BURN

Come on out when you’re Abel.

Morgan Jones, 

Patriarch of House-Morgan

 

When investigating the village in Zaire in the movie Outbreak, several huts are burned down. 

This is the traditional tribal method for controlling the spread of an infection in many parts of The World. 

Food and water are left outside the entrance to the dwelling, and the occupants cannot leave. 

If several days (usually three or four) of these supplies are not used, then the dwelling is burned down to stop the infection from spreading.

It’s useful to stay informed - but you don’t have to be INUNDATED. 

That way, Madness Lies. 

It’s too damn complicated.  

You’re constrained by your own existence, and then you're constrained by the existence of Other People, and then you're also constrained by The World. 

If I read Hamlet and what I extracted out of that is the idea that I should jump off a bridge, it puts my interpretation to an end rather quickly. It doesn’t seem to be optimally functional. 

An interpretation is constrained by the reality of The World. It’s constrained by the reality of Other People, and it’s constrained by your reality across time. There’s only a small number of interpretations that are going to work in that tightly defined space. 

That’s part of the reason that postmodernists are WRONG. 

It’s also part of the reason, by the way, that AI people who are trying to make intelligent machines have had to put them in a body. It turns out that you just can’t make something intelligent without it being embodied, and it’s partly for the reasons that I've just described. 

You need constraints on The System, so that The System doesn’t drown in an infinite sea of interpretation.

It’s like what, uh, a father said to son when he give him a watch that had been handed down through generations. 

He said 

"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire, which will fit your individual needs no better than it did mine or my father's before me, I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you may forget it for a moment now and then and not spend all of your breath trying to CONQUER it."

Amy:

You are so weird.

Dale :

It's not me, it's Faulkner. 

William Faulkner. 

Maybe my bad paraphrasing.