Like the chip-software in Gibson’s sprawl, from the micro-soft to the ROM cowboy to the Aleph, the endgame of computertool distribution is via single-use chunks of quasi-biological computronium
Artificial colorants make it easier to design visually hyperstimulating foods without having to compromise on flavor. What could the upside for the consumer be, to disrupt our evolved associations between appearance and flavor?
I regret never having written a single essay in my decade of being homeschooled; it wasn’t until the last year of my bachelor’s I could even begin to appreciate the benefit to the writer that composing an essay has. I find it sad that future cohorts of students will have even less of a chance to lay hold on that power.
Learn by imitation ; if you want to make DnB tracks, try and inevitably fail to recreate existing DnB that you admire. With time your failures-to-imitate will congeal into a novel and personal style.
Uh, too bad for them? What if I want a hot muscular body, but don’t want to spend the hundreds of hours running, lifting weights, planning and executing a healthy diet; and I certainly don’t want to use steroids?
I should rather have said, “we will solve it no sooner than …”, because certainly there are countless other ways society constrains desire to the detriment of the subject’s capacity to relate to others. I’m sure our musical culture would do well to cast off twelve-tone equal temperament, which trades a dimension of artistic expression for a certain fungibility; pitch classes have no particular identities because their internal relations a
have been flattened, every perfect fifth is as perfect as it will be, every major third sounds equally inflamed, and so on.
But as for matters of mental health; I assert that every man exhibits desires which we have decided fates him to be a homosexual. Any suppression of true desire (as opposed to that which society grafts upon us) introduces a schizm in the personality. Consequently, there is not a man alive who is spared from this issue; all men are divided against themselves, and so they are divided against each other and against really anyone they ought to be vulnerable with.
As an American, I would not call our system healthy from a practical sense; certainly not for society, if this past decade of mounting instability, distrust, and profiteering is any indication.
For one, a brain can’t do anything without irreversibly changing itself in the process; our reasoning is not a pure function.
For a person to truly understand something they will have a well-refined (as defined by usefulness and correctness), malleable internal model of a system that can be tested against reality, and they must be aware of the limits of the knowledge this model can provide.
Alone, our language-oriented mental circuits are a thin, faulty conduit to our mental capacities; we make sense of words as they relate to mutable mental models, and not simply in latent concept-space. These models can exist in dedicated but still mutable circuitry such as the cerebellum, or they can exist as webs of association between sense-objects (which can be of the physical senses or of concepts, sense-objects produced by conscious thought).
So if we are pattern-matching, it is not simply of words, or of their meanings in relation to the whole text, or even of their meanings relative to all language ever produced. We translate words into problems, and match problems to models, and then we evaluate these internal models to produce perhaps competing solutions, and then we are challenged with verbalizing these solutions. If we were only reasoning in latent-space, there would be no significant difficulty in this last task.
Many people hold worldviews which are ontologically incapable of co-existence with other viewpoints. By reducing discourse to intergroup sparring and affinity signaling, the intermingling of various such extremists only solidifies the status quo.
In the former case it is a list of performances characterized by including Anthony Hopkins; in the middle, it is a list of performances belonging to Hopkins. The latter reads incorrectly to me as an American but as a possessive nonetheless.