My thoughts on how the world works

The Daily Beast

Who the Daily Beast is I do not know (they are very coy about that)  - but whoever they are they are well-funded.

Here it the first paragraph of the report:

All of our machines have accomplished some re-creation of ourselves – have made us better in exciting ways we could not resist. And we have always ended up serving these amplifications of ourselves – simply because we had to.

It’s time we stopped this idolatry, and used our brains for a change – and gave up our eternal chase after getting better. Because the latest reincarnation of ourselves, the computer, is destroying our minds – which for most of us, feels like the ultimate thrill – self-destruction!

The computer is so dangerous because it seems to be intelligent – when it is nothing but a parody of intelligence. I must take some time to explain this – even though it should be transparently obvious.

Most will resist admitting this, because everyone now believes in the computer – and considers any criticism of it as sacrilege.

Allow me to speak against it. I spent most of my working life serving it – and I am using one right now, in the middle of my breakfast, to write this. The computer is a superb writing instrument, and I will say that until the day I die – which may not be too far away. But I have noticed that the more I become a computer, the less I am human. But I also notice that no one else seems to notice this. No matter; I see what I see – whether any one else can see it or not.

All you have to do is poke around in the guts of the thing to realize what it is – and how we are deceiving ourselves about it. There is only one appropriate response here: the primal scream.

But this can only be uttered by humans – of which there are not many left.

NY Times

Costa Rica has its own nutritional experts, they are college graduates and you can find then in any town – but they are useless.

American experts study how the body actually works – which is often far different from how it should act, in theory. His conclusion is:

It’s something very simple, very obvious, something that few want to hear: The epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States.

One other thing: it takes a year for your new diet to work – or in some cases three years.

I tried the simulator mentioned in the article, but it didn’t work. I went to the trouble to uninstall all my old Java and install the latest Java (which was something worth doing anyway) but it still didn’t work. Don’t mess with it.

On this subject Emerson and Lewis Mumford are in agreement. Mumford, writing much later, does a better job of it. I have broken up two long paragraphs from his The Condition of Man. on page 7, to make them more digestible online.

Man’s life differs from that of most other organizations in that individuation has become more important to him than strict conformity to type: he participates in all the characters of his species, and yet, by the very complexity of his needs, each individual makes over the life-course of the species and achieves a character and becomes a person.

The more fully he organizes his environment, the more skillfully he associates in groups, the more constantly he draws from his social heritage, the more does the person emerge from society as its fulfillment and perfection. But that process is never finished. Like the measuring worm at the end of a twig, in Albert Pinkham Ryder’s illustration,  Every other animal but man is a complete representation of his species: man remains the unfinished animal, ever reaching out into the unknown.

Man’s growth, therefore, is not completed by his biological fulfillment as a mate and a parent; nor is it completed by his death. Man’s nature is a self-surpassing and a self-transcending one: his utmost achievements are always the beginnings and his fullest growth must still leave him unsatisfied.

This quality of self-transcendence must be joined to another fact about the nature of man: namely, that his instinctive and automatic activity lies a whole stratum where purpose and meaning have full play.

A meaningless life and a purposeless life belong to the not-yet-human. Man does not, therefore, merely function towards survival, his own or that of his species, like other animals: he functions towards ends, which he himself becomes progressively conscious of and progressively able to define.

Outside such meanings and ends, the bitter words of the Preacher will hold: All is vanity.

Here Mumford is waxing poetic, as Emerson the Transcendentalist, did. Any many others before and since.