Reality in the Information Age

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In today's age of Google searches what is intelligence?

What is reality? Something lost, something gained?

That it is what we identify with? A veil or a grid placed over or between the real thing and the observer.

If we identify with an image of something rather than the actual thing the image represents will we be able to obtain the same detail out of this image's character and resolution?

I Taste A Liquor Never Brewed
Poem by Emily Dickinson.

I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

When the landlord turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!

Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!

Comment:
We receive wisdom because we reach into the "spiritual" source of knowledge and we do not take the indirect roads to understanding.

Because we understand the thing that the object represents. The subject and we are not only exposed by the text and indirect information in the absence of the subject itself.

We learn in the digital era that information is lost each time it is copied or "reproduced".

So we are learning from copies of copies and the real mind that experienced the actual information is a sub reservoir of information that is not perceived on the surface. It is condensed and made linear and one dimensional.

Actual information is based on a complex reason set that is not evident in the over all proof.

For we are only seeing a slice of the whole process and event, that slice is only an image or copy of the subject's complete expressive capabilities.

I Never Saw A Moor
Poem by Emily Dickinson.

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

Comment:
Is the information highway actual information or is information itself the actual subject and the highway only an image of the real thing we call intelligence? Can life be understood by information? Man shall not live by information alone...

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As reality slowly becomes virtual one may wonder if reality was ever real at all...

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I think the heart of this discussion (that has not gotten off the ground yet) is that people are sense oriented. They have what they perceive as reality and what they perceive as virtual reality.

Yet we put on the blinders and we become immersed in a world that gives us new found freedoms but it also restricts certain senses. Like a bonsai tree that is forced to grow around a rock and there is the question, what is lost in miniaturization? Does the intellect grow stunted?

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Not bad rex. Not bad.

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The second Dickinson poem you quoted is most often entitled Chartless. Why you have put this drivel in Philosophy and Debate mystifies me, but i am not surprised.

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I like it. I think it's completely relevant.

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RR is trying to suggest, among a welter of meaningless maunderings, that "wisdom" can only be imbibed from from a "real" spiritual source, and then goes on to disdain "copies" from which we, apparently, get false versions of wisdom. RR's favorite source of "wisdom" is the bible. Does he assert that "god" speaks the verses to him, or does he in fact read a copy of the bible? The medium by which ideas are presented in a language--whether clay tablets, sheets of paper or agitated electrons on a CRT screen--cannot be reasonably said to have more or less value than any other method of accumulating a knowledge of the world and of mankind. I think most of his wandering claptrap is without meaning, and in those portions in which he has made a limping attempt to make a coherent statement, he fails because he is making distinctions without differences. Copies of documents made by hand are no more nor any less valuable than a download from the internet.

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I agree with both of you.

Thomas Paine Writes in "the age of reason" (if you don't feel like reading please read the last paragraph)

As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some observations on the word 'revelation.' Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/part1.html#2

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Well, Ese, you've just blown RR's thesis right out the water. Whether one reads a printed bible, or reads something on-line, it will not qualify as "revelation" in Paine's terms.

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You said it first. It reminded of what paine said.

Because of "Age of reason" nobody went to his funeral (or so I hear).

and he is a very big part of the inception of America ("Rights of Man")

a great and sad historic Irony.

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Reality in the Information Age

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