What cannot be expressed digitally

The multichromatic nature of the world, and the binary lens we choose to view it through.

This is Bach's handwritten sheet music for Cello Suite #1 Prelude. And this is the same piece from a sheet music website:

Measurably, these two images contain the same information, and the digital one is standardised and so possibly easier to read. But why is the first one so beautiful? Why can you feel so well the spirit of the song just from the writing, even if you don't read sheet music and can't remember which tune this is (you've heard it)?

It's like the Mary's Room thought experiment: Mary is an expert in all things colour, from wavelengths to colour composition and paint mixing, and is also completely colourblind. She knows everything we can know about colour, except for having never experienced it. If she by some miracle suddenly and for the first time perceives colour as we do, the question posits, would she learn anything or not?

You might call it knowledge versus wisdom, or education versus experience. My ghastly point is that the electronic way we mostly interact with our world and each other is full of knowledge but completely unwise - all education and no experience. My yet more audacious point is that the fundamental technical limits of the technology make this lack of wisdom not likely, but inevitable by its very nature.

Life isn't black and white but all shades of grey, and that's a universal law that applies to everything, except in simulations. From the individual binary bit to the number of individual colours a screen can render, the fundamental energy of the technology is a simplification, a compression, an ever smaller rounding within an ever smaller decimal precision of a part of the real world. But like the grasshopper that only ever covers half the distance to the finish line, he never quite gets there. No matter how much anti-aliasing your graphics card has, every smooth curve is a jagged collection of squares, and you will always be able to tell the difference between anything simulated with this foundation and the real world.

When Bach wrote his music he was expressing his soul through the pen and that interaction is elegant and carries with it meaning one cannot comprehend through calculation but with feeling, with ones heart not one's head, with wisdom not knowledge.

I have grown up perfectly happy with the screens because a simplified life, a binary life, a compressed image of a life, takes up much less space. A black and white life is easy to understand, all judgements are clear and obvious, and there's no room for doubt. But when the multichromasticity of greys enter your perception, it's a beauty and a thrill that you can no longer live without. Go back and look at the original graphics for a game you played or CGI from a movie you saw as a kid and remember looking mind-bogglingly good. You'll be staggered by how awful they are for you, and how now that you've seen what 4k looks like you can never go back to enjoying those old things in the same way again, not all the way back. Not when you know what you're missing out on.

I get what the older generation who grew up pre-screens are so nostalgic about and why they're so upset. We've been downgraded (by choice and by social change) not just visually but in our very perception of ourselves, of each other, and of life. From analogue to digital, from infinite difference to basic, inaccurate duality. I'm not riding some high horse, even the words I'm using now are standardised symbols that simply indicate the gist of some undisplayable meaning being expressed in the real world somewhere. Even Bach's score is simply a collection of symbols representing some but not all of the meaning he intended, the best any of us can do. But still I see, in the breeze on a cliff-face, between my toes walking on a sandy beach, in the auburn spectrum of a setting sun, that which cannot be expressed - only referenced - by word or by digit.

[I have a picture of a waterfall

Hanging in my bedroom

Printed from the office copy machine

And stuck up with scotch tape.

I am at the top, but I'm very far away, and the waterfall's enormous and dwarfs me.

Once I looked for myself with a magnifying glass, and there I was;

Fifteen pixels, I can't make out what the yellow thing on my head was,

Or if I was smiling]