Did you ever want to play questions?

Wait it isn’t even lunch time yet, then again shoudn’t one follow the advice of W.C. Fields?
(I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast)

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Aren’t I still in Amsterdam for a few more days? Isn’t it coming up on dinnertime here?

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Wasn’t the guy from Philly, after all? :wink:

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Double gin?

Who the hell are phreedom and why do I have a certificate from them?

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Why is there so much mansplaining around the boards today?

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?

Didn’t I have to look up that quote?

And wasn’t I left with an impression that the author was familiar with concepts such as ‘the weather’ and didn’t this especially catch my eye?

while the pile of debris before him grows skyward

Is this the debris that one is instructed to ‘push to the side,’ in some of the more esoteric literature (having noted the authors connections with Jewish mysticism)?

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Could be, or maybe it’s more that the march of history doesn’t allow us to do much more than that, other than just watch the disasters accumulate as we move forward in history? Doesn’t he mean we can’t go back and change the destruction of “progress”?

Isn’t Walter Benjamin the bee’s knees? Doesn’t he cut a rather tragic figure, though? Isn’t that entire generation of scholars similar, even if they survived the wars and depression? Isn’t that period where the entire project of questioning the enlightenment in the postwar period came from?

Also, isn’t that Paul Klee painting wonderful?

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Didn’t it seem to me to be a (please excuse the phrase) psycho-historical reconfiguration of those concepts which I had previously only really encountered when talking about perception of inner components?

Didn’t his take immediately make me wonder why I hadn’t made such a connection previously? Obviously, we all perceive input from out-with but didn’t entraining the concept in a context of historical… impetus just ‘click’?

Am I not so impressed with Nietzsche because of his ability to foster in his readers such an experience of instantaneous congruity? Am I not excited to go and read a new author that also managed to knit complex concepts in but a few words?

:smile:

Any recommendations to start with?

(There’s something about the hair which grabs they eye, no?)

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Couldn’t you start here?

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm

Then maybe try this?

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Isn’t his Arcades project pretty sweet?

Isn’t this the stuff I’ve read by Benjamin (or parts of, at least)? Isn’t this a more complete bibliography of his body of work?

http://www.egs.edu/library/walter-benjamin/bibliography/

Might I wager a guess that some of his work has not been translated from the German?

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Isn’t an internet high-five warranted?

Hmm, just another reason in a litany of reasons for me to feel bad about not learning the German?

One day, don’t I promise!?

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How will we ever fit in all the things we want to do in this world to better ourselves before shuffling off this mortal coil? Isn’t that part of the tragedy of being human, that there is never enough time for all we want to do in this world?

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Hehe, personal philosophy tiem!?

Concerning the end of processes supported by neural substrate, don’t I think we are potentially afforded a number of ‘outs’ in an arena such as this vacuum?

Not that I believe in heaven or any such non-scientific formulations but don’t I hold hope for far-future technology which can easily read, with perfect fidelity, energetic processes from the past? Doesn’t such scope for detecting energy across time-like dimensions, coupled with (future) well-understood models of mind and associated supportive substrates open the possibility of reading and writing mind-states?

Can’t one take this even further and invoke all sorts of potentials like simulation, not just of environments but of specific complex processes such as minds and bodies?

Don’t I think that the sheer fact of any existence at all massively implies wider and more complex, casually-linked, arenas of existence?

If you had the power, the technology, to look through the litany of disaster that constitutes history and lift the minds of those who died into new, more perfect arenas (perhaps simulated), would you not?

The implications of future capabilities of conscious beings is wide and vast, can it really all end here, amongst the dust and deprivation?

Anyway, as I said: ‘hehe,’ ne?

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Mm… isn’t that a particular tricky area of philosophical thought, which addresses the nature of consciousness itself? Didn’t I just get done reading this article about luddism and fears of technology and what makes us human?

So, at what point do we stop being human if we upload ourselves into some major computer thingie and transcend our ordinary bodies? But how is that any different from what religious folks argue about the afterlife, with Buddhism especially focusing on humans transcending our mortal plane of existence? Isn’t the question about whether we’re more than our physical bodies, and if consciousness itself can exist outside of the firing of our neurons or the beating of our hearts? If we upload into the collective consciousness computer, do we cease to be human at that point and become more like the changelings in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, who spent most of their time inside what they called the great link and looked down upon what they called “solids” for not existing within a bond greater than that which can be found within the connections we make as individuals?

Isn’t this above my pay grade? :wink:

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Fun though, no?

Doesn’t the strength of the future neurone concept, though, provide no incongruity between process type? Doesn’t the dissociation become time-like, rather than space-like, in that there is no need for aetheric realms or even simulated substrates (although I think they are heavily implied in early revisions of such a technology)?

Haven’t you totally got the central conceit though? How many times could such a thing happen? Couldn’t there be, in theory, a multiplicity of ‘yous’ spread across the universe in time and space, like, even ‘right now’? Why not already?

If there really is some human-like uber-mind off in the far flung future regulating, say, the natural biological transmission of mind-stream, what would it want for it’s transmuted consciousnesses? An arena in which they can work out their karmic imprint, the weight of their historical behaviour? What would such an arena look like?

Wouldn’t you want to ‘escape’ such a system? Out into an un-smitten universe as an individuated entity? Or would you choose (if afforded the opportunity by technology perhaps) to stay entrained within a project of trans-personal consciousness, the likes of which the Buddhists think we are already embedded (and also happen to want to escape)?

Like I said, the sheer fact of existence implies so many possibilities, isn’t it all so very, very weird?

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isn’t it super-weird?

But are we still human uploading into the computer consciousness? Is it our individual natures that makes us human or is it our connection to others? Am I the same mindysan without my physical self making these comments to you? And is there something different about what those who advocate for an uploaded future and those who are buddhist? Or can we think of it as a continuum, which is making the ability to transcend our mortality a lived reality?

Can you explain what you mean by this, cause I have no idea? :slight_smile:

I’m not homophobic or anything, but why are you looking at my butt?

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Yah, what am I divorced from my body and the instincts to protect its continued existence? Of course, in a simulated environment, with a simulated body, would I even notice the difference? Would some part of the enrgetic processes of which I was constituted continue on in some collective-subconscious realm whilst my mind was written into the simulation in the future?

But isn’t that why I like the future neurone? Isn’t it just as physical as my current neurones? Doesn’t the technical challenge (assuming good, future cloning or synthetic neurone technology) get pushed into the realm of reading (with perfect fidelity) the energetic processes of which our minds are constituted, the patterns of neurone firing and structure of the brain?

Don’t I believe current conceptions of such technology involve very fast-moving, orbiting singularities and exploitation of extreme distortions of spacetime to place two temporally dislocated arenas (for want of a better word) next to one another?

Remember, we are only looking to read information from the past, the normal way (from our perspective) of information transmission, past-to-future, aren’t we just seeking to point one end of the ‘telescope’ at a local point in the past (inside someone’s brain (and maybe body for DNA synthesis))?

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Hey, are you guys ragging on me, or the dude what I was jiving at!?

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But is this still you? Or is the individual the actual place where we have false consciousness anyway? At the end of the day, does it even matter or rather, does it matter now because of the limitations of the individual body anyway and it wouldn’t in the uploaded world?

And isn’t this what historians are struggling with (well, some of us), overcoming the teleological mode of thinking? But can we ever get out of that, given our very real limitations at of coming at the problem of reality from within a particular point in time, from within the constraints of our own senses? Are you suggesting that the “future neurone”, where we’re uploaded into the collective consciousness can eliminate this problem, where history, which depends upon individual subjectivity doesn’t even exist any longer, because it’s one great mass where we can finally get past our perception that time is linear?