The New CotG is up, over at Life Before Death. No fanacy gimmicks or frills this time around, just a sampling of each article. A few stand-outs this time around, particularly Greta's.
The little blurb that Felicia used for Greta's post tweaked my brain a little.
“If there is no God and no soul, and everything we are is comprised of physical things and the relationships between physical things… then when you change those physical things, the self changes as well."
Since we are, obviously, just physical things, we don't really have free will of any kind, do we? Essentially, we are all just enormously complex chemical reactions. And chemical reactions, no matter how complex, are predictable. So, in actual fact, we, as in our 'selves' are actually just byproducts of a system seeking to 'balance the equation'. We are an intermediary on the way to universal stability, that being the future (Depressing) state where everything in the universe is a few degrees above absolute zero and there are no stars left anywhere in the sky.
The fact of the matter is, we know how the end of the equation looks, and we have a fairly good idea of the beginning. Both of those thing indicate that the middle part, the intermediary, us, are part of the calculation, and thus have an inherently predictable outcome.
Sorry about that. I just felt an inexplicable urge to type nonsense, then share it with a small number of people over the internet. Sorry.
At least I didn't also ramble about the equally scary idea that after we hit the Singularity, will the Machines be able to predict us? (Will they eventually have the capacity to know what we are going to do, based on the data that they can collect through observational data? I shudder to think! Damn, I'm doing it again...)
Friday, March 7, 2008
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Saturday, March 1, 2008
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