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Since I feel like my place in the Gemini ecosystem is to
provide non-tech content for interested minds, I will be
writing a lot of stuff that is downright weird [1].
I am fascinated by patterns and coincidences, and so I will
write about them, but this not be taken to indicate that I
believe there is anything "behind" them. With a large
enough set of data, including sensory experiences, all
sorts of things can crop up.
My operant understanding of the the joy of life and its
magical feeling is they come from emergent properties.
This is what Douglas Hofstadter was trying to get at in a
lot of his work. If read well, his work gives a good feel
for how arbitrary substrates following arbitrary rules can
lead to emergent wonder.
I have no problem learning about substrates. Doing so is
one kind of pleasure -- an austere beauty on the
mountaintop [2]. But emergent properties play by their own
rules or, to use a different metaphor, follow different
grammars. I like to celebrate that they do and that we
are living in the world that we in fact are.
Maybe the future is Disneyland Without the Children [3],
but in the meantime I will be human and create my human
writings. I just do not fall into the all too common
pretension that my writings speak for the Gods.
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[1] I am actually a big fan of weasel words like "may,"
"could possibly," etc. But in this case I can be emphatic
because I *already* have an established habit of regularly
writing weird stuff. The only thing that has changed is
that I now have another place to publish it.
[2] Robert Pirsig on the side versus the top of the
mountain:
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the
sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.
Here’s where things grow. . . But of course, without the
top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines
the sides.
[3] Nick Bostrom.
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I'd love to hear from people. My email is the handle minus
"net" (work by Voltaire that starts with "c"), at sdf.org.