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DISTINCT ROOMS OF PERCEPTION

There do not seem to be any particular limits to the diversity and size of rooms of perception. It just seems that a perceptual space that can draw on a physical encounter or experience (somatic room of perception) has a wider range of information exchange than a purely virtual perceptual space that is limited only to acoustic and/or visual signals.

Rooms of perception with physical levels of experience, as they are the case in everyday life and with personal contacts, can partly be transferred to virtual areas with technical aids. But only through digital spaces they can now be recognized and differentiated as such. For a long time in human history, every encounter and every form of group cohesion or team spirit was simply part of the possibilities. But it was difficult to look more closely at the group dynamics themselves. A somatic room of perception can therefore be described as a personal interaction of two or more people, whereby the interaction takes place on all known communication channels and also on a subatomic level. It can therefore be stated that a somatic perceptual space also depends on a good or bad feeling that a person has during a meeting. And this inner feeling, this mood is certainly connected to the person's appearance, posture, and way of articulation.

In a virtual room of perception, a transmission medium is inserted for the exchange of information of common images and dialogues between the fields of perception.

This can include all media that make the flow of information between sender and receiver tangible or storable in any form, for example, inscriptions carved in stone, such as books, records, radio and TV broadcasts or social media and game platforms on the World Wide Web. Also, automated virtual environments (CAVE), VR headsets and applications with mixed (augmented) reality can be included, as well as telephone conversations, the stream of data for the use of smartphones, walkie-talkie transmissions or even archaic smoke signals.

All these transmission media have one thing in common. A human being is always assumed to be both the sender and receiver of information. But this does not always have to be the case.

The Deep Dream Generator of the world's largest search engine is able to create artificially generated images from human or man-made images. These creations, apparently no longer of human origin, can also be found in the field of high-speed trading, where many more algorithms than humans interact with each other. In researching the linguistics of chatbots, it can be observed how two bots can jointly develop a virtual room of perception with their own language. At least the results show only a few commonalities of human logic. Some dialogues are much more reminiscent of the performance of the first Dadaists in Zurich about a hundred years ago, as this short excerpt from an experiment in 2017 shows: 

Alice:“balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me….“, Bob: „i i can i i i everything else“, Alice: „balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me…“, Bob: „i“, Alice: „balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me….“, Bob: „you i i i i i everything else“.

With almost boring routine behaviour in comparison, in all these experiments and examples people "only" provide the source data, which is sorted and prepared by the self-learning systems. Even if the results of such virtual systems are currently still reminiscent of fuzzy dreams or Dadaist poetry, they are not as artificial as a first glance would suggest. At least as long as the information for these systems comes from humans and the results are again "only" processed by humans. 

There are no machine-only interactions known, which originate from artificial self-learning systems, and are similar to the human psyche. Meaning these systems are able to integrate information comprehensively and are also able to develop behavioural patterns to improve social contacts and not only to achieve statistical values. 

But in the daily processing of data for the maintenance of everyday life, a level of algorithms has long since become established which, similar to a visual aid, help to reduce the amount of information that is generated on the one hand to secure public space and on the other hand to simplify individual needs.

The enormous increase in the global flow of data that goes hand in hand with the market launch of smartphones, and which can mark the beginning of the digital age, makes something else visible. More than ever, it shows how much is happening in parallel in the world and what incredible connections there are.

But even if the global flow of data allows the individual domain to be better organized than ever before, overall it seems to have caused a greater degree of turmoil. Many long-established models appear to be corroded by corruption, violence is still the most common means of pressure, and deliberate ignorance makes it difficult to remedy jointly created system failures that are geared towards individual enrichment and cause collective damage. Should political and military conflicts coincide with natural disasters and aggressively contagious diseases, chaos would be perfect. It remains open whether self-learning artificial systems have then already developed far enough to help when harvests fail repeatedly and drinking water is contaminated.

It remains to be feared that purely virtual rooms of perception will not be able to achieve tangible results for the preservation of life in the same way as strictly somatic rooms of perception. It is not yet possible to bring healthy food out of the virtual world and into a living reality.

There is another significant difference between a virtual and somatic room of perception. The statement of a person in a virtual room of perception does not have to correspond to the constitution of the person's body, since the physical components in a virtual room of perception are only superficially important.

Even if the transfer of information from a somatic to a virtual room of perception retains the appearance of reality, the originally diverse flow of information is restricted and reduced to a few levels, mostly only text, images and sound.

Under these circumstances, information can therefore also be transmitted if, for example, a person bends over on the ground in pain without the recipients having to be aware of it. A limited spectrum of information can therefore always be presented out of context and lead to distorted interpretations.

In a somatic room of perception, such a controlled separation between a microscopic and a macroscopic exchange of information can normally only be achieved by excellent actors or highly trained managers.

Nevertheless, the lightness of virtual rooms of perception offers some great advantages. Compared to somatic rooms of perception they have no geographical boundaries and the number of people who can interact with each other in an authentic way is not limited. A sports team, for example, can only build a strong inner dialogue with images up to a limited number of players, which is powerful enough to make all players melt into an inner unity. If it is possible to establish such a strong common ground in a somatic room of perception, the iconic dissemination of the results of a densely fused group in a virtual room of perception can be easily achieved. Nevertheless, a "true" sports fan will never miss a sporting event of the favourite team "live", to be satisfied with the virtual copies of reality, as long as the real team spirit can be personally experienced.

The transfer of jointly constructed images and dialogues of a somatic room of perception to a virtual room of perception is also advantageous because the inner images of a field of perception as well as of a room of perception are constantly changing and rapidly fading. This means that as soon as a person leaves a somatic room of perception, the jointly developed inner images are also lost after some time. Every form of recording, therefore, makes it possible to relate to the jointly generated images and dialogues again and also helps to develop new spaces of perception.

So society (somatic and virtual rooms of perception) creates therefore reciprocal interaction (reciprocal rooms of perception) when they are coordinated with each other, complement each other and are in superposition.

Fig. 21: Iterative room of perception. A study by the author, ca. 22 x 100 cm, 2018