Karl Ove Knausgaard, writing in Harper’s earlier this year:
It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world.
Knausgaard is best known for his voluminous autobiographical writing (his memoirs are in six[!] volumes). It’s perhaps not surprising then that this piece is less about the and more about his experience of technology. I don’t know about the prediction limitation (Asimov might disagree), but I still think he’s on to something.
One corollary to education is that while simulation is powerful and even necessary, the emotional valence of true experience is impossible to replicate entirely.
All the images I’ve seen of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met create a kind of pseudomemory from a pseudoworld that I don’t participate in.
We are physical creatures living in a physical world with other physical creatures. The question is—as was perhaps most enjoyably explored in the nostalgia romp that is Ready Player One—how much is lost in the virtual world, how strong is the draw to the physical world, and how much of it do we need to live full lives?