Being somewhat confined to the house, so-say 'looking after myself' i.e. not letting my unresolved ailments get out of hand, is for the most part a dull and uneventful routine, so a week can slip by with little of interest to report or reflect upon. Today was an exception however.
Today, I visited McTimoney chiropractor Clive Taylor again. This certainly does me good, and the value added is in the accompany conversation. Clive has been an active practitioner of alternative kinds of therapy for over thirty years, and speaks confidently of his understanding and experience of the nature of healing being embedded in the relationship he has with his clients, not just in a social way, but in the physical connection which therapy requires. Without any need for interpreting this in a metaphysical way, he speaks of the importance of laying on hands, resting and centering himself, and then letting his hands be guided to work on the other person's body. It's a process Rachel and others also speak about in their therapeutic work.
It's part of what we are, what we can be for others. I like it, and trust this more than I trust the analytical and rational approach of busy modern medicine, which seems to have broken everything down into procedures. While I have no objection to this in principle, there can be so many procedures that some get missed out, avoided because of the pressure to deliver. Really I feel we need both approaches, but this calls for more time than we ever seem to have these days.
After this, I drove over to Dinas Powis to have coffee and a conversation with Russell on the subject of Artificial Intelligence. He's interested in what the church may have to say about it. I can't really say what theologians or Christian philosophers are publishing on this, let alone what Bishops and others have to say. In the end, it's a matter of morally evaluating the use of various AI resources and concluding whether they are a blessing or a curse, and that's complex enough. The key worry seems to be over progress towards autonomous self replicating systems, promised by visionary promoters to be with us in a couple of decades.
Seeing will be believing. All sorts of things are possible in lab conditions, like cloning sheep, but that's not turned out to be as perfect as hoped for. It's not just that such immense complexity can be perfectly reproduced, but that, to put it simply, the date, time and location of any clone is different from the original, and this alone my be enough of a change in the basic precondition for perfection to avoid flaws at a genetic or systemic level. We think that various mathematical universal constants governing the laws of the universe are perfect, unchanging and absolute. For the most part they are, until someone comes along with new observations of certain conditions which call the presumed absolute into question. There may be no end to the process of refinement in search of ultimate truth. Maybe, an infinite regress is all we can expect, like a hall of mirrors.
After this, I drove over to Dinas Powis to have coffee and a conversation with Russell on the subject of Artificial Intelligence. He's interested in what the church may have to say about it. I can't really say what theologians or Christian philosophers are publishing on this, let alone what Bishops and others have to say. In the end, it's a matter of morally evaluating the use of various AI resources and concluding whether they are a blessing or a curse, and that's complex enough. The key worry seems to be over progress towards autonomous self replicating systems, promised by visionary promoters to be with us in a couple of decades.
Seeing will be believing. All sorts of things are possible in lab conditions, like cloning sheep, but that's not turned out to be as perfect as hoped for. It's not just that such immense complexity can be perfectly reproduced, but that, to put it simply, the date, time and location of any clone is different from the original, and this alone my be enough of a change in the basic precondition for perfection to avoid flaws at a genetic or systemic level. We think that various mathematical universal constants governing the laws of the universe are perfect, unchanging and absolute. For the most part they are, until someone comes along with new observations of certain conditions which call the presumed absolute into question. There may be no end to the process of refinement in search of ultimate truth. Maybe, an infinite regress is all we can expect, like a hall of mirrors.
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