Add New Post

The human, feeling the need to put forth a record of its thoughts, both for its own benefit and for the benefit of the readers of the thoughts, types in the appropriate location code and passwords which enable it to freely “click” on a rectangular region of the screen, called a “button”, labeled “New Post”.

Faced now with a screen full of such rectangles the human must now begin elucidating its thoughts by means of the same interfacing devices it used to arrive at the screen in question.  I shall describe that process here.

The human’s thoughts are transmitted by means of discrete units called “words”, which are grouped together within the limited spacing of the rectangles and, when interpreted according to a set of conventions known as a “grammar”, must suffice to convey the person’s intended meaning.  The words themselves consist of groupings of a limited set of printed characters called letters.  Humans are not born with the conscious use of any given set of letters, causing the possible sets of letters to vary from group to group, since the group into which one is born is the group from which one learns one’s own set.  In order to be able to preserve and distribute thoughts in this way, humans for many centuries have learned to subdue their natural need for more elaborate mechanisms of communication, (in what amounts to a great accomplishment for beings with a biological heritage).

According to the set of letters which the human is accustomed to using, it presses a series of physical buttons on the device known as the “keyboard”.  The buttons appear on the keyboard in a such a way that only the letter the human has in mind will be produced within the rectangles on the screen, and only in the place marked by a consistent indicator which moves as more and more letters are “typed” in.  As the number of letters increases, several additional characters, “punctuation marks”, provide a means by which the words can be arranged into “sentences” and other groupings consistent with the grammar.

When the space occupied by the letters in the rectangle surpasses the size of the rectangle, several symbolic devices appear as other rectangles on the screen to help the human understand and control the display now burdened by a surplus of information.

While at first the human merely typed in a sequence of letters, having distilled from its thought those letters which it believed best represented the thought it desired to communicate, it now has a chance to observe a transcript of those letters on the screen within the display rectangle.  The human can use the input devices to position the typing indicator wherever it believes it needs to change the transcript.  Adding, changing, and rearranging are all possible, since the information is coded within the computer as malleable bits of data rather than as ink on paper, for example, and is simply represented on screen by an adjustment the luminosity of the various parts of the screen according to the current data.  This provides almost complete freedom to the human to change and rearrange as it wishes, providing only that it can remember exactly what changes it wanted to make in the interval between the mental conception of the changes and the time in which the changes are typed into the system.

After a period of consideration, the human can preview the post as it will appear to the public, which gives the person a final opportunity to make changes it may not have been able to make without a due consideration of the whole body of the words it has typed in to its on-screen rectangle.

The deed of Adding a New Post is carried out by pressing the button on the screen which represents the human’s willingness to have what it has typed become publicly known as an Entry.  Now the post has become public.

I have cut short here some interesting points about human communication methods which I will continue discussing by means of the communication methods to which we are accustomed.  In particular, the origin of words as sequences of familiar variations in the naturally detected compressions of the gaseous medium, which surrounds the people at all times, particular to a specific group of people who have developed the capacity to detect the meanings of only a limited set of the total possible number of compressions is a fascinating additional topic I will take up.

Can’t Say Everything

I can’t say everything I think about.

• I forget things before I get to the typewriter.  I probably think ten things for every one I manage to type.
• I don’t know what people want to hear.  Of all the things I’m willing to say, which ones are of interest to the readers of this forum?
• I may want to keep secrets.  I’m not committed to the idea of saying everything people want to hear.  The willingness to keep secrets can emphasize their significance in a powerful way.  Those who receive the information therefore possess two virtues — 1) persistence, i.e. commitment, and 2) capable of winning the confidence of the secret bearer.

These three bullet points conspire to make it hard for me to write at this time.

I will make sense

I will make sense.  I will make sense.  I typed I will make sense.  Hard work will correct my deficiency.  Hard work.  Working cannot be hard.  Work cannot be hard.  What’s hard about choosing?  Work cannot be hard for one who chooses to serve one’s totality.  Hard work is only possible if one chooses one piece at the expense of another.  Work is either not work, or it’s not hard.  Working in order to survive is not working, but rather it’s surviving.  Surviving can be hard.  You work to survive, but work is voluntary.  I think that there is a load of guilt associated with the word “work”.  The moral valuation of “work” is “good”.  This must be false, since either it’s not hard, or it’s not work.  Work is only good if it is put to good ends.  If it’s merely a question of survival, then that is the ends to which the work is put.  If the ends are good then the work is good.  The question of national unemployment is morally wrong because employment is not moral.  Unemployment is not immoral.  The real question from a material point of view is what is the national standard of living.  The real question from a spiritual perspective is, what are the ends to which employment is put, the products of people’s employment.  The middle ground question, what is the rate of unemployment, is harmful and misleading.