Our brain is not the seat of our mind, but the medium through which we can reach the spiritual. When I first heard this many years ago at a conference on media theory, I was astonished. Did they really mean this seriously? Is it crazy or brilliant? There is this beautiful old-fashioned word, ‘subtle matter.’ Our body is a medium through which we can reach this.
Our media theories generally have in common that they are conceived technically. There is a technical medium through which information is shared between different participants. Claude Shannon first defined media theory in this way. Now there is much discussion of what a medium is, what information is, who sends it, why and to whom, with what intention? Media are material, technical objects that can store information. Information can, of course, also be read out; only in this way does it make sense for us. Only in this way do media become part of society.
What Actually Is Information?
For years I searched for a usable definition of information. What is it supposed to be? A structure, a process, an energy? Is it abstract, like mathematics? The number 2 does not exist in the real world either, only, for example, two apples. Abstract theories describe reality with the help of concepts that do not occur at all in so-called reality. That makes me pause. And it makes me pause even more that it does not make most people pause. This is science and technology, they say, and it works. Undoubtedly, but how?
What if we set this technical concept of media aside for a moment and instead look at moist media. Bodies, plants, animals, (viruses and fungi) are moist media. Their DNA does store information, just like technical media, yet we would probably say that individual living beings cannot be reduced to their DNA. They are more than that. This stored information must, in a sense, first blossom before the moist media are activated. Only when this technical information is alive can it interact with the world and perceive it. And yes, we are currently trying to recreate this very principle with artificial intelligence and autonomous interactive systems.
Moist Media
Many moist media have consciousness and thus access to a part of reality; only they are truly able to perceive reality. In contrast, technical systems process information in a simulation that, if it is good, corresponds to reality. Moist media thus understand communication not merely as information processing, but as real interaction; they are part of reality. Through access to consciousness, to subtle matter (?), moist media can recognize what holds the universe together. The interaction of all elements with one another can be thought here. Moist media can understand themselves as part of reality because they serve as a bridge between matter and subtle matter, between matter and spirit. They are not a simulation; they are not hyperreal. They are real.
Moist media are far ahead of technical media. Many have consciousness, a sense of context; they are anticipatory, emotional, holistic, they improvise, are creative and playful. Moist media train their bodies, repair themselves, are adaptive. Above all, however, they are communicative, collective, social. At the moment, they are still so much more complex than technical media.
The future is moist.
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