Re: argument that the internet is becoming conscious

On 25 Sep 2012, at 02:09, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i9kE3Ne7as&feature=relmfu


Can you summarise the argument?

I think his argument can be summed up as "Technology as Mind expanding and that is ecstatic". On the whole this is more of preaching than philosophy.

He seems to be playing with very christian/platonic fantasies of immortality and being God.

He quotes Alphonse de la Martine: "Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire man is a fallen poet who remembers heaven" . But this is just Plato's story about our having seen the forms before our birth, a story he needed to answer Meno's paradox  "how can you be looking for something if you don't already know what you are looking for, since you could not know that you have found it if you did not know what it was". Plato argues then that we have known all before our birth, and we just recognise the heavenly forms now. In doing this in the Meno and more explicitly in the Phaedrus overturns ancient greek Tragic thinking, by 

 (1) placing the place where the non living are from under the ground to the heaven
 (2) which impacts the idea that the memory comes from the past to one that is fixed in advanced
 (3) inciting the idea that human souls are immortal, whereas ancient greek thinking would have had it as exactly the thing humans cannot be. Humans are those that are mortal.

  But otherwise he brings a lot of ideas together from other talks that we have come across. On the other hand, it is important to also notice the dangers of what is ahead. Thinking cannot just be ecstatic thinking. It also has to be Bazon Brock's Apocalyptic Thinking: before leaving his cave primitive man had to think ahead of all the dangers that were lurking out there in order to avoid them. You have to be think about the worse in order to avoid it - so thinking cannot just be ecstatic. Thinking is fundamentally bi-polar.

	Henry


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)
[3] http://www.vimeo.com/21388622

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