The Vast Re-Education Program of the Superbowl Ads
churchlife.nd.edu
churchlife.nd.edu
That's a common argument, but completely flawed. Yes, logic gates are binary. But when a bunch of them are wired up to compute in floating point, there's nothing binary about the external behavior.
Binariness depends on the resolution you look at. Individual bits are binary, but floating point registers are an excellent approximation to analog. Individual synapses are binary, but brains are analog. Laser pits on a CD are binary, but the music isn't.
The curious thing is, presumably the author has seen video games and heard music on computers. How has it escaped their notice that the outward behavior of these systems is not all-or-nothing?
Perhaps it's no more silly than the claims people have made about how the quantum nature of reality makes us all one in a spiritual sense.
I get that you were linking to the letter only as an example of handwriting, but the story behind the letter has since taken on a much darker turn.
All of our digital media have limited resolution. CD-quality audio may (or may not) have enough resolution to completely fool human hearing. But CD-quality audio is not interactive or three dimensional in the way that a concert hall is; you can't tilt your head to the side or move to a different seat to get a different experience. Instead, you get a pinprick of audio information taken from a single point of view which you cannot manipulate or see through. And that's not even to mention the zillions of studio tricks and digital manipulations of that signal. Because of that limited resolution (e.g. 16-bit PCM on an audio CD), you can't "zoom in" and hear sounds that are much much quieter, both because the SNR gets too bad and the fundamental resolution limitation.
The real world has so much potential for "zoom" that it's fundamentally not the same as its digital representation. Buy a microscope and take a look at an insect and then realize the vast majority of our reality which is extremely near to us is actually so small that it is below our unaided senses. Digital representations of it completely truncate and destroy the information below the level chosen. No more zooming. It is fundamentally different in the real world. In the real world, you can zoom deeper than your mind has capacity to process.
But yeah, video games are fun. Don't get too sucked in, though. Not real. If you ever do get a chance to look at an insect through a microscope, then you'll realize that the outside world has about 50 orders of magnitude more complexity than a video game.
Given that we're already talking about cognitive psychology with a religious tinge, the Screwtape Letters (1942) [0] seem entirely relevant here. (Context: A senior devil is advising a junior one on how to corrupt his human)
> I have known cases where what the patient called his “God” was actually located—up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall.
> But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer.
[0] https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-screwtapeletters/lewiscs...
…what? Seems like a strained metaphor to me. Computers suddenly becoming ternary would not magically make the country into a three party system.
yes, sorry in advance, but I accept your internet demerits for this bit of foolishness, at least it made me chuckle
No, no. They mean military veterans. The numbers were probably Military Occupational Specialties. Army MOS 11B is infantry. MOS 25M is "multimedia illustrator".
"Oil, water, bread and wine are signs that bring about profound changes in the soul of the recipient because they are tied to a fundamental reality, God’s saving love for mankind affected through the Incarnation and the created order."
Huh? Oh, right, that ritualistic cannibalism thing Catholics are into. The tortured reasoning around that is amusing.[1]
The author is in media studies, not theology.[2] He also wrote "Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs". Reviews of that book are mixed, but trying to understand Apple as a religion is promising.
[1] https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2011/08/06/the-eucharist-a-...
[2] https://mcgrath.nd.edu/about/faculty-staff/brett-robinson-ph...
There's plenty of room to criticize the tech giants, and their advertising, but this is disappointingly shallow even for such a short piece.
Also, they threw in "the ultimate form of protest and rebellion is to declare oneself non-binary" which I think might be just a pun, but I'm not sure if they are being serious or not..
> In fact, the logic of binary is inherently polarizing. You can either be a 1 or a 0 and you must pick a side. Pro life or pro choice? Trump or Hillary?
what the frick is this?
That's a flask, not a beaker.
Maybe we should just take the article on the merits of its content, and not its source.
The content of this article stands on its own or it doesn’t. Ignoring it because it was written by someone with different values from your own is puerile. That was my original point.
You should be careful with that, it rarely leads to healthy opinions.
Is religion the same?