here.

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