Saturday, July 30, 2011 0 comments

Reflections on Funes the Memorious and the Internet as a Virtual Landscape of Perception

'I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began', he said to me. And also:'‘My dreams are like other people’s waking hours'. And again, toward dawn: 'My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.'— Funes, el Memorioso, Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges' Funes the Memorious
is a fantasy short story about Funes, a teenage boy who's Memory tells the evocative tale of Ireneo Funes, a Uruguayan boy who suffers a crash which leaves him hopelessly immobilized coupled with a critical method of Hypermnesia - a mental abnormality expressed in exceptionally precise memory. So vivid is Funes' memory which he can effortlessly distinguish any physical object at most distinct period of viewing. Within his perpetual present images unfold their archaeology as infinite wells of details: "He knew the sorts of the clouds while in the southern sky to the morning of April 30th, 1882". Funes' memories are intensely present as muscular and thermal sensations accompanying every visual record to be recorded. They can reconstruct every event he ever experienced. His recollections are really accurate which the time that it takes to reconstruct a full day's importance of events equals to the length of that very day. In Funes' world perception makes no for good business choices is only little time or motive to perceive, reflect, or interpret.

As a result, Funes lacks the ability for detail suppression and any search to conceive, or manage, his impressions -muscles and stuff of thought - is overridden with relentlessly literal recollections ("We, within a glance, perceive three wine glasses revealed; Funes saw many of the shoots, clusters, and grapes of your vine".) Funes is unable to generalize, to deduce in order to induce anything he experiences. Everything's just what there're, scaled one to one. Cursed with meticulous memory, Funes escapes to reside in remoteness and isolation - a "dark room" - where new images tend not to enter and where his motionless figure is absorbed inside the contemplation of an sprig of Artemisia.

On the century later, Hypermnesia happens to be to Funes what the Web is today to mankind.

An inexhaustible anthology
of each one possible thing recorded at intervals of conceivable location in a different time, the internet is displacing the role of memory plus it achieves this immaculately. Any imaginable detail regarding the many dimensions of the given experience will be either recorded or consumed confirmed another fragment of reality. There is absolutely no time to think, this indicates. Through technology, thinking becomes so much easier. Or perhaps, this is simply a brand new types of thinking. Will be the Web just one more kind of reality, or possibly reality to become label of the world wide web?

In their "On Exactitude in Science", Borges carries on sticking with the same ideas concerning trace when he talks about an empire in which the work of cartography attained such accuracy that its map has emerged the size of the kingdom it describes. Scale, or distinction, was now changed by repetition. A model within itself, this sort of map embodies the dissimilarity between reality and its particular representation. It is the territory itself plus the origin loses authenticity; it achieves your being more real than real mindful about reality to chart.
The net, without doubt, is becoming such a map worldwide, both literally and symbolically, simply because it traces in a almost 1:1 ratio every event that has ever taken place. One cannot afford to have lost inside a space so perfectly detailed and predictable. Physical navigation is very solved as online maps offer including the most exuberant flâneur the information of prediction. But additionally, there are enormous mental implications to that.

Even as we are fed while using the information required or desired to understand and perceive the world around us thus comes the particular power of perception and the ability to practice abstract and critical thought atrophies. Nothing demonstrates this more than virtual games or virtual reality. Models become the very reality that individuals are inspired to model.

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