What we long for says a lot about who we are. Many apparently are longing to be “child-free.”
I actually can’t remember when “child-free” would have marked the speaker as morally defective, though I almost published that I could. I certainly can read about when childlessness for a married couple was a great sorrow and even was thought a curse.
That intentionally “child-free” should be a encomium, and should stir a envy among normal people (I use that term advisedly), is a mark of how degenerate we have become, and a vignette of why same-sex marriage is now plausible to the point that it’s almost axiomatic.
In my view of marriage, “intentionally child-free” equals “freeloader on sundry government benefits.”
What we long for says a lot about who we are.
Ray Kurzweil apparently wants to live forever, but not as a brain in a jar. He wants, and is ever-so-confident that he (or we) shall have, a brain transferred to capacious silicon chips controlling an army of nanotech bots that form his new body.
Give him credit for this: unlike many, he recognizes that a human without a body is subhuman. But he considers a human with a silicon brain more capacious than our meat brains, and with a body manufactured of nanobots, transhuman, as the coinage has it.
There doubtless are many links out there on the topic, but an interview with Gilbert Meilander on the priceless Mars Hill Audio Journal is what put me in mind of it.
What we long for says a lot about who we are.
Google, which has made Ray Kurweil its Director of Engineering, may want to be N.I.C.E.
But despite his prognostications about the transhumanist future, the story of Ray Kurzweil is not the uncomplicated story of a man unhinged by his own genius. His “later life” is full of useful inventions for the blind and such.
My imagination tells me that he, and Google, are headed somewhere I decidedly don’t long for. But I can hope that the utopian wonkery is an avocation, and that his daily work will produce more good goods.
Life makes sense backwards sometimes, but we must live it forward.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
