Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.
— Benedict Spinoza, Ethics
Month: October 2004
The Conspiracy of Self-importance
KRYTEN They always say the hardest part about leaving
Cyberspace is realising the whole universe does
not revolve around you.
CAT Sure doesn't! It revolves around me.
KOCHANSKI Absolutely.
CAT I'm serious! Look at the evidence.
LISTER What evidence?
CAT Take food. Until I bite into it, it has no taste.
Even when I know what I'm gonna say, it never
bores me!
LISTER You and you alone...
CAT And here's the clincher: all of the interesting
things that ever happenned to me, happenned when I
was in the room! Coincidence? Get outta here..!
— From Red Dwarf Series 7 Episode 4 (scene 24), Duct Soup (extended)
Verb The World
Because physics has found no continuums, no experimental solids, no things, no real matter, I had decided half a century ago to identify, mathematical behaviors of energy phenomena only as events. If there are no things, there are no nouns of material substance. The old semantics permitted common-sense acceptance of such a sentence as, “A man pounds the table,” wherein a noun verbs a noun or a subject verbs a predicate. I found it necessary to change this form to a complex of events identified as me, which must be identified as a verb. The complex verb me observed another complex of events identified again ignorantly as a “table.” I disciplined myself to communicate exclusively with verbs. There are no wheres and whats; only angle and frequency events described as whens.
— R Buckminster Fuller, 250.32 Synergy
kybernetikos 