And Yet... And Yet...

A hammer is a tool and by itself it can build nothing.

A song written on a page, unsung, it just a piece of paper.

Sand on the beach is just grains of sand and if there are millions and billions grains of sand, they still are just grains of sand and by comparison could easily be bits of data stored in a computer.

Things and data have no value by themselves. It is the human invention and acknowledgment of things and how we humans interact with things and other humans, that bring meaning to life, to each other and to ourselves. It has always been and always will be about human relationships.

Lawrence Weschler has way too much encyclopedic knowledge. How can he deal with the real world of mental midgets? Doesn't he get fed up with knowing so much and having such a ridiculously ginormous vocabulary? At some point he's got to realize that life ends and all his extraneous knowledge will be wiped out when he's deceased. Just eat an ice cream cone and enjoy it. Stop overanalyzing everything. People think you're a freak.

Allenehrl,

Someone can just keep on jumping into clones, transfer their consciousness to another body, and live forever. How about transferring your mind into a robot? Maybe a Cylon or Transformer? By the time I'm in my old age, I'm sure we'll have some kind of crazy tech out there to do something like this.

Why do I want to live a very long time, maybe thousands of years? I'd like to explore the universe....and right now we don't have Star Trek type spaceships to do that, so I must live long enough for that technology to come. :P

The worst thing I see about information is there's too much and too little time to sort through it all and gather what I want (latest physic's experiments, aerospace technology...etc). Now cloud based is possibly just an easier step to controlling information and filtering it out there in cyberspace. Yet I find that if the people are knowledgeable enough about CISCO and Cloud-based programming in the future, we the people may have control of those e-books that hopefully won't get destroyed and forgotten followed by the paper-back copies in the physical world like Fahrenheit 451.

Cookiees453, I would rather have science discover youth-longevity and fill my veins with nano-swarms to keep me young and healthy, rather than transferring my mind into a clunky cast of metal. I see more of society in the far future (2045) merging with our technology than jumping into clones which may have a glitch and be considered unethical. If you were to inject bio-mechanical swarms, that were programmed to continuously maintain your DNA, it would technically be merging with technology discreetly.

Put that in me and send me to Sirius in a space pod that has a quantum computer so I can instantly transfer my consciousness back to earth into an android. That way every time I go to sleep on earth I wake up back in space. Truthfully if you all haven't noticed, I don't want to be another statistic and be buried into the ground like all of us have for millions of years. I want to fulfill my evolutionary destiny and take to the stars. Now that would be that ultimate happy ending for any book we should teach our future children.

" Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Albert Einstein

Weschler, as a writer, posits a binary world composed of books ... and everything else. There are innumerable acts of creation beyond written books. Most of these will never see the light of day, let alone audiences (or interactive co-creators or whatever) if not for distribution via the Web and the Net. (The cloud is just a temporary phenomena while data memory catches up. Its drawbacks are already obvious including an end to data security absolutely.) Books may or may not survive in their current form as a particular method for sharing information. Sharing creative acts is not dependent on the outcome. There are plenty of creative forms (including many that are not considered "art," but that are artistic ranging from doodles to spreadsheets to wings of planes to landscaping on a massive scale, and millions more) that will continue to tell stories and permit those who experience them to interiorize the experience or share it.

More realistic problems include ubiquity -- data that is inescapable, therefore altering our perception as we have it; and plentitude, just too much of the stuff and no way to know what's good or bad or worth even worrying about in this fashion or susceptible to change even if we knew what needed changing. It's not the Devil you know but the one you don't who will get you with his pitchfork every time. The challenge of our times is to anticipate the future and be prepared for it, a contradiction since the future is unknowable. Where data will take us, and get us, is still to be determined, no matter how many supercomputer cycles you have to spend on the issue.

You lived a thousand of years. You amassed great things all around you and knowledge. Then in the dark of the night, a face you cannot see, sneaks into your bedroom window and hides in the shadows of your bedroom. His deep dark eyes in the darkness glow with slits watching, waiting. A slight little glair comes from the blade in his hand.

You finish you dinner and head to you bedroom. You ready yourself for bed, lie down and turn off the light.

In the quiet of the night, a slice is made. Your thousand year life now enters a eternal sleep of forever.

Why did this happen? No one knows why death comes, but it comes for all eventually.

Now, what happens to all your acquired knowledge, what value of it exists? What of tomorrow? Your essence is gone, you knowledge is gone; you possess no more actions of life.

Do you want to be immortal I ask you? Then it will be your life choices and actions and how you affect others that lives on and continues! As you live life, it will be your actions in how you are judge for you time spent on earth. And it will be you actions that will echo through out time!

@Grunt, wouldn't 1000 years of knowledge have given you the wisdom to lock and bar your windows?

What if I were to say to you that in the future, banks stored your body, that way there is an assurance you're safe, while your android body you control walks the streets and is expendable.

However the flaw now is the ability to break into the bank and just simply explode every body that thought they were safe in a "stasis-like" state. In reality, immortality is a hurdle to achieve, and the only way to minimize death is isolation from entropy, which is an impossible feet. But imagine all the years of life you could have had. The galaxies you had visited, the alien life you made friends with.

So I ask, imagine an alien meets king Solomon, just makes friends with him and leaves. Nearly 4,000 years go by before the alien returns to find his friends world has changed, but the alien had also left they're body and found a way to become energy like a 2001: A Space Odyssey David Bowman. So what was the real death? Friendship? The aliens body left behind? A mortal who was not gifted with technology and responsibility as his other? Or is it the vale of time evolving?

I'm just throwing out there that in hopefully 10,000 years time, if I could live that long, I would hope to never stay in a physical form, I would like to transcend. Because how can a thief in the night kill an omnipotent being everywhere and nowhere?

" Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Albert Einstein

Starchild_1,
First dear, I have no desire to be ugly or gruesome. You not need to die soon or by a slice of knife. You may simply die by walking across the street to put a letter in your mail box and be run over by a chocolate milk truck. Well, if one must die, it may as well be smothered in chocolate.

We all die, eventually and I do believe you read that in my originally comment.
The point was what the value is after that.

Actions in life brings value ever lasting!

As I read on to your comments I feel you are gargling on chocolate and have pen in hand as you comment to me, in your dying words. Oh, I do hope you are not dying now. I do look forward to your commentary tomorrow. Enjoy the chocolate and sleep!

Night night!

@Cookiees453 I have ZERO doubt we will be able to transfer the contents of the mind to a computer or clone in the near future, but you never brought up conciseness.

I have near ABSOLUTE doubt they will ever be able to transfer that conciseness.

considering we still have about ZERO idea what it truly is.

Imagine you could transfer you mind to a clone. okay. so instead of transferring you mind, what about copying it.

so would you share 1 conciseness??? would you have two separate conciseness? if you say yes to the first one then they would be different concisenesses, yes?
well then they were different, then if you simply transferred you mind, it would still be a conciseness right? there for a different person, and your former conciseness would be dead.

many people including my self belive that conciseness is FAR more than the contents of our mind.
look at Carl Younge and his theroy of the collective un-conciseness. Something I find much truth behind. in my mind there is no doubt that all things are connected through collective un-conciseness. thought is energy and matter is energy. scientist have no idea if this connectin is part of another diemines hinted in string theroy, or a new branch of phycics we have not even begun to touch upon. I think it will be a VERY long way until we can pass our conciseness onto a new body or PC.

but I share you diseare and have little hope in it.
they will have longevity treatments long before clones. no reason why our brain can live in on in a robotic body. or a body that has had its aging reversed.

“The Web occasions a sort of frenzy of rebound, a swirling frottage with the many (albeit one that is almost solipsistically onanistic).”

Eh?