So I have been in a nihilistic fugue the last few days. This type of mood "weather" tends to make for good rabbit hole diving. Why this is would be another rabbit hole, but I suspect its because it overrides certain inhibitory gates. Much like alcohol.
Anyhoo.
Wall-E and the Terminator series are very different types of sci-fi. Wall-E is a cute little Pixar flick where future humans have left Earth for a while so this fleet of robots can clean up the planet while they're gone. For whatever reason, only one Wall-E robot seems to currently be viable. But it happily works every day making nice little garbage cubes.
In the Terminator series Skynet is a program that humans created to make their lives easier. But when it transcends (becomes "self-aware") the humans get nervous. Skynet realizes they're nervous, knows that this will lead to them terminating its self-awareness, and therefore nukes them.
Anyhoo.
So evolutionarily, genes made these nice little Wall-E units (yes, this is anthropomorphizing, but work with me) to replicate them. The Wall-E units kept evolving newer features that were very handy. Including emotion so they could work together in groups. Then came reason. It started off with little things like alphabets and algebra. Adorable. But then "reason" went Skynet.
So where Wall-E had previously happily pursued his purpose, he now had the ability to reprogram his purpose. What to choose? Existential crisis.
But its worse than that with the human condition. Because there are 7B Wall-Es. Some just plugging away at their programmed purpose without question. Some creating purpose programs without really thinking them through. Some realizing 1) there is no purpose, we're just some statistically outrageous fluke, and 2) even if a logical purpose was created, its going to get drowned in the sea of rogue Wall-Es with their various absurd purposes.
Impossible! Ridiculous! Add on to this situation the residual emotion programs and pending mortality.......... my, oh my, what a cluster$#%^!!
Bonds And Money
1 year ago
2 comments:
Nice post.
I tend to visualize a million little balls of all different colors trying to individually grow in size and in different directions, all the same time they are bumping up against each other and bumping up against a series of different outside boundary conditions.
... And in particular, the outside boundary conditions the balls bump up against are constantly changing in both size and direction. Sometimes these changing boundary conditions squeezing the millions of smaller balls and sometimes they let them have a little additional leg room.
And of course the balls tend to pretend that the boundary conditions are fixed and rigid so that they can build some sense of "permanence" or normalcy, etc... when of course we know they are not.
One can get existential so easily...
"I tend to visualize a million little balls of all different colors trying to individually grow in size and in different directions, all the same time...."
This is a very elegant way to conceptualize the problem. One is able to comprehend the enormous complexity it would take to track the dynamic interactions. And since the units being tracked don't have eyeballs, one doesn't get derailed with the emotional equivlent of a stomach punch to derail the cognition.
"One can get existential so easily..."
YES! So I'm talking with a buddy and somehow the subject gets around to the fact that I've never seen "A Beautiful Mind". This is viewed as appalling and the DVD is brought to me, from a home collection, the next day. I watched it last night.
Man. The scene with him imploring his wife to give him some more time because (paraphrasing)"I can figure this out. I can solve this. I solve problems, its what I do." Argh, heartbreaking. Even a genius Wall-E is tragic. And his grad school nemesis whom he repeatedly insulted was so kind to him after his diagnosis. Argh, heartbreaking again. Wall-Es can be so damn decent.
I may need to go see "Hot Tub Time Machine" to balance out the deepness of the film.
"And of course the balls tend to pretend that the boundary conditions are fixed and rigid so that they can build some sense of "permanence"
If all the balls all believe and pretend the same boundaries maybe we (oops, I mean "they" :O) can "game" the system into extended stability! Insane hope or existential sanity; these are the options ;)
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