Friday 2 December 2011

Deep thought Friday

Here we go then. If you'd like some background reading, try this thesis and this recent blog post.

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.

But is a birth an imperative to grow or succeed when presumably we had no say in whether or not it happened? And if many of us play games we played in our youth, would we now aspire to grow old given the choice? Should life on Earth?
_

5 comments:

Paul´s Bods said...

Imperative suggests necessity...there is none. We all play the games we played in our youth..only with different rules/perameters and rewards. Some take it very seriously and become "sucessfull"..others still "play" about and never attain any sucess.
I don´t get any older than this moment..I just "feel" older..in a comparison to what I could prviously do.
Cheers
paul

The Happy Whisk said...

A deep thought Friday, indeed. Interesting.

And thanks for the nice words on my blog.

Game Master Rob Adams said...

When the game playing is oh so joyous as to make our adult selves remember our child-hood then it is more therapy for a developed mind rather than an exercise in child-play. Still the two are not mutually exclusive now are they?

Porky said...

@ Paul's Bods - I know we've talked about this approach before, but it's fresh every time. I still think you should write it up as a whole - that would really be something worth reading. If the exploration of a mental landscape was possible in a fictional or gaming sense - as if in a kind of psychopunk, meaning a cyberpunk of the mind rather than anything psychopathic - that worldview would make a very attractive setting. I mean that far more positively than it might sound - it really is a highly rational view, very much rooted in hard fact, in the sense that the things we can each presumably be most sure of are sensations as we experience them. Looking at how the thinking applies to our development as a spacefaring species, I agree there's no imperative beyond that implied in the metaphor in the quote, a subjective analogy. I take your point to be that what will be already is, in the sense of a world line, and we have no more than a detached observation of the fact. If so, I'd argue the world line does still depend on our actions, and runs out based on what we do.

@ The Happy Whisk - It was hard not to say them - thanks for all of yours.

@ ArmChairGeneral - I do think both are possible, and that to the extent it's possible it may be better not to mature if it means a loss of joy or the opportunity for further development and self-discovery through play. Hopefully we're showing in what we do that the two can go together. But does the fact we could maintain that balance mean we should? What if we don't manage it, or can only do so at a cost, maybe even one we don't have the ability to measure yet, or prefer not to? Growing up isn't necessarily painless, for us or the people and things around us. What could our growth mean for beings and values outside of us when we scale it up to development as a spacefaring species? How far are we justified in aiming for that?

Paul´s Bods said...

Hmmmm...write ir´t up as a whole? It could get a bit confusing....not only for the reader but for me writing it. my ideas on time and space are probably not all that original anyway...just my way of looking at them, after all, everyones doors of perception are infinately different ;-D
Cheers
paul