Since you didn't take down the last one... A modern poet, Don Mclean, Falling Through Time: I can't answer the questions you ask me, I don't know what to say. The answers are somewhere lost in the stars when the night has turned to day. But I know if the silence of night could be here, It would drift through my soul and calm all my fear And I could reach out and draw you so near to me
Touch me and warm me and I will lie still. And all that you ask me to give you I will One living moment we'll have for our own. A brief flash of time that we spent unalone. But you ask me for nothing and give what you can And we're wrapped in a pillow of sleep once again And my memory drifts through the universe when we are one
Closely we're falling through time
And the earth will turn in the silence of space, always in motion yet always in place And all things will change yet remain what they are. And far will be near and near will be far And the ages will darken and blend into time And all that is poetry will no longer rhyme But our moment together is forever sublime
For the time has arrived when we must understand That we're lost in a void on this sad speck of sand And nobody knows where we are, no one cares And the tears that we shed in the dark no one cares And the madmen who plunder this world for their fame Have forgotten that no one remembers their name But time and the universe are always the same
Closely we're falling through time
I'm in Oxford right now, for the Global Catastrophic Risks conference.
There's a psychological impact in walking down a street where where any given building might be older than your whole country.
Toby Ord and Anders Sandberg pointed out to me an old church tower in Oxford, that is a thousand years old.
At the risk conference I heard a talk from someone talking about what the universe will look like in 10100 years (barring intelligent modification thereof, which he didn't consider).
The psychological impact of seeing that old church tower was greater. I'm not defending this reaction, only admitting it.
I haven't traveled as much as I would travel if I were free to follow my whims; I've never seen the Pyramids. I don't think I've ever touched anything that has endured in the world for longer than that church tower.
A thousand years... I've lived less than half of 70, and sometimes it seems like a long time to me. What would it be like, to be as old as that tower? To have lasted through that much of the world, that much history and that much change?
Transhumanism does scare me. I shouldn't wonder if it scares me more than it scares arch-luddites like Leon Kass. Kass doesn't take it seriously; he doesn't expect to live that long.
Yet I know - and I doubt the thought ever occurred to Kass - that even if something scares you, you can still have the courage to confront it. Even time. Even life.
But sometimes it's such a strange thought that our world really is that old.
The inverse failure of the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence, is failure to generalize from things that actually happened. We see movies, and in the ancestral environment, what you saw with your own eyes was real; we have to avoid treating them as available examples.
Conversely, history books seem like writing on paper - but those are things that really happened, even if we hear about them selectively. What happened there was as real to the people who lived it, as your own life, and equally evidence.
Sometimes it's such a strange thought that the people in the history books really lived and experienced and died - that there's so much more depth to history than anything I've seen with my own eyes; so much more life than anything I've lived.