Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org &
Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Survival / Integrity /
@ K. 2006 01 25
Larger context setter:
The Greeks had a shadowy place where the dead went. There are traces in the Bible that the Hellenized Jews had something similar. Christianity blows the fragment of an idea up into a hell where the centralized manager/god judges individual humans, claiming some for himself as “good”; leaving the rest, “bad,” for his demon counterpart, the rejected centralized manager: Satan.
Thus: heaven and hell.
Yesterday I visited the local boat ramp to check on wind and wave, maybe wade along the shore and make a few casts. There was a guy standing at the water’s edge. I saw little stuff floating away from an emergent shrub. Was the guy feeding the fish, I wondered. Or had he, or someone, just dumped a car’s ash tray into the lake? What I saw could have been a bunch of filtertipped butts floating away, dose the fish with tar and nicotine. Ah, no. I had it. They were seed pods fallen from the shrub, you know, those fuzzy caterpillar-shaped things, the plant responding to this hot windy January as to a false spring, wasting its fecundity. The trees around here seem to know the seasons, but the understory gets routinely confused.
The wind, the water of course would treat cigarette butts, pollen, or bird poop exactly the same: by physics.
Last evening I read a Reuters science release on some gal having some success in breeding critters other zoos had given up on: pandas, cloud leopards …
In the past the zoo had taken a cloud leopard, male, thrown it into a cage with a cloud leopard, female, the cage right next to the tigers, people staring at the animals, concrete floors, no place to hide. Instantly, the male would kill the female.
Both animals’ droppings had betrayed high stress levels. The gal moved the small leopards away from the monster tigers, gave them a dirt floor, added trees for them to climb. Wouldn’t you know, the female started ovulating, the male producing sperm … She was nice to them, made them comfy. They purred, they chuffed, they mated.
I found myself born into a zoo with compulsory school having replaced compulsory superstition as the basic universal compulsion. Oh, yes, and then universal military conscription. Somehow, I produced sperm, I married, I mated.
In circumstances even worse I’d hope to hell I’d have the balls to kill any female I got my hands on, regretting only that she wasn’t strong enough to kill me. Any naturally free creature, caged, should kill any of its kind it finds also caged. Noblesse oblique of the stronger of any pair. Serena Williams, thank God, in the cage, could kill me.
Decades ago, in On the Beach (the movie, I didn’t read the novel), a survivor of a nuke, desperately scans the radio waves for messages, hoping for other survivors. He hears something. Can’t detect code, but it’s a signal. Tracks the source, finds the (ahem) Cause. There’s a telegraph key, power is still On. A falling Coke bottle has gotten its neck hooked into the ring on the chord to a window shade. Gravity pulls the Coke bottle back into its fall, the spring wound inside the roller bar of the shade, yanks it back up: to fall again, sometimes hitting the telegraph key. The “message” is (ahem) Random.
thanx John K Muir
Earlier kleptocractic humans — one group, centrally organized, seeking to bring all within its reach under its agenda — built the Iron Maiden. The priest, the cop, any orthodox klep tool, takes the schlepp, the schmuck, the heretic, the dissident, and puts him inside the Iron Maiden. Close the device on him and he’s mechanically pierced all around with spikes. Torture.
Now imagine that group dead, expired, but the Iron Maiden still existing, the spikes still cabable of piercing, the hinges still hinging. Imagine a cigarrete butt blowing into it. No harm. Imagine a seed-caterpillar from my shrub at the beach blowing into it. Harm we don’t care about. Now imagine the welfare mother dumping her next infant at the public park. Crows feed the babe. The babe crawls into the Iron Maiden, gets stuck, crows still feed it. That’s one unlucky baby.
Now imagine the baby still there but not dropped by a welfare mother. Say some god spews his seed over the universe, little Christs drifting like oyster eggs through the cosmos. One of them grows trapped inside the Iron Maiden. Now imagine the god coming around looking for his sons. He comes to my wretched boat ramp: and there’s the little bleeding Jesus. That god is going to be pissed. Who’s he going to take it out on?
That will depend, will it not, on how stupid the god is.
In Star Wars the white plastic gorillas, all replicants I assume, look for the missing droids, R2D2 and 3CPO. Jedi Obi Wan Kanobi says, in his Alex Guiness voice, “These are not the droids you want.” And the assault-rife-armed white plastic gorillas go away. We in the audience laugh, thinking that Alex Guiness is human, not a droid. But is it true? He’s an actor, isn’t he? He’s reading a script. He didn’t write this movie.
And if he did, how do we know he’s not a robot writing machine?
You buy the package. Inside is a slip: “Inspected by C.” Who the fuck is C? How do you know C isn’t a droid? How do you know C was paying attention?
This morning I was awakened by the phone. Some girl was asking to speak to “the owner or general manager.” She was calling for the Avon Park High School Red Devils, looking for sponsorship from local businesses. She had to repeat herself three times before I understood a word she said. A high school girl, the school compulsory, suckered to act as a telemarketer, reading a script, some other robot dialing the phones. Are there any human beings in human society? Have there ever been?
What should robot inspector C make of us? What should the robot serial number stamping machine stamp us with?
The engineers pay great attention to building the protoype. The company may think the prototype is a lemon but mass produce it anyway. Or they may ask the engineers to keep tinkering with it. The company may think it’s OK and mass produce the hell out of it.
But once it’s mass produced, the company may occasionally sample a product example, but only the dumbest Coke-bottle-caught-in-a window-shade company would keep examining every individual Barbie Doll.
I can see God judging Adam. I can see God judging Eve. But the God who would then judge you, me, Mary, and Harry has got to be meshugana.
Of course what the god does, if it’s really a god, should be up to the god, shouldn’t it? If human free will is a joke, divine free will could still have some bearing. Unless the gods too are replicants, left-over Iron Maidens, berserk industrial robot stamping machines …
But I’ll tell you: if it were up to me, a god should only bother judging a prototype. And in a society of production-run individuals, the god should only bother judging the institutions they come up with. Does a church made by spawn of the prototype in fact suit the nature of the prototype?
Is the government guiding how the humans are human? Or is it remolding humans into droids?
Or: is it taking droids insanely programmed to be Republicans and insanely reprogramming them to be Communists?
I’d thought at first that I’d be drafting this to go in my Judgement: Heaven and Hell section. But it also damn well suits my Integrity series: being a natural extension of my Turing Test piece.
I drafted this in the order thoughts already in my head stimulated my fingers. I think it will read better slightly reordered. But I put it up as is first.
Grr! 2012 06 18 I don’t know how but I just lost a paragraph or two of response to John Muir‘s blog article on On the Beach.
One difficult-to-accept aspect of this, for the survivors, is that they didn’t launch the war. They didn’t press the red button. But they will die — the human race itself, will die — because someone else did. In a way, On the Beach concerns the ultimate form of tyranny: the recognition of the fact that a few old men, in seats of power around the world, could kill billions in an instant because of a simple difference in ideological beliefs. Individual liberty is nothing but a convenient illusion so long as nuclear weapons exist, because such weapons can destroy not just those deemed responsible for crimes, but whole populations; innocent and guilty alike.
I’ll rephrase: (I guess I didn’t. If I remember what I was going to say, or get a fresh impulse, maybe I will yet.
