
Developing Embodied Familiarity with Hyperphysical Phenomena (2019) - Impossible
http://www.graycrawford.com/thesis
======
Ameo
> Modern computed environments can now receive and provide a wider set of
> sensory channels

> more powerful ways of thinking

> The body itself now becomes a designable structure

This reminds me of a novel called "Diaspora" by Greg Egan. The virtual human-
descended main characters were trying to communicate with an alien species
extremely different from humans - different to the point where their very
thought processes were incompatible with any shared method of information
transmission.

As a workaround, they created a chain of copies of themselves, each one
slightly more like the alien from the last, but similar enough to be able to
communicate with its neighbors. In this way, they created a way to communicate
with the aliens through the chain of proxy-entities.

\----

It's really interesting to see these kinds of ideas come up in experimental VR
research. I do believe that that's the end-game of VR-style technology: not
perfectly replicating reality and making the virtual world indistinguishable
from the real world, but opening up the human mind to a broader set of
senses/thoughts/experiences than are available through the corporeal human
body.

> [...] designers will hamper themselves and their users by perpetuating old
> UI mechanics, turning VR etc into a rough simulacrum of the constrained
> physical world rather than the means for its transcendence.

I think that the human mind is an incredibly general thing and that it would
be capable of existing in an environment completely separate from the body.
I'm excited to see what kind of advancements we'll see in our lifetimes in the
area of expanding consciousness through technology and moving past the
previously insurmountable constraints of the human body within which we spend
our lives.

~~~
EdwardDiego
I'd like to see the computed environment that can reliably reproduce smell and
taste. Or the sensation of touch. Or the hairs raising on the back of your
neck when someone is staring at you.

As for the repetitive usage of "hyperphysics":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperPhysics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperPhysics)

> HyperPhysics is an educational website about physics topics.

