From the monthly archives: July 2012
Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil is planning to live forever. Kurzweil is a futurist, a person who predicts the future based upon current trends. He’s a brilliant inventor and he knows far more than most people about trends in science and technology. And based on what he knows he says that in two or three decades we’ll be at a point where we’ll be able to live forever. Wow! Eternal life! And in just ten or twenty years from now!
No one laughs at Kurzweil. (Well, maybe a few people at Critical Pages do.) The man has an astonishing record — as a student at MIT he founded a company and before he graduated he sold the company for $100,000 plus royalties. Six years later he started a company to develop a computer program that could recognize printed text; later he and others developed a system that could read text aloud. Kurzweil is also the man who pushed the music synthesizer forward to the point where it could produce musical sounds indistinguishable from those produced by musical instruments. He’s received the half-million dollar MIT-Lemelson Prize for inventive genius.
Currently, Ray Kurzweil is taking good care of himself, aiming to get through the next two or three decades to the year when science will have brought humankind eternal life. He keeps fit, exercises and eats well and, according to an article in Wired, he takes “250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea” every day and drinks several glasses of red wine a week. He figures that should do it.
Raymond Kurzweil is brilliant and helpful and and nobody will say I told you so when he dies. You don’t have to know what he knows to know he’s not going to live forever. His hope for immortality assumes that in the next twenty or thirty years we’ll acquire complete and perfect knowledge of human biology and the technology to apply what we know. Maybe we’ll have the ability to apply what we know. But thus far in history we’ve never acquired complete and perfect knowledge about anything.
God Creating Stars
The physicist Stephen Hawking has answered the prime question of whether or not the universe was created by God. According to Hawking, it wasn’t.* It’s good to get that question out of the way after so many heads have been bothered by it for so many thousands of years. Here’s the next question — Is a universe without God a universe without any hope? In Dante’s poem, the entrance to hell has an inscription that says Abandon all hope, you who enter here. In Dante’s view, to be without hope is to be in hell. So, what about hope? With that question in mind, Jo Page turned to the philosopher Julian Baggini who has written a bit on that subject. She found his words less than satisfying. Very much less. Here’s Jo in her own words.
When Emily Dickinson wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the Soul” I think she comes closer to a definition of hope than Julian Baggini, a British philosopher, does in his lips-tightly-pressed-together piece, “Hope Against Hope” in the online magazine, NewHumanist.org.uk.
He engages in some deft word play and studs the article with quotations from everybody he knows and some he doesn’t—Benjamin Franklin, Jean Paul Sartre, a British comedienne, the British comedienne’s mother—just barely saving it from prim-faced misanthropy. But his zeal to dash all hope comes across as mostly overwrought, over-thinking.
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Gene Mirabelli writes most of the posts here, so we're very pleased to announce that his recent novel, Renato, the Painter, has won a first prize for Literary Fiction in the 2013 Independent Publisher (IP or "IPPY") Book awards.
The Awards program was created to highlight the year’s most distinguished books from independent publishers. Award winners are chosen by librarians and booksellers who are on the front lines, working everyday with patrons and customers. Some 125 books competed for the literary fiction Gold Medal. These books are examples of independent publishing at its finest.Publishers Weekly says "In prose as lusty and vigorous as Renato himself, Mirabelli captures the feeling of coming to terms - ready or not - with old age." For more about the writer and his book, turn to our contact page or to the author's web site.
