Monthly Archives: January 2009

I thought this reading was intriguing. I never really thought about how “conferencing” came about or about how important it is to the cyber community along with the daily lives of other people. I really liked the lines towards the end of the reading where it said, “Information-age hunters and gatherers were lone wolves until we found the net”. This relates to people connecting with each other through the use of virtual conferencing throughout the world. This allows people from different places to create a community in which in which there can be intellectual diversity and they can be considered “united” but in realty have never seen each other in person. Another interesting part of the reading was under social rule. One of the social rules of WELL was “Nobody is anonymous”. Everyone is “known” by their user id.

Machines and science have gone way beyond from being mere tools of humanity. It has achieved a status of necessity among mankind and will continue to evolve along with philosophy, art and cultures.Therefore, I came to think, “what is the purpose of life when intelligence may as well be a mere algorithm, only extremely complicated?”

You might argue that machines and artificial intelligence cannot create something as human minds do, but what is a creational process? Isn’t it just a logic of selections and combinations from the surrounding materials? No creational process can be out of thin air. Every human creation is  derived from a source that is in no way perpetual, so all creations are fleeting in their essence.

It continues to perplex me and grieve me that there might not be a spiritual essence, perpetuity of existence, or most importantly, a reason behind our existence. We might as well be beings created from the chaos by chance, however unlikely it might seem. If that were be true, our existence serves no purpose and that will certainly give credance to nihilism, and though I wish it were not true, I have yet again failed to disprove any of the above speculations, and modern science only throws out more of those grim questions rather than answers.

It truly grieves me so that no bright minds have yet explained this grim theory other than the un-proven religious view of Buddhism.

I found this couple of weeks ago. Thought I’d post it here.

http://notnews.today.com/2008/10/13/turing-test-won-with-artificial-stupidity/

I find myself, in reading these articles, sometimes having to remind myself of the time in which they were written. Bush’s article, written in 1945, talked in depth about the progression of photography as limitless, boundless in its development. Technology as a whole should be thought of in this sense. I’m particularly intrigued by Bush’s comments on the nature of man: “Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push its logical conclusion….” It is so incredible to think that man has so much thought and so much to say that it cannot possibly be recorded and remembered through the use of the human mind, or pen and paper. Man has created something so grand (far too grand for human capacity) that it becomes necessary to turn to technology as a means of preservation of humanity. Bush’s pondering of the plausible futures of technology are crazy to think about – I was thinking the other day about how, in a matter of a decade or two, we have progressed from cassette tapes, to CDs, to MP3s, to iPods, to iPhones….what next? What could be more capable of playing music than an iPod? In our lifetimes, there is certain to be something more, something easier at music facilitation than the technology that we have now…It is mind-boggling to think about.