Dec 9, 2016 05:31 PM
I think there are many reasons for discussing human values. Humanity has done so for thousands of years. Some of this discussion we call religion and some of it we call philosophy. We formalize our agreements in laws. Our cultures express our values through the arts and education. Star Trek always depicted computer run societies as terrible, and yet today the talk seems to be in favor of having computers in control.
Kilhill Gibran said we speak when we are not at peace with our thoughts, and my enjoyment of this forum has crashed because of the popularity of insulting people and talking about their faults instead of the topic of threads. The hope of the Enlightenment was that our human potential is much higher than what is popular talk and I am troubled by this human behavior that reduces us to our lowest level, while the idea of being controlled by computers or an authoritarian, has gained popularity.
To civilize someone means to refine this person, and with the Enlightenment in mind, this meant liberty. But we seem to be going in the reverse direction, of encouraging people to be crude, rude and socially unacceptable, making ourselves more brutish as happened to Germany under Hitler, and with Trump in office there is an intense concern about what happened to Germany happening to the US, and like Germany, we are coming to this democratically. We have imitated German in very significant ways and are no longer the democracy we defended in two world wars. And if we do not destroy ourselves, our next big hope is being controlled by computers?
Kilhill Gibran said we speak when we are not at peace with our thoughts, and my enjoyment of this forum has crashed because of the popularity of insulting people and talking about their faults instead of the topic of threads. The hope of the Enlightenment was that our human potential is much higher than what is popular talk and I am troubled by this human behavior that reduces us to our lowest level, while the idea of being controlled by computers or an authoritarian, has gained popularity.
To civilize someone means to refine this person, and with the Enlightenment in mind, this meant liberty. But we seem to be going in the reverse direction, of encouraging people to be crude, rude and socially unacceptable, making ourselves more brutish as happened to Germany under Hitler, and with Trump in office there is an intense concern about what happened to Germany happening to the US, and like Germany, we are coming to this democratically. We have imitated German in very significant ways and are no longer the democracy we defended in two world wars. And if we do not destroy ourselves, our next big hope is being controlled by computers?