Which Iteration of the Matrix is this?

As the Great Sequestration of 2020 slowly oozes along, we can see how the Web has become our social fabric -- with huge deficits, mind you.  Not only does IT merely simulate our social ecologies, it makes obsolete the learning curve that defines personal interaction.  Oh well. Soon our 'connectivity' (as we oxymoronically call it) will be running our refrigerators and vacuum cleaners.  Huzzah.

I'm wondering how much of our anxiety comes from one intuition: that the simulation has rounded on its source - our sweet and irreplicable flesh. 

Of course this isn't a new situation.  Every time one of our inventions (metallurgy, astronomy, god) falls into the hands of a particular kind of human, his first order of business is to pave over the bodymind.  So really nothing to see here, folks: Just another  entertainment-industrial-medical-calculatory-agency that has once again attempted to delimit the zöegraphy of incarnation.

A zöegraphy† that is prima facie, expandable to the edge of infinite. And therefore very much spookier, more open to accident/desire/whim/karma than any of us want to acknowledge.

But I digress:  Let's get back to this latest media/medical/government intrusion.  Now that we have been frightened into staying 'home' (assuming you have one), our work and play, lives and lucre are increasingly dependent on the Net.  Though advanced as if it were a 'new' idea, the fallacy that we can live through a webcam, a chat room, a video conference has been with us for a couple of decades now.   But what exactly is this 'living...'?

" [. . .] Meanwhile, the author continued to speak, invoking the need to mine a poetry from randomly-generated orders of knowledge. "Cyberspace," he said,"reduces selves, objects and processes to the same underlying ground-zero representation as binary streams, permitting us to uncover previously invisible relations simply by modifying the normal mapping from data to representation."

Did he really think that this was a set-up for creativity? she wondered.Coleridge had encountered a similar confusion, and put the matter to rest by distinguishing 'fancy' (recombination, or in the speaker's parlance,'modification') from imagination--an altogether more complicated gift.  So while the author assured them that "poetic thinking is to linear thinking as random access memory is to sequential memory," here was the blunder renewed, as if Samuel Taylor had never lifted a pen. 

Now he was saying, "The mind will always overflow the body, find its limitations an impediment to the mind's range of motion."  "There it is," muttered the tibetan.  The Cartesian rabbit pacing the entire presentation shot out from the podium and bounded up the stairs.  Twitching to a stop at the tibetan's pantsleg, the rabbit sniffed his shins, then scrambled up into his lap.  He absently scratched the hare behind the ears, then leaned over and said, "I think this means you're on..."
      
The texan gauged the time available, her relative beauty (it would finish the point begun by her language), the patience and intelligence of the speaker. There was probably enough. Go.          

"About this mind/body split you are hypothesizing," ...it was a clean blow to the forehead, the eyebrows were UP... "what do you think happens to the senses in the hyperesthesia of cyberspace?"       
"What do you mean?"       
"I mean if we go from 259 colors on a paper chart to 1016 colors on a monitor, what happens to our ability to distinguish color?"      
"Obviously, it becomes more acute."      
"And is this acuity located in the body or in the mind?"  It was a stupid question, but the author didn't seem to notice.  She watched his body weigh the answer.  "The mind," he said. 

Damn. She didn't know whether to burst out laughing or begin to shriek with vexation.  Suddenly conscious of her connection to the tibetan,she packed an answer down into the next question.

"What I really want you to think about is the relationship between increased sensory acuity and desire.  What are we actually doing at the point of distinguishing one shade from another?"  He looked puzzled, so she took a breath, slowing down to pace herself to the tension in his face and shoulders, the way his glasses drew back when his ears tightened. 
"When you make the transition from 259, the known universe, to the 260th," ...she watched him register the feeling of that transition... "is this just the result of accelerated experience?  Or is there a change in the extent to which desire..."  and here she unveiled the whole, slow mirror of sound, letting his image flood her voice "...comes out of Being?" Did he hear the wordplay... or better, did he feel it? 

The rabbit stretched over from the tibetan's lap and nipped her finger: You are about to go too far...  She smiled, pushing the question into the speaker's flesh.   And he began to blush, his skin blooming like a parachute in the long fall toward his body. 
The rabbit loped back down the stairs to the podium."

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Cybersoma

Of course it is possible to digitize the measurable, known, recombinant world that humans have taught themselves to hold in their attention. 

But um,  Ekam sat vipra -- as the OGs say -- Reality is once. Whatever happens twice is reality and its simulation.  Good luck figuring out which is which.  And you need to know this because Reality is where all the art and the miracles hang out.   (Ever tried to repeat a miracle?  don't bother. . . ) 

Speaking of...

Happy Easter.




...†I realize I am committing neology here... I would say 'biologic,'  but the word's been tainted by genetic engineering...