Arguing Against Myself – Final

In the first blog entry I wrote of the impending doom that Dreyfus warns us about in his book. I related it to the move “The Matrix” and about how everyone might end up in this computer simulated world, while in reality they are lying motionless is some pod somewhere. This is not all that bad if you think about it. First of all there is no disease, no death, no cancer, and no real danger at all. We could live our lives without worry or fear. There would be no need for money; we could do what we wanted, when we wanted with really no one or nothing to answer too. This, according to Thomas More himself, is called Utopia or a perfect world. Now we could take a page from the “Matrix” book and use our bio-electricity to support the system and could develop interfaces so that people inside the virtual world could fix any problem with the programs from the inside. Granted this would take many years to develop and could cost millions of dollars. But by charging a one time entry fee you could easily cover the cost, and if we can use bio-electricity to power the program and computers there would be no continuing cost. I don’t know how much outside maintenance computers require, like replacing circuits or processers, but that could be solved by building in the ability to remove ones self from the program. Now of course the only people who could or would want to would be computer programmers or people who could repair that type of stuff. And think about the impact the program would have on the environment, little to none. No burning coal or natural gas to power the system, no production of cars, houses, or buildings. No human waste either biological or man-made. No more landfills or garbage dumps, burning of fossil fuels, hunting of animals anything. It would be like it was before humans ever existed. The world could return to its natural state and everything could be in balance. And we don’t need to force any one to join, eventually everyone will see the advantage to being in a virtual world and join on their own. Then people will be plugged in from birth, with the knowledge there is an outside world, and even then we could give them a choice, here or there. The world itself would just be better off if we as humans did this. Of course not everyone could afford this so there would still be an outside world that people within the program could go out to. This again gives the option of whether or not a person would want to stay in the program.
In another blog I argued that Sims was simply complaining when he says, in simple terms, we need more silence in our lives. Now I can understand where he is coming from. There is literally no way to get away from the noise we create as humans. Everywhere we go there is usually some source of noise there, whether it is at the mall, a baseball game, or our own homes. TV’s, Radio’s, and PA systems blast our senses with useless and endless amounts of noise. And what is the purpose of this? To advertise or influence? This is simply demeaning our society because it is implying that we cannot decide for our selves what we want or need. Every you go there is an ad or sponsors for something telling us we need this or we need that. When in all honesty we really don’t. When was the last time you need a new pair of $120 Nikes or a $60 shirt. I am not saying we need to not wear clothes, I’m saying there is no need to purchase a $120 pair of shoes. And granted we all have a choice, but we need not let that choice be influenced by large companies or conglomerates. This is partly to blame for our struggling economy. It is largely service based so if the economy falters slightly people try to save money and do not use or use as little services as possible, therefore driving our economy down farther. Companies have advertised so much and placed so much on their service sectors that when the economy falters a little bit, it absolutely kills them. If we as a society would buy only the products needed and base that purchase on product quality we would develop a very solid economy that would be very unlikely to falter. This is because companies would not be able to bet on people buying excess product for there own enjoyment, and would therefore have to focus inward on themselves on products and there employees. Advertising would be a small and insignificant part of there business strategy and would remove much of the advertising from our daily life. And how much noise would be removed from our lives if advertising was virtually eliminated? I’d venture to say almost all of it.