Re: Singularity: Individual, Borg, Death?

Emmanuel Charpentier (manu@cybercable.fr)
Sun, 06 Dec 1998 01:07:05 +0000

Dan Fabulich wrote:
> > There is absolutely no objectivity into anything.
>
> This claim is logically incoherent if it is objectively true. (It is
> objectively true that nothing is objectively true?) And of course, if it
> isn't, then there must be at least a little objectivity somewhere,
> objectively speaking.

You are right. Just rephrase it the way you want, as long as you get the meaning.

> >What we do, is we
> >create models (beliefs, equations, theories, system of memes...) of the
> >universe, we invent them, we induce them from observations of the
> >universe.
>
> How can you know anything at all about what WE do when everything is
> subjective? Maybe YOU do that, while we tap into the truth directly.

But as long as you are not sure this is the truth, then it's no good. Have you seen the movie 'dark city', where all the citizen of a strange town have their memories changed every night in order to experiment and understand humanity? This is the same image I have in mind when speaking about information we would have to know in order to attain the truth. And as long as you lack one bit of information, you don't have it all, thus you need to embrace the whole universe to be able to be sure of anything.

You tell me when you are taping into the objective truth... we'll discuss it :)

Manu (having in mind a future post about meme and singularity).

---
One note about eli's post I've just received but don't have time to
understand fully (time to go to sleep), I love sophists, they were great
people who were not all that bothered with objective rules, but instead
concentrated onto memes (sophistai = "knowledge master") and their
transmission (rhetoric). It's a sophist who stated that 'man is the
measure of all things'. And they believed that there is no god, and if
there are, we can not know them (I'm reading that from a book). Too bad
that nowadays the word 'sophist' possesses such bad connotations (just
as machiavel).