Re: El Aleph

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
01 Jan 1999 13:49:44 +0100

Stardrive9@aol.com writes:

> Why Anders chose it for his site? I've wondered about that myself.
> Anders...?

Well, there were several reasons. One evening in 1993 or so, the members of the Omega mailing list (swedish transhumanism list, still active) met to have dinner. During the discussions we decided to form a formal organization to promote transhumanism. The question of names came up, and we began to play with the original name omega. Somebody suggested alpha, but that didn't quite strike a chord. Then somebody 8I think it was me, but I'm not certain) suggested aleph instead - it is the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It has a number of nice resonances:

  1. Of course, the pun/antithesis with omega.
  2. In the Kabbalah, it represents origin, power, just about Everything with big E.
  3. Borges story (quite fun) where it is a kind of place where the whole universe can be viewed.
  4. Mitch Porter's concept of an Aleph State, a kind of generalization of an Omega Point.
  5. And of course the transfinite cardinals in set theory.

It is a nice symbol, although we have sometimes been accused of having a swastika for symbol (amazing but true). 

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y