Archive for July, 2010

How many lights do you see? A trinity!

I recently saw a double episode of Star Trek TNG entitled: “Chain of Command“. In this episode Captain Picard is tortured by Cardassians and asked to tell that he see five light, though there are only four of them.This episode reminded me of 1984, by Orwell and the famous phrase: 2+2=5.
When I first read the book (and if you have not, do it now) I thought that was a silly method of torture. I mean, it does not cost anything to spell four letters… “five”. However with time I have understood that there is much more behind it. To admit that something you have always know it is true it is false, to bring yourself to the point that even your own eyes tell you that you see five fingers instead of four, that is the point where a man is totally annihilated.

Well, I’ve never understood the meaning of the trinity, but now I know. Tell me, how many gods do you see?

Monkey see monkey do

In the past three years I had the opportunity to observe the growth of a child, once in a month, so I did not become accustomed to his habits and the way he talks, but I could observe the progresses he made. Well, now I can tell that there is nothing in what he says or what he does that is original, nothing from his own. Every sentence he spell is a sentence he have taken from a cartoon, or an adult, or another child. He is just a cluster of memes. The only thing that changes with time is that it becomes more difficult to trace the source of the memes, because they grow in number, and similar memes melt with each other end eventually give birth to a new meme that another child is ready to receive.

I’m starting to believe that an intelligent being is just a biological or artificial device which has gathered a number of memes so big that it is almost impossible to distinguish the single meme and to trace its source, it is capable to reply to external stimuli he receives from its sensorial system and memes which it receives from other intelligent beings that posses an adequate network of memes.