䷝ Dream beyond Vision
What has happened to our vision of the future? If we cannot see beyond this event horizon, we better start imagining. Do you imagine a future with us in it? Can you imagine the future at all admist the 24-hour din? I put away new YouTube, Twitter, Netflix for months write this. I’ve surely missed many interesting diversions, new seasons of well wrought series. After an hour of brainrot, can you imagine anything at all?
Do androids dream? We’ll never know if we forget how to dream first. If you can’t dream it, you can’t be it. Let me tell you about my dream.
We need to become better at being humans. Learning to use symbols and knowledge in new ways, across groups, across cultures, is a powerful, valuable, and very human goal. And it is also one that is obtainable, if we only begin to open our minds to full, complete use of computers to augment our most human of capabilities.
Douglas Engelbart said that. People say Doug invented the computer mouse. Often with technology, people miss the important part, the hard part, the part about becoming a better person. That was Doug’s dream, and people don’t remember him for it. It’s a mistake. To forget is an insult to life itself.
But I remember, and it’s my dream now. I bought that dream. You can too. Dreams are a non-rival good like bosons bozo, lasers, reverse rainbows. What to do? Connect. I’m wearing a frog suit holding a guitar, “Someday we’ll find it…”
Feynman had that dream.
Today we cannot, and there’s no use making believe we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other [everything from the fundamental laws of physics to man to history, beauty, hope, the ultimate creator], in fact we’ve just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy.
And so I don’t think either end is nearer to God’s. And that to stand at either end, and to walk out off the end of the pier only, hoping out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake. …
But that actually, the great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle. And in that way we are gradually understanding this connection, this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies.
A lot has happened since 1964. Today we can connect if we’re willing and careful. We have the Internet. We have friends all over, all different kinds. Engelbart and Feynman had big, public dreams, the kind that need all of us dreaming together.
For me, my work, right now is to warn you. Searle did. “Syntax is not semantics.” Many times. “Simulation is not duplication.” For more than forty years. We didn’t listen. We didn’t understand. He could have been more clear. It’s obvious to me now. Obvious like a mathematical proof, which is to say not obvious at all until you understand the insight and then clear as the day is long.
We need to keep the real real and the imaginary imaginary. My sister shared a quote:
“Shout-out to libraries for keeping fiction and nonfiction separate; that is not easy to do these days.” Also, AI has infiltrated my social media to a point where I no longer know what is real.
Keep it real. Where does it all come from? Who is responsible for this? Wait, who even said that? No attribution, no context. What is it for?
Consider recorded music, live music, a rock concert. They’re all different things with different purposes. You can tell by the way you do it. You don’t go to a rock concert to hear the music, else you wouldn’t bring earplugs.
I will try my best to sing Searle’s warning one more time. Try my best. Heaven help us.