User:Ssstephen/Reading/The Shape of Things

The Non-Thing 1 (p85)

immaterial information

Again with the separating content from form, when will you learn? When will you learn that your thoughts have consequences? Lady Anne Conway said (The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.):

Creatures were in one sence from Eternity, and in another sence not from Eternity

For me it can be useful to think of information on its own but to fundamentally separate it from matter makes no sense imo. I am therefore I think, Plato existed and then thought about things.

This throw-away material, all those lighters, razors, pens, plastic bottles, are not true things; one cannot hold on to them... All things will lose their value, and all values will be transformed into information.

This dismissal of the physical world seems really dangerous to me, and not very realistic. Again makes me think of Anne Conway and the pain she physically felt:

Moreover, Why is the Spirit or Soul so passible in corporal Pains? For if when it is united with the Body, it hath nothing of Corporeity, or a bodily Nature, Why is it grieved or wounded when the Body is wounded, which is quite of a different Nature? For seeing the Soul can so easily penetrate the Body, How can any Corporeal Thing hurt it?

If you keep throwing away all your lighters, razors, pens, plastic bottles, someone is going to get hurt.

The only things left of his hands are the tips of his fingers, which he uses to tap on keys so as to play with symbols. The new human being is not a man of action anymore but a player: homo ludens as opposed to homo faber. Life is no longer a drama for him but a performance.

What is the difference between a drama and a performance? And if you only have fingers what connects them to your wrists?

The Non-Thing 2 (p90)

The liberation of software from hardware

Maybe I need to read Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game to understand this, but from my point of view just because you can move software from one piece of hardware to another doesn't mean that software can exist outside of hardware. If the future is full of non-things, what are the humans pressing with their fingertips?

This future everyone keeps talking about sounds incredible.

Carpets (p95)

The cave, the womb of the mountains, is our dwelling.

What troglodytes still believe this nonsense, why is it still in the stories. Linnaeus and his damn categories again. My ancestors lived in tents and sometimes I go to the beach and don't write down anything I did there.

Nothing human is natural. That which is natural about us is inhuman.

Ugg

Knotting itself is not a fluid process but a jerky one

Snap, I thought threads were vector. Just because something has jerk doesnt mean it is discontinuous. The finished carpet has the appearance of edges and boundaries but the knots (and the hidden warp) can still be followed back along their paths. Particles are just a simplified way of explaining the vibration and paths of strings.