Outside it was stuffy this Sunday, my feet were on the coffee table, a drop of sweat crawled down my forehead, and there was nothing on television. Yes, the news, endless repetitions, and okay, sport, but that falls in a different category. I was reminded of Virginia Woolf, who Waves (1931) Sighing wrote: ‘How much better is the silence; The coffee cup, the table. How much better it is to be alone like the lonely sea bird that opens its wings on the post. ” And I thought it was with her. I prefer to be among people, but that is not given a raid TV columnist in the summer.
Now that the army of talk show hosts is on vacation and Summer Casters Not started yet, time really tastes like cucumbers. Unjustified of course, and alienating, because the world is burning. And hard too. Fortunately, an old video of the philosopher Awee Prins showed up on the timeline of my social media. In an interview of VPRO Books From 2007, the Colds (now Emeritus) says Boker teacher: “You no longer have to look for the interesting, for pastime, but allow the impasse of the deep boredom. In that impasse the possibility of stilling arises.” The stillness is the gateway to happiness, according to Prins, and the truth, I think.
Because when I started to allow the impasse of boredom, I saw an episode of it Philosophical quintet (Quartet) (NPO 2) that was worth it. That was because of three things: the guests did not agree all the time for a change and had the debate with humor, and the current affairs value was high. Theme: The truth.
The truth is a social process, the guests at Grunberg at the table agreed. We work on it together, produce it as a community. This means that the truth is not relative, but: “People’s work, from people who are situated from a social, economic, political positioning,” said Jaron Harambam, who is assistant professor of sociology but sometimes admitted that he is a professor. “There comes knowledge that is not universal, and that is not necessarily … well, ‘objective’ is a difficult word, because then the accusation is that the knowledge that is produced is ‘even an opinion’, or an expression is only of power. So I think it is important to show that knowledge is constructed, but that it can still be robust.”
The struggle for the truth is essentially a struggle for common sense, brought in cultural philosopher Thijs Lijster. Hopefully chatgpt will not win that fight, because it can lie too well, moreover, it will be better and better and will never admit that it doesn’t know anything. Not robust. But whether we will ever become human cows, Grunberg asked, subjected to a superior AI? Tech philosopher Marjolein Lanzing thought that those kinds of questions distract from the physical damage that the world and the climate are already experiencing through the Energiedorst of AI.
Hypnotizing voice
On NPO 2, the EO later showed an episode of the six -part nature documentary on this quiet Sunday Mammals. It was about mammals in the water. Under the hypnotizing voice of Sir David Attenborough, the most beautiful images came by. Images of splashing monkeys and swimming moles, of friendly dolphins and sea lions. Images of a dying world, a world on which only one mammal is walking around that can deny the truth.
“Every year so many fishing nets disappear into the ocean that they can reach the moon and back. Together with twenty million traps and fourteen billion fish hooks.” The lines cut the bodies of the sperm whales, because of the floats on those nets they have difficulty diving to catch squid. And so, says Attenborough simple but effective, just as he can only do that: “Now that we know what dangers we cause, we have to do everything we can to prevent them.” Talk about a robust truth.