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02/12/2007

Comments

Steven Augustine

I never cease to think of it as miraculous: moments, days, weeks or even centuries of four dimensional reality are simulated in a human imagination, encoded with little squiggles on paper (or some other material) and gazed upon months, days, years or possibly centuries later by another human in whose imagination the 4-D simulation then comes instantly alive...with a somehow ambiguous precision; demonstrably a product of the sender's imagination but experienced in a way unique to the receiver. We take this bizarre magic for granted; we think those are cars, trees, demons, planets, cigarettes and people on that sheet of paper....but they're just funny little squiggles of ink. Is microchip technology *really* much more impressive than that? It's a hell of a lot easier to explain the creation and enjoyment of a blockbuster film than it is to explain how the sentence "Molly's thumb was bleeding," works. How can we ever find such voodoo ordinary? And why does it require justification?

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