Informant38

about the rosy machine future. he's on the pro side all the way. I'm pretty sceptical, as are most of us SF babies from the 50's. I say most b/c Brockman and Kurzweil and others, SF kids among them, whose careers depend, whose lives and whose children's lives depend, on the 'emerging union', are not.
my point would be, it's bias. there's something really really wrong here. I think of it sometimes as if Germany had triumphed in WW2. enough time has gone by and the death camps are shut down, turned into parks, the population now fit, healthy, bright-eyed and optimistic, and the technology of surveillance insures that that stock cliche of the underground ragtaggy rebels with their 'organic' alliegances and their memories of the black time are wiped out. gone. non-existant. so there's no drag on the great flow up and out. the stars are ours. Ayn Rand cybernetically wired into the first immortal transport. but no conscience. no humility.
something bad happened before this. what was it? what do we do about it?
Cain and Abel. Jacob and Esau. it's like that in a way. primal, and dark. one animal fighting with another to survive. only these are human animals. with an overlay of moral code and civic rule. science will show only the animal, the laws being strategies no more true than camoflage or fangs. emotions are genetic at base. in that world the blood on your hands becomes meaningless. that's kind of the point here. it's a super-high-tech return to the might-makes-right we supposedly got above.
so to combat that logical heartlessness you need a clear organized map of the full terrain. which is the spiritual.
only thing is, the old spiritual institutions are collapsing into their foundations. I would suggest that the seeming conflict between those institutions and enlightened scientific inquiry is a smokescreen.
we have to get deeper, more real, more truthful.
but without a plan you stand around lacking all conviction, and the go-getters spurt forward, making you feel potentially like a throwback. which is how many of the elders of the 20th century were treated, as throwbacks, 'old-fashioned', in the way of progress, with their rejection of mass-production, their complaints of the poor quality of factory 'goods'. 'Luddites' as it were.
it's an uncomfortable position, at times. the need to survive can easily make it hypocritical.
other times it feels like fire, like war. adrenalin surges, the battle is here, but the enemy is invisible, the cause is unspoken.
so that's the objective. to name these things. while there's still time.
one of the larger tasks is an accurate detailing of what it is to be human. it's been this given thing for so long, as though 'human' is a constant through our history. I've said for years that that's a scam. that human nature is only a sum of whoever is there to be accounted.
remove all red-haired genes from the pool and human nature no longer has red-headedness as one of its attributes. so it's deceptive for Brockman to speak of what it means to be human. because that is changing, and changing more rapidly than anyone can conceive. and being changed, more to the point. so that the description of human nature is often being delivered by people who are at the very same time changing human nature.
it is my contention that that change is biological, darwinian, just as the eradication of the old ways, the long lines of traditional knowledge that were severed world-wide in the 19th and 20th centuries, was darwinian.
I don't accuse here, not Brockman and Kurzweil, anyway, but it is an important moment. and these are central concepts to the moment. we are in charge of our destiny, in an unprecedented way, but it's naive at least, and dishonorable at worst, to pretend we just suddenly inherited all this from no one but the chaotic past.
though we did of course inherit it, just as the German kids born after the war, rising from the ruins into a broken dream, inherited their world from a horror whose eventual benefits were and are unmentionable.
I'm not suggesting guilty paralysis as a way of being truthful. but I condemn the lie that says there is no past.
there is another way. we have to find it. but it has to be honest.-