Travel in time

We want to totally escape the grip of gravity and inertia.

We want to be able to transport ourselves or other objects by dematerializing at one spot and reappearing at another; we want to be able to completely conceal and cloak our vehicle as in a big space ship.We want to be able to travel in time, so as to see the full sweep of the past and the future; we want control over everything that we see; we want to become immortal, omnipotent, and omniscient, insofar as possible; we want to be in the presence of and commune with the Universe; and we want a full escape from the vagaries of sickness, accident, and war.

We truly want to live a human existence.

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Losing faith

Since Hegel’s time, the intellectuals have been losing faith in philosophy, in the idea that redemption can come in the form of true beliefs.

In the literary culture which has been emerging during the last two hundred years, the question “Is it true?” has yielded pride of place to the question “What’s new?”

Heidegger thought that that change was a decline, a shift from serious thinking to mere gossipy curiosity. (See the discussions of das Gerede and die Neugier in sections 35-36 of Sein und Zeit) Many fans of natural science, people who otherwise have no use for Heidegger, would agree with him on this point. On the account Richard Rorty is offering, however, this change is an advance. It represents a desirable replacement of bad questions like “What is Being?”, “What is really real?” and “What is man?” with the sensible question ...

“Does anybody have any new ideas about what we human beings might manage to make of themselves?”

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Enduring many things

"We men are in prison all that time which we choose to call life. For this soul of ours, being bound and fettered in a perishable body, has to endure many things, and be the slave of all the affections which visit humanity."

[Flavius Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 7.26]

Liquid modernity

Zygmunt Bauman's thesis, set out in his book of Liquid Modernity (2000), is that we have moved from a solid to a fluid phase of modernity, in which nothing keeps its shape, and social forms are constantly changing at great speed, radically transforming the experience of being human.

Bauman notes that while the workplace was traditionally a very important source of personal identity, changes in the economy have rendered it far less reliable. He suggests that the enduring identities once associated with work have given way to looser and more provisional identities, and conceptions of community, that are subject to constant change and renegotiation. Indeed, Bauman points to a more profound transformation of how we understand what it means to be human in the absence of transcendent ideologies (traditional or otherwise) such as have characterised modernity until recently.

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Enter Hypertextual

Hypertext and body integrity

Jay Bolter has claimed that hypertext, as a particular case of computer-aided writing generally, is one metaphor for human cognition.

Whether human cognition is essentially computational is not the point here. Rather, I want to emphasize how this metaphorical relationship conflates questions of hypertext design with questions of the body and bodily integrity, with problematic consequences. Bolter's metaphorical connection between human cognition and hypertext implies that if hypertext is considered a species of AI (that is, as a computational model of human cognition) then it has become a model for nature -- that is, a model for material processes that occur in the body without technological intervention. (Diane Greco)

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts