jmcmichael

~ Wednesday, June 23 ~

“ Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things—makes you old. Time-which-slips-away is what fills the void created by the absence of the self. The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of consumption. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time has to be caught on the wing, in the present—but the present has yet to be constructed.

— Raoul Vaneigem, “The Revolution of Everyday Life”

Tags: philosophy

~ Tuesday, January 20 ~

“ The role and power of metaphor is rising in our culture. Our modern digital world is a metaphoric world. We make things real by first constructing them as a metaphor, an “as if” type. Then we slowly deepen the metaphor, adding more layers of meaning and realism, until metaphor slowly passes whatever invisible barrier lies between the real and fake, and it becomes “is” — it becomes “real.” Pinocchio is at last a real boy, earning the love of his mother. ¶ We have made as-if realities, which someday may be felt as real. We are making as-if communities, as-if democracies, as-if intelligence, as-if life. One by one, we are moving all existing entities into the as-if realm, and then we’ll pump them up till they cross that Pinocchio line and are indistinguishable from real.

— Kevin Kelly, in his essay “As If”

Tags: culture philosophy

~ Friday, January 16 ~

Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey

An online course from MIT Open Courseware based on Douglas Hofstadter’s book.

Tags: science philosophy computer science
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