Dear Learners,
Someone once nearly tricked Goethe into visiting a mad house, but Goethe
saw the trick in time and refused saying, " I have no need whatever to see
the ones who are locked up." Even at THIS level Goethe would not split the
world into two.
"'He feels a constant need to create microcosms, he fills the large empty
building with an audience: 'that beast of many heads and many minds,
swaying and roving hither and thither and yet united as one noble body -
one being animated by one mind.'"
Goethe's internal vision of his ideal audience. Makes one think of that
Kevin Kelly vision of the man with his head in a bee swarm doesn't it?
'Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as
means to your end.'
Immanuel Kant
"Clearly twin forces, though not alone, are eating away at the world:
globalization and disintegration, unifying love and corrosive death
wishes, bonding kindness and disjointing cruelty, on a colossal scale. And
the bastard, schizophrenic, seizure-prone son sees the world as if through
shattered glass, moving his head slowly back and forth while waiting for
coherent images to form, wondering what it all means.
As the Picasso-like fragments assemble themselves into something of
postmodern art, flowing images start to congeal: perhaps there are indeed
integrating, bonding, unifying forces at work in the world, a God or
Goddess's love of gentle persuasion, slowly but inexorably increasing
human understanding, care, and compassion. And perhaps there are likewise
currents viciously dedicated to disrupting any such integral embrace. And
perhaps they are indeed at war, a war that will not cease until one of
them is dead--a world united, or a world torn apart: love on the one hand,
or blood all over the brand-new carpet.
What immediately tore at my attention, all that year, was the three-decade
mark of Armageddon doom rushing at me from tomorrow: in thirty years
(thirty years!), machines will reach human-level intelligence, and beyond.
And then human beings will almost certainly be replaced by machines--they
will outsmart us, after all. Or, more likely, we--human beings, our minds
or our consciousness or some such--would download into computers, we would
transfer our souls into the new machines--and what kind of future was that
for a kid? That was the year the event occurred, altering my fate
irrevocably, a year in the life of a human machine that miraculously came
to life. It was a year of ideas that hurt my head, made my brain sore and
swollen, it seemed literally to expand and push against my skull, bulging
out my eyes, throbbing at my temples, tearing into the world. Of that
year, I recall almost no geographical locations at all. I remember little
scenery, few actual places, hardly an exterior, just a stream of
conversations and blistering visions that ruined my life as I had known
it, replaced it with something humanity would never recognize, left me
immortal, stains all over my flesh, smiling at the sky."
Ken Wilbur
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the
starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
'er stehe fest und sehe hier sich um!'
Goethe
Mmmmm.
Love,
Andrrew Campbell
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