From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Wed Nov 07 2001 - 10:00:25 MST
From: "Leonardo Gonzalez" <magos@extropian.net>
> This reminds me of a passage from the Illuminatus! Trilogy:
>
> --------
> Well, I was young and ignorant of everything outside ten million books
> I'd gobbled and guilty-unsure about my imaginative flights away from my
> father's realism and of course stoned of course but I finally understood
> why he was watching me that way, it was (this part of it) pure Zen,
> there was nothing I could do consciously or by volition that would
> satisfy him and I had to do exactly that which I could not not do,
> namely be Simon Moon. Which led to deciding then and there without any
> time to mull it over and rationalize it just what the hell being Simon
> Moon or, more precisely SimonMooning, consisted of, and it seemed to be
> a matter of wandering through room after room of my brain looking for
> the owner and not finding him anywhere, sweat broke out on my forehead,
> it was becoming desperate because I was running out of rooms and the
> Padre was still watching me.
> "Nobody home," I said finally, sure that the answer wasn't good
> enough.
> "That's odd," he said. "Who's conducting the search?"
That's easy. The brain named "Simon Moon" was conducting the search, and the
brain correctly concluded that the phantom host did not exist. (The Padre was
a deluded brain.)
--- --- --- --- ---
Useless hypotheses, etc.:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism, GAC, Cyc, Eliza, cryonics, individual
uniqueness, ego, human values, scientific relinquishment, malevolent AI
We move into a better future in proportion as science displaces superstition.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:11:51 MST