against the royalists Today I want to present a "realistic". Who is this?!? Ask bouncing on the chair-hey, you're so impressionable? -
A realist is a staunch defender of reality, an advocate of "real things you can touch", in short, a paladin who wants to kill all the ghosts of the virtual with the sword of concreteness.
usually is so stubbornly clinging to defend its values \u200b\u200bto reason with him around the penetration of the virtual in every sphere of daily life is frankly impossible. And do not waste your time trying to convince him that the virtual is not to be understood as the antithesis of reality but as its potential. ... Unless you have no better way to spend the afternoon.
I met realists everywhere: at the pub, the walls of the university, and alas in the streets en masse in their habitat: the rectangular box called television. Feeling a pseudogiornalista with swollen lips as boats - Tug polished with every trick permission from the television screen - Second Life denigrate and praise of the "natural" recalling his peasant origins is what the blood-curdling. Prefer not to disclose the name of that. I would also deny them the privilege of quote.
The fight becomes a virtual mission to the realist . not lose the occasion for recognizing the dangers of synthetic worlds. At a conference in Second Life I remember the intervention of a lady, genuinely concerned for the fate of her godchildren who peremptorily stated "we have a responsibility to inform young people of the threat of virtual worlds. " me the figure armed with every bell brochure busy buzz of the city to raise awareness.
Realists fall into the category of skeptics of progress. The problem of the opportunity to push our scientific research in areas of dark and potentially disastrous for humanity is complex and requires a specific treatment that will remain a wishful thinking of this blog.
I would still close the speech quoting George Steiner in his book In Bluebeard's castle gives us his famous opinion on the matter:
"We open the doors of Bluebeard's castle later because there are , because each leads to the next with a logic of intensification, which coincides with the same consciousness that the mind has to be. Leave a closed door is not only cowardice but treason (radical, self-mutilation) inquiring attitude, eager to know, leaning forward, that characterizes our species. We are hunters of reality, wherever it leads us. The risks and disasters that we encounter are all too obvious, but this is, or was until very recently, the axiomatic assumption, this was the belief in a priori our civilization: the man and the truth are companions, their paths are dialectically and Lean Initiatives. " [1]
Steiner at this point asks whether the axiom of unstoppable progress must be questioned. The answer is no. He writes:
"We can not go back. We can not choose the dreams of the unsuspecting. Open up, I believe, the last door of the castle, even if it leads, perhaps because conduct political realities that go beyond the sphere understanding and human control. " [2]
The human mind moving forward in its research and computer science has paved paths that our curiosity will urge us to practice. I will not deny the possible negative implications of a society dominated virtualized. But I believe that the "bigotry" of the realists is equally counterproductive. We
hunters of reality and this reality we're looking for - for some Paradoxically, but not for me - in the virtual. It is implausible return.
Why, and conclude with a quote from Michel Houellebecq extrapolated from an interview in Le Monde: "Some things are irreversible. All that science can provide will be realized, even though it radically changes what we consider today as a human, or as desirable. "
