Love those clips! It's all in how one defines the word "real". --- On Sun, 8/21/11, turquoiseb <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
From: turquoiseb <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Managing an attractive young woman with large breasts To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Date: Sunday, August 21, 2011, 3:34 AM --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, cardemaister <no_reply@...> wrote: > > Just occurred to me, are "them" real or fake?? :o The answer to this koan was more easily realized on Spanish beaches. There the jiggle factor was the the big tell. Or, if the woman in question was reclining, whether "them" remained pointing stead- fastly towards the midheaven, or more gracefully went with the natural tendency of gravity. But all of this stuff Curtis is reporting from David Eagleman's book has me wondering how we tell whether *anything* we perceive is real or fake. If the mind has such an extraordinary ability to shape false data into what it believes is true, is anything we believe to be real really real? Naturally, this leads me to a discussion of a movie. This whole subject of "What is real?" reminded me of a 1974 SciFi classic made on a shoestring budget by John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, then still in film school. If you haven't seen it, the necessary back story for this clip is that a bomb big enough to blow up an entire planet before it falls into the sun and causes a supernova that could endanger a to-be-colonized star system, mistakenly gets the order to detonate. This is problematic, because it's still stuck in the bomb bay. As far as the bomb knows, it's been given the order to detonate, thus fulfilling its purpose in life. The crew is trying to stop the bomb from exploding, and in desperation one of the crew decides to teach the bomb epistemology. AI bomb being taught epistemology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk The bomb's resulting epiphany: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9-Niv2Xh7w
