Week 8 | NanoTech + Art
Nanoscience indeed gives us a shift in our perception of reality, when we can visualize individual atoms whose sizes are hard to even grasp. Even though Jim Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna characterized the shift as "from a purely visual culture to one based on sensing and connectivity" (Gimzewski and Vesna 1), focusing on the mode of perception, I would like to focus on the significance of the shift in the content of perception, or more precisely the interpreted content of perception since while our perception changed over time reality stayed the same.
Much like inhabitants of Flatland, for majority of human history, we could only see the surface of things at only our particular arbitrary human scale. Being so used to seeing a purposeful agent in the form of a human-shaped bag of relatively smooth skin, for example, we overlooked the physical basis of our behavior and our psychology for much of human history, ascribing beliefs and desires to ethereal souls. Now we know that there are electrical currents and billions of connections in the brain interacting with the environment via sense organs, all of which laid our from our DNA protein by protein, to eventually determine our behavior, personality, and human nature.
“Scanning Tunneling Microscope.” IBM100 - Scanning Tunneling Microscope, https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/microscope/.
With the invention of scanning tunneling microscope by two IBM researchers, we even have concrete evidence of the fact that everything we see around us are made of tiny atoms. Instead of clean cut objects and creatures with artificial or divine purpose, we now have swirling sea of atoms that come together and drift apart in chaotic complexity. Instead of settling for the comfortingly simplistic views involving good and evil, meaning and nihilism, clear cut classification of species, academic disciplines, and philosophical concepts, we must now face the ever changing nature of matter and the fuzzy boundary in many of our arbitrary naming of things seen under poor resolution. And of course, in light of our new perception of reality, the ultimate riddle of consciousness and human mind becomes even more mysterious yet fascinating.
Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. London: Seeley, 1884.
“Scanning Tunneling Microscope.” IBM100 - Scanning Tunneling Microscope, https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/microscope/.
Gimzewski, Jim, and Victoria Vesna. “The Nanoneme Syndrome: Blurring of Fact and Fiction in the Construction of a New Science.” Technoetic Arts, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, pp. 7–24., https://doi.org/10.1386/tear.1.1.7/0.
Graziano, Michael S. Consciousness and the Social Brain. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Hoffman, Donald. Case against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.
Hi Aaron,
ReplyDeleteI love your thoughts on this week’s content! I appreciate how you focused on a different angle of the development of neuroscience. What I found most interesting is the description in the last paragraph that elaborated on the new perception that neuroscience has given us— I have never considered it in this sense and your words gave such a vivid image.
Hi Aaron!
ReplyDeleteWow, what an incredible post! I love you interest in looking at nanotechnology in a different view than our professor this week. I found it so fascinating that IBM created a machine that allows us to see something so incredible, something we could for so long only think of as a theory.