ABSTRACT
The same DNA that gives rise to the brains which develop and utilize the many information technologies considered in this book creates flesh and brains that have needs unmet by information technology. Some needssuch as nutrition on the individual level, and procreation on the species level-are intrinsically incapable of satisfaction by just information, in any known meaning of the term. They require not the representations or re-presentations that are information, but the presentation of physical originals-not communication, but the physical, living processes which so much communication is about. Other pleasures, such as feeling the breeze upon one’s face, might someday be provided by some clever electronic stimulation or simulation that is so realistic as to be all but indistinguishable from the original, and in that sense not quite a simulation either. But at the end of the twentieth century, such satisfactions are as incapable of provision by information technology as the more tangible hungers.
