- Apr 2024
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archive.org archive.org
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[Narrator]: The Cluttered Desk, Index Card,file folders, the in-out basket, the calculator.These are the tools of the office professional's past.Since the dawn of the computer age, better machines have always meant bigger and more powerful.But the software could not accommodate the needs of office professionals who are responsiblefor the look, shape and feel of tomorrow.
In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)
Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.
30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.
Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.
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- Jan 2024
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by far the most illuminating to me is the idea that mental causation works from virtual futures towards the past 00:33:17 whereas physical causation works from the past towards the future and these two streams of causation sort of overlap in the present
for - comparison - mental vs physical causation - adjacency - Michael Levin's definition of intelligence - Sheldrake's mental vs physical causation
key insight - comparison - mental vs physical causation - mental causation works from virtual futures to past - physical causation works from past to future - this is an interesting way of seeing things
adjacency - between - direction of mental vs physical causation - Michael Levin's definition of intelligence (adopting WIlliam James's idea) and cognition and cognitive light cones of living organisms:: - having a goal - having autonomy and agency to reach that goal - adjacency statement - Levin adopts a definition of cognition from scientific predecessors that relate to goal activity. - When an organism chooses one specific behavioral trajectory over all other possible ones in order to reach a goal - this is none other than choosing a virtual future that projects back to the present - In our species, innovation and design is based on this future-to-present backwards projection
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