I will not be answering that question in this post. Instead I am more interested in the phenomenon of information. It has been said that in the last couple decades we (humans) have produced exponentially more information than we have ever produced in all of history(due in large part to accelerating computing technologies).
Jean Baudrillard in one of his papers laments this as the saddest thing to ever happen to modern man, our information obsession in which we must generate and categorize information about everything but NO MEANING is ever produced.
He gives the example of a recent airplane crash in which recovery teams collected the majority of debris of the wreck and pieced the plane back together in attempt to discover why the plane went down, We gain no meaning, no solace from this activity, the deaths of the individuals on board still remain pointless and tragic, the human condition is still one of suffering, we have only garnered more information to be analyzed and continue its ad nauseum profusion. SO the question than is how do we construct MEANING? How do we use our abilities of visualization and expression to make sense of it all?
Making sense! what a concept! This is an excellent question and one of the discussion subjects for tomorrow's class.
ReplyDelete"I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me."
ReplyDeleteRichard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out