That's just it: people are dying and killing for metaphors all over the world.

"Only a small minority of believers in any of the scriptural religions, for example, have ever taken scripture literally."

Ward, not Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man where the protagonist is an invisible African American (post Harlem Renaissance), right?

That's just it: people are dying and killing for metaphors all over the world.

Aug 3, 2013 - 10:22am PT
I predict that by the 2020s we will see the first supercomputers designing new generations of supercomputers, with material innovations now on the horizon. The first credible android/ cyborgs will start to emerge , designed and built by other computers.

In the 2030s regional resource wars will break out, culminating in some sort of hideous conflict by 2035 in which nuclear weapons will be used on a somewhat large scale, resulting in the subsequent death of millions of people , largely by radioactive contamination of the environment and food chain .

The 2040s will be a period of recovery from these hideous wars and environmental devastation.
A new nation will be founded attracting growing numbers of disaffected people who seek to escape what they consider the folly of a world based upon the runaway excesses of technology.d
The world essentially will be divided between these two camps-- the 'naturals ' who favor a restricted and highly controlled technological society and the 'techs ' who favor no restrictions on technological growth.

In the early 2050s supercomputers will become so advanced that they will start to exhibit strong independent and autonomous characteristics . These highly advanced "supers "collectively develop a meta-program so awesomely powerful that it links every computer on earth and begins to solve problems with absolutely astounding solutions, at ever- increasing incredible speed. The cures for almost all human disease, like cancer, are finally realized, as well as a reversal of the radioactive genetic damage from the wars of the 2030s..
These computers ,having been built and designed by other computers, will consist almost entirely of different materials and components from the puny ones we have today.

By the 2060s the meta-program , which is not located in any one specific locale, has grown so powerful and omnipresent that it has designed and controls every aspect of collective human life, from food production, resource extraction, manufacturing, and environmental regulation and management. Computers do everything.

By 2070 the meta-program has decided that humans , at a population of 14 billion, represent a continuing threat to the integrity of the planet and to an ever growing legion of Artificial Intelligences.
The meta-program therefore designs a highly specialized group of viruses that can kill a person within an hour and subsequently massively dehydrate the corpse in another hour. Humans go from apparent health to a pile of dust in 2 hours.

The meta-program decides to eliminate 98% of the human race...
The year: 2072.

(I could be off by a year or two on that.)


Edit

utilitarian hard-on

whenever someone says or acts as though they have an excluisive on the truth, run for the hills.

My own reply to Leon Wieseltier should appear in The New Republic on-line shortly.

Yeah, I'm probably the only one following this but I post anyway as part of my own journey and journal of thought.

Always been a Pinker fan...

"The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

"Those [philosophers, pro or amateur] who want to be taken seriously when they launch inquiries about such central philosophical topics as morality, free will, consciousness, meaning, causality, time and space had better know quite a lot that we have learned in recent decades about these topics from a variety of sciences.

Unfortunately, many in the humanities [not to mention the climbing world, lol] think that they can continue to address these matters the old-fashioned way, as armchair theorists in complacent ignorance of new developments.

You can't defend the humanities by declaring it off limits to amateurs. The best way for the humanities to get back their mojo is to learn from the invaders and re-acquire the respect for truth that they used to share with the sciences.

But it's not too late to acquit yourself by leaving off with the forked-tongue reversals, take your own self seriously for a moment (it won't kill you), and say something, anything about your life, your ideas, your experience, your beliefs, lest we might think you are sans self, while mistaking yourself for a mirror.

Susan,
Always been a Pinker fan...

Well, that's neat! :)