But consciousness and its lower strata of unconscious awareness yield not only pleasant imaginings. I mentioned the faultiness of humankind. Other bizarre kinds of life or non-life persist, inimical to our peace of mind. Take the androids of AI, Blade Runner and other science fiction movies. Such impossible beings are the inheritors of a long ancestry of chimeras plaguing our imaginations. Goblins, gnomes, fairies, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, leprechauns, dragons, water sprites of various kinds, nameless things that go bump in the night: they haunt us. Above them sits a bewildering and unending hierarchy of gods and goddesses: Baal, dusky hags like Ishtar and Astarte, Zeus, Hera, Nemesis, Isis, Mithras, all the way to old Silenus, Lucifer and Satan, the Hitler of the Underworld. Such preposterous gubernatorial creatures have been and are all-pervasive. They permeate our vocabulary. Nemesis lives on. Even the word "galaxy" is named for the milk spurted from the breasts of a goddess. Thousands of these spectres have governed human life since human life began and someone lit a fire. Senior bogeymen still determine what we should eat or not eat, which way we should face when abasing ourselves to them, with whom we may or may not sleep, and against whom we should go to war. Faulty? Id say. A definite genetic misfire.
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/likehuman.jsp
Popular Posts
-
I've learned a great many things over the past month... "friends" at work are not neccessarily friends, people you thought wer...
-
Brad Dalton is the first to admit his theory is far-fetched: that bacteria could account for odd light emissions, as well as the reddish hue...
-
Lots of funny stuff today. Tim, check this one. http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3
-
Some interesting tidbits about Lynchs Mulholland Drive , as well as David Bowies next movie apperance. http://www.crowdsurfer.com/index.php3...
-
We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity, Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said about the ...
-
Let me make this clear. This is a long book. Weighing in at just under one thousand pages and probably a pound and a half this book takes ...
-
Now ideas for advances in data routing are beginning to emerge from a surprisingly simple model: the ant.Indeed, applying the study of ants ...
-
I'm always fascinated by ways to get stuff done, particularly at work. It's changed quite a bit since I've been in my current r...
-
Looks like a sweet FPS for Linux... and it's team based like Counter Strike. If it's good, Hiyat's going to kill me. It took...