From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Tue Oct 21 1997 - 19:23:53 MDT
Eric Watt Forste wrote:
>
> Thanks for diagnosing my thinking. You're right, it probably is
> more of a psychological hypothesis or hedonic heuristic or both
> than a moral principle. Your paraphrase identifying my clumsy
> English phrase with the old Latin one makes me a little
> uncomfortable, though I can see how I gave that impression, because
> I tried to head off that impression by quacking about how I found
> it quite likely that Aristotle's "summum bonum" is a meaningless
> phrase. They might be the same though... that would just mean
> that my phrase is meaningless too. ;)
>
> The possibility of a summum bonum would to me imply the possibility
> of a permanent end to all progress. Whether my resisting this idea
> is merely wishful thinking on my part I am not sure yet.
>
THe thing is, that, despite people's concepts of the "Singularity" being
a place or goal set and fixed, to anyone familiar with the concept, they
know that a singularity is always unreachable. When you think you got
there, it went and moved on you. It's the penultimate end of the
rainbow. The more capable, the more transhuman you becom, your own
conception of what the "Singularity" will be like moves that much
farther ahead. Of course, there will tend to be a contraction over time
as to the foreseeable event horizion, but nobody will ever reach their
own "singularity", except for death. Death is the end of the line, so
once you die, then you are there. Possibly with the exception of those
whose sigularity is the now, that they can imagine nothing beyond what
they are now. Those people are already walking dead... SO, if your
phrase is meaninless, then its the right one for the job.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@together.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive MikeySoft: Graphic Design/Animation/Publishing/Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------ How many fnords did you see before breakfast today?
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