Enjoying the view from Limbo
In a recent essay, “The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device,” I recounted my response to a student’s questions about artificial intelligence, related to my previous piece, “The Intellectual Welfare State.” A central theme of that earlier discussion was the likely, or perhaps inevitable, retarding effects of increasing AI dependency on human intellectual development. This time, prodded by the same thoughtful student’s subsequent correspondence, we cut...
I suspect that the universe extends as far as the range of our vision — and I mean exactly that far. For I believe there is no universe, in any of the senses that we use that term, without perception. The universe — extension and time — is in part a product of the activity of enmattered souls, which is to say limited...
In my recent “Reflections From A Great Distance,” I compared the thinking life to backing away from a mirror. Seeing yourself too close up exaggerates one’s perception of the immediate foreground of life, the accidental details of the moment — flaws, errors, pleasures, excitements, fears, frustrations, and all the rest of the transient and noisy. As you back away, those accidental details of...
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