i GOOGLED Douglas Hofstadter today and found some video from THE SINGULARITY SUMMIT held at Stanford University. His introduction and his sceptical questioning had an echo of RAW's concerns at times - sceptical investigations into REALITY and the gutters and valleys between science fiction and technological scientific progress were just begging, i thought, for BOB to clear up with a sprinkle of poetic humanitas, hilaritas and maybelogic.
I think that a sharp definition would help us understand Ray Kurtzweil and many around the A.I crowd by introducing what Bucky Fuller called livingry and killingry to compare and evaluate, from an added humanitarian point of view. The mixing of humanitarian shared values with those different greedy values often related to military-industrial-corporate techno-pharma-nano so & so... seems to me to be a global problum to be tackled at these debates. NOW! (Nice toys boys, but who's allowed to play and who makes the rules?) It may be enough to say simply that we can all live forever and ever, or blow ourselves to tiny pieces for ever and ever. All men. Have none of these speakers read COSMIC TRIGGER I? And what of applying the Hindu/Leary/Wilson 8 circuit model to these questions? Smart folks at Stanford, but something's missing for me when i watch these high brow video's, sex, drugs and pirate utopias?
Listening to Douglas Hofstadter i wished he would have invoked Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, who seems to me to have thousands of helpful suggestions and new questions for the emerging age of faith-based spiritual robots, angels and demons and Palmer Eldridge gone wild...?
Meanwhile, a Dr. Harrison suggests that we may have to abandon Aristotelian logic, i.e. give up classifying things into only the two categories of "true and real" and "untrue and unreal." In between, in Aristotle's excluded middle, we may have the "maybe" proposed by von Neumann in 1933, the probabilistic logics (percentages/gambles) suggested by Korzybski, the four-valued logic of Rapoport (true, false, indeterminate and meaningless) or some system the non-Hibernian world hasn't found yet. The Kerry farmer would handle all of this better than the typical graduate of any university outside
"Fuller also invented the word "livingry," as opposed to weaponry (or "killingry"), to mean that which is in support of all human, plant, and Earth life. " -- R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER.
2 comments:
Great find and post, Fly. Thanks!
I just got back from painting the cottage, and building a compost heap, and getting the wireless internet going...now sat watching these vids (although the first one paused halfway through) and enjoying them immensely. More YouTube to trawl...
A Comment doesn't seem the place for a long post - but these High IQ guys do use a lot of that 3rd Circuit approach...but we need these 'ingenious engineers'. I can't build 19th Century steel bridges, let alone explain how my digital camera works. As ever, with these developments, I await the moment when 'artists' get their hands on the technologies ... or even just 'the tribe'.
Great food for thought...
In terms of missing RAW - he hung out with guys like this, and read a lot, and I tend to think of him as a 'popularizer' in the best sense of the world, a vivid communicator (and enthusiast). He monitored all this stuff, and, as a generalist, made a lot of new connections and expansions of the material.
I posted that before you had added Cory Doctorow.
Now, he has the kind of scepticism about the exponential growth to a Singularity (or rather the things that hinder/limit/balance it -in complex 'ecological' systems) that makes sense to me.
The artist's view! And he even threw in some stuff about archives and libraries - which (as you know) now hits right home to me - from my day job, and my love of the sci-fi, Psi-Phi concept of the Akashic Records (take yer pick!)
Thanks again, Fly. Gotta Sleep now...
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