2002-04-27 - 2:04 p.m.
I'm sitting here reading the Hum message board and seeing people talk about Centaur. They discuss how much they anticipate the cd release, and how much they love the band and all that. I then look over at my cd player and see my Centaur bootleg cd. This is the source of the initial mp3's that were released to this small community. I recieved the bootleg from Hoodoo and then mailed a copy of it to Trilobyte. He then hosted them and the rest is history. So I'm looking at this thing and realising that the world is just information. Let me explain...
Centaur plays their show. What is actually going on is that they are just disturbing the air around them, sending out these complex waveforms of atmospheric disturbance. Hoodoo has a small electronic device that detects these disturbances and converts them into digital information...1's and 0's. He then transfers that digital information to a cd, which is just a piece of plastic that has been affected by a laser beam such that it now contains that information. I then extrapolate that information and transfer it to another plastic disk and send it to Trilo. He then extrapolates the information and hosts it so that all can retrieve their copy of that information. The information is converted back into complex waveforms of atmospheric disturbance, and it moves the listener deeply. Some cry with joy and pain. Others smile with images of summer days they've long since forgoten about. Most have dreams and ideas and recollections I'll never know about, but fundamentally, the source of all those experiences come from this piece of plastic I'm holding in my hand...not so much the plastic as the information that was given to me and replicated/distributed elsewhere. So when they say they love Centaur and can't wait for the new album to be made, do they really love the band and are they waiting for a physical object? They in fact love the information that the band produces, and they anticipate recieving that information stored on those pieces of plastic. Somehow it feels strange to me that the information that I'm holding in my hand has been replicated, and now exists in so many places across the world. My Centaur information is identical to everyone elses. This abstract thing that has no fundamental physical structure has been transported through physical means and has now multiplied.
So what does that mean about us? Who am I? If the new Centaur album is not the physical disk I'm going to purchase, rather the information it holds, what am I? You could say that Byron Tatman is this specific physical lump of matter existing in three dimensional space at these coordinates. But my cells die and are replaced by new ones all the time, and every 7 years they are a totally different set of cells than before. Despite this, I am still me. I still remember things from my childhood. I speak to people on the internet and they experience me through my ideas and feelings, but they are only recieving patterns of electrons(information). So I guess who I am is the information that I am comprised of. These chemical ratios that correspond to certain brain states that are my memories and feelings and ideas make up who I am. If you look on the sub-atomic level, one atom of a certain element is the same as any other. So if who I am is coded in Chemestry, then the exact same conglomeration of chemicals elsewhere should also be me. If those chemical ratios could be coded into digital information, then I should be able to be transported and replicated much like the Centaur performance was. The moral of the story is, the world is just information...including you and me.
I like to think about wierd things.
