File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2001/lyotard.0101, message 11


Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 20:41:05 -0500
From: hugh bone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: singularity


Eric et. al.

I found McKenna at the "dromo" link below where he made more substantive
comments.
The Esalen event seemed to be a cocktail party without peanuts or drinks.

See other comments below, marked ** .


http://www.dromo.com/fusionanomaly/singularity.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

> hugh bone wrote:
>
>
> > >
> > > Vernor Vinge is a "new" name to me, so was surprised to
> > > learn that he wrote many books, and found his account of the
> > "singularity",
>
> I'm not really that familar with Vernor Vinge either.  I know he is a
> science fiction writer who has won big awards and is famous for a
> novella entitled "True Names" which prophesized cyberspace long before
> William Gibson ever came on the scene.

** He was a math professor at San Diego State.
>
> One of my reasons for mentioning singularity is that this is a
> contemporary site where science is merging into the domain of religion. >
What liberals once considered the wackiest part of fundamentalism >
Christianity; namely its end-time rhetoric, is now being granted a new >
currency by a strange fusion of science and technology that hurtles >
towards the Omega point of a posthuman, trans-human apocalypse, a > machinic
eschatology. (This might be described as the metanarrative to
> end all other metanarratives.)

**They could wear sandals and sandwich themselves between placards
proclaiming "The End is Nigh".

I think there is no metanarrative yet.  Only "petite peu" narratives.  Not
in physics, not in philosophy, not in religion.
I've counted about 20 areas of complexities that threaten us.
By concentrating on abstractions, and slicing those abstractions them into
ever tinier areas of specialization, the experts get further and further
from the common "sense" world in which we live out our  "be-ing".

> I don't know if you are familiar with Terence McKenna or not, but,
> during his lifetime he also espoused a similar mystical doctrine of
> singularity, based on the notion that history is rushing towards an
> encounter with some mysterious hyperspatial object that will soon
> transform everything.

** The mere concept of transhuman makes us think more about  "humanity", and
that should help.

> Sometimes called the Timothy Leary of the esctasy punk set, he devaloped
> a popular alternative philisophy which reveals similar reverberations to
> the technological singularity espoused by Vinge.
>
> You can sample some of McKenna's views, recorded at an interesting
> conference that covers a number of topics at the following site:
>
>
> http://www.well.com/user/suscon/esalen/dayone.html
>
>





   

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