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Showing posts with label hegel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hegel. Show all posts

Monday 20 June 2016

Are We Turning into Machines?

Surely this isn't likely.  At least, not terribly.  I mean,  I accept that as organic beings - if you take a teleological perspective - we are wending our way along a Hegelian-style continuum of evolution - that is, probably.  Perhaps.  Then again,  perhaps not.  And whereabouts we are on that continuum, should such a thing exist, or be occurring, is a matter of pure conjecture.
Where does that leave us?  Sort of where we always were I suppose.
I don't think we're that far from the 'fish crawling out of swamp' stage really.  Well, so it seems if you look at social media.
We certainly use a lot of technology - our lives revolve around it now - and technology is increasingly involved in health care and in food production, so that we even ingest technology without knowing it.  The virtual web surrounds us and numbs us like the poisonous silvery threads of an enormous, crushing, stifling spider's web.  The harder you struggle, the more you kick, the harder it is to escape.  (Is that true?  I'm not sure.  Perhaps it just feels like that.)
One of the things that worries me most is that already there are no letters, no diaries with which secrets are shared, no accounts of daily life written in the watches of the night and hidden under pillows. Will there ever be political diaries again?  A Chris Mullin, a Tony Benn?  What about Byron and his Letters?  Nowadays he'd have an Instagram account and probably a leaked sex tape.  Everything's ephemeral - close your account and it's gone,  all gone, all bar that embarrassing photo you were tagged in on Facebook that just will never go away.
Perhaps as we age we will have failing parts of us replaced so that eventually we are completely mechanical, and just require to be 'maintained' and 'serviced'.  Hips, knees, kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. Teeth.  Faces.  They do all this already, in some form or other.  So, semi-mechanical humanoids, yes, that I can envisage.   What about brains?  Will they be next?  And what about souls?  I think we all have those, and I'm quite sure you cannot manufacture a soul.  A machine may be able to 'think', but it cannot have a soul.
No, I don't think we''re 'turning into' into machines.  I'm not convinced that we're turning into anything, we're not evolving at all.  If we're doing anything, anything at all, we're spiralling downwards, the trajectory is downwards, earthwards, drilling into the dirt and knocking ourselves senseless on rocks.  We don't understand time never mind the infinite, and our place within it.  Our view of existence is limited,  we see only a fraction, like navigating through life via that steamed-up triangular window in the Apollo 13 space capsule.
What gives me hope is the organic world.
Nature doesn't like nasty machines.

Next post - Will there be an Apocalypse, and if so, after, will we still be able to buy cheese?

Friday 27 September 2013

Wee in the Tea-pot.

Our front door
"What's green, yellow, and orange, has no superego to speak of, and can recite Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in its entirety, in the original German, backwards, while accompanying itself on the piano accordion and eating a bacon sandwich?"

"I don't know.  Give us a clue.  Where does it live?"

"It lives up your chimney."

"What does it eat?"

"It likes milk chocolate digestives.  McVities ONLY.  But it realises it's being a snob."

"So it has insight.  Does that not indicate that it does in fact have a superego?"

"...."

"I see. You don't know what you're talking about, do you?"

"No."

"Good.   Now let's get on with the game.  Loser has to thread the other one's eyebrows."

"I've not got eyebrows."

"That doesn't matter, because you're going to lose."

"How DARE you!"

"Oh shut your pie-hole and put the kettle on. Look, I'm sorry, all right?  I've not got eyebrows either.  And what's more I don't care. Let's crack open the Soreen loaf and forget about it."

"Maybe.  Maybe not.  You said to shut my pie-hole and that's not very nice.  It'll take more than Soreen loaf to make up for that."

"I said I was sorry."

"You said it too fast.  It was meaningless."

"No really.  Really, I am sorry.  Will that do?  It better had because it's all you're getting.  I know there's issues and stuff underlying my foul nature, but I can't be bothered dealing with them.  Can't we just have a nice cup of tea and not talk about it any more?"

"Oh I s'pose. I weed in the teapot when I was in a temper last night by the way. I really regret it now that you've said all that.  If I rinse it out with boiling water do you think it'll be OK?"

"No."