From: Chris Hind (chind@juno.com)
Date: Wed Dec 18 1996 - 00:19:06 MST
>When I was 35 I started playing a video game. I became obsessed with
>it. I would play for hours at a time. This could be considered a form of
>meditation. The game required very fast eye-hand coordination (with
>both hands), and it required intense visual concentration -- not on an
>unchanging pattern, as in some forms of meditation, but on a moving
>pattern, which was just what I needed. The breakthrough came about
>six months after I started playing the game. Something snapped
>one afternoon, and that was when I started getting my strength back.
Sonic The Hedgehog? I remember when I first played that video game it was
faster than any predecessor and at first I had a difficult time following
the action onscreen but I eventually 'grew' to the point where it began to
appear running more slowly. The same thing occurs with newer better
processors. Sure increasingly bloated applications slow down the system,
but as soon as you used a system with a dramatically higher processor speed
you're system appears EXTREMELY slow. This makes me wonder if we will
notice the singularity at all. Some people see the singularity as a point
in time when instantly things will be different. Sure, when the first
nanite is created it will take time to come up with a better design and a
better design and an even better design not even taking into consideration
that there all nanites will be specialized and there will be no all-purpose
nanite just as there is no all-purpose cell type that encompases the entire
human body. Things will speed up but it will appear as gradual progress to
us. In the 1990s more technological progress than in the history of mankind
will occur. Pretty soon it will only take half a decade, and then a quarter
and get smaller and smaller but time will appear to run just as it always
has from our perspective. Perhaps the Great Filter is that the biological
clocks of all alien races run at different speeds and that clocks similar
to ours are many many lightyears away. Time is entirely based on our
perception as anyone under the influence of certain mind-altering drugs can
tell you.
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