tb: How do you feel about rich media, my friend? Teachings can now be made more tangible -- the words can acquire some hardness, some softness, some colors, some corners in the new substrate. Your description of words (and teachings) is like to a diffuse vapor, imperceptible for more than a few fleeting moments after emission. But now the world features an information substrate that is rendering reality more viscous. Structures can be built and made to persist and proliferate.
Siddhartha: "Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. I suspected this when I was still a youth and it was this that drove me away from teachers."
tb: Maybe not; but one can self-exemplify wisdom. Rich media bolsters the effectiveness and extends the reach of self-exemplified wisdom. [a humble example; another] And, Siddhartha, I think I can further phase-transition your enlightened ferryman mind with just a little discourse on network theory and related perspectives. Like a cooking show, where the host can take the finished cake out of the oven right away, allow me to jump to the network-perspicacious hypersegments of the 4D Siddharthapillar.
Siddhartha: Wow! It sure is nice to have a robust theoretical apparatus on which to hang all my hitherto incommunicable wisdom. You have succeeded in communicating much wisdom to me, thereby self-exemplifying your point that it is possible. I might quibble -- in an attempt to save the purity of my 'can't communicate wisdom' wisdom I was trying to impart to Govinda -- that you too are like all teachers in that you have also only shown me knowledge; that my network perspicacity has sprung from the depths of my own soul, as ever.
But I am not so small-minded: You have demonstrated a material shift in the quality of reality, and my former view has given way. Perhaps you have only shown me knowledge, but the new substrate has changed the ratio of knowledge-exposure to wisdom-emergence profoundly. Quibbles about what is being communicated (knowledge vs. wisdom) melt away.
tb: Thank you, my friend. You told Govinda that you do not attach great importance to thoughts; that you attach more importance to things. Do you still feel that way, Siddhartha?
Siddhartha: Yes, but thoughts are now more thing-like, in this new substrate. Thoughts and words and images are now instantiated physically and interconnected as never before.
[Siddhartha bent down, lifted a stone from the ground and held it in his hand.]
Siddhartha: Previously I would have said, "This stone is a stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything. I love it just because it is a stone, because today and now it appears to me a stone. I see value and meaning in each one of its fine markings and cavities, in the yellow, in the grey, in the hardness and the sound of it when I knock it, in the dryness or dampness of its surface."
I do not feel otherwise now, but I wish to point out that my respect and love for artifacts like microchips surpasses my respect and love for stones by some orders of magnitude.
[Siddhartha opened his coarse hempen knapsack and drew forth a 4GB micro-SD chip.]
On this tiny flake of matter is encoded vast stores of interconnected knowledge. I have seen electron micrographs displaying its intricate patterns, and with your help I have come to understand the physics of its function.
Without diminishing the beauty of the stone, I perceive a higher order of value and meaning in the microscopic markings and cavities of the microchip, as compared to the chaotic markings and cavities of the stone I hold in my other hand.
And when I put the micro-SD chip into my web-enabled handheld over in my third hand, it becomes physically connected to far-reaching networks of people and information, and wondrous new meta-things emerge and self-organize. Thoughts, knowledge and information are made tangible and communicable and accessible, acquiring a utility far surpassing the humble stone in the hierarchy of things in the thingosphere.
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