GRGR(10) Control

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On Thu, 13 Feb 97 11:29 GMT
Andrew Dinn (andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk)  wrote
>... A technology of death used by the death-obsessed
>to promote death. ... rocketry -
>yearning to fly into dead space to visit a dead moon?
Dead?  Really?  When did you go - on a Tuesday?
> Ditto for
>computers, the `thinking machines' the acme of whose learning
>capabilities includes the stupidities of `smart' warfare.
"Thinking machines?"  There's a straw man dead these twenty years.
Smart weapons, the laser-guided bomb particularly, owe much less to
computers per se than to advances, sorry, developments in
communications, optics and image processing that have propagated along
the same axes as arthroscopic surgery and forest- and crop-land
diagnostics.  In any event, artificial cognition is the betrothed of
physiology, not of physics.  Only as we learn what the brain does,
will that behavior be synthesized - er, mimicked.
>No, the only real act of synthesis mankind has performed is the one he
>was preprogrammed for, multiplying, polluting and poisoning -
>`our mission is to promote death', by creating yet more human life? 
No.  Sorry, abstract collective nouns don't m,p&p. 
>maybe the only control man can (should) hope to attain is enough
>self-control to stop despoiling our world in the search for God-like
>powers. 
That one was going pretty good until the gratuitous motivational
analysis.  Do you really believe the transition from edge-flaking to
striking whole blades off a prepared core, was accomplished by nerdy
paleolithic wannabes?  And you didn't really mean 'self-control', as
in "control of the individual self  by that self", did you?  
>Maybe control lies not in making things happen but in not
>being tied to responding to what does happen. 
Let swap "freedom" for "control" and you have an apostle.  F:IW -
"Freedom: I Won't" was the themephrase of an early H. Beam Piper short
from the Campbell days.
>Maybe those Herero are
>God's chosen people after all.
Fat chance.  In any event, being chosen by God hardly seems to be a
rose garden.