At 04:34 PM 9/12/2001 -0600, you wrote:
>>Yes, the targets were highly symbolic, but they were more than that
>>and really strategic. Economic life has stood still, Wall Street is closed
>>and other worldwide financial places are diving deep, planes are stuck to
>>ground, and so on.
>
>It's absolutely true that every sign-vehicle is a physical entity, and thus
>binds energy. In that way, the massive human death and real-world
>politico-economic disruption is, of course, significant distinct, from the
>symbolic function.
>
>But a symbol is ONLY a symbol if its interpretation has effects which are
>entirely disproportionate in time to its physical existence: the 1 volt
>toggle-switch which launches the megaton missle; the 1 kg blueprint which
>provides the basis for the building; the single-nucleotide mutation which
>triggers the cancer; the religious idea which launches the crusade; the pen
>which is mightier than the sword. And I have little doubt that this is the
>case here, the responses in the markets and the cabinet rooms and the
>barracks around the world will harness much more free energy than the
>proximal results of the hijackings.
>
>----
>O------------------------------------------------------------------------>
>| Cliff Joslyn, Member of the Technical Staff (Cybernetician at Large)
Yes. And consider this. We just watched what I suspect history will record
as one of those equilibria being punctuated: no longer will hijacked
passengers remain passive expecting to land eventually. Like the frog
which forever altered the fitness landscape for flies by inventing a sticky
tongue (to borrow from Stuart Kauffman), something happened when a
passenger on one of the hijacked planes phoned home and learned that he was
riding a suicide mission; the folks on board voted to take over, and they
appear to have at least aborted a suicide mission by crashing nowhere near
a target. A couple more events like that and we may have seen the end of
airborne hijacking activities.
Considering that it appears that a sufficient number of our neighbors on
this spaceship have signed on to backing our efforts to stomp out
terrorism, it seems that we now have access to an awesome amount of, as you
say, free energy. The question is this: Do we have the moxy to use it
properly?
It strikes me that we now must find a way to globally engage in a
communication effort the likes of which Doug Engelbart has been calling for
over the last several decades. It is now time to start talking and
thinking before we begin acting.
Jack
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