Quote:
Originally Posted by drjd
This process of 'consuming' the 'contents' may possibly further evolve in future(?) when a hypothetical concept of science fiction comes true to life where you would be able to 'transfer' the contents of single/multiple/(thousands of) 'books' to your brain within a moment, connecting it to a host computer through some wired (weird ?) connection.  I wonder whether we shall still be feeling the 'pleasure' of reading the books, which we feel now, once that hypothetical situation becomes reality. |
I guess it depends what the purpose of the reading is.
A lot of the reading I do for my Egyptology degree is academic PDFs that I need to read to acquire knowledge, and I'd be lying if I said that the process of reading some of them them was any pleasure at all (eg, at the moment I'm ploughing my way through an enormously tedious paper about wills and deeds of sale in the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt - not the most enthralling of subjects
). If I could just acquire the knowledge at the flick of a switch it would be great!
On the other hand, the reading I do for pleasure is for pure pleasure, and not done to gain knowledge, as such. As such, it's the experience of reading a book that's the important part, not the memory of having read it and the information I've gained from the book. That's not something that "neural uploads" would be substitute for, I suspect.
So I'd make a clear distinction between reading-for-pleasure and reading-for-knowledge.