Eliezer Yudkowsky (1999) on a world with nanotechnology
Eliezer Yudkowsky (1999) on a world with nanotechnology
Unless you’ve heard of nanotechnology, it’s hard to appreciate the magnitude of the changes we’re talking about. Total control of the material world at the molecular level is what the conservatives in the futurism business are predicting.
Taking 10^17 ops/sec as the figure for the computing power used by a human brain, and using optimized atomic-scale hardware, we could run the entire human race on one gram of matter, running at a rate of one million subjective years every second.
Kendall Roy on Logan Roy
He was comfortable with this world. And he knew it. And he liked it.
And I say, amen to that.
Tom Holland on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians
COWEN: Which Gospel do you view as most foundational for Western liberalism and why?
HOLLAND: I think that that is a treacherous question to ask because it implies that there would be a coherent line of descent from any one text that can be traced like that. I think that the line of descent that leads from the Gospels and from the New Testament and from the Bible and, indeed, from the entire corpus of early Christian texts to modern liberalism is too confused, too much of a swirl of influences for us to trace it back to a particular text.
If I had to choose any one book from the Bible, it wouldn’t be a Gospel. It would probably be Paul’s Letter to the Galatians because Paul’s Letter to the Galatians contains the famous verse that there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no man or woman in Christ. In a way, that text — even if you bracket out and remove the “in Christ” from it — that idea that, properly, there should be no discrimination between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, based on gender, based on class, remains pretty foundational for liberalism to this day.
I think that liberalism, in so many ways, is a secularized rendering of that extraordinary verse. But I think it’s almost impossible to avoid metaphor when thinking about what the relationship is of these biblical texts, these biblical verses to the present day. I variously compared Paul, in particular in his letters and his writings, rather unoriginally, to an acorn from which a mighty oak grows.
But I think actually, more appropriately, of a depth charge released beneath the vast fabric of classical civilization. And the ripples, the reverberations of it are faint to begin with, and they become louder and louder and more and more disruptive. Those echoes from that depth charge continue to reverberate to this day.
quote tom holland christianity st paul bible liberalism convergence
Carl Schmitt on liberalism
"Schmitt thought that liberalism had an overly benign, naive view of human affairs, overestimating the extent to which government could function based on rules and procedures alone, or politics on the basis of reasoned discussion. Life was too unruly for that." pic.twitter.com/sfSGBXkp9i
— Peter Hartree (@peterhartree) February 13, 2023
Otto Petras on the conditions for religious awe
A religion that one understands is, for he who understands, no longer a religion. For by comprehending it, he stands above it; he surveys its conditions and possibilities, and to the extent that he does so he no longer feels like the unconditional object of religious demands. One can be possessed and awe-struck only as long as one does not understand how and why that occurs.
Chris Cullen: what do you want to naturalise?
We become our habits. So it’s crucial to ask: what do you want to naturalise? What do you want to come easily?
Whatever the heart frequently dwells upon becomes the shape of the heart.