"OutreZoneD" wrote in message
...


Perhaps Dr. Hawking's entombed brain has been
imprisoned for so long in an emaciated shell
of a hybrid cybernetic infrastructure that
his lonely, cosmologically-mathematical
myopic mindgland can no longer remember
a vital state of being prior to hyper-
vulnerability to the ravages of
time/space symbolized as a highly
sophisticated form of predation?


He's suffers from the same condition that plagues
most of the scientific community.
Which is excessive Faith!

The faith that somehow, someday or someone
will find a way to travel faster than light.
Which is every bit the pipe-dream as
having dinner with God.




Or, maybe, like Dr. John Lilly's
isolation tanks in conjunction
with experiments with LSD and
Ketamine, his mind has
intercepted vast arrays
of extraterrestrial
cognitive probes
without form
eliciting
a great
fear?

~o0-O-0o~


You've argued yourself narrow!

Hawking fails to take into account a simple fact
of life. Which is that life is not a fluke, it evolves
just as soon as possible, as soon as it can.
One would think that 'fact' means we should be
visited, but what it really means is that we are
probably among the first wave of intelligent life
all coevolving around similar time frames.
So 'they' are probably out there, but probably
waiting for ...us to visit them.

Combine the coevolutionary character of life with
the distances, and it just isn't reasonable to expect
any contact at all, even though the universe
is, and will be, teeming with life. There is no
contradiction.

Recent discoveries in dark matter and dark energy
support this view. As dark energy was almost
nonexistent before life on Earth evolved.
Dark matter emerged just as the universe became
dominated by matter, about the same time as our
solar system and life formed.

So the question should be asked, what's the relationship
between dark energy and biological evolution?

Both are emergent system properties.

Like a market force, for instance.
The force or tendency exists, we know it does
yet it's ethereal in nature, and has no tangible
existence.

Emergent system properties guide the whole
towards increasing order, they are responsible
for all creation, yet cannot be seen, measured
or touched.

Hmm, what's another word for something like that?




s

















We, Borg

Speculations on Hive Minds as a Posthuman State

http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Pos...ty/WeBorg.html

by Anders Sandberg

The designers of our species set out to produce
a being that might be capable of an order of
mentality higher than their own. The only
possibility of doing so lay in planning a great
increase in brain organisation. But they knew
that the brain of an individual human being
could not safely be allowed to exceed a certain
weight. They therefore sought to produce the
new order of mentality in a system of distinct
and specialised brains held in "telepathic"
unity by means of ethereal radiation. Material
brains were to be capable of becoming on some
occasions mere nodes in a system of radiation
which itself should then constitute the
physical basis of a single mind.
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men

Hive minds where the individual is subsumed into a
collective consciousness has been a recurring idea
in science fiction since Olaf Stapledon's influential
novels Last and First Men (1931) and Star Maker (1937),
although the concept in some sense had been suggested
by Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1651). They have often
in western science fiction been used as an allegory
for communism or the anonymity of industrial
civilisation, and have usually been portrayed in a
terrifying light (Nicholls 1982). The latest such
portrayal is the Borg in Star Trek: the Next Generation:
a race of bionically augmented humanoids linked together
into a collective mind, striving to assimilate every
other intelligent species into the Collective. [...]
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Pos...ty/WeBorg.html

~o0-O-0o~

[ See also: "SATBOT I:
Prototype of a Biomorphic Autonomous Spacecraft"
http://home.netcom.com/~mthorn/satbot00.htm
and... C y b r i d i z a t i o n
http://home.netcom.com/~mthorn/sectoid2.htm ]