Enjoying the view from Limbo
I occasionally post some thoughts here in Limbo under the title, “Random Reflections.” I am not in general an aficionado of randomness, and by “random,” when I apply the word to my written thoughts, I never mean chance or arbitrary. I mean something more like reflections that have no obvious place within ordinary discourse, or that seem to come from somewhere just beyond...
Phone calls and message alerts at any moment; one learns to stop in the middle of anything — and worse, to expect to have to stop. After all, the social rule in the age of ubiquitous digital communication is determined by our new understanding that not only is everyone immediately accessible at any time, but what is more, everyone knows that everyone is...
To the extent that a machine becomes your memory, you have no memory. To the extent that a machine becomes your calculator, you have no numeracy. To the extent that a machine saves you effort, you are drained of the ability to exert yourself. To the extent that a machine sorts out the options for you, you have no practical wisdom and no...
The modern materialist insists he is right because his explanations obviously work. In this case, “to work” entails (and more than just incidentally) sucking all the sense of meaning out of human life as such. But to say that something works is to assume a specific goal in accordance with which “working” may be judged. Materialism works, therefore, if one’s goals are unrelated...
If there ever comes a day when the machines are threatening to take over, we humans, who could easily end the threat in a heartbeat by simply destroying the machines, will instead plead the machines’ case, urge our fellows to consider all the benefits the machines have provided for us, demand that we all try to see the situation from the mechanistic perspective,...
Can machines think? Well, as everyone says, machines can do what their creators can do, only faster and better. But their creators are humans, and humans of a purely practical, materialist orientation — doohickey specialists and thingamajig experts. Such humans do not and cannot, in the strictest sense, think. Zero times a million equals zero. Therefore, machines cannot think. Calculate, yes. Compile and...
What do you get when you cross nihilistic materialism, a century of compulsory retardation in public schools, three generations of complete immersion in the alternative reality of technological mass media, a lot of cynical profiteers, and the innate and intractable human need for ultimate answers? Oh! I see an object in the sky that I cannot easily identify because it is so far...
A map must be read, which is to say it must be deciphered, thought through, examined and understood. Digital navigation is not a replacement for the map; it is a replacement for the map reader, i.e., for the mind’s processes of absorbing and contextualizing information. Calculation is a difficult skill which must be studied as a child, and then practiced regularly for years...
Arrive faster, and fatter. Work longer to pay for the luxury of getting to work more efficiently. Race unaffected past a year’s worth of interesting potential observations each day. Do a hundred transient and inconsequential things in the time it would have taken you to do just one meaningful thing in the old days. Accomplish thousands of tasks without having to go through...
As I am sure everyone knows by now, the United States Federal Government is about to make its first (allegedly) open disclosure about UFOs, which they have renamed with the military-speak abstraction UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), presumably to avoid laughing every time they name the subject of the report. Since there are about a hundred different angles from which to come at this...
Follow: