1,050 words
The year is unknown. You wake up from a pleasant dream and tear off a virtual reality device which was attached to goggles seemingly built into your head. You find yourself sealed in a pod, although you are soon extracted by a strange machine. It is difficult to walk, because you have never done so in your life. A robotic voice calls you “Redeemer” and tells you to step into something called a “rejuvenation chamber.” (more…)
3,335 words
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
—Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.
The nature of reality has puzzled men since long before even the Greeks asked ti esti?; “What is it?” Reality has been explained in as many different ways as there have been thinkers to explain it. Even the supposed precision of the physical sciences can’t persuade scientists to agree on the ultimate nature of reality. (more…)
2,030 words
What are my Saturdays like? Quite dull. After my weekly pizza, I settle down to read, perhaps write and revise, pig out on a podcast, and go out sometimes if there is a play, concert, opera, or movie to get my interest. I don’t mind a nice sunset walk (more so now that I have skin cancer). I never watch TV. (more…)
1,457 words
Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) is a science fiction classic. The setting is a devastated Earth in the far future. The premise is that humanity has been enslaved by artificial intelligences. Human beings spend our lives in what are essentially coffins while mechanical vampires drain our energy. We don’t know it, because we are asleep, dreaming that we are in a radically different world. This is the Matrix. Today we would call it a multiplayer online game.
Like many dystopias, The Matrix is actually too optimistic. The Wachowski brothers thought the human race would have to be forced into the pods. (more…)
Plato predicted the postmodern predicament in his allegory of the cave.
Plato predicted the postmodern predicament in his allegory of the cave.
1,230 words
Police shot a black man dead after he’d lunged at an officer with a large kitchen knife in the once-unspoiled northern California town of Crescent City on August 25. (more…)
1,531 words
Spoiler: Neo and Trinity die and the machines win. Bummer. Most of the rest makes no sense.
I hated this movie.
I didn’t hate it for its racial politics, which are the absolute worst I have ever seen. There are wise, powerful, competent, heroic Negroes everywhere. (The fact that they are all in Zion, a fictional city buried near the center of the Earth, explains why I never encounter them in real life.) (more…)