Computers as Computational Tools for Exploration of Self

Computers as Computational Tools for Exploration of Self= attempting to quantify, calculate, or somehow “compute” the parts of ourselves and the world we live within which go unnoticed.

To use computation to examine the layers of our humanity – or the layers of our machine-nature is a means to explore the Human Condition.

Computation used to expose the world we think we know, to expose things we take as factual submerged in our hind brain or parts of the world lost to us because of our inability to notice, is to examine our motives and our Truths. At its best, this practice has the ability to be a profound method to truly examine Life.

I am Hannah.  I have a story.  This story is a story of my life is built upon my experiences in the physical world.  That physical world is fleeting, in a state of constant change as am I as I live within it. That physical world is vast, as are parts of myself which I do not understand or are even cognisant of.

The mechanisms I use to understand the physical world and my relationship to objects (not including other people with other stories) is constructed on a platform of my physical body’s ability to register information, digest information, and remember information.  At each of these stages there are large swaths of information that gets lost, mistranslated, unnoticed,  reinterpreted, misappropriated and forgotten.

Humans are not computers.  We like to think that we are.

All facts are memory the moment they are registered.  We do not exist in real time.  There are physical delays.  My memories change over time, affected by physical and psychological variables.

The computer is a machine, rigid, factual, unforgiving. To have it track and keep, to have it remember and log the parts of ourselves which we take for granted, the parts of ourselves which we take for fact is to remember, to see and to understand ourselves and our world better.

For a computer to be able to see, hear, feel, and ultimately understand the quiet parts of our machine selves is to examine the truths that we assume are facts and to bring to the fore things about our world and our part in it which we cannot register.  In an investigation of these machine parts of humanity, we should be able to uncover bias, remember instances based on facts, and understand that Humans are non-linear, squishy beings filled with faults.