There’s
no longer a need to touch many things these days. With the Internet of Things, many daily
processes in our lives are activated by remote control. Some processes are activated by a timer. Other processes like the lights, water
faucets and toilets in many public washrooms are activated by our proximity to
sensors. Yet, in spite of the fact that
so much goes on around us these days without our tactile participation, it is
reassuring to know that some things in our everyday lives still require contact
from our fingers. For example, touch screens
in our cell phones. Touch screens are
not organic surfaces and do not allow for physically making and receiving
organic imprints. But at least there is
some touch involved, an experiential reminder that we still live in a physical
world. At least there are some physical
anchors we can count on to cling to as floating figures in the experiential
vacuum of modern technological society.
Right?
Wrong. Yasuaki Monnai, the head of a research group
at the University of Tokyo has created a touch screen that one doesn’t actually
touch. It is a holographic touch screen. Now actually this has been done before. Others had been able to project a holographic
touch screen onto any surface. What
makes Monnai’s invention so different is that, through the creation of
ultrasonic vibrations, one can actually feel the touch screen. In effect, one is given the tactile illusion
that one is actually using a material touch screen. This definitely makes the holographic touch
screen more user-friendly.
But
what benefits, according to Monnai, can accrue from using a holographic touch screen
in the first place? One advantage is
that it can be used even when a person’s hands are wet or greasy. Furthermore, the user does not have to worry
about coming into contact with germs.
Now I
have never seen anyone who had an urgent need to use his smartphone whose hands
were wet and/or greasy. If you get a call
and your hands are wet or greasy, you can dry your hands or wash your hands and
call the person right back. As to germs,
are we all going to end up living in a perfectly antiseptic world? What Monnai seems to be implying is that the
only surface that we can touch without getting infected is air.
This
Haptic holographic display, as it is called, is simply creating one more layer
of vacuumization for modern human life.
Imagine if we found a way of transforming all the phenomena with which
humans have to deal, so that they would exist just in thin air without any
substance, without any material essence.
We would never again have to worry about what was on our hands. We would never again have to worry about
contagion from germs through touch. And
at the same time, through Monnai’s invention, we could create the sensation of
touching, while we were making contact with thin air. Would this constitute actually being alive in
the external world? Although we would
experience the sensation of touching, it wouldn’t really be touching some
phenomenon with mass and matter. We
wouldn’t be making, preserving or receiving organic imprints on the
experiential surfaces that we were supposedly touching. And sustained contact with air surfaces could
lead us to becoming overstimulated by physical contact with material
surfaces. It could, by extension,
contribute to overstimulation with regard to real social connections with the
material entities that we call other
people. We would be living in our own
very private sensory bubble, our own very private world.
So
the question arises as to whether it is really necessary to create and deal
with these interactive holograms. For
those who would make them a part of everyday life, there is a deeper reason for
using them than concerns about wet hands, greasy hands or germs. Interactive holograms allow humans one more
degree of separation from and transcendence above the perishability of more
natural material living environments.
The more we become separated by technology from the organic
perishability of more natural material living environments, the more we become
afraid of and intolerant of what little organic perishability remains in our
modern technological living environments and of the organic perishability within
ourselves. And the more we feel a need
to separate ourselves from these small remnants of natural material living
environments and from our own organic selves.
Of
course, it is one thing to separate from the organic stimuli of nature through
surrounding oneself with the modern technological environments we have had up
until now. Yes, we have had an
experiential vacuum as the base of our typical field of experience in modern
technological society, but we have also had clusters of free-floating material
figures. In the material world, this
means solid substantive figures, phenomena which we can actually touch without
having to artificially supply the sensation of touch. What if we decide that to avoid catching
illnesses through germs, we would be better off turning more and more of the
phenomena with which we interact into holograms, into vacuumized figures, and
then find a way of artificially supplying the sense of touch to our contact
with these other holographic phenomena.
In such a field of experience, we would be making only the most tenuous
contact with the external world. To the
extent that we were only artificially supplied with the experiences of
sensation, we would really mostly be living from inside of ourselves. Our inner world and our outer world would
blur together, and after a while, we could never be sure if we were dreaming
what we were living. Life would become a
living death which we could never escape.
In such a purified holographic world, where all the figure phenomena
with which we came into contact would lack solidity and substance, not only
would we have decreasing opportunities for making, preserving and receiving
organic imprints, for having rich vibrant life experiences and for preparing
for death with a surrogate immortality, but gradually we would lose our full
human consciousness which gives us our awareness of the potential richness of
life and our awareness of our mortality.
In a perpetual dream mentality, there are no firm boundaries of life. It is a flowing mental grounding that doesn’t
correspond to the realities of our finite limitations in the external
world. It doesn’t stimulate us to
participate in those experiences and those events that act as highlights of a
meaningful purposeful life.
Yes,
the need for a holographic touch screen represents something deeper than simply
concerns about the condition of one’s hands or one’s hygiene. Creating a purified vacuum state of
experience puts us in an experiential state with no boundaries, an experiential
state without beginning or end. It is an
experiential state that seduces us into thinking we are living free of organic
perishability, free from rot, decay and death, in a state of immortality. Except that like the hologram, it is a kind
of illusion. We may not be directly
experiencing organic perishability around us, but it is still going on inside
of us. We are still organisms that are going
to perish one day. But by deluding
ourselves into thinking we are living in a kind of eternity in a world filled
with interactive holograms, we will not be motivated to create a surrogate
immortality of preserved organic imprints that can help us to prepare for death
in a more realistic way.
Interactive
holograms will only prevent humans from properly confronting their finite
existential realities in life. They will
prevent people from having a rich vibrant life filled with organic imprints and
a death that has been prepared for with preserved organic imprints. Interactive holograms are a potentially
dangerous aspect of the new technological realities of our time.
(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow
No comments:
Post a Comment