Genesis

by Bernard Beckett

“Imagination is the bastard child of time and ignorance,”

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition.

The superstition that held sway at the time was a belief in simple causes.

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another.

The Republic was best understood by its motto “Forward toward the past.” Plato,

For a society to function successfully perhaps there needs to be a level of empathy that cannot be corrupted.

Again, the problem with conspiracy theories is their assumption that people are capable of exerting sophisticated control over events. I believe that complexity emerges quickly and unexpectedly.

questioned. The promise of The Republic was that the best and the brightest would become Philosophers, and these Philosophers, trained in the art of understanding, would promote wise and enlightened policies from which all the people would benefit.

It is possible, I believe, to be both shrewd and competent, yet still be overrun by circumstance. Again I come back to my main theme. Conspiracy theory fails because it assumes people have within them the means to achieve their ends.

They reasoned that it was only those at the bottom of the pile who had cause to rebel, and so a stable society would be one where no humans found themselves so low.

I have found what I have found by first doubting it.

“Program in the ability to think through the consequences of your actions, and you are left with an android paralyzed by indecision.

Hard as they tried, the Philosophers found the androids had no way of distinguishing right from wrong. Right is as right does. The only way around the problem is to allow the androids to learn for themselves, pick up some of the tricks evolution has provided you with.

His upbringing is as a Philosopher. That is where he spent his formative years. He believes that one’s thoughts must have precedence over one’s feelings.

It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

I am choosing one of the most important days in our history. It is the duty of the historian not to shy away from such events, but to shine new light upon them.

It felt like a throwaway comment, yet landed with the weight of something more substantial.

“You think you’re the end of it, but that’s what thinking is best at: deceiving the thinker.

The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders. And then, whenever the opportunity arises, the Idea sends out its shock troops in search of new brains to infect. The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes. It’s a jungle out there, Adam. Many Ideas are lost. Only the strongest survive.

Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.”

The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.

My actions are deliberate. I do them with a purpose in mind. To the outsider there is no difference. The difference is in the intention, not the effect. We call this difference thought. You deal in data. I deal in meaning.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory. Why else do you not have memories from your earliest years? It is because your consciousness has not fully developed.”

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface.

The Republic, in the end, was a rational response to an irrational problem. To arrest change is to arrest decay. To bury the individual beneath the weight of the state, is to bury too the individual’s fears. It was possible to see what they were trying to do, but easy too to see, from this distance, that no state can ever weigh that heavily. Always, the individual’s fears will wriggle free.

“It is possible to know without understanding,” Pericles had told her once. “Knowing starts as a feeling. Understanding is the process of excavation,

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.

“Your word is your thought.”

Anythingbthat can produce indepent speech can think.

I find, having you as my only companion, I am drawn toward treating you as if you are as conscious as I am, but perhaps this is nothing more than a prisoner’s kind of madness.

If two beings are forced to spend time only with each other for a long period of time, will they eventually start to think they are the same?

I was trained to kill them on sight. Not because we believed they weren’t the same as us in almost every respect, but because we taught ourselves the differences were worth dying for.

She spoke slowly, sculpting order from the swirling of her thoughts.

So long as we do not know the evil we are capable of there is a chance we will never embrace it.

Maybe