Random notes that almost pertain to UFOs

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

I viewed Paul Kimball’s first season of Haunted on Vimeo and for those of you interested in ghost hunting, you should check out Paul’s effort(s).

Not only is Paul a terrific film-maker but also an intrepid searcher of things odd and, in this instance, it’s the apparent presence of dead spirits in the usual haunted venues.

Season Two will be online upcoming.

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The February 11, 2019 New Yorker has one of the last essays that neuroscientist and author Oliver Sacks wrote: The Machine Stops [Page 28 ff.] Oliver Sacks died in 2015.

The piece is about smartphones, social media, and the future.

In it, Dr. Sacks, one of my idols (despite his avid use of illicit and/or bad drugs, LSD, cocaine, marijuana, et cetera) noted his response to a panelist, an Internet pioneer, who proffered that her daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day, and that "while she (the daughter) might be socked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge.” (Something I’ve told a past pal of mine who gets all his information from the internet, not books, magazines, or college, but solely the internet, sadly.)

Dr. Sacks also wrote that the plight(s) brought upon society by social media “was envisaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909 story “The Machine Stops” in which … people live underground in isolated cells, never seeing one another and communicating only by audio and visual devices. In this world, original thought and direct observation are discouraged…”

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The New York Review of Books for February 21, 2019 has a review by Christopher Beha, of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25].

While the review covers the usual exclamations about religious atheism, there is an account of materialistic and non-religious oriented “atheism” which I read as applicable to the skepticism of such UFO pals of mine as Zoam Chomsky and Lance Moody, and others in the UFO community:

“Knowledge increases at an accelerating rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been.”

“… faith in reason tends to inspire its own evangelical zeal. It encourages – even demands – that reason stamp out unreason wherever it may be found.” [Page 33]

“In The Silence of Animals Gray quotes two of the greatest Enlightenment philosophers: ‘There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white” (David Hume); ‘The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that arises above the trifling” (Immanuel Kant). Racial prejudice may be immemorial,’ Gray adds, ‘but racism is a product of the Enlightenment.’” [Page 34] (This for my buddy Bryan Sentes.)

“… human beings have all sorts of desires that run counter to their rational interests.”

“Humanity isn’t special. In fact, there is no such thing as ‘humanity’; there is just an endless variety of individual humans, going about fulfilling their wants and needs in much the same ways as other animals do.” [ibid]

And for the skeptics, particularly, “One of [Gray’s] abiding ideas is that you cannot dispel an illusion simply by demonstrating that is it is an illusion: ‘The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth.’”

RR