there was a thing in the news the other day about some science guy saying that time machines weren't that far off. that time travel was closer than you might expect or words to that effect. and like a lot of people that just kind of rolled off me. but I was thinking this morning well they do have this clone guy running around. I mean the 'Italian' doctor who's got x many pregnant women carrying little clone feti. and then a lot of the old time weirdness came back. I mean to me, I used to think about this stuff a lot. and lose a lot of the thoughts I had. still do really which is why all this writing so-called gets put here. to keep it b/c I forget. so much I forget. so there's all these science fiction cliches that come up. the dodo one of kill your granpa but even more the limits of the actual doing. the boundaries of time itself. I think the evidence points to a necessity of human mediums. the way the discussion is framed makes you think of a device, a machine, but meditative process seems much more likely. b/c really we're talking about two things. perception, that is viewing other temporal landscapes, and expression, doing things there. so people are natively reluctant to surrender the concept of self as body. but it seems pretty obvious to me that that's not all that's up with that. so I imagine a meditative state that transcends the 'fixed' zone of temporal experience. 'disembodied spirits' is the way the Victorians described it. cuts down on the hardware overhead dramatically. but requires a 'medium' willing or not. that is, there has to be some form of human consciousness to receive the 'traveller'. b/c what they're gonna figure out is not a machine, but a mechanism. a means whereby. rather than a mechanical contraption imagine a meditative process that allows the subject to transcend subjective temporal flow. so they pop into....well I don't personally have a term for that, but I think that's what's going to have happened. and there's more. there's always more. like I said the closed system aspect. they can suddenly manipulate the whole arc of human endeavor. but then after a while, you know, that was....all. so it becomes again a question of alignment, of joining with, of whose side are you on? there were signs all along the road. I seemed to have missed most of them. but it's always been, to me, a very interesting 'co-incidence' that the word 'evil' is spelled the way it is.
posted by Juke at 1:39 PM [edit]