Wired as Word as World

So all this buzz about hypertext and the noosphere over at Vortex Egg reminds me of the Myst video games. In its story, a race of people called the D'Ni had the power of writing worlds through an elaborate description of its every detail, even down to the workings of its physics; that could then be travelled to. This sounds an awfully lot like the internet, especially in light of how Metachor describes it as a self-organization towards collective consciousness. I imagine if we could write such a detailed world-book ourselves such a thing might be possible, and the net's stygmergic and collective nature lends itself to that purpose (interpretation). As more knowledge becomes linked through the web the limits of our collective understanding of existence expands. The biggest issue then would be providing greater access to it and a really damn effective organization for it. It's not the collective consciouss if we're not all conscious of it. I would kind of picture the inner workings of it like a vast multilayered correspondance chart, much like that found in magical texts (like Crowely's "777"), but each person would only see the nearer level links in their particular field of query.

The other interesting thing about the Myst games, was that though the linking world books were written in words, the games themselves were played out in a virtual world of symbols and sounds that had to be interpreted in order to procede. This is very similar to Vinge's portrayal of the Other Plane in "True Names," as well as many other sci-fi depictions of cyberspace, as a virtual space moved and manipulated within (assumably in a multi-dimensional way) by the user's avatar. As noted before, Vinge clothes this space in terms of elaborate and magical symbol-complexes that while appearing as actual rooms and objects also symbolic of the underlying processing of code that is their function. The article on transmogrification Metachor dug up points to this as well, saying that the Web weaves word and image together in such a dynamic way that "Cyberspace becomes visualized data, and meaning arrives in spatial as well as in verbal expressions." It then goes on to compare this to religious ritual and iconography: "While the sacred Word lives primarily in the hearts and mouths of believers, the transmission of the Word over generations takes place through the rituals and the artistic images adopted by the community of the faithful. Since the medieval period, for example, the Catholic Church surrounds its word-based rituals with music, paintings, architecture, gesture, and incense. Such communal art is deemed essential to the transmission of the Word as conceived primarily through spoken and written scriptures. The word on the page is passed along in a vessel of images, fragrances, songs, and kinesthetic pressed flesh. Elements like water, salt, and wine contribute to the communication. Truth is transmitted not only through spoken and written words but also through a participatory community that re-enacts its truths through ritual." In other words the knowledge is being passed along by an actual experiencing of the thing it is representative of. Word is transmitted (taught) by linking it to its phenomena. Prior to the advent of such common virtual reality necessary to implement a full scale symbolic search-space such a thing could appear in two dimensions as a collage of images that roll up behind the linked words, and offer a higher level interpretation to the word data being presented.

And since its computers, then the words are all just a higher level interpretation of numerical processes, and correspondances would have to be me made between the numbers and the words and the things as well, such as in numerological approaches to knowledge. Then with numbers for the lowest level agents instead of words we write worlds out of code, and find ourselves back in the matrix again.

To play the fool, I will point out that this whole process of words and symbols and representation in the net is remarkabley similair to being alive and interpreting and transmitting meaning from our everyday experiences. Until the net breaks through into some other world of omniscient existence it is only a mirror for the veil of our beliefs.