<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Before you skip this message, let me assure you I have never advocated such a thing. Let me tell you how I heard this immortal sentence in my local library.</div><div><br></div><div>I became unemployed two weeks ago. After firing off a few online job applications, I like to go to my local library to peruse books and read newspapers. I was reading the Financial Times for the energy news, when I overheard a man say "The Higgs Boson *is* the singularity!" My first reaction was "did he just mention the singularity?" My next reaction was "That doesn't make sense! It's not even wrong!" Perhaps I was being uncharitable - perhaps he meant it in a purely mathematical way and was describing mathematical physics. No, it became clear on listening the white-haired man was telling the younger man a mix of cosmology, theology and
technobabble. "Is God matter, dark matter, antimatter? You understand these things, you read." Being British, I was of course far too reserved to interrupt their conversation and point out that a creator deity / great simulator is free to construct their universe as they see fit and can emulate it on whatever substrate they feel like. As the conversation runs on, I wonder how the thoughts and jargon got into the older man's head to construct these arguments.</div><div><br></div><div> He tries to get the younger man to look at a website on the library computer - at this point I suddenly get the urge to return the newspaper to the stand and walk past the computer they are looking at. I see in white the word "ZEITGEIST" against a black background and it becomes clear - the old guy has seen the Zeitgeist movement's material, tried to mesh it with his own cosmology and is making a really bad job of explaining it to a stranger in a
library. </div><div><br></div><div>Brothers and Sisters and post-gendered relatives in Extropy, I had a failure of nerve and did not take this chance to steer the two men towards a more solidly Transhumanist viewpoint. I have failed in the great commission to evangelise our beliefs. That, and I'm not sure directing them to H+ magazine's website would make an effective quick answer, and I didn't want to spend hours carefully explaining the finer points of philosophy to them, especially when the older guy made me wonder if he was on antipsychotic medication.</div><div><br></div><div>I have a feeling that when singularity thinking meets the local eccentric folk, this sort of thing could happen quite often.</div><div><br></div><div>Tom</div> </div></body></html>