Please pardon our dust
I’m currently moving between servers and working on a new theme that better fits my personal brand, so the default wordpress theme is up.
I’m currently moving between servers and working on a new theme that better fits my personal brand, so the default wordpress theme is up.
To all and sundry, I’m in the process of moving my blog over to www.jonathancamara.com. I may try to keep both blogs in sync or I might leave this one to roll with the tumbleweeds. I’m not completely sure.
Writing is a social activity, and for a Catholic it should be an act of charity.
Last month, I read the printed issue of WIRED on the Future Of Design, and for some reason, I felt used, alienated, and just about ready to throw my computer and all my chic electronic devices out the window. Why? because I felt I was being limited and controlled through them. The moment I turned on an electronic device and opened an app, I was being manipulated by it to click this button or type that text or swipe some direction on the screen. I did have a goal in mind, but that goal was being modified and changed by the device I was using. Now I could put these modifications down to the limitations of the hardware and software I had available to me, but that wasn’t the whole story, at least, not according to the articles in WIRED. Some of these limitations were set intentionally by designers in order to ensure that their users would have the “best experience” in using their products. WIRED noted this and proposed a future for design in an increasingly connected world.
I went to a Catholic Mass several months ago that was celebrated beautifully. The priest sang the extraordinary form of the Mass, the servers all knew their duties, the congregation diligently participated. But it was during the homily that a false chord jarred the entire symphony of smells, actions, and sounds. I heard not the harmony of solid Catholic doctrine but a weak sycophantic Gnosticism masked with Catholic language.
In the previous week, I had studied Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, in which he lists the different characteristics of gnosticism. These characteristics nearly matched with the description of gnosticism given in Cardinal Ratzinger’s homilies on creation in In the Beginning. Gnostic thought creates an “Us versus Them” mentality, attacks love as unstable, does not believe in conversion of heart, attacks legitimate authority figures who do not agree with gnostic philosophy, and pushes its members to create or build some kind of salvation which is attainable here on earth.
I was working on my Linux machine and thinking about the required insurance mandated in Obamacare when it hit me. Why don’t large companies split themselves up into smaller companies of less than 50 people in order to avoid having to pay insurance for their employees? Now this may be practically impossible but humor me for this article.
In Unix-based operating systems, the real power is found on the command line, where you chain together small programs in order to accomplish complex tasks. It looks something like this:
The development and use of technology should be founded upon a philosophy which not only agrees with the findings of science and known facts about man, but also helps to explain them. The Gnostic philosophy that underlies the technocratic goals for technological advancement sees man as a mere pattern of information, destined in the near future to build a machine that will surpass the human pattern, allowing the next step in the chain of evolution to occur. This philosophy fails because it ignores any attempt to explain man’s origin, rejects love, the mystery of suffering, and substitutionary redemption, and focuses on controlling life and the world through knowledge. Love appears too insecure a foundation because it is not absolutely certain, and makes the person absolutely dependent. To the Gnostic technocrat, this dependence is burdensome, and only by attempting to achieve god-like power and skill to create a new world can “salvation” be attained. On the other hand, the Christian philosophy sees man as being created by God in His own image and likeness. This philosophy succeeds because it not only gives a description of the origin of man, but also allows for the very rational scientific progress upon which the technocrats attempt to base their philosophy. Man, because he is created, is dependent, but this dependence takes the form of love that essentially says, “I want you to be.” This kind of love transforms dependence into freedom. The attempt to remove man’s inherent dependence rejects the love that brought him into existence and the freedom which that love gives him. The fact of creation also gives man the end of achieve union with his Creator, which means that he will become God-like through the love of God. Technology, therefore,would be better developed and used if it helped man achieve his final end as stated by the Christian philosophy.
I just updated the theme of my site to be more readable. The old theme hurt the eyes a little too much. Let me know what you think!
In the final argument of Joseph Ratzinger from the last post, many people might start claiming that technology is evil. The fact that technology seems to lead to a breakdown in man’s moral nature and a push toward totalitarian control often leads some people to the conclusion that technology should be either rejected or treated as a necessary evil. This rejection is present in certain segments of the environmentalist movement and is often seen in the push for organic foods. This rejection and resentment of technology, however, eventually becomes a resentment against humans and especially human freedom since that freedom allowed the development of technology. This resentment often leads to the idea that man is diseased by his mind and its freedom. But the view of man as presented earlier by Joseph Ratzinger, sees this rejection of man’s reason as another way of denying man’s nature. Technology, as it is not man’s salvation nor man’s bane, and yet can be used for either, must be a mere tool which man uses. This means that technology does not form it’s own philosophy, but rather it is philosophy that determines the development and use of technology.
Thus far in this series of blog posts, I have been pulling paragraphs directly from my more academic and probably boring Bachelor’s thesis. Reading over them again has been a little painful, so I’ve decided to rewrite the long boring argument between Kurzweil’s and Ratzinger’s viewpoints into a hopefully more interesting - though fictional - conversation(Note: I do not know the writing or conversational styles of either Kurzweil or Ratzinger, this is merely a vehicle to give each side’s argument.) Ratzinger: It appears, Mr. Kurzweil, that your argument for the close relationship between humanity and technology rests on the idea that an organism is the same as a machine.