A recurring idea from Jaron Lanier (“You Are Not A Gadget” – 2010) goes like this: “It isn’t really a question of whether AI can get smarter than humans. It is more whether humans will collectively (unconsciously) agree to make themselves stupid enough to descend to the same level as artificial intelligence”. I’ve paraphrased but you get the idea. What does this have to do with the social debate over transgender athletes?
Dionysius the Areopagite in the 4th century pointed to nine distinct choirs of angels, each a level miraculously incomprehensible to the stage of Being just below it. And the guardian angels are only but the ‘lowest’ and closest to the humans of these nine…
True, not fictionalized, to the best of my recall. (Because the memory function rapidly deteriorates immediately upon crossing the membrane from sleeping to waking — the sudden influx of sensory inputs taxes one’s will in an overpowering way.)
_______RS
Notes: This haiku arose while reflecting upon and re-reading Gertrude Reif Hughes’ thoughtful and stimulating foreword to Rudolf Steiner’s monumental text “The Philosophy of Freedom” (sometimes translated as “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” — which gives an insight into the intended meaning of the term ‘freedom’). The book was written in 1893-1894 but the foreword was from a later edition, published in 1995. The book is very far from a typical philosophical work, which would turn many souls off, including myself in many ways. But if you pay it true and engaged attention — this book is still riveting and uniquely fresh. I have looked at it five or six times in life, always at least five or ten years apart, and it is every time a novel revelation. In contemplating the haiku, it is crucial to bear in mind that the act of noticing being referred to is realtime, in the moment! Not something realized a bit later, even a few seconds later, after the deed, relying upon memory.
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A Novella in installments, tracing the intermingling autobiographies of a boy and a violin, spanning over a century. The previous episode is right here. To find any episode, look here.
(The protagonist posing with some old friends: a Japanese shakuhachi, A Zimbabwean mbira, and a good ol’ American jaw harp.)
(13) – Widowed in the Cupboard, NJ, 1959
||skirmishes|| ||with|| ||reality|| 