My wife and I saw a trailer for a remake of the film, “Red Dawn.” Toward the end of the trailer, a character says, “To them this is just a place, but to us, THIS IS OUR HOME.”
Ironic, is it not?
A patriotic treatise or patriotic parody? A political satire? How can a film both inspire a feeling of idealistic national pride AND question one’s tendencies toward nationalistic idealism?
Time to [re]read Karl Jaspers’ “The Question of German Guilt” and find the answer(s).
A few years ago, I installed a couple of ultrasonic buzzers in our attics to keep out animals. The first year, it was quieter than usual — fewer bumps in the middle of the night by our furry friends. Then, this year, I discovered a family of raccoons had taken up residence in the attic.
Call it affirmation of survival of the fittest except, in this case, it is a family of deaf raccoons that discovered a place to live peaceably under the roof of our house.
I found out that fact last night by opening the attic door and shouting at the raccons to be quiet. The baby raccoons kept chasing each other until one of them must have smelled me and turned, catching the attention of the other two who turned and froze, too.
Waving my arms and making aggressive charging motions scared them off into the unreachable corners.
Well, at least there’ll be no more screaming at the top of my lungs and confirming to my neighbours that the crazy man next door is trying to commune with the dead again.
In robot news, more from the analysis of Heidegger’s Being and Time by Hubert L. Dreyfus…
“2. Comportment is adaptable and copes with the situation in a variety of ways. Carpenters do not hammer like robots. Even in typing, which seems most reflex-like and automatic, the expert does not return to the home keys but strikes the next key from wherever the hand and fingers are at the time. In such coping one responds on the basis of a vast past experience of what has happened in previous situations, or, more exactly, one’s comportment manifests dispositions that have been shaped by a vast amount of previous dealings, so that in most cases when we exercise these dispositions everything works the way it should.”
“4. If something goes wrong, people and higher animals are startled. Mechanisms and insects are never startled. People are startled because their activity is directed into the future even when they are not pursuing conscious goals. Dasein is always ahead of itself.”
In other words, our actions/thoughts are based purely on the past while focused on the future. No wonder we have no idea what we’re doing in the present moment.
In business news, UPS made a hostile bid for the company Space Exploration Technologies Corp, commonly known as SpaceX, now that SpaceX has demonstrated its near-Earth-orbit package delivery service is reliable.
Experts expect FedEx to make a competitive bid to prevent UPS from expanding its reaches to “infinity and beyond,” with FedEx merely wanting to “be there before there are customers to be there,” mainly the Earth-to-Moon route that international transportation corporations are watering at the mouth to sink their teeth into.
The UPS CEO denied that Felix Baumgartner would be vice president of dropoff service for the new SpaceX division, if their bid is accepted.
The bicycle messenger union has opened negotiations for a stratospheric drop and parachute deployment training center that could provide pinpoint hand-delivery of packages to customers in remote locations via sky-high balloon or dirigible.
Pickup of the delivery person is a major sticking point in the negotiations at this time.
Thanks to Giba, Stephen, Lesya, the Ledges Lodge, Friends inc., Harold of KCDC, Marketplace Cafe, Latrice, Patton James and the Synchromatics…sweet sax music!
Stop-motion short film to follow!
[edited this post twice]
I was sent the following information in response to one of my recent posts. Good advice, regardless of [non]religious belief:
Ecclesiastes 9:10
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It took a warning from my email system to make me realise that I had been making my life more socially complex than I had intended when I retired from working in an office environment several years ago.
Dozens of blogs I found myself following, filling my email inbox.
Hundreds of friends and family on social networking sites I found I had accumulated, creating a constantly-flowing social “news” stream.
Thousands of websites I found I was tracking.
Billions of people I found I had written about.
It took an interview with an author on the der spiegel website to make me realise that seeking social connections is one of the aspects of being a member of our species.
Instead of simplifying my life, I have jumped right back in to social connections, albeit mostly virtual ones.
Back to simplifying my thought sets so I can return to contemplating the vast universe of which we are a tiny part that we rarely see through the cloud of socialising that normally defines us.
To the dozens of fellow blog writers and hundreds of social network friends, I thank you for your hospitality and kindness. However, I bow gracefully and exit from your lives.
I have other pursuits, none as important as friends and family, but ones I want to look for, nonetheless.
I had used this blog as a means of safely storing my written thoughts. However, with my smartphone I have a new means of storing my thoughts without having to put them out here for everyone to read, allowing me to explore thought patterns I have kept to myself in order to avoid offending any of my friends and family who might see themselves in this continuous satirical viewpoint through a serial book of parallel lives.
Have, have, have…there I go again, sending Morse code to the universe!
This blog has come to an end.
Today, the author J.K. Rowling hinted at the rewrite of the Harry Potter world she had created.
In the new version, 10% of the girls at Hogwarts become pregnant and quit school, 20% of the boys pass on the STDs they contracted during conjugal visits away from the school and are summarily dismissed, 15% of the students drop out (due to poor grades, lack of motivation, etc.), several instructors will be fired and arrested for inappropriate relationships with their students, the Ministry of Magic will be fired for running Ponzi schemes, dragging the headmaster down with them, and the majority of the students will be dismissed for rampant cheating, leaving Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley to fend for themselves once again, having committing all of the acts cited above.
In other words, Hogwarts needs no external enemy — it will do perfectly well destroying itself from the inside.
9-23-2012 “beyond the grim”, story about movie trailer that convinces people there’s a film about a legend about a man who believes there’s a boy who sees the grim reaper in mirror reflections and also hears whispers about who’s going to die next; international “do not consent” rule that allows a person to opt of use of his/her image for any reason while in public/private; increasing, rather than decreasing, one’s freedom from intrusion
by business/government in the always-on, always-connected internet age; the myth of the middle class, a metaphor for compliant populace ready to compromise freedoms for perception of security from imagined evils against exercising one’s freedom to exist in/out of “1984”/”animal farm” type societies …zzzz…
The one area of intelligence that my wife and I agree on is the definition of X-in-the-loop.
A machine that requires input from a person is a human-in-the-loop device/system.
All commercial automobiles require a person to operate the automobile (but that is quickly going to change).
Is a road full of automobiles that require no human input a sign of intelligence?
What about the Curiosity rover on Mars?
What features can we list that show autonomous functions in one subset, intelligent functions in another and a set of features in the subset of the autonomy/intelligence junction?
What makes the autonomous functions of my central nervous system intelligent or conscious?
What about the automatic connection of my laptop computer’s WiFi radio subsystem in this room to the WiFi router in another part of the house and then on out to the Internet?
What is pure hardware-in-the-loop intelligence like, no HID required/allowed?
If a database is updated by a software program which seeks to maximise its collection of available knowledge, knowledge that it alone determines is valuable, is that intelligence?
And what about the age-old arguments of the conscious-vs-subconscious thought sets?
These words are just a few that pass through my thoughts before I make a last-second decision upon another upon another, etc., until I type these words in a coherent whole row called a sentence, in exclusion of and in competition within a finite possibility (you won’t find Croatian or Sanskrit here without the use of an online translator, for instance).
If the Internet is now an extension of my thought set, am I a human-in-the-loop extension of the Internet?
I sit here, taking an occasional sip of black label Irish whiskey (“Black Bush”), looking at the clock, which shows 22:38, and contemplate going to bed, where I will not be directly disturbed by the Internet, although my dreams (my subconscious?) may work through thought patterns I’ve had today about artificial machine intelligence which date back to my childhood days of the 1970s and the promise of LISP/ELIZA and other AI programs that relied on pattern-matching (why does the image of trees appear in my thoughts right now?).
…data structures…hmm…
On the floor next to me, in addition to “Dictionary of Quotations” by Bergen Evans, “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert and “The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Satre and R.D. Laing,” are two books that captured my attention several years ago: “I, Cyborg” by Kevin Warwick, and “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence” by Andy Clark.
From them, I contemplated a novel I write using software agents in a database, with every word/phrase/sentence/paragraph/chapter hyperlinked/connected such that the story changed based on reading the reader’s online self, with a voiceover and accompanying 3D video that interjects based on the reader’s vital signs, the novel frequently switching to a series of random words to shake up the reader’s thought patterns, slipping in and out of the reader’s online life — social life, blog, game sequences, website, etc. — so that the reader soon could lose track of self completely in a world of half-plagiarism, half-homage collage.
As I write this blog entry, my software agent has jumped from suggesting the word I’m typing to suggesting the rest of the end of the sentence.
After hundreds of blog entries, my software agent has jumped from suggesting the rest of this sentence to write the rest of the blog entry for me.
Based on the research I perform on the Internet every day and the books I have lined up to read the rest of the week, as well as following my daily patterns, including eye movements, my software agent has written the rest of this week’s blog entries for me, suggesting that I skip using the Internet altogether today and go for a nice, relaxing hike in the cool autumn morning, using my “Internet of things” kitchen appliances to assemble a sandwich along with the rest of my meal/snacks to eat that my smartphone will remind me of when my vital signs show sign of hunger along the trail.
Readers of this blog can now no longer tell when I stopped writing these blog entries, or when I sometimes step in as a person-in-the-loop to tweak a blog entry as a surprise, because both I and the software agent use the trick of occasional misspellings and grammatical errors to give an ambience of authenticity to my/its speedy typing and lack of postcreation proofreading/editing.
Is this intelligence?
If all I do between computer programming gigs and life coaching, other than go out to eat, shop, attend football games, watch movies and travel with my wife, is write blog entries here, your only connection with me, could you say I am more or less intelligent than the output of my software agent?
What if my writing became more oblique and more full of interesting Internet links, would I (or, rather, my proxy) seem more intelligent?
When all of us depend on software agents to supplement or (perhaps) better yet, substitute for our online lives, is the Internet intelligent/conscious?
When software agents are interacting with software agents to create unique output that I and the other people who created their software agents would not have thought of, is that a sign that the Internet has become intelligent/conscious?
Is a “train” of autonomous automobiles traveling on a road an intelligent/conscious entity all its own, receiving stimuli from the environment and reacting as one just like a caterpillar or earthworm from our anthropomorphic view?
How can I say that my typing here is anything more than an autonomous response by my set of states of energy to the environment?
Am I really just a hardware-in-the-loop device like any other set of states of energy in the universe?
Why should I label “me” as a special condition of intelligence or consciousness? Because I say I can see myself write this blog entry while I “see” thoughts that do not win the competition to make this blog entry a coherent sequence of symbols we call words?
The wooden mannequin on my desk has no autonomous functions, does it?
What about gravitational pull holding it down on the desk?
What about the photons interacting with its surface, indicating a series of paths from the incandescent light bulb inefficiently emitting more heat than light that reflects off the shiny surface of the mannequin into my eyeballs?
Obviously, I’d be more convinced if the mannequin started talking to me in a manner I could understand — arm gestures, leg movements, etc.
I shake the desktop and the mannequin shakes in responses.
We have a relationship with each other, if not an understanding between us.
Is that a sign of intelligence/consciousness?
I cannot assume that what I anthropomorphically or anthropocentrically want to call intelligence/consciousness is what I will see when the interconnected wires and fibers we call the Internet becomes more than an automatic response to our stimuli, which is really all I am in one view, aren’t I?
Never assume the event horizon hasn’t already been crossed just because your definition of the impossible is the only one you can envision.
Hindsight is mostly 20/20.
Symbiosis is asymptomatic, in my book (but that’s the whiskey talking, not me).
Good night!
Palatia rode the bus to work that morning.
She walked up to the back door and rang the bell.
A security guard answered. “Palatia G. Spaut?”
“Yes?”
“Follow me.”
Palatia walked with the guard to the manager’s office.
“Palatia! You made it in this morning, I see. Feeling better already?”
Palatia nodded at Veruog, her shift manager. “Yes. Thanks for asking.”
Veruog waved off the security guard and pointed at the chair next to the manager’s desk, with about all the room left on the office floor taken up by a tiny desk.
Palatia sat on the edge of the seat and looked up at Veruog.
“Palatia, first of all, I want to say you have been a good employee. Don’t say we haven’t noticed that you can handle the cash register and the food line with little supervision.”
“Thank you.”
“But…but yesterday, you called in sick.”
“Yes, I wasn’t feeling well.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Ohh…you know, aches and pains.”
“I see. And you spent the day at home in bed?”
“Pretty much…”
“Pretty much? What if I was to say that we have video evidence that you not only left your flat but you also went to a local park with friends, not returning until later in the afternoon, perfectly healthy-looking the whole day?”
“How can you say that?”
“Funny you should ask. You see, we consider you a valuable employee since you haven’t quit in the first six months of working long hours and low pay at a fast food joint. Therefore, we registered you with a security service that has links to many traffic cams, security systems and other monitoring devices so we can make sure you are out of danger.”
“Out of danger? You mean you’ve been spying on me?”
“Oh no. Let’s just say our company has health insurance policies on our best employees and to make sure our policies are well protected, we ensure that your habits outside of work are within the actuarial predictions of your overall value.”
“Huh? You pay someone to follow me?”
“No. We…or, rather, the security service uses the latest in face and body motion recognition to monitor your whereabouts and warn us if you are in imminent danger. From what we received yesterday, it appears you hiked near the edge of a canyon where several hikers died earlier this year and where some campers died of a hantavirus infection last week.”
“What? Are you kidding me? You mean you know, or think you know, where I was yesterday?”
“Yes. After we received the message from the security service, we attempted to contact you at home but got no answer. We then sent a security guard to your flat and, again, no answer. We contacted the building supervisor who was worried that one of his tenants had died on his watch, so to speak, raising his insurance premiums. He gladly opened your flat to reveal you weren’t home, which, we believe, verifies that the person we have in this recording right here…” Veruog pointed at the flat screen mounted on the wall above the desk. “…indicates, through deductive reasoning, was you.”
“But I…”
“Do you deny that you went hiking yesterday?”
“No.”
“And do you deny this scene we’re watching from satellite imagery which indicates your hiking path reached up to and over the safety barrier of the canyon edge?”
“No, but…”
“Then we have only one conclusion to make here, Palatia. You have voided the contract you signed when you agreed to work for us…”
“But…”
“…and further, based on the fine print here just above your signature, you are hereby terminated for endangering the efficiency of our company by exposing yourself to nonwork conditions that not only make us liable for training a replacement employee but also liable for health insurance coverage we had not calculated in the actuarial tables generated by your user data, including your social media profiles and the application you submitted to us. The only exception to this contract would have been if you died and, in that case, we would have collected a tidy sum. However, since you are still alive…”
“You can’t fire me! I quit!”
“Ahh, see, that’s where we differ on this issue. We have already posted the change in your employment status to our social media site which we hope you will be kind enough to reflect by changing your employment status on the various social media sites you frequently use that we agreed to document when you signed the contract.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Again, Palatia, it’s a matter of perspective. We both have our reputations to manage, including, these days, our online presence. We have held up our part of the bargain, providing you not only a safe and secure work environment, but also compatible employees, a steady paycheck and a guarantee that you are a stable, if somewhat independent type personality. Any questions?”
“Yes? What about my last paycheck?”
“We will issue you your last paycheck as soon as you return the uniforms we provided you. According to the spreadsheet, you have three uniforms issued in your name.”
“Yeah? Well, fuck you!”
Veruog pressed a button on the edge of the desk and the security guard immediately stepped into the doorway.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“We have a set of clothes in Palatia’s size. Here’s the ticket. Get one of the guys off the line to open the supply cabinet and return with the clothes. Palatia, I’m sorry, you have given me no choice but to demand that you return the uniform that you are wearing right now.”
Palatia got up to run and noticed that all the order screens in the fast food restaurant changed to an image of her jumping up from the chair in Veruog’s office.
“As you can see, Palatia, it’s up to you whether you want to turn this into a criminal act for the police to investigate. The security guard has already requested a patrol car to swing by our restaurant as soon as possible.”
Palatia, caught between wanting to maintain a viable employment record and wanting to tell this whole system off, stopped in the doorway.
She wondered if her friends, all of whom depended on shaky job histories, would take her in if she bolted.
Surely, there was more out there than background checks and slave labour jobs like hers.
Palatia quickly stripped off her clothes and ran out the back door. If Princess Kate and
Prince Harry can make millions with their clothes off, she…well, there was also that stripper named Katrina Darling…she could make herself famous as the first employee who was fired and ran naked from the premises. How much was 15 seconds of fame worth in this YouTube era of celebrity scandals and embassy burnings?
News headlines the next minute reported a naked bandit who was shot and killed by brave police officers called to the scene of a crime in progress, said an iNews reporter who had pulled up into the carpark and was shooting video of the restaurant sign when a woman, running as fast as she could, flipped a bird at the police, ran straight toward them and screamed something unintelligible. “The next moment, a manager walked out with a security guard, both of them looking panicked, saying that the dead assailant, named Palatia, had stolen two uniforms from the restaurant and threatened harm to the reputation of the establishment’s owners. The police clearly had no choice but to protect themselves from this crazed individual! Here’s my video and I thank you for watching. You can see my other videos at…” The instant news stations switched to the next forgettable crime in progress, posting a link to the video at the bottom of the screen.
= = =
While investigating what makes some people vote for one U.S. presidential candidate over another, I came across the book, “What’s the Matter with White People: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was,” by Joan Walsh, referred to me by the website, salon.com, which has provided many a relaxing and entertaining moment of reading in the past.
However, after reading the following 2-star review of the book on amazon.com by Tom Peterson, I’ll have to encourage myself in the future to be open-minded about book suggestions (and, most importantly, subsequent reviews) by websites I review habitually, before I automatically jump to their linked commercial content:
The basic theme of this book is, why do some Whites refuse to fully cooperate with the destruction of their own people and culture? Why won’t they more eagerly promote the genocide of their own children and grandchildren. The policies the author promotes are Anti-White. Open borders, mass immigration, huge transfers of wealth and opportunities from Whites to non-Whites, all of it to the detriment of Whites. Lest someone think genocide is too harsh a term, note that what China is doing to Tibet is rightly called genocide, even though it is largely “non-violent”. Most of the time, genocide does not involve outright killing.
In 1965 the US was roughly 90% White. Today, a minority of children born are White. This is the most rapid demographic change in the history of North America – far more rapid than what followed the arrival of Whites to this continent in 1492. Four hundred years after that date, Amerindians and Whites were still fighting! We now witness a crushing dispossession of Whites in just a few generations. Apparently some Whites are not quite as enthusiastic about the genocide of their people as the elites would like, and this disturbs the author.
The shocking fact is that in 50 years, there will be NO majority White countries anywhere on earth. Yet every Asian country will remain Asian. And every African nation will remain African. It is White countries and only White countries that are being flooded with non-Whites and it is every single White country without exception. None of that is of concern to the author.
Imagine if Africa was undergoing forced assimilation and mass immigration of non-blacks to the point that every single African country would be non-black in a 40 or 50 years. It would rightly be called genocide. Yet this is exactly what is happening to every single White country. This is the central fact of our age, and the one the author willingly ignores in this book
Can I guess who a person like this would vote for in the upcoming U.S. presidential election? You get three guesses and the first two don’t count!
More to add to the reading backlog list:
As they say, it’s better to play dumb and be dumb than to play dead and be dead…
treetrunkdings 