Interesting Read--You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
We are not yet looking deeply enough into its intellectual foundations, which can be traced to the Greeks, to the interplay between Platonic idealism and Aristotle's metaphysics -- this was where the still-standing intellectual edifice of divorcing form and substance began. From it, we have now put ourselves in the strange posture of having 'information' be one of the most real, defining aspect of our day-to-day lives, but no clear notion of its right relation to reality in a philosophic or intellectual sense. Lanier's work takes a worthy cut at the resulting hyperbolic claims that have been made about the power of information in the Web 2.0 age, but doesn’t get altogether to the heart of the matter.
In the East, this divergence between form and substance never hardened. It was a distinction held much more lightly, so that the term for the material universe, prakrti, encompassed, in addition to gross matter like earth and water, also mind, intellect and ego.I will have a good deal more to say on this …
