There has been alot of discussion this week about all of us ('natural') people becoming integrated with ('unnatural') digital technology, so I thought I'd have a rant about how digital we already were, biologically speaking.
I think there is a pretty widely accepted perception that we are analogue beings and the technology we engage with (ipods, phones) is digital. I would argue that any such distinction is pretty blurred.
For a start, the instructions we grow from (DNA) are digital in nature (a series of four elements in a certain order), much like binary code. But we are also shaped by our environment, you may say? Well, I say, the ways in which we absorb our environment are also digital. Nerve impulses from our skin to (eventually) our brain go something like electrical impulses - on, off - 0110101 etc. Digital. Same with optical impulses that carry images to the brain.
So in theory, the digital images our eyes send to our brains could be recorded, stored and 'injected' into someone else's optical neurons and they would have experienced exactly the same scene.
Technology is already part way there. Check out this bionic arm. It 'reads' the digital impulses coming from the nerves where the original arm was. So the wearer thinks about moving her arm and the bionic arm moves accordingly:
So maybe the digital extensions we give ourselves aren't really so different from the ones we were born with?
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