The Robot That Lives Where We Think

The beginning forms of the internet resembled the mindless forms of early life from the amoeba on up the ladder of lower forms. The beginning internet was not much more than wired interconnections of simplistic (relatively speaking) early government computers. Then open protocols allowed a kind of spontaneous expansion up the internet ladder much like the progress  in the natural world of lower and still mindless forms of life to instinctual behavior guided by crude spinal  cords that eventually evolved to small undeveloped brains. The internet needed the massive concentration of mind-power from thousands of computer engineers and programmers before it reached the present stage. It has evolved to a vast system of open communication ripe for commercial exploitation (and hacking) once  provided with a concentrated, limited mental focus by organizations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Animals evolved up to the stage of limited brain power and that is about the mental status of the present internet. It can only falsify real thinking which can  be real only if it starts individually in one individual brain and expands with complete freedom. Google patches together for us our ideas if they can be diminished to fit the focus of its platform’s technology. And of course Facebook nicely arranges for us with its platform pale feelings we try to express as genuine although our real feelings live only in a space that Facebook knows nothing about called the heart. The internet is a robot. It is not alive. Its power is that it succeeds in acting like it is alive. 5000 years ago animals named humans started using their minds creatively. They had nothing much around them to stimulate complex thinking so they began using their minds together with imagination. It took 5000 years to develop to the complexity of our present technological society which has eliminated imagination as a companion to our well developed brains. The challenge now for the internet is to take the next evolutionary step from lower-level sense thought to truly complex thinking, to  graft onto itself something  resembling  the wide range of our minds which we have drastically limited by submitting them exclusively to reason and logic. The goal is to make the robot who commands so strongly our attention able to think with something like our unique capacity for free individual thought. “Man does not think or is not able to think where he lives and so he is compelled to live where he thinks,” wrote the Russian philosopher Leo Shestov. The internet is discovering new revolutionary free protocols so that it soon may be able also to live its robot-style invented life where we think along with us who become more and more stupefied the more we live where we think.

Daniel McNeill

Read examples of the free individual thought that wants to change the United States of America to the United States of the World. At: usoftheworld.com  

Woody Allen, Millenials and the Same Vapid Culture

Woody Allen must answer those who now accuse him of immoral behavior. His generation grew up in a kind of social and political moral vacuum. In  Woody’s youth in the 1950s, we had three clear and loud moral commands: hate Communists, shut up about everything else and use the educational and economic system to make money. James Jones wrote a novel published then, “From Here to Eternity”, in which the hero declares you’re nothing if you don’t go your own way. We either went the way of a morally inept and vapid society or our own way. Woody refused the public-school educational system which taught him nothing culturally except drivel and refused the dead-beat culture taught in colleges which was mainly European culture, by then a dead culture strangled to death by the Second World War. What to do? Something, anything other than what we were supposed to do. Woody almost became a criminel and saved himself by becoming a comic. Then he succeeded in enlivening the tedious and dumb conformity of the period in movies with the interesting and unusual personalities of actors who floated before us for a few minutes as though real persons even though clearly they belonged to no society of any moral authenticity.  The insipidity of our American culture will tirelessly turn all of us into work-a-day slobs unless we find the courage to express ourselves with real freedom and real words free of media blather and oversimplified talking points. We need also some brave and free political acts that may end our moral vapidity by actually creating goodness. But nothing has changed much since Woody’s time. We have terrorists instead of communists and the educational paths to success are still dead-beat with most humanistic studies gone. The millenials have the same vapid culture. Their technological bells and whistles don’t make it as lively as they think. But there is one difference. They don’t feel any necessity to go their own way. That’s big. The vapidity is still real. They accept it wholeheartedly and intend to enjoy it as best they can until their generation or a new one decides it is immoral to live without the freedom and creativity of the bold.

Daniel McNeill

Read 42 arguments for changing the United States of America to the United States of the World at: usoftheworld.com  

World Unity 27

After the Civil War, Americans wanted as little to do with Washington as possible and most considered it a grave moral weakness, almost a sinful condition, if anyone expected anything from it. Protestants in the south lived for years under martial law and some Protestants in the north had sent their sons to their death in Washington’s armies. Both groups knew that nothing could arise in Washington except more power for Washington.The only power they had was the power they found in themselves. Native Americans were soon surrounded by vast numbers of immigrants speaking incomprehensible languages. Over 20 million Europeans came to America between 1870 and 1910. They came from nation-states or empires and understood little about the new radical political system in America. Most native Americans understood that they had never lived in a nation and had no reason to believe they lived in one simply because Washington had gained more power by a civil war.  A common saying passed among immigrants that was equivalent to not living in a nation, “America is a free country”. As America raced on through the most extraordinary industrial revolution ever witnessed on the planet, Americans were forced to take upon themselves a new identity that gave them power and purpose in the new America. Individuals discovered “the work ethic”.The new religion that thrived in the late nineteenth-century industrial jungles preached that poverty was shameful and sinful and riches blessed. People struggled to improve their lot by making money. They ascended if they could the stairs to the divine temples where the rich lived in bliss. On their way up, like the rich, they did not look down at the millions of Americans that the savage industrial development had defeated and held prisoners in the hell fire of poverty.  In the economic arena no one was united with anyone and this lack of unity made individual values the only solid weapons against defeat and produced ironically an overall unity as everyone searched for the American dream on their own. Extreme individualism fit well with a government at the top that was like an aloof imperial government that never left its lofty perch to aid the common man.  Rich men conveyed money to key officials in Washington to keep federal-government power out of the hands of the average American and the immigrants laboring in the dog-eat-dog industrial hell. Many Americans never again took anything Washington politicians said seriously. Historians went to work to discover in American history the “new nation” that Lincoln had spoken of in his Gettysburg Address. Americans kept silent and lived by the work ethic.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall