[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[markhsmit]

Hi John,
To be honest, I do not remember the specifics well.  It is on my
list of books to read again.  Also, I haven't read the releases
following his death.  Are these gloomy as well?
Mark
Mine too, Mark. Did you find it sorta eerie that his last book, Long Dark
Tea Time of the Soul, should be so full of moody mortality musings? Just
before he died?

Remind me never to write anything that gloomy, just in case mind does create
it's own reality.

John

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:32 PM, markhsmit <markhsmit at aol.com> wrote:

>
> Thanks for the Adams, Krimel, Dirk Gently is one of my heros.
>
> Mark
> [Mark]
> Evolution in terms of human brain capacity for man,
> is not so much evolution, as it is development. However,
> if the brain does indeed evolve (as I think is happening
> today with autism), the end product will be something
> unpredictable and unimaginable to us, as human
> consciousness was to the bacteria. While it may still
> continue to contain the biochemistry that we do, the
> methods of communication will be much more effective.
>
> [Krimel]
> Sounds a bit like Minority Report. You might enjoy Nancy Kress' "Beggars in
> Spain" series.
>
> [mark]
> Imagine a form of telepathy where words are no longer
> needed, and the underlying circuitry of the brain is
> transferred unambiguously as a computer code. This would
> take such species away from the need for communication
> through the simple symbolic. Such ability to transfer so
> called emotional senses (which are a the core of our
> thoughts), will provide for a highly evolved species.
> All of this of course assumes communication as the evolving
> power.
>
> [Krimel]
> Ok, but I prefer this from Douglas Adams:
>
> "The Babel fish," said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is
> small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the
> Universe.
> It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it.
> It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to
> nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a
> telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies
> with
> nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has
> supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a
> Babel
> fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any
> form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the
> brainwave
> matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish."
> "Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so
> mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers
> have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence
> of God."
> "The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,'
> says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'"
> "'But,' says Man, 'The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could
> not
> have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own
> arguments, you don't. QED.'"
> "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in
> a
> puff of logic."
> "'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that
> black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."
> "Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's
> kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when
> he
> used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps
> It Up For God."
> "Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to
> communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and
> bloddier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
>
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