Reply to Lucifer
The New York State Lottery evening number for Saturday, September 6, 2003, was
666.
See last year’s entries for Mary Shelley’s birthday,
These were written partly in response to the New York State Lottery midday number for Monday, August 26, 2002, which was also
666.
In reply to that occurrence, I commented on the website
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In reply to last Saturday’s return of the beastly lottery number, I recommend the following links on software guru Bill Joy:
Sept. 9 – Sun Co-founder Joy Steps Down:
“Joy co-founded Sun, originally an acronym for Stanford University Network, with McNealy in 1982. Before that, Joy was the designer of the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system and helped pioneer the concept of open source.
More recently, Joy found himself at the center of controversy after he wrote a Wired magazine article on the challenges posed to mankind by new technologies such as nanotechnology, robotics and genetic engineering.”
and
Joy’s April 2000 Wired article, titled
Why the future doesn’t need us:
Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species.
Joy says
“I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil….”
I, too, can date, at least approximately, an encounter with the philosophy of
transhumanism (a Lucifer Media link)
that Kurzweil embraces… It was sometime in the first half of January, 1989… I know this because January 9, 1989, is the date of The New Yorker’s review of Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press).
Brad Leithauser, reviewing Mind Children, says that if Moravec “is correct in supposing that human minds will be transferred into or otherwise fused with machines, it seems likely that traditional religious questions — and traditional religions themselves — will either melt away or suffer wholesale metamorphosis. Debates about Heaven or Hell — to take but one example — would hold little relevance for an immortal creature.”
Au contraire. Immortal creatures– such as, according to Christianity, human beings– are the only creatures for whom such debates hold relevance.
For an example of such a debate, see
The Contrasting Worldviews of
Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis,
by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi.
For more on Nicholi, see my entry of August 19, 2003,
For the temple tablet associated with Nicholi in that entry, see my entry of September 6, 2003 (the NY Lottery “666” date),
To sum up this entry, a phrase of C. S. Lewis seems appropriate: