From Disembodied to Empathetic

In an awesome lecture titled “The Disembodied Universe” in his book, The Accidental Universe, Alan Lightman says that:

“What we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we feel with our fingertips, is only a tiny sliver of reality. Little by little, using artificial devices, we have uncovered a hidden reality.”

We’ve learnt that time isn’t absolute, teeny tiny molecules encode the instructions to build life forms, and that matter behaves like both particles and waves!

And then Lightman points out where all this knowledge is taking us:

“It is an irony to me that the same science and technology that have brought us closer to nature by revealing these invisible worlds have also separated us from nature and from ourselves. Much of our contact with the world today is not an immediate, direct experience, but is instead mediated by various artificial devices such as televisions, cell phones, iPads, chat rooms, and mind-altering drugs.”

Talking of how glued we are to our smartphones:

“Their attention is focused not on the scene in front of them, but on a disembodied voice coming from a small box… Where are their minds and bodies? Certainly not present in the park. Nor can they be located in the electromagnetic waves and digital signals flowing through cyberspace… They are attempting to be several places at once, like quantum waves.”

But there’s a good news. But it starts by looking bad. At first, virtual reality (VR) seems to be taking us farther down this road. In his TED talk, Chris Milk says:

“(In this VR world) You'll notice you see full 360 degrees, in all directions. And when you're sitting there in her room, watching her, you're not watching it through a television screen, you're not watching it through a window, you're sitting there with her. When you look down, you're sitting on the same ground that she's sitting on.”

So what’s the good news?

“And because of that, you feel her humanity in a deeper way. You empathize with her in a deeper way.”

Now see what Milk does next. His team created a VR of a tent in a refugee camp. And then:

“(We) showed it to a group of people whose decisions affect the lives of millions of people… And they were affected by it.”

Hence, says Milk:

 “So, it’s a machine, but through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected. And ultimately, we become more human.”

From embodied to disembodied and back, science and tech have brought us full circle. And made us more knowledgeable along the way!