Imagination and the Void

 

Jackson Pollock at Work

By Patrick Laude

The ambiguous power of images has never been as pervasive as it is today through the world of media and virtual reality. Images shape ideas and tendencies, determine action, invade daily consciousness, and sometimes rule over opinion. They can hypnotize and control; they can feed all sorts of delusions and foster imbalance. In short, images fill up the vacuum left by the spiritual disarray of our contemporary world. So saturated is modern life with myriads of images of all kinds that we don't take notice of most of them anymore. One must wonder what may remain of the power of creative imagination when such a passive, hardly conscious relationship with images has settled in and become second nature.

Notwithstanding, modern man still values imagination as a rare, mysterious, and awesome faculty. Our schools encourage children to explore, display, enrich their imagination, although what we mean by it is far from clear, so blurry and capricious have become the criteria that validate its worth and function. When we try to specify what imagination entails, the most likely associations involve subjectivity, individuality, and freedom from boundaries. Imagination is a private, idiosyncratic realm that makes one enjoy the oft-complacent delights of being special. As a comforting haven of fantasy, it protects us from the harshness of an objective world of drab realism and cold, inhuman structures. It seemingly frees one’s mind and heart from the strictures of an industrialized world of tedious, mechanical, senseless activity. From all of this we may infer that imagination is akin to a world of unreality to which we turn to find solace from a reality that alienates us and robs us of meaning and happiness. The imaginary is not real. Its very raison d'être is to be a sort of parallel reality to which we may escape...

In a world in which reality is defined by action and outer realizations, imagination is also prized for its prospective, unconventional, creative power of exploration and discovery. To the impediments of memory, akin to the hindering weight of the past, modern man espouses the seemingly unlimited power of projection of an imagination that defies the constraints of reality as it is known. Modern science and technology thrive on this sense of unhampered liberty to question, inquire, and fathom. This is, in a sense, the very pride that modern mankind boasts as its uncontested superiority over ages of allegedly conformist compliance with unexamined beliefs and unscrutinized customs. There is no modernity without unconstrained imagination, imagination to think, to do, and to be.

Article source Parabola Magazine

I Hid the Body... Now What?

For James

 

It was a dark, gloomy February evening. I was bored. The party was canceled, my husband was away for the weekend and there was nothing on TV that I wanted to watch. I called everyone I knew, but my friends were either lazy or busy or just as bored as I was.

I ordered pizza. The guy who delivered my order looked like someone who tortured small animals. Maybe he jumped in for someone because I could not imagine that Giovanni's Fine Italian restaurant would hire someone like that. You expected a shady mafia type guy to arrive at your door. This was to add some spice to your pizza experience, not disgust.

I shut the door as quickly as I could. The pizza was too large for two, but I decided to eat it all by myself. Candles, Merlot, and Miles Davis. Nice!

And yet, Friday evening all alone was not my idea of fun...

I remembered a joke that was making rounds on facebook. "If you are bored, send a message to a random number..." This was such a fun idea! I took my iPhone and composed the suggested message: "I hid the body... now what?" The message went to a number I dialed without even looking at the keys.

I took another bite of my pizza and there it was. Faster than I would even think. "What did you do with the knife?"

Interesting, I thought. Whoever was there must have been just as bored as I was. "There was no knife!" I answered.

Seconds later a new message came. "You did not look under the bed!" "Oh, yes! I did!" I was laughing. This was turning to be quite a fun!

An angry message came back seconds later "I told you to check carefully you idiot!"

Was someone overdoing it or something? "I did my job. I want my money now!" I wrote.

"You will get nothing!" was the answer.

I took a large sip of wine and tried to think of something funny to make the person on the other side even more furious. And just as I was ready to type the message I heard a loud bang on my door. "Police! Open the door!"....

By Dominique Allmon

Image "Between past and present" by Nico De Pasquale

I Hid the Body... Now What? by Dominique Allmon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A New Industrial Revolution

Some people think that nanotechnology will transform the world. Nanotechnology, to these people, is a new technology which is not with us yet, but whose arrival within the next fifty years is absolutely inevitable. Once the technology is mastered, we will learn to make tiny machines that will be able to assemble anything atom by atom, from any kind of raw material.

The consequences, they believe, will be transforming. Material things of any kind will become virtually free, as well as being immeasurably superior in all respects to anything we have available to us now. These tiny machines will be able to repair our bodies from the inside, cell by cell. The threat of disease will be eliminated, and the process of aging will be only a historical memory. In this world, energy will be clean and abundant and the environment will have been repaired to a pristine state. Space travel will be cheap and easy and death will be abolished.

Some pessimists see an alternative future - one transformed by nanotechnology, but infinitely for the worse. They predict that we will learn to make these immensely powerful but tiny robots, but that we will not have the wisdom to control them. To the pessimists, nano technology will allow us to make new kinds of living, intelligent organisms, who may not wish to continue being our servants.

These tiny machines will be able to reproduce, feed and adapt to their environment, in just the same way as living organisms do. But unlike natural organisms, they will be made from tough, synthetic materials and they will have been carefully designed rather than having emerged from the blind lottery of evolution. Whether unleashed on the world by a malicious act, or developing out of control from the experiments of naive scientists, these self replicating nanoscale robots will certainly break out of our custody, and when this happens our doom is assured.

The pessimists think that life itself will have no chance in the struggle for supremacy with these nano robots; they will take over the world, consuming its resources and rendering feebler, carbon based life forms such as ourselves at best irrelevant, and at worst extinct. In this scenario we humans will accidentally, and quite possibly with the best of intentions, use the power of science to destroy humanity.

The above quotes come from the book Soft Machines, Nanotechnology and Life by Richard Jones.