Forwarding a post from listee Peter Ridyard, who's having trouble with
JISCMAIL--Candice
Wow, the concept really blows you away. Though not a philosopher I
recently read a piece about Martin Heiddeger's Sein und Zeit (Being and
Time). One of the main thrusts of his work (at least the one most relevant
to this issue) postulates that we have an illusion of self as a consequence
of constantly anticipating the future or future events. The whole of
thinking and being is predicated (if that's the right word, you can tell I'm
not in that discipline) on anticipation.
To our detriment notions of individuality and self (as opposed to communal
identity) command centre stage in Western culture yet I find the
implications of non-self a bit scary. That is, if it is at all true. I've
still to be remotely convinced. Though intuitively the concepts are
attractive.
Ironically from my perspective future of the poetic has never looked so
bright.
Kind regards,
Peter Ridyard
Perth, Western Australia
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: AI's Elegies
> Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 11:11:32 +0100
>
> I've been reading an intriguing little book by David Gelernter, 'The Muse
> in the Machine', (1994) ISBN 1-85702-083-9, which argues against predominant
> conceptions of the mind as machine, and of vistas of cybernetic progress
> towards Mr Spock-like Artificial Intelligence as a desirable cultural goal,
> while speaking up for, of all things in such a technocratic m! oney-backed
> context, the psychological validity of poetry. He takes an interesting, if
> critical, line of departure from Julian Jaynes's remarkable 'The Origins of
> Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind', and too looks at,
> and takes issue with, critiques of the notion of Self as being, although
> objectively valid, in the sense that the unified 'I' we experience is a
> conjuring trick, experientially false. I guess one could say he views them
> as modes of alienation.
>
> The book too has implications for the cultural reception of poetry, for the
> academic predominance of criticism over creativity, altho' sadly it is
> pessimistic, he sees poetry as an art that is dying along with the cognitive
> habits that create it., just as modalities of spirituality or prophecy are
> dying too, at least in 'educated' Western-style cultures. I was interested
> too in his linkage of! the metaphorical fecundity of the speech of infants
> with the creative facility.
>
> Best
> David Bircumshaw
> Leicester, England
> A Chide's Alphabet
> www.chidesplay.8m.com
> Painting Without Numbers
> www.paintstuff.20m.com/default.htm
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/default.htm
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