From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 09:57:13 MDT
Thanks for the responses. I could be hallucinating, but I could swear
the article was on slashdot.
Robert Bradbury writes:
> Does raise an interesting perspective with regard to the Fermi
> Paradox though.
Agreed. Actually, I was interested in the 'cheerful libertarianism'
thread, but am still reading Brin's article. I've heard Brin previously
praise Star Trek for its take on gradual improvement of existing
institutions (as opposed to the 'romantic' solutions of Star Wars or LOTR).
Trying to synthesize in Robert Anton Wilson's notions of 'internalized
strange loops', my (not claimed as original) concept of 'Temporal
Pollution' discussed months ago, torturing children (per a recent post,
something we can all agree is a bad thing, except that people have been
torturing children (esp. girls) for millenia (and continue to do so)),
and genocide, which seems the same way (agree it's bad, do it anyway).
This somewhat dark mood perhaps due to recently viewing the anime
Boogiepop Phantom, which (like much anime) tortures children, the motif
of much anime seeming to me to be 1) there is something only you can do
(often, pilot a giant mecha), and 2) people will suffer (or the world
will be destroyed) if you don't do that and instead do what you want to
do. Thinking of suicide as often a theme in anime, the movie 'The Virgin
Suicides', thinking about the effect of being sued by the RIAA when
you're a 12-year old girl...
Mixing in thoughts about capitalism changing from 'let's produce a good
or service and see if people will value it' to 'gaming the system',
where you replace your workmen and engineers with lawyers, wondering if
we aren't headed for some sort of deadlock, by which I mean perhaps
humanity failed the Great Filter test, and we just haven't gotten to the
consequences yet...
The romance notions which Brin decries seem imho out of touch with where
we find ourselves, as perhaps 'the last moral generation'. Seems to me
that if we are in some higher powers' virtual reality, this would be an
era of intense interest (pre-singualirity).
I know little about neural nets, but understand that they can become
deadlocked too in a sense, and need some sort of reset, and wondering if
our civilization is the same way. Religion being perhaps the best
example, with armageddon on one side and jihad on the other, it's hard
to see how such an institution can be 'improved'.
Anyway, discuss this brain fart among yourselves, I need to get back to
work :-)
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