The Great Fallacy
We don't know when. 2,000,000 years ago? 200,000 years ago? 20,000 years ago? We don't know how. Something happened in our brain. We don't know what. Clumsily, we now try to replicate the awakened brain. We call our attempts "computers." All we have is various prehistoric evidence that we woke up. Primitive tools of increasing refinement. Cave paintings and pictographs of increasing skill. And finally, writing, and thus history. And thus us. 6,000 years (the length of recorded history) of us. Full of lots of fun (art! science! sport!) and lots of not-fun (starvation! disease! exploitation! greed! war-war-war!). So far, so good-bad. II. Little did he suspect. Now we hurtle forward, connecting like crazy. The great landrushes of the past give way to the great bandwidth rush of the present. More, more, more! Faster, faster, faster! Luddites howl profitably at the superficiality of the New Connectedness. But surely some connection is better than no connection (as Forster seems to imply). So, intermittently, partially connected, we celebrate our paginated, pixelized with-it-ness.
The voices speak in many languages, in many times, in many places. Some at great length, some at hardly any length at all. Take away the filigree and (as Huxley pointed out in The Perennial Philosophy) you find they were all saying the same thing: Massive sensory evidence to the contrary, all is one.
Still, the quiet voices persist. And begin to become audible to veterans who've ridden the leviathan, verily, who think to have tamed it, only to note eventually with some puzzlement the troubling status of their hearts (empty!) and the transient nature of their achievement (sand!).
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