X-Message-Number: 5296
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 17:53:44 -0500 (EST)
From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <>
Subject: Re: Future patient care investments

On Tue, 28 Nov 1995, Keith F. Lynch wrote:

> > ... until such an ultimate eventuality as our all becoming part of a
> > single universal intelligence.
> 
> Why should we all ever become part of a single universal intelligence?
> --
> Keith Lynch, 

1) First let me clarify that I'm not saying we *should*.  I have no opinion.

2) But there are various reasons for thinking it a possible eventuality:
	a) it is imaginable, and whatever humans imagine may one day 
happen, given that "one day" extends not just through the next 200 years 
(into an already unforeseeable future), but through the next 2,000,000,000
years;
	b) there may already be the beginnings of a pan-galactic 
intelligence in our galaxy, or a universal intelligence in the universe, 
but we haven't run across it or it chooses to leave us alone at present; 
however, that may change, we may contact it, and everyone may end up 
joining it;
	c) suppose we are the most intelligent life form in the universe, 
and we expand for a billion years and more, and we as individuals are 
still alive, think how much we would have changed: our 
individual intelligences could well be so vast that we would want to 
increase them further by the only possible way left open, sharing with 
others; and this might not mean a change in personality, for who knows 
what our personality would be by then;
	d) the very concept of "where does the universe come from, 
anyway?" is so mind-boggling, that the theory that we are all fragments
of a single pre-universe intelligence to which we are seeking to return 
makes as much sense as anything else.

But again, I'm not saying we *should*....

Robin HL


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