quotes from Jaron Lanieržs early interview with the Whole Earth Catalog:
"The question is: well, given that you have a world where you can change it, how do you change it? Do you just talk to it and does it become the way you say it should be? Or do you do something else? Now, there are real limits to how you can change the world by talking. For instance, imagine that you were trying toteach a robot to fix a car engine and you tell the robot, "Okay now, connect this piece to that piece, turnthis bolt and so forth." Well, you can do that to a degree but you can't really do that with a person. Youhave to show them. You can't run the world with language. Language is very limited. Language is a veryvery narrow stream through the plain of reality. It leaves out a great deal. It's not so much it leaves thingsout as that language comes as a stream of little discrete symbols and the world is made of continuity andgesture. Language can suggest things about the world, but no painting could ever be fully described bywords, nor can reality."
"The way that you can probe the reality is with a special kind of physics that can only exist in VirtualReality. It's what I call Absolute Physics. For some time now I've been working on software that will beable to make Absolute Physics work in Virtual Reality."
"Coming back to the physical world for a second, there are only a very few things in the physical world thatyou can change fast enough to use as forms of communication. Mostly it's your tongue, and to a lesserdegree the rest of your body. Your body is basically the extent of the physical world that you cancommunicate with in real time, but you can communicate with it as fast as you think. That's the way thebody is. But then, beyond that you can change the physical world but you need tools. You can suddenlychange a room from being dark to light by turning the switch because the switch is there. Technology inthe physical world mostly functions to extend the human body one way or another so that it can be used asa medium for human action. The problem is that the kinds of tools that you can have are very limited. Youcan't have a light switch that turns day to night or a knob that makes the room suddenly grow or shrink insize. You can have tools that can color your face, but you can't have tools that can change you from onespecies to another. Basically, all that absolute physics is, is a physics that has any kind of causality at all, soyou can have all these tools. Once you have all these tools, you can start, using whatever body you chooseto have in Virtual Reality, to use the tools to change the world very quickly in all kinds of ways. Then, youhave this idea of being able to improvise reality. That's the thing that excites me the most about it."
Jaron Lanier