Carranza, Metaphysical Certitude was actually used first by GG [Geoff Goodfellow Message 15481244 ] to explain the mind set of the Globalstar people and the certainty of failure of Globalstar's business plans. Their mind set derives from the culture of telecommunications people over the decades, probably traceable back to Queen Victoria who, when told that a telephone call could be made to India, asked, with the implication that it was of little value, "But what would I say to them?" and to Thomas Edison who issued instructions
hawk.fab2.albany.edu
<All five of these utilities had in common that they were isolated from each other and that they were unidirectional. For example, no one at the desktop ever put heat back into a radiator, and the user at a terminal did not provide any cycles back to the mainframe. The most interesting argument for this, albeit a counterintuitive one, comes from telephony. At its most general, this is not a technology for two people to speak to each other but rather for one of them to summon the other into his or her "presence." If you doubt this, look at the immortal words of that first message spoken by Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas A. Watson on March 10, 1876: "Mr. Watson, come here! I want you!" Or consider these two statements from a boss to a secretary: "Get me the Wrigley file," vs. "Get me Wrigley." The former will bring a manila folder into the office. What about the latter? Will it bring a flesh-and-blood Wrigley or a disembodied voice over the phone? At a very fundamental level, there is no difference. They are equally unidirectional in their underlying intent. The larger point is that to the end user, each of these disjoint and one-way technologies appeared monolithic, and getting help was straightforward: it would never have occurred to anyone to ask staff in the computing center to repair a leaky radiator or to ask someone in the telephone office how to find a book in the library stacks....>
I just then got a little fright! Perhaps that fright was bigger than that I got from the World Trade Center attack which was a 20th century barbarism in the 3D world. That merely made me sob to see the mayhem that people cause on people in the biological world. This little frisson, made the hair stand up on my neck.
The Trade Center was nothing special. Just another on the continuum of mayhem humans have visited on humans throughout their transition from chimps to humanoids. It does feel special and it is in many ways, but it's trivial when lined up alongside any number of deliberate events of the 20th century. White Russians. Cultural Revolution. Srebenica. Rwanda. Hiroshima. Final Solution? Reality television has a hard act to follow. As Calvin [of Calvin & Hobbes] says, "TV defines reality". Though it doesn't. Neither does perception. Ask Shrodinger's cat! Though perversely, it does - as much as the TV people can make it do so anyway.
I have ranted about IT for a long time now and the transition from a dumb silicon rock cleverly formed by humans into a calculating device to a silicon, gallium, germanium, carbon, laser, optical fibre, superconducting cyberspace sentience which is well up Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
For a long time [internet time, not human, geological or below the event horizon time] cyberspace has known more than anyone and more than everyone. Data is now in cyberspace which is in nobody's head. Cyberspace is already the keeper of knowledge. But that's a long way from smart. People often confuse knowledge and learning with smart too. Knowledge and senses are essential for smart to function, but they are two separate things. But that's a human issue and I don't want to get sidetracked.
Anyway, I started out to explain metaphysical certitude and I ended up trying to explain Globalstar's culture and ended up with Thomas Watson and Queen Victoria and it occurred to me that metaphysical certitude was intrinsic to the very first conversations which were one way concepts wherein Victoria and Edison both saw it as a one way mirror.
They look in and see a reflection of their own wants and self. They had the mindset of issuing instructions. Of being the boss. Of the other serving their needs.
The more accurate truth is that the cellphones were used to say, "I am going to die. I love you." That is not a one way conversation. The phone is the integration of two beings.
There are science museums where two of you can sit on either side of a half-reflective window and you can both turn up or down the lighting on yourself. When you turn your light down, the person on the other side sees only themself. When you turn it up, they see a mixture of themself and you. By carefully aligning your noses and eyes, your faces morph into each other. Some of the light from the other person comes through and is superimposed with the image of yourself from the reflection you see. It is an eerie feeling and the meaning of the self becomes a little less clear.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I thought I'd click and get the correct quote 'come here Watson' or whatever it was, from my buddy Google.com. The old days of getting 20000 hits are gone! Google gave me a few things to check and that link was right there staring at me.
Google was ahead of me. Google already knew about what I was thinking and hauled it out of cyberspace in a couple of seconds. I got a little fright. Most or few or maybe no people will see why that should give me a fright. A bigger hair-on-neck feeling than a couple of planes crashed deliberately into some buildings.
Well, you watch what happens in New York. Don't follow the soldiers. Watch cyberspace relink almost instantly as backup offices, distributed computing, multi-server web sites and backup power supplies, fibre links and satellites swing into gear.
This is Arpanet in action. dei.isep.ipp.pt
Oh,Oh! I just thought I'd scroll down the second link [the Watson one] to see if it actually was ahead of me or was I just imagining it because the idea was in my head. Fright 2 occurred at the bottom. There is a picture of a large wave rolling over New York and the now 'just is' hole in the ground. That's my other hobby horse - Google was ahead of me again...
If people think the World Trade Center destruction was bad, wait until there's a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean of a comet. Look at the surface of the moon. That's how you know it's going to happen. No, it's not every million years. It's every thousand years. Tunguska was a little one. 'Every thousand years' can mean next week. And the week after that.
Before everyone gets too carried away with a dozen nasty guys with pocket knives who have a penchant for drinking booze and fondling females in strip joints although they claim to be Jihad Moslems, let's not be like the two seals fighting on the beach at the edge of the water. One thought he'd beaten the other because it started running, but the running was because a killer whale [Orca to the politically correct wackoes who protect sharks which has lead directly to children being eaten] swam up and grabbed the 'winner'.
Sure, we don't want alcohol-drinking, female-fondling Islamic Jihadists with pocket knives crashing planes into buildings. Lock the cockpit door! Simple really. Meanwhile let's keep our eye on the killer whale surging towards us right now! Which is, I think, a mindless comet.
But some would say, such as Ted Kaczynski, Bill Joy, Stephen Hawking that IT is even bigger and is now among us. We are looking into the semi-reflective mirror and IT is looking back. The light on IT's side of the mirror [note the correct apostrophe] is getting brighter. I suspect it will be brighter than the total from our side.
We created IT and our image is gradually being subsumed into a new image.
Metaphysical certitude is like being a dumb comet.
Metaphysical certitude is having a Globalstar or telecommunications mindset with a semi-reflective two way mirror with customers on the other side but they don't have a light control - all you see is yourself, stolid and fixed in your own reflection.
Metaphysical certitude is "nuking the Moslems" back to the stone age.
Metaphysical certitude is looking into cyberspace and seeing only electronic gizzards instead of IT
Metaphysical certitude is seeing only your own light.
Metaphysical certitude is common, including in this SI stream.
Well, that's the short explanation anyway. Maybe GG meant something else. If he did, well, language moves in meaning; a paradigm shift! As we all now know, Paradigm Shift Happens.
Mqurice |
