PERPS

Bubblehead: So nice to have you back. I worried that something might have happened to you. I don’t know what the world would do without your absolute dedication to the facts. Obviously I should have said Admiral Fallon rather than General Fallon (I confess that in most contexts Admirals and Generals are all the same to me, not being a dedicated military person). It is true, I believe, that Fallon was a superior officer to Petraeus. I believe it is also true that Fallon resigned (probably forced) because he resisted the Bush/Cheney desire to (perhaps) go to war against Iran. He also is on record of not having a very high opinion of Petraeus. As many believe Petraeus may be more amendable to such a strategy, in that sense he is presumably replacing Fallon in the eyes of Bush/Cheney. That he is not taking over the entire Command is not really the point although I suppose I should have made that clear (frankly, I don’t see that it matters much with respect to the Iran situation). I, Morialekafa, did not say I thought we were going to war with Iran, merely that some people do. Personally, I don’t think even your beloved Brafia is that stupid (although going by past experience they might be). In any case, if Morialekafa is not up to your obviously higher standards of truth and beauty, perhaps you should stop reading it.

Getting away from the ongoing absurdities of the “war” in Iraq and the equally absurd election campaigns for a moment (not an easy thing to do these days), let me fantasize about my idea for the Personal Experience Recovery and Preservation System (PERPS). I have always been an avid reader of biography and autobiography. It is perfectly obvious that no biography or autobiography can possibly deal with the entire life experience of any individual person, no matter how “average” or “inconsequential” a person may have been. A complete account of any person’s life would require the equivalent of several thousands of volumes, and may or may not be worth the effort. Thus all biographies are selective, extremely so, just focusing on things that the biographer or autobiographer thinks were significant. At the same time they invariably omit things the person does not want other to know about. No one could ever write a completely truthful biography or autobiography because everyone’s life contains experiences that were embarrassing, illegal, inappropriate, gauche, stupid, unconscionable, or whatever. Thus the sum total of a person’s experience is lost when they die. It is not their soul that leaves the body but, rather, all those experiences they have had. Why is this important? Because of culture. The essence of culture is that human experience and knowledge can be transmitted extragenetically from generation to generation. It is this capacity that makes it possible for naked apes like us to actually survive and compete on the world stage. It saves us time and energy as it makes it possible to not just have to discover things new over and over again. Things that were solved by experience in previous generations can be transmitted to us, thus enabling us to avoid having to do that. But because of the limitations of biography, fully 99% (perhaps even more) of a human’s experiences just evaporate when they die. So think of just how more powerful culture and its transmission would be if we could recover all that personal experience instead of a mere fraction of it, and preserve it for the following generations. Naturally a lot of it would be repetitive and superfluous, but there would doubtless be some true gems of knowledge and experience that would otherwise be lost. We need some kind of machine or device or system for capturing and sorting this lost experience, something that could be hooked up to the person just before death that would record and preserve all the best of it for mankind at large. This assumes, of course, that the experience a person has during his or her lifetime is preserved somewhere, however consciously, unconsciously or subconsciously, in that unusually large brain (this might not work for members of the Brafia). Fantastic? Of course. But more fantastic than time machines, black holes, people from outer space, world peace, or Bush/Cheney telling the truth? I don’t think so. Instead of spending billions more on clever and diabolical ways to kill each other, let’s work on it.

LKBIQ:
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Alan Kay