we only swim in the current..

Something from the Reimagined Battlestar Galactica, which totally kicks ass. And I'm totally in love with the entire idea of the series because it challenges all of my conventional, yes my conventional notions about science fiction. For me, Star Trek was once the opiate of sci-fi. But now, after having probably absorbed more Trek than is healthy for the average individual, and after having watched Trekkies and Trekkies 2, I have concluded that ultimately, no matter the popularity of Trek and the immense passion for which Trekkies and Trekkers have for the ideals of the Federation, I have concluded, that really, Star Trek sucks.
It sucks because all of the characters aren't people that you and I can relate with. They aren't colleagues who have that annoying habit of smacking their gum while they talk to you, or tapping their pens against their noses, or aren't crunching down a bag of cheese doodles every ten minutes, or whatever; in other words they aren't like anyone I know. For that matter, knowing what I know about people living three hundred years ago, they aren't all that dissimilar from you or I. Edmund Burke or Roger Bacon or John Locke or even Newton, despite all of his "issues" (most of which indicate that Newton was what we consider autistic). Even if every bit of the possibilities promised by the Singularity comes true (if you haven't been paying attention to the Sphere lately, then you'll know there's a rather torried undercurrent of it's own going on in which the theists are ridiculing the Singularitarians, calling the Singularity "rapture of the nerds"; it's pretty funny) then we will still have human problems that we have today in three hundred years. It's very likely that the Singularitarians alive today will be among those still having those problems three hundred years from now. Just because we can process information faster doesn't mean that we won't still have disagreements, moral qualms, ethical considerations, and the like, it just means that we'll have them faster, and with improved storage capacity, we will be able to reach faster conclusions, because we'll be able to play upon our interior mental landscape the exact memory that we recorded that particular day of that particular event and compare it to the one we are currently experiencing.
Again, we only swim in the current. Most of the time we are unaware that we part of the stream, that all that we are emanates from it and without the stream we are nothing. What fascinates me right now is the wholeness of things. There is no keyboard. There is only this imagined tactile space upon which I communicate my thoughts to you. I forget about the keyboard--I am only the words that are now on the screen and they are coming to you as fast as I can type them. Imagine how many words I could produce for you if all I had to do was will my mind to type--what thoughts, experiences, novels, music, what could I do if I had the ability to transcribe mind to matter immediately. If reality is truly only the intersection of my consciousness and extrusions from the substrate, the implicate matter of the universe, then there is nothing that is not part of the entirety. In other words, the separateness, the divisive need to categorize, label, name, analyze independently, the entire way that our minds have been trained to deal with "reality" only exacerbates the experience that most of feel that we somehow alone, that regardless of ones ontological and tautological views of the universe, we are ultimately limited by the reality that to truly experience God is an impossibility. To know infinity, to stare back at it and still not realize, really realize how truly tiny we are. How insignificant. How more likes electrons we are than thinking individuals and how little protection we have against the universe. How easy it would be for one really dedicated group of individuals to wipe out most of the human race. And how lackadaisical we all are, as the Left rants and raves about the next wooden horse that they have rolled into the square, this time the NSA "scandal." I don't think there's a Leftist alive today who would be able to relate to Bismarck or Metternich or even Truman--Democrats don't have strategy, they have strategery, and again it's a shame, because no amount of infighting within the Gop will do what a disciplined opposition party could do in terms of forcing the Gored on Porkers to come to terms with the fact that there are right now a substantial number of people within the conservative movement who aren't quite sure yet what we are going to do in 2006.
My feet are freezing. Of course I'm not wearing any socks, but Socrates used to stand in the snow barefoot. I'm going to go eat some dinner. Another moment in the current, but it's only carrying me forward. I want to be able to stand on the shore and watch the current move.