(0501) You’ll have noticed, sharp-eyed reader, that DAD opened at 0426, there was a pause and this opened at 0501. What’s time anyway in the context of this opening post? Cup of coffee and teacake at the ready.
Past, present and future
1. Awakening this morning, it crossed my mind from the flood of X posts concerning the Don Lemon attack on the Minnesota Church yesterday that people are at sixes and sevens … widespread confusion, false prophets everywhere but also good people, ignorant of so much, and yet self-assured that they’re unerringly correct on all aspects of past, present and future, esp. for this construction called the West.
2. That last lot include us. In taking a random sermon or lecture by Pastor Arnold Murray, now deceased, just the first ten minutes, say … now extrapolate that to include his entire adult life studying the entire bible, both parts, not just the NT … a man who can instantly refer to Ephesians, cut back to Ezekiel to the exact verses in each case, throw in Isaiah, jump to Revelation, back to Daniel … that is an amazingly well read man … of the bible.
3. Gaze over at a friend of mine if I might be so bold … unread in those things beyond what most of us know … maybe the cherrypicked 2% of the entire combined scriptures but learn’ed in Spinoza, the classical philosophers, the Kants, Hegels etc., with a somewhat bemused eye, perhaps, looking at the previous paragraph.
4. Now gaze at another friend, steeped in the ways of the opening bracket in coding, the including of all contingencies the programme needs to include, concluding with the reverse code in exactly the correct sequence … just think of that mindset, then look back at the previous two paragraphs.
5. I myself, a dabbler in the many arts, a generalist of some knowledge of each, not a lot, but with a scholastic background, not unlike Sherlock Holmes and a rejection of the “camps” mode of learning, the adversarial, parliamentary or legal mode of learning, of gaining knowledge … in favour of laying what we have on the table in a big room … but overawed by the vast range of knowledge required to see the overview with as little a priori prejudice as is possible in one mortal man.
6. Gaze over at Hywel Bennett in The Consultant, 1983, peer of the chap in Para 4, but with an added character flaw … greed. As one reviewer put it: “If you had ‘any’ knowledge at all about a system, and the process used by a firm (and ‘physical’ access to boot) the opportunity to manipulate the system for profit was not difficult.” Precisely as Para 2 man pointed out from the vastness of his reading of past, present and future.
7. Which comes out in 2001: A Space Odyssey. As Para 4 man points out about AI (actually machine learning, only ever as good as its input), therefore limited by someone else’s shaping of reality, it’s further limited by many traits in the Fauci or Mengele, the conscienceless scientist, quite able to torture beagles to death, just to observe what happens. Do you entrust your fate to Para 2 man or this Para 7 man or to Hal 9000 itself, to its tender mercies?
8. There was an interesting argument that Hal’s flaw was that it had within it two contradictory prime directives … one seeing the human, Azimov like, as sacrosanct, as opposed to the secret prime directive concerning Jupiter and the monolith and to hell with any humans.
9. Maybe “to hell” is too loaded. It presupposes (see Para 2 man again) that the antiChrist of the end days is no man at all, that there is no rapture, that the Kingdom continues on a cleaned and scoured earth, renovated. At the 6th trump comes the antiChrist and the entourage of false prophets, inc. the plague of locusts; and then at the 7th trump comes the Messiah.
10. Then comes the notion from Para 5 man which he put in his long book, (possibly 3:21:III onwards might work), begun in Russia but concluded in Albion, in which time was seen, not as linear, except on this earth … rather, it was a coming together of the required circumstances, all the required elements, in order for things to happen, for an event to happen. Predestination and free will are both possible in that model … such things appear in the latter chapters of the book.
Let’s leave this post openended. Am I, personally, more for one or the other Para man? Well certainly more for the learned Para 2 man than Para 5 and 10.
……
Just a note for any who do venture to read the latter chapters of the long book. To play fair, the last chapter and a bit won’t mean much if you haven’t read the rest of the book … it keeps revisiting those places and you’d need to know the characters.
What does make at least some sense, cold, is to start at 3:21:III and then stop, maybe, near the end of 3:22, the part which reads:
“The first and most logical place was the Lodge and thus they were now on what had once been the front porch. Though they’d lost their sensory apparatus, they knew the air would be acrid and yet, all sorts of mites still infested the air, eating tree bark and gnawing at anything gnawable.
Down the street was what looked like sewage and blood, ankle deep.
It was a crime against nature what had happened here.”
Charming, eh? Just trying to make the passage readable, cold, for curious cats. Oh and yes, I included this excerpt because it does relate, imho, to our current situation on Jan 20, 2025.
Maybe.
