http://virtualwayfarer.com/why-the-term-multitasking-is-all-wrong/ Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:43:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://virtualwayfarer.com/why-the-term-multitasking-is-all-wrong/comment-page-1/#comment-860 okie Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:31:30 +0000 http://virtualwayfarer.com/?p=381#comment-860 The occasional high-level crack conversation, "What the hell are we doing?" is a good thing, and this one is no less cracked out than it should be. I realize the slight difference between the meanings of multitasking and parallel processor as an analogy for how your (ours?) brain works when you're doing that sort of thing. We're probably actually doing both and like 12 other things, sometimes. Up to the current time, I hold that our brains are doing essentially the same thing they were 10,000 years ago but with different input and completely different processes that we sometimes can no longer relate to. To continue your computational analogy...we're still an array of parallel processors that can multitask, compute very serially, and have somewhat programmable interrupts. Before the written word, peoples of oral cultures were parallel processing their world in ways that you cannot imagine. The written word brought about a restructuring of the architecture that seemed beneficial at the time (people had infinite memory all of the sudden!) and the attention of most of the cores was reconfigured to be a parallel language parser/generator instead of a listener/creator of the music of the mouth. I agree that the information in our world relevant to humans has changed drastically, but I disagree with your assertion that our perception of how the processes in our mind should work haven't changed. The change is evidenced by your description of them using computing terms and more importantly, language that implies a mind of a discrete nature. The written word brought about dominance of a discrete serial nature and new information technology has encouraged a more parallel information bus, but what we left behind and are now trying to find our way back to the outrageously, massively parallel, continuous, analog beings that we can be. The occasional high-level crack conversation, “What the hell are we doing?” is a good thing, and this one is no less cracked out than it should be. I realize the slight difference between the meanings of multitasking and parallel processor as an analogy for how your (ours?) brain works when you’re doing that sort of thing. We’re probably actually doing both and like 12 other things, sometimes. Up to the current time, I hold that our brains are doing essentially the same thing they were 10,000 years ago but with different input and completely different processes that we sometimes can no longer relate to. To continue your computational analogy…we’re still an array of parallel processors that can multitask, compute very serially, and have somewhat programmable interrupts. Before the written word, peoples of oral cultures were parallel processing their world in ways that you cannot imagine. The written word brought about a restructuring of the architecture that seemed beneficial at the time (people had infinite memory all of the sudden!) and the attention of most of the cores was reconfigured to be a parallel language parser/generator instead of a listener/creator of the music of the mouth. I agree that the information in our world relevant to humans has changed drastically, but I disagree with your assertion that our perception of how the processes in our mind should work haven’t changed. The change is evidenced by your description of them using computing terms and more importantly, language that implies a mind of a discrete nature. The written word brought about dominance of a discrete serial nature and new information technology has encouraged a more parallel information bus, but what we left behind and are now trying to find our way back to the outrageously, massively parallel, continuous, analog beings that we can be.

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