Technology Toward Reality
Believing senses are what make us contact reality, or whether that's possible at all, do you believe that humans will have invented enough artificial senses some time in the near future to finally figure out how reality actually looks like?
Comments (11)
Technology can give us info about what external reality is like at frequencies we can't hear, electromagnetic radiation frequencies we can't see, etc.
Re the first question, it's just a different experience. There's no way to experience "everything, from every perspective in every regard" because some things exclude others.
For example, you can't experience a view of the Earth from the surface of the Earth, where that's your entire field of vision, and from the moon, where that's your entire field of vision, at the same time.
As for your original thesis, it contains some problematic assumptions, chief of which is that there is something that "reality actually looks like." What something looks like is not just a property of the thing that is being perceived, but rather a property of perception, which involves both the perceiver and the perceived. So what "reality looks like" to the perceiver will be in part a function of the perceiver - including any technological augmentation that she employs.
To elaborate on the previous remarks, we don't see with our senses, but with our brains. Sensation is, for the most part, the act of altering the brain state in a manner that increases the mutual information that it shares with the external environment.
If by "figure out how reality actually looks like", you mean to make ourselves aware of the entire state of the universe (static and dynamic), I'm afraid this is not very likely. It assumes that an arbitrary human brain, or whatever other reasoning device we use in the future, would be able to hold all the information for such comprehension. If the universe is indeed quantum, as it currently seems to be, the only way in which I imagine this could happen is to merge ourselves in a singular intelligence that subsumes the entire universe, which is very futuristic.
If you mean to completely comprehend our immediate environment, by observing and reasoning about all processes happening on all smaller temporal and spacial scales directly around us, then this is slightly more likely. The problem is fundamentally the same - storage and processing capacity of our intellect, but if we augmented and offloaded some of it to devices in the "cloud", it is theoretically possible.
P.S.
I actually have to comment on something else. The universe has redundancy, which implies that the information content of its state may be stored in some strict subset of this state. Even if we assumed that this is technologically feasible, it complicates reasoning further, because in addition to prognosis, the intellect has to perform state inference to recover the redundancies that were previously compressed. Which implies a lot of concentrated processing power. If the state is not inferred, but directly perceived all the time, then the intellect is essentially merged with the universe, as previously mentioned, or at least unilaterally.