The Idea Man: No. 35 in a Series.

Pong et seq.
Hints about the Origins of Consciousness
from the History of Videogames

by Douglas Milburn

The "history of consciousness" guys and gals use all sorts of stuff to try to reverse-engineer this awareness called, well, us. Everything from scratch marks on bones from 1,000,000 BCE (indicating that we may well have been eating each other way back when) to dreams to pheronome research to the dinosaurs on wheels a.k.a. SUV's serves as grist for their self-reflective mill.

Now come videogames as a possible key source.

HINT NO. 1
Consider:

As primitive hardware and equally primitive software deveopment converged in the early 1970s, what game did we create first? We sliced a low-rez screen vertically and divided it into two equal halves or fields of activity. Then we set up two tiny "paddles," one confined to the left edge and one to the right edge, and each limited to vertical movement along the two edges. As the game's free, dynamic element, we put a little splotch or "ball" in the middle and let it move in a straight line until it encountered either an edge of the screen or one of the "paddles," at which moment it would rebound at a perfectly predictable billiard-ball-like angle. Add a bit of crude sound feedback to keep the old ears happy.

Call the whole thing Pong, market it, and you create the first cyber-millionaires at Atari and elsewhere. Not to mention the first wave of videogame addicts.

If Pong doesn't contain vital, hidden hints concerning the original manifestation of self-aware human consciousness, I'll eat my mouse. What is the Pong screen if not a map (albeit crude and over-simplified) of 1) the bicameral mind, and 2) the two parts of the bicameral minds interacting with each other in a way which produces a... game. THE game. The game of consciousness.

HINT NO. 2
Consider also:

Right at the beginning, as soon as the possibility of game-creation existed, text-based role-playing games appeared. (A version of the first, The Oregon Trail, is still used as an instructional tool in schools.)

In other words, as soon as we could speak, we spoke. We spoke and played.

Is this maybe an indication that language is older, much older, than we think it is? That the ancient ability to grunt meaningfully quickly gave rise to meaningful grunts?

Homo sapiens ("knowing" man)? Yes.

Also homo faber ("making" man).

But also, and perhaps above all, homo ludens ("playing" man).

END

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