Re: De-Anthropomorphizing SL3 to SL4.

From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Sun Mar 14 2004 - 20:24:14 MST


At 05:05 PM 3/14/2004 -0800, Paulwrote:

>Here is some snippits about the Singularity (a bit
>long but interesting) from Mark Pesce, inventor of
>VRML.

Ah yes, the tedious shade of Terence McKenna. Some of what Pesce's saying
(in perhaps rather inflated language)

http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce/biosandlogos.html

might be interesting, but he will go floating off into stuff like:

< But there is a new birth coming, a new form erupting into being. And we,
as the folks focused on the future, who broaden our minds in every
conceivable way ­ by reading about the future and doing the work of
creating new culture, with everything that entails, be it esoteric
spiritual practices or taking psychedelics - we may be among the few who
can take stock of the entirety of the transformation, because we have
occasionally been thrust into spaces where what is to be permanently true
for everyone else has become temporarily true for us.

Because we have been there, we know we need not be afraid, or give in to
amazement, and can avoid being hypnotized by speed or pretty blinking
lights. Talking to aliens? Been there. The end of history? Been there,
too. Maybe all the bizarre trips that we’ve all had are just what we need,
even as humanity enters its last, strange trip.

Just a few months before he died, I went to visit Terence in Hawai’i. I
asked him to sign my copy of The Invisible Landscape, which he did. He
wrote: “Properly understood, this book is a map to the stone. As above, so
below.”

The stone he referred to is the Philosopher’s Stone, which could raise base
materials to their highest, transcendent state. He knew that at best he’d
constructed a metaphor, a way to conceive something inconceivable. >

Yada yada, alas. IMHO.

Damien Broderick



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