It’s more than half an hour as my younger sister
switched on our PC and she’s been looking for another piece of information for
her domestic task on History. ”Click-click!” Quickly she finds out what was
happening during the WWII. The tired and sleepy printer mourns unwillingly and
then pushes out some sheets of paper with names and dates on them. You can see
here even the map which covers in detail the process of this or that battle.
Now it’s time for the break. After reading and
learning by heart several chapters in the student’s book she decides to visit
her page “Vkontakte”. Her little accurate fingers are searching for necessary
letters on a virtual keyboard on the screen of her tablet while she tries to log
in. Small but convenient gadget helps often to keep on touch with others almost
everywhere we are at this or that moment.
The noise of the computer is still heard from the
room. I go to switch it off.
It’s rather a
big machine, bulky a bit, consisting of many parts which we use for numerous
purposes, rather complicated. And – big.
The latest
devices of nowadays are much smaller, their size is that of the book even
thinner. Times change, humans invent more and more gadgets, simple outside and
complicated in their core.
Just imagine a monitor or a keyboard working without
that huge block, which bears the proud name “Brain”. Yes, it supports and
provides the functions of the other PC parts. Funny thing, earlier I thought
the monitor is the essential part of any computer. In reality it only reflects
the process of working on the computer, just like our appearance and deeds
mirror our essence, character, thoughts, relations…
Times change. As some years have already passed, I’ve
got a small collection of various gadgets, which were birthday gifts or which I
bought myself. Several phones (as a birthday rule, I’ve received a phone every
3 years), a notebook, a tablet. And the
main computer, which is for all. It’s interesting to follow the changes in the
gadgets. Further – more perfect. And smaller.
And smarter. Humans create more
and more devices and they do it quicker and quicker. It’s even fashionable now
to change phones for more up-to-date ones, maybe not for their functions,
memory, cameras but for stylish design, for mark and price. In our times it’s
not surprising to see a small child with the iPhone. People chase the products
which are not only the result of technical progress but the part of marketing.
People are mad about their devices. People replace their memory and
capabilities by those of their perfect gadgets. People refuse to communicate in
real life by means of virtual reality. People forget books…
Though we must understand that everything is relative
in this world and we can’t judge what is better or worse now in comparison with
previous decades, centuries, we can’t moralize without looking properly through
historical times… At least many educated persons use their gadgets to read or
write books or create beautiful pictures (known as computer graphics). Maybe,
these books and works of art are technically weaker unlike their predecessors
in the case of how save and keep them – the more perfect a device is, the more
it is capricious and fragile; but, surely, people will find or invent a method
how to store information on electronic carriers.
Times change. People explore, invent, develop, create…
What was unusual, unbelievable and bizarre a century ago is quite habitual
nowadays. And on the contrary – it’ll be strange to imagine how people would
use airships, old-time trains and cars, and what is more – huge machines which
occupy space equal to football field, weigh almost 40 tons and work not so
quickly – in their everyday life. People seek new discoveries to make their
life easier and safer in different ways and to know more about the world
around. The space of our knowledge becomes wider, but the horizon of cognition
is still far from us, even more farther, as a cleverer and moreover wiser human
understands the absence of cognoscibility
of the world, of the Cosmos and the Universe.
They are experimenting with devices, test them, and
improve. Perhaps in the future, closest or farthest, we will see the fruits of
infinite searching. A robot will be our best helper. Humans can’t reach far
planets themselves – the robots will be able.
And what if they become uncontrolled? What if we leave
them for themselves suddenly? What if the results of our creation would be the
new race which would inhabit the planet and turn it out to a new world, strange
for people of this Old World?
This delirium seems to be brought on by fantastic
films or novels. It’s possible that reasonable machines will “conquer” the
solid part of our life and help us to save more time and strength for business,
entertainment, discoveries and more inventions (!), but even if they would
replace mankind totally, this would happen not so soon as many of us tend to
think. It’s more possible that mankind itself can erase them from Earth by
means of various “perfect” weapons – in any time. Maybe I am too realistic
concerning invading our old poor planet by robots or even aliens.
There is another thing that interests me. The fact is
that people tend to create.
Everything we made, if it is constructive or not, was created by us.
A human, while creating something, orientates on
living world or, if further, on himself. Notice that many things surrounding us
remind something which exists in nature, suppose we this or not when creating.
Fabric reminds us about spider net; paper is made not only by humans, but also
by wasps; plain wings resemble dragon-fly wings; tanks in some manner are like
mechanized turtles; even such phenomenon as Internet can be considered as
human-made inheritor of the spider’s web as it tights people and “sticks” them
to the screens of their PC monitors, tablets, etc.
And what about computers, about which it was written
above? We create them, improve them and make them more convenient and smarter.
When we make another new model we orientate on ourselves to create the clever
machine, which will be our helper and in some sense companion. The numerous
terms (or their equivalents) which we use to describe the structure of the
device can also be somewhat applicable for humans or their occupations at
least. It’s incontestable that we try to recreate the reasonable creature
similar to us.
Everything we create is similar to us and our world.
In general we all create. Scientists, travelers,
writers, artists, actors and even ordinary people tend to create. All we are
Creators in our own way.
Religion says about the Creation which started it all.
The human was its highest form, as he was the reflection of God. His inheritor
on the beautiful Earth of the Old Times
I can’t say
that I am too much into creationism, but probably it could explain that what
the science can’t. Maybe some inner
disbelief and contradictions don’t let me to be in solidarity with
creationists’ ideas…
We pass through different stages of creation from the
very birth.
We start creating early in childhood. Children,
perhaps, are the wisest creators in the human’s world. When adults fail to
understand the world and id give it their new-born creations, children already
have answers to many questions of eternity. By means of the play, their
capability to learn about world and create
their own world through games and toys. I have already remembered a verse
from an old horoscope magazine. It sounded like:
Как наш Творец-дитя, играя, создал
миры,
Так дети начинают свой путь, вдыхая
жизнь в игрушки…
People like to create parallel worlds. These worlds
are shown in books people write, pictures they draw and everything in culture
people create and keep. The latest manifestation of mankind-created worlds is
virtual reality, which slow but sure transforms into the real world
alternative. A lot of us know the term “hyperreality”, which meaning is
inability of consciousness to distinguish the simulation of the reality from
the reality itself; it happens mainly in post-modern societies of now. People
are closed in their own created worlds, where they are gods, rulers, emperors
of all time.
Can’t it happen that our real world is somebody’s else hyperreality and the result of His
imagination? Can’t it be that all we create in our minds is real somewhere as
the product of our imagination? This is
where Creationism ideas can work and science is in most cases helpless. Each
smallest part of this world, each atom can be called microuniverse; macro- and
micro- are connected, so we deal with Great multiuniverse…
It sounds crazy from the ordinary person plunged in
the daily routine, but haven’t we experienced philosophical nostalgia during
which we understand our nonentity and greatness at the same time? If we can imagine the existence of Non-being
,why can’t it come to its existence and to be parallel to Being?
It’s possible that we, while inventing perfect human-like
creations in the image of modern computers and other machines, create side by
side parallel reality by means of virtual images, created in their turn with
the help of our gadgets, which are only instruments of our creation process and
which are minimal form of
anthropologic evolution if compare with the whole universe of virtual reality.
Step by step humans try to repeat the Great Something which is called Creation
in our language. Perhaps without understand it we try to go the way He, somebody named our Father, who started It by
chance or premeditated, was going then. We try to reach our divine roots.
That’s
possibly why all we create resembles us
in some degree. And we resemble the
Great in some manner.
I was going to
switch off our computer when some kind of mood, maybe the philosophical
nostalgia seized me for a moment. Different pictures from nowhere suddenly
appeared in my mind, while a rumble of something lonely for a couple of minutes
cut me off the reality and made me forget everything around for just an
instant.
Later I
wondered what it was. Maybe that was a kind of enlightenment. Or simply
fatigue.
We don’t know
about the nature of these very moments which suddenly happen. We just go our
way. We repeat the Great History step by step.
