essays and ideas from Eliza Sarobhasa
via The Diamond Age – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of education, social class, ethnicity, and the nature of artificial intelligence.
via Can someone explain the ending of Serial Experiments Lain to me?*spoilers*.
The entire world of “Serial Experiments Lain” is a computer simulation. Everybody in the series is a more or less sophisticated AI. Thus can hacking computers directly affect the world, thus can kids playing computer games accidentally kill people in the “real world”. It’s all computer data. All you need is the “protocol 7” that translates your computer data to reality, which is possible because you’re already inside a computer.
The whole world of Lain oozes electronic weirdness anyway. There are the steadily humming telephone wires, the unreal, moving shadows, the organic-looking high-tech – quite a lot of clues hinting at an artificial world. It’s almost a surprise that of all the people, only Iwakura Lain eventually understands what it all means.
And what does it mean? The entire message of Lain is that, as soon as you understand, truly understand that you’re nothing but data inside a computer simulation, you are able to transcend your own existence and become much more than a mere part of the simulation you used to live in. You actually gain the ability to directly rewrite the simulation – you cannot leave the computer you live in, obviously, but you are no longer restricted to what your original programming made of you. You become a god of the computer world you live in.
via Serial Experiments Lain – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Serial Experiments Lain describes “the Wired” as the sum of human communication networks, created with the telegraph and telephone services, and expanded with the Internet and subsequent networks.
The anime assumes that the Wired could be linked to a system that enables unconscious communication between people and machines without physical interface. The storyline introduces such a system with the Schumann resonance, a property of the Earth’s magnetic field that theoretically allows for unhindered long distance communications.
If such a link was created, the network would become equivalent to Reality as the general consensus of all perceptions and knowledge. The thin line between what is real and what is possible would then begin to blur.
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Towards an Astrophysical Cyberspace: The Evolution of User Interfaces
“The design of cyberspace is, after all, the design of another life-world, a parallel universe, offering the intoxicating prospect of actually fulfulling – with a technology very nearly achieved – a dream thousands of years old: the dream of transcending the physical world, fully alive, at will, to dwell in some Beyond – to be empowered or enlightened there, alone or with others, and to return” – Michael Benedikt, 1991 (Bolter/Grusin 1999:182).
General semantics is a program begun in the 1920s that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial program launches under the trial names “human engineering” and “humanology,”[1] Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski[2] (1879–1950) fully launched the program as “general semantics” in 1933 with the publication of Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.
General semantics is not generalized semantics. Misunderstandings traceable to the program’s name have greatly complicated the program’s history and development
General semantics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Dianetics is a set of pseudoscientific ideas and practices regarding the metaphysical relationship between the mind and body that was invented by L. Ron Hubbard and is practiced by followers of Scientology. Hubbard coined Dianetics from the Greek stems dia, meaning through, and nous, meaning mind.
Dianetics explores the existence of a mind with three parts: the conscious “analytical mind,” the subconscious “reactive mind“, and the somatic mind.[1] The goal of Dianetics is to remove the “reactive mind”, which Scientologists believe prevents people from becoming more ethical, more aware, happier and saner. The Dianetics procedure to achieve this is called “auditing”.[2] Auditing is a process whereby a series of questions are asked by the Scientology auditor, in an attempt to rid the auditee of the painful experiences of the past which scientologists believe to be the cause of the “reactive mind”.
Dianetics grew out of Hubbard’s personal experiences and experiments and has been described as a mix of “Western technology and Oriental philosophy”.[3] Hubbard stated that Dianetics “forms a bridge between” cybernetics and General Semantics, a set of ideas about education originated by Alfred Korzybski that was receiving much attention in the science fiction world in the 1940s
After establishing a career as a writer, becoming best known for his science fiction and fantasy stories, he developed a self-help system called Dianetics which was first published in May 1950. He subsequently developed his ideas into a wide-ranging set of doctrines and rituals as part of a new religious movement that he called Scientology.
L. Ron Hubbard – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.