Why is it that Kurzweil can focus so clearly and radically, acceptable as prophetic visionary, on the assumption of organized energy from the body into the machine, in other words the uploading of the self's architecture out of the short-lived corporeal into the mechanical and immortality that way, but it's laughable, ridiculous to insist that same process or something like it could take place from the body into say something like a 2000 year old tree? Could have been is taking place all along beside us around us through us in us.
Why is that absurd, but Kurzweil's vision of the uploaded self residing in an eternal mechanical housing is plain fascinating?
I'll tell you why.
Because the threat is there - in the tree, in the world, in organic life itself. The rejection of the failed and failing being, greedy grasping incapable, thwarted and petulant, etc and so on. Beauty and grace for all their benevolent lustre are implacable and uncompromising. Kurzweil's vision is a loser's alternative to what's been here from the beginning and won't accept that selfish uber alles mentality of spirit.
You can destroy the world but you don't have the skill or the grace to create it.
Or the humility to help bring it into being.
informant38
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...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not...
Milton, Areopagitica
Except he had found the
standing sea-rock that even this last
Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace
that quiets the desire even of praising it.
Jeffers, Meditation On Saviors
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