Consciousness and Pavarotti . . .
Friday, April 25, 2025. It's Freya's day . . . and the weatherfeather indicates easy Southerlies bringing cloud cover and upper 70's to TulseyTown today. Rain chances increase slightly today, rising tonight and definitely tomorrow.
Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. – Hobbes [as in Calvin and Hobbes}
‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.’ – Ludwig Wittgenstein, author of Philosophical Investigations.
As the superintelligences begin to set and execute their own research agendas, the work they do would therefore become unintelligible for us because we would lack the internal perspective necessary to understand their science. From our view, their research would be a science created for theoretical-aims-we-know-not-what, with purposes-we-know-not-what, to be interpreted in ways-we-know-not-what. – Brandon Boesch, in Aeon, 4.24.25.
We are witnessing just the beginning of massive, unimaginable suffering that's going to happen over the next year as America betrays its values and abandons the most vulnerable people in the world. – Heather Digby Parton
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. – James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Vintage Press, 1992.
— Dates —
Edward R. Murrow The most influential and esteemed figure in American broadcast journalism during its formative years was born in 1908, Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, North Carolina.
Al Pacino turns 85 today. The multi-award laureate film and stage actor was born in 1940, New York City.
Thirty-five years ago today the crew of the space shuttle Discovery placed the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit about 370 miles above Earth.
And, Puccini’s twelfth and final opera, Turandot premiered posthumously 99 years ago at Milan’s storied La Scala opera house and was conducted by Puccini’s friend (and occasional nemesis!) Arturo Toscanini.
I can't say I know much about consciousness. All I know is that morning bird song and Pavarotti speak to me.
— Luciano Pavarotti, Zubin Mehta, the L.A. Philharmonic, and the L.A. Music Center Opera Chorus. 1994.