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Hyper-Communication 293

space, or giving birth. To digitize life completely, we need to stimulate
every relevant nerve ending in the human body in real-time – skin, ears,
eyes, balance, pain centers, and so on.

At the low end, a ‘perfect’ IMAX production would require 360
degree stereoscopic projection and the generation of a full sound field.
This would take 3 Gigabits per second for the audio field and 5,600 terabits
per second for the video field. This could be substantially reduced if the
person wears virtual reality glasses to track their head and eye move-
ments, but then you are substituting resolution with computer power.

At the high end, a team at the US Department of Energy’s Fermilab
estimate reality needs one hundred trillion samples per inch for a
‘simple’ quantum representation. If we look at the many worlds view of
quantum mechanics, each photon hitting our eye can’t be fully described
by a single number. The photon may be entangled with other realities
we should keep track of. This causes our picture of reality to become
wildly complex. Everything we might see and experience is in some way
a combination of possibilities, and these possibilities all interact. Real life
is very complex.

Symbolic Communication
Computers have no concept of an in-person meeting. They communicate
using purely symbolic methods in binary numbers. These have the same
meaning whether communicated over a short piece of wire or using a
fiber optic cable half way around the world. Computers never have to
communicate understanding to each other because they use programs
and a program can be perfectly transmitted. Body language is, of course,
completely alien to them!

We know there are non-computable things; functions, numbers,
musical melodies, and mathematical puzzles. Why would there not also
be a place for non-computation in communication? David Deutsch has
suggested human creativity is used to guess the ‘program’ running in
someone’s mind, and evolved so we can learn skills. Instead, might face-
to-face communication be important because it lets us impart knowledge
in a non-symbolic manner?

Hyper-communication
As with hyper-computing, hyper-communication is controversial. We
instinctively know human communication is very different to computer
communication. Face-to-face communications have a qualitatively

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