ARC 597 | On Speed Situated Technologies Intellectual Domain Seminar, Fall 2014

It may be a little strange, however I want to begin with a very traditional story about a couple of blind men and an elephant (the story is common through several religions and ancient nations).

Once upon a time, six blind men encounter an elephant. The first touches its trunk and says that an elephant is like a snake, another touches its side and says that an elephant is like a rough wall. Another feels its tail and says that an elephant is like a piece of rope. Each comes into contact with a different part of the elephant and is convinced that the reality is what they touched.

In fact, when I was a kid I was told this story to understand none of them realizes that they are all experiencing just one part of the same elephant and that none of their explanations are complete. However, now I am to explore that each of the blind man could just realize the virtuality (here the elephant which at first was an imaginary amorphous phenomena) according to their previous life experiences. They just could compare the new introduced phenomena (elephant) with a group of abstractions which they realized before or it would be better to say, with their actual examples in mind to complete and form an image from their own consciousness. That’s why in Persian version of this very traditional story, the first blind man says that the trunk is like a snake while in some tropical countries, the story tells that the trunk is like a palm tree. It is obvious that people in Iran could not imagine what a palm tree is because their land was not located in a tropical district which palm trees usually grow up.

Kwinter pinpointed that after changing several fundamental definitions of world-like nonlinearity of time and curvature of space or space not as a background of event but as a determinative part of it-the meaning of the reality started to be different from the old-fashioned point of view. For me this astonishing observation was strongly interesting.

Thought the Railway Journey tend to admire the role of mechanization in exploring new opportunities and impossibilities which can even change the aforementioned “actual examples in mind” which I know them as means of making a reality out of a virtuality and means of making our consciousness, the mechanism of realizing should not be considered like the pre modernistic one. I mean our archive of abstractions or realities which we hold in our minds is growing up every second by any means (especially by any kind of media as strong resources of our consciousness), and I hold the opinion that after the revolutionary changes in fundamental definition of world; like time and space, even our mechanism of making something to be realized have changed. In other world, unlike the pre modern time, we the people do not use our previous realized abstractions (them “actual examples in mind”) to create new realities based on them and finally to create our consciousness.