Homo Sapiens Version 1.0

From an interview with Steve Homer in The Independent (Oct. 5th '92).

Our ability to comprehend the world was laid down in the sort of firmware in our system ROM when Homo Sapiens Version 1.0 shipped about a million years ago, and we are trying to perceive a world that is infinitely more complex because we've made it so. (Translation for the computer illiterate: We are using brains that were designed when the first Homo Sapiens was built, for a different world.)

But just as the world is now impossible for us to understand, we have 'quite by chance' come up with a machine that allows us to model things in software better than ever before - the computer.

I could be entirely wrong, but the coming of such things as virtual reality, which enables us really to re-map the way in which data presents itself to our perceptual system, might start to give us entirely new handles on the nature of the universe we live in.