WE DIE. You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it.
A few years ago you could make an interesting distinction who thought there was something special about the Internet and those who saw it as no big deal. Now of course everybody sees it as a big deal mostly because of those weirdball IPOs and the overnight billionnaires they spawned. But I think the distinction is still valid. Most companies with Net-dollar-signs in their eyes today are still missing the "something special" dimension.
Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.
When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parent's house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money. Not a perfect analogy for the Web, but a primitive starting point.
My body is an electronic virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker. I don't even wear glasses (though I do wear clothes). But I am slowly becoming more and more a Cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and still without the need for wires, surgery or bodily alterations, we shall be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable...just fill in your favorite fictional Cyborg. Perhaps we already are. For we shall be Cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry.
We must forgive each other our arising, for our existence always torments others. The golden rule in the midst of this mutual misery has always been, not to do no harm, but as little as possible; and not to love one another, but as much as you can.
I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.
You are led
through your lifetime
by the inner learning creature,
the playful spiritual being
that is your real self.
Don't turn away
from possible futures
before you're certain you don't have
anything to learn from them.
You're always free to change your mind and
choose a different future, or
a different
past.
A weblog is a coffeehouse conversation in text, with references as required.
Webloggers interested in political matters--on both left and the right--seem more to exist in echo chambers of their own making, linking and reading only weblogs and other publications that reflect back their own points of view.
