Jesus the Vampire's Landing Spot

  We've all known talking potatoes--at least that's my favorite name for the those who seem so unthinking and unreasoning that we might as well be talking to a vegetable. It turns out that it's not really such an an inexact parallel. If we really examine the potato closely, it turns out to have many of the traits of humans that we've likely failed to notice. Samuel Butler, in his famous volume "Erewhon," elaborates the traits we have come to think of as human, and how these traits are also to be found in the potato. Butler's explorations were in the context of consciousness and machine learning, which would one day become what we know call Artificial Intelligence. So, next time YOU call someone a Talking Potato, just remember, it might be a bit generous of a comparison. From The Book of the Machines: Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get...

Thinking is something that doesn’t seem to be in fashion these days, perhaps that is why I feel that I have outlived my usefulness, like the obsolete man from the Twilight Zone, played by Burgess Meredith. For many people, dogma seems to replace actual thought, whether political or religious, or what passes today for the scientific. That observation made, as I am an ignorant man, I am very interested in what others think as well, so I pose these questions: What is your take on existence and reality?   Do you think that our existence is real, or an illusion, perhaps even a hologram?  Do you think we are the product of some god, or evolution, or both?  Do you think we are the only life in the universe, or just one of many examples?  Are there other types of life, and is there other sentient life?  How did life start, and is panspermia a credible theory?  Do you think there are other lives or other existences, or afterlives?  In our ...