What if the panpsychists are right, and somehow even sand fleas and vegetables can feel pain? Makes the Christian doctrine of humankind’s essentially sinful nature even more soul-destroying to contemplate than it already is. Listen, I’m conscious enough of my very traditional transgressions, I don’t need to start worrying about how many carrots I’ve murdered in my eight decades of blissful predation. Either panpsychism or Catholicism, or better yet both, have to go. Meanwhile, I just don’t wanna talk about it….
Ironies and Minor Epiphanies
The Apostle’s Creed
“Will you tell me the truth?”
“Almost never. The truth is complex, far more complex than my intention. The truth that I will tell you, that I can tell you, is that between human beings intention is everything, and that my intention is to tell you only as much of the truth as I think likely to leave you undamaged.
That’s why you mustn’t trust me. Good intentions are inevitably tainted with both ignorance and condescension. Never mind what Nietzsche said, no one ever gets beyond good and evil. The nature of reality forbids it.”
Unbidden Bits—April 9, 2023
How many more Republican governors and so-called conservative Supreme Court justices, I wonder, will the American Psychiatric Association have to observe before adding self-righteousness to the DSM as a class B antisocial personality disorder?
Unbidden Bits—April 7, 2023
In this final, metastatic age of social media, the only true luxury is anonymity.
The Naming Of New Things
What should we name our new virtual reality headsets? I have some suggestions.
Apple: EyeProds
Alphabet: Googles
Meta: Metempsychoses
The March of Technology
I’ve been reading that ChatGPT can create plausible essays on any subject that are both utterly self-confident and utterly wrong.
I take that bit of news to mean that ChatGPT could already be a perfect replacement for Donald Trump, at least on paper. All of the ignorance, none of the sneering—as technological miracles go, that ain’t half bad.
I’m Not As Smart As I Thought I Was Either
I feel about Elon Musk pretty much the same way the Salieri character felt about the Mozart character in Amadeus. Is this buffoon on Twitter really the guy who beat NASA at its own game, and on a shoestring, too, and almost single-handedly made electric vehicle propulsion for the 21st century a commonplace? Really? This is the guy?
Yeah, this is the guy. The Universe may not care very much about us, even less about our categories, but it does have a sense of humor, and it does deserve respect, even when—especially when—it appears to mock our most cherished pretensions….
Unbidden Bits—June 1st, 2022
Giving hostages to fortune can be a noble gesture, or a moral imperative, but more often than not it’s just a dumb idea.
The fault, Fru Vestager, is not in our algorithms, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Freudian Slipperiness In the House
From CNN, Updated 1:38 PM EST February 10, 2022:
White House records obtained so far by January 6 committee show no record of calls to and from Trump during riot
“Whether it is the absence of data or phone logs or willing testimony, inevitably, we have different sources to get that information because these are conversations that require more than one participant,” committee member Rep. Stephanie Murphy said.
“So even if there is one node that isn’t forthcoming, there are inevitably other points of information that we can use to build a more fulsome picture of what happened on January 6,” the Florida Democrat said.
Ful⋅some /fulsəm/
adjective
1a — characterized by abundance
1b — generous in amount, extent, or spirit
2 — unpleasantly and excessively suave or ingratiating in manner or speech
syn: buttery, oily, oleaginous, smarmy, soapy, unctuous
Waiting Room
