The Nicest, Oldest Idea

Tuna salad and singularity.  “Singularity is Near” has interrupted my review of Russian Medievlia.  Where is “my” book?”  I couldn’t find the book I was in the middle of.  I must have left it somewhere.  Upstairs?  In my bag?  Lunch time is an armistice time.  A time when one doesn’t need to read emails, nor Trump foibles, nor the must-get-done-immediately-ies.  At lunch, you get to read something interesting that is purely for pleasure, purely for personal edification. 

I’ve got thirty books on my shelf that I’d like to start.  There is no obvious progression as to how to proceed.  Other than the self-restraint, which suggests the next book cannot be started in earnest until the current one has been finished.  Unless of course, you can’t find the current one.  I pulled “The Singularity is Near” off the shelf to accompany me for lunch today.

I generally read novels and nonfiction in equal measure and my nonfiction reading is fairly predictable.  History, or Sinology in the main.  I rarely find myself reading layman’s books about science or technology.  Though when I do I always enjoy myself and wonder why it was I took so long to read the next one.  Probably because my work is all about working with technology companies and their stories, all the doo-dah-day.

Over tuna salad I read the first chapter or two of Mr. Kurzweil’s book.  I read it and considered his glass-will-be-brimming-over, thesis.  Perhaps predictably, the one that took hold of my lapels, involved reengineering one’s corporal body and living forever.  Or, as Mr. Kurzweil suggests, define one’s own time of dying. 

This is a nice idea.  It is, perhaps, the nicest, oldest idea humans have ever thought.  It served as the catalyst for every religion known to man.  Death is terrifying.  What if it could be put off for a few hundred years or at least redefined, re-conceptualized so that all the relevant body parts were operating quite reasonably at a thirty-year-old’s arc of maturity for as long as one needed?  What if knowledge acquisition could be magnified exponentially so that the store of information of the internet were readily available to my thinking mind.  Of course, this man has my attention. 

Scraping up the last bits of tuna, and consider the subsequent 450 pages of this book.  This is certainly now on-deck, after we get through the “Life of Archpriest Avvakum By Himself” who was also concerned with eternity.   I must go check the upstairs bathroom. 

Monday, 08/21/17