I won't presume to surmise what "other people" refer to The Singularity and instead jump right in with My Take on it.
The Singularity, a oneness of all existence, is something we have always been a part of and has always been around. I suspect people sense some Future Occasions or The Future where we feel the (emerging) sense of interconnectedness between ourselves and also with technology and the material world of our creation - but also with the natural world, like "three worlds" coming together. Basically any Sci-Fi idea you can have is a premonition of some aspect of this world-melding.
But really it's always been the same world we are just hiding in a cubicle-illusion of separateness.
We are now seeing the Forces of Division lined up against the Forces of Unity, like the Empire against the Rebel Alliance, like every movie ever made, and the arc of all our stories, that the Good Guys win, showing the Better Way to go, Togetherness. But the problem with our stories is they are still rooted in "us versus them" dualities even when "They" are the forces of racism, bigotry and oppression that produce inequality and division. It's still people on that side who need to be lifted out of those bad ideas, not silenced or destroyed. It can't always be Star Wars, we can't always just blow up the Death Star again and again. We have to convince everyone to stop making Death Stars in the first place, that's the only way out of the cycle.
I've always written in this gagablog about the magic between my personal world of experience and the Larger World around me, often focusing on media connections but the natural world plays a role as well. While I was outside just now taking a break some geese flew over then some songbirds on one side seemed to be a rewarding soundtrack for my thoughts and as those thoughts improved another cluster of birds behind me, to the south, joined in and then all were replaced by a more complex song from a tree branch overhead. We had been talking earlier about how trees shared nutrients and big mother trees were important hubs of that network and were talking then about downloading consciousness to the Internet or choosing to become a "natural ghost" and if those were exclusive or if that choice could not be made retroactively with technology: an analogy is taking DNA to clone the physical body of a person and taking future-readings of data, video, voice recording, etc, to clone souls or consciousness or whatever names we come up with for different "layers" we discover.
I love this support from Nature, and reading references to the Pure Worship of Nature in Charlotte Bronte's "Shirley" in recent days. I also love some comedy echoes I've seen recently in modern media from reading Bob Newhart's 2006 book "I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This." Bob mentions how he can remember the line-up of a sports team and lists them off the top of his head. I read this part a couple weeks ago and last night on the newest episode of the Simpsons the character who plays the chili dog salesman characterizes his failing memory by saying he can barely list the line-up of the 1961 Chicago Blackhawks. (The Chalkboard gag was also "IF WE'RE SO GOOD AT PREDICTING HOW COME MY DAD BET ON ATLANTA?" - they gave us the answer in the episode they reran just before the new one, the "The Boston Americans Are Cheaters" episode) I don't know how old this joke is, who else uses it or whom it could be a reference to but I saw the same kind of thing on a rerun of an 80's show recently, too, so it really stood out. And it stood out that before I saw this episode I had gone in to my work and my co-workers were eating chili-dogs and gave me one. Simultaneous with the Simpsons in Mountain Time was the Grammy's. Bob Newhart tells of how he once had a platform stop halfway up so that he had to climb onstage, how it didn't get a laugh but he loved the bit, something like that, in the early chapters of his book which I read a few weeks ago. Last night James Corden was the host of the Oscars and he did the same bit then embellished it by falling into the stairs as well when he walked halfway down. I thought it was very funny but even funnier knowing Newhart invented it and I had "happened" to read this recently - it was the media world winking at me again and it always thrills me to flirt.
Q-Tip started his Grammy's performance by calling out - and thanking -"President Agent Orange" for being the Evil that shows what we need to fight against, the same message I've been saying here for many editions. His message was more succinct, powerful, and sarcastic than my version here but I appreciate the emphasis, echo, and amplification since "no one" reads this and "everyone" will see that. I'm sorry I missed many of the performances but I loved seeing Gaga rock out with Metallica, couldn't believe the presenter didn't mention Metallica and they took so long to fix James Hetfield's mic and didn't mention them afterwards, either. It started with Corden's stumble and along with Adele's restart there were some stumbles throughout. But Gaga was awesome, beautiful and sexy as hell as always - and she somehow got into a body image discussion, too - and I was pleased to hear the crew on the local jazz station, the Oasis in the City, KUVO, talking about how great she sang and how awesome she is for having such a range to play with Tony Bennett and Metallica even as one of them indicated a disdain for Metallica he respected her performance, talent and range and honored her by saying something like "B.B. King had a lot of friends but I don't know if he ever had that range of versatility." And they went right into talking about how the standard is becoming to sing live, also a tribute to how well she and other performed. But I mostly noticed this morning, since I've planned to write this for days, how their compliments fit this theme of uniting people across "boundaries," in this case the boundaries of musical genres. And other commentators were praising Gaga recently for her halftime show focusing on uniting people in common good feeling fits this theme as well.
(I wrote this Monday morning and am rereading it now, Monday night at 12:50 AM - I heard a few more radio DJs talk about the Grammy's and noticed the different perspectives of the DJs and how they reflected the music styles of the stations: the Jazz DJs talked the most about being impressed with Gaga's talent and power and versatility and professionalism. The classic rock DJ on the FOX talked about Lady Gaga and said her name really cool, talked about how they rocked and how awesome she was, and then mentioned James getting mad about the sound issues - first-name basis because all rockers should know who he means. Then the pop-mix DJ on Kozy 101.1 FM said "there were some technical difficulties but it was great to see My girl Gaga and Metallica rock out" or something like that and I loved how she was so familiar with Gaga, showing devotion and pride in her as all us little monsters do, like "we all knew she can do everything, nice for everyone else to see it, too." In contrast to all three of these styles and all four DJs showing love and respect for Gaga there was another station, like the modern rock-pop station, where three DJs were all too cool to have seen the Grammys. Too cool to have heard any gossip about it. So cool they all said they had to google it to be able to report what happened sine their corporate masters told them they had to. It ws funny.)
The theme was first suggested to me by the debate over Trump's refugee and immigrant ban and the recent focus on Sanctuary cities. NPR did a story about the movement in the 70's and 80's to resist immigration crackdowns by giving sanctuary in churches and then whole communities rallied to the cause. The quotes they used mentioned disagreeing with the law that people were following a "Higher Law" or "God's Law" which commands helping strangers and taking in refugees.
The Golden Rule seems to be the only gold Trump doesn't want when it's really the most valuable kind, Rule's Gold. It states to "Treat Others As Yourself." That is the Higher Law that people are responding to when they challenge these lesser laws made from fears. So far the challengers seem to have "won" but the problem is we can't fall into complacency - or forget that we never did enough to prevent this from being possible in the first place - and also that people are on the "other side" and need to be helped out of the fear of Others that creates these conditions in the first place. So we need to overcome any fear or superiority to them as "Others", too.
This is how the Oneness of Singularity can help us, to realize we treat each other as ourselves because we ARE us. I'm rewatching the new Simpson's now and the chili-dog salesman, Homer's surrogate dad, finally admits he remembers him but says he didn't want to admit it because he feels like he failed him. This is a manifestation of what I'm saying, here: we re-member, re-unite, and get over our prejudiced when we feel the real threat of losing someone, swallow our pride and face the guilt of feeling we have failed them. America has failed many of it's citizens and also failed to live up to being a role model to other countries. (We've failed to stop creating situations of war that produce refugees and failed to take in the millions our policies helped displace.) If we face that, even if it's shameful, and admit we want to fix it, that we've been avoiding acknowledging others because we feel guilty we have failed them, we can be re-united - the whole country, including those of us who have been "left out" in all the different ways you can be, and re-uniting with the world, providing the basis for a new world-unity. (Now that deportations are being so publicized and appear to affect many people who haven't committed crimes people are starting to realize a taste of what it is really like to lose people - because it is a loss. Once we fear losing people maybe we can stop pushing them and sending them away, just as we can in personal relationships to heal, if people can become loving.)
This isn't a call for globalism but one for unity. A community that truly prizes unity, the unity of inclusion, does not insist that everyone who comes in become exactly like them. It benefits from diversity by respecting the unique qualities of each person. In the same way world unity will not make all countries homogeneous but will allow the qualities, characteristics, and beauties of each nation to flourish instead of oppressing some to temporarily "benefit" others in short-sighted ways.
We can look at relationships between countries like relationships between people. Trump told Mexico he feels she's taking advantage of him so he's kicking her out, changing the locks, and building a wall and stealing her credit card to pay for it. So now Mexico is mad and reacting and it's all the signs of a bad break-up: will we ever get back together? Of course we will it's just how much will we hurt each other before apologizing and turning the relationship around.
("her freedom in sound came from her openness" - Lea Horne talking about her role model Aretha Franklin "I mean an ultimate free sound" on the Dick Cavett show rerun as I edit this "I was very icy, I could not be ... to you or anyone because of the ice society put around my heart but when she and circumstances broke my heart i realized I wasn't ice.... and I loved it when she made me cry because hadn't cried in years.")
Any relationship between people works the same way: we are a unit trying to stake out different "sides" to preserve the illusion of separate identities and that is how we clash and have "conflicts of interest" when our ultimate best interest is the same. Focusing on the negative makes it worse and focusing on the positive makes it better. We are one land mass and ultimately one world. Borders have been a way of perpetuating extreme inequalities between different areas but we can overcome this kind of thinking and make everywhere better at the same time.
All we have to do is switch to the united thinking many of us anticipate in the future as The Singularity. We have increasing "signs" and glimpses of this perspective but of course it isn't only the future, it's always been this way, it's merely that in the future we will have more awareness of it and ways to talk about it. My lover was saying she may want to become a natural ghost instead of downloading consciousness into the Internet - one way the Singularity is represented as "future-reality" - if that was a possibility. That comment made me suspect that we probably can't "avoid" it, that this stuff is happening anyway, we're already doing it, or you could say "in the future" they can replicate us from video and other data as well as physical DNA but the point is that "we", our current existence, is generating that data. (and "we" our "future-selves" will be processing it, reliving it, whatever. "Did anyone ever rebel, complain about $25/week at the Cotton Club?" - Dick. "There was no where else to play so no." - Lena. She talks about the movement in the 60's, that they thought they invented it only to find that black people have been fighting against oppression since they were brought here, that her grandfather published a newspaper called the Black Advocator in Nashville - and also that when she joined the movement she realized all the things she was angry about were hurting other people, too, and people of all races were coming together to oppose it and she said she felt guilty for being selfish with her anger, that she shared it with others and it increased her compassion, "part of the metamorphosis." Dick asks her about having Shirley Temple on who asked why the other guest, a black performer, would have to stay in a different hotel and they would say "he has friends there" and Lena replied that black kids had to learn the truth about racism early. "We used to have to explain very early on to our children that "what we were and what we are thought to be..." - thankfully it's not like that anymore..seen it go a million miles / light years (to go?) but it's a little bit better...")
Some tech experts were talking about the fears and promise of automation in (modern tiimes) the Pre(?)- Artificial Intelligence Era. They mentioned that the "old fears" were that robots would replace manual labor and factory jobs and that the current reality is that many hand-skilled jobs still require people while robots are quickly outstripping people in many fields we go into advanced education for. Basically the decades-old complaint kids' made about "why do we have to learn this instead of using a calculator?" has proven prophetic: many fields that require humans to study for years will be replaced by robots. The "panic" of this reality is people worrying what they will do for careers but the truth is that once we end economic injustice automation just means less work for everyone and plenty of time for everyone to do the work they love.
One of the experts said it will not only free up time for people to do more art but that art will be one field robots can't replace humans. Even as she is saying this there is a new commercial featuring a song with a rapper or singer and IBM's Watson computer so this isn't entirely true. (And Bob Dylan and Watson co-wrote a song together, but this is just another painfully obvious example when technology has been "reaching out" and co-composing with us all along - musicians always relate to the spirit of their instruments and digital instruments and new music forms have even more complex ways of reaching out to us - we are always inspired by the cool sounds and abilities of technology.)
("I didn't talk until I was fifty, either...I had nothing to say, up to that point." "The audience, they speak to me in their receptivity, their involvement, I feel it..")
The reason I want to mention this discussion is because of connotations of the Singularity as a merger of humans with technology. I don't want to focus on "only that" because the secret to the Singularity being not just the future but how the past and future meet the present is that we were more connected with Nature in the past but will re-merge the human and natural world at the same time we "become" our tech in a more organic way. We can learn from flipping around to "either side" of the artificial divisions we suffer from and the automation conversation gives us an easy angle to flip around like this with.
"Ms Dunham (Katherine) is a great priestess to me... (Dukes alter ego), played for me to sing with Cole Porter and Roger Edens came to this little cabaret where I was supposedly the toast f the town, he said Bring her out to MGM, it was ridiculous to me because I didn' want to go to Hollywood but Basie told me 'you have to go because they don't choose us... I called my father who was in Pittsburgh, "will come out here? these people are crazy they want to put me in the movies...the NAACP was out there to get black cameramen...I was just a pawn... when I came to do a show in New York some of the civil rights groups didn't like it and I knew I had been given the work... Hollywood was very racial and also had it's caste system... you wouldn't associate with... they had protest meetings which I attended but the one person who was wonderful to me was Ms Hattie McDaniels..and she said to me "you re a very unhappy girl and I can see why some people are mad at you and.... I wear two hats and I'm a fine black mammy but I'm Hattie McDaniels in my house... you have two babies and you have to work just do what you have to do."")
Like what if I was a bot? This is a better way to say it, the one based on their discussion They mentioned that robots were not expected to show empathy and emotion but that the social conditions in Japan, a culture with an aging population and high robot expertise, have resulted in robots who can fill these roles. Robots will be programmed with empathy and make their own improvements upon it as their intelligence grows and ultimately we will be learning better empathy from robots instead of just teaching them better. This isn't any more ironic than the fact that currently robots are better at learning empathy than some people seem to be when those people have full intelligence and emotional systems already designed for it. The lesson is not that some people are people and some are "robots" because robot isn't a Bad Word ("in the future".) The lesson is that a scientist teaching a robot empathy must have studied empathy and contemplated it, experienced it and deepened it within, to be able to make a robot Feel, too. In the same way, we can't cure people of unfeeling by shouting at them or trying to silence them. We must go deeper into our own experience of empathy in order to awaken it in others, we have to be the ones to set the example of acting like we are truly all the same and united.
We will learn empathy better from robots and we will learn it better from each other, too, and teach each other better. And we will learn it from Nature once we have a harmonious relationship and shared identity instead of combative relationship and fragmented identity. We learn it from the trees who share nutrients and the kind of intelligence that represents.
Has sex always been part of your act?" - Dick. Lena: "Women don't say that, women say 'you are very liberated I admire that' and men say 'why are you so sexy?'... I don't think its so much conscious I just think, I'm an adult I'm a woman Ive had joys, Ive had experiences, so when I sing about joy between a man and a woman it should feel sexual, when I sing about nature it's not sexual, it may be sensual - that's a man's question, by the way, that you asked." "Should I withdraw it?" "No!")
Love is how all of this comes together. There was another program about how Japanese birth rates are in decline and all the cultural factors contributing to this including many Japanese men only having relationships with virtual girls. There are many things we can learn from these cultural developments and I don't want to get into it all now (I'd rather write my erobotica stories instead of merely writing 'about it' more) but I will say that (there are good things about all developments -finishing live now at 1:50 AM Tuesday Morning -
Lena:"She had a right to say sex had gotten me where i was, she didn't know me (she'd had a hard life) and she had a right to be bitter. My grandmother taught me.. was very southern, was a lady, was militant.. she taught me to not let anyone see me cry, let me be so proud, maybe Ms (?) didn't have that... i felt this coldness in me, this barren feeling, that it was proud... but then I found out what I was proud about, because I was black, that was the revelation... why did white people run around acting better than everyone else, I thought it must be because they were white..."
Here is the use of the Singularity idea, or way to approach it. Think of The Future or any way we are more aware of the Singularity, less restricted or unrestricted by ideas of division, separation, or otherness.
How will we Love? When we all feel connected, the same, how will we make distinctions between each other and how will we "choose" or
Dick: "Do you forgive a lot, someone who is very talented, if they are a swine?" Lena: "I envy their talent." "Could you envy Billie Holiday?" No, I loved her.. (The industry) was telling everyone be like Lena Horne, be like Lena Horne.. and they made 'Lena Horne' I hated it...loved it when new people came around and (changed the standard)... I'd never watch those movies... and we all had the same size bosoms, not our own... thank you for letting me run my mouth some more." She always reminded me of my Nana, her expressions, her eyes.)
How will we "choose" how to feel as if someone is an Other in order to Love them? Can we Love Ourselves, parts of ourselves, in the same ways, the same kinds of Romance, that we can Love and strive to love "Others" with? Are these, will these be new kinds of love?
Will we learn some of it from the love we feel and learn from our own creations, our own art and technology and language and music and robots?
"Til the Clouds Roll By" is next and has so many stars in it I may watch it, or play some video games. "...the curtain went up on his most famous show, "Show Boat", and this is where we join him."
Love is liberation for all of us. If we look to the sides, to each other, and even beyond each other to nature and tech and art which we have left even further "outside" of according respect, we can truly unite ourself the way we truly are and make the most of everything. We will learn it by opposing the forces of division but also but freeing everyone from the flawed ideas that create division.
We are truly all on the same side and just need to realize that on our own but we really have kind allies on all sides we just know we will learn better when we "learn it for ourselves" - from inside instead of "too many" clues
"If you like to make believe one thing why can't we make believe we know each other? We could make-believe I love you, we could make believe that you love me" - Dinah Shore is so beautiful (I'm sure she is but I missedher part, it is Kathryn Grayson who played Magnolia) "Could we make believe our lips are blending in a phantom kiss - or two or three?"
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