It was cold after work today so I put on a podcast and let my body walk me home. I noticed how much warmer I felt, or at least how much less I felt the cold. I wondered for a moment if my ear buds were acting like tiny earmuffs helping to keep the wind out of my head. In a way they were doing just that, but not physically. Half of me was in a temperatureless space between Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark, rapt with termite fantasies. I wasn’t as cold because I wasn’t as there. I wasn’t as outside.
I listen to a lot of podcasts. I’d say at least two hours a day on average. They fit so snugly into the mental whitespace of my days – showering, taking the bus, doing the dishes, walking to work. It’s very efficient. It’s also gotten me thinking about the eroding relationship between conscious experience and physical space. Increasingly, cell reception is the sole significance of our bodily location. I know I’m exaggerating, but take a moment to be amazed at the modern capacity to instantly strike up real-time conversations with anyone you know while speeding along the highway or hiking through a forest. Those bowed heads on the bus aren’t lost in social isolation, they’re just not really on the bus. At least not in a way that matters to the conversations they’re having.
What if we extrapolate these experiences? Imagine podcasts, text messages on the bus, and even google glass as transitive technologies. Google glass aims to move away from intrusive tech – you don’t have to pull your phone out and hold or look at it anymore when you’re checking movie times on the metro. But why even go to the movies? The Oculus Rift already has a demo where you can sit in a virtual theater to watch movies. Having your friends join from another city and hang out with you barely qualifies as science fiction. For a gutsier fantasy, throw in some haptics so you can high-five and cuddle while watching too. A proper virtual reality [like that sweet basement arcade chat room in Ready Player One] might eliminate socially-driven locomotion. Tele-commuting, tele-parties, tele-shopping. These all exist in inferior forms, and we’re already doing them.
You might imagine a world of limp cybernauts slowly bulging from their haptic suits, but let’s try a more interesting picture. What about a legion of empty-eyed manual laborers? No one’s sure exactly what amount of our mental activity is available to consciousness. Notably, in some cases those blinded by brain trauma will retain the capacity to catch objects or navigate cluttered hallways – all the while reporting absolutely no conscious visual perceptions. This is known as ‘blindsight’. Apparently some visual processing stream is executing these functions without bothering to evoke an associated conscious experience. It’s unclear what the limits of non-conscious processing might be [if this question interests you, read Peter Watts’ fascinating and auspiciously-titled e-novel Blindsight. It’s not amazingly well-written, but his thoughts on consciousness will stay with you. So will the hard-science space vampires]. It seems reasonable that some repetitive tasks could be learned so innately as to be performed with little or no conscious intervention.
Now imagine yourself shoveling hot, buttery popcorn into your face as your friends joke about the latest Hollywood flick up on the big screen. You’re not even vaguely aware of your physical body, which is on a treadmill or laying bricks or checking people’s passports or some other nonsense. I guess by the time VR technology has gotten this good, most traditional jobs are fully automated anyways, but that’s not the point. The point is that the Matrix will have basically come true, but not as an evil robotic ploy to enslave humanity. Just as that place you [the conscious ‘you’] slip off to when you don’t want to experience the banal exertions of your physical body.
What I’m trying to say is that you should listen to podcasts, because in my experience they’re the closest thing to that sort of technology available today. So grab your earbuds and a sponge, dip into some Radiolab or This American Life, and before you know it your body will be knocking around the kitchen looking for more things to clean while you bask in idle entertainment.
Within Riesen 