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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

lchic - 05:25pm Jan 31, 2003 EST (# 8422 of 8426)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Don your waterwings guys and dive into the 'think-tank' and think on how the gifted, talented, genius mind has the ability to 'move culture', 'move technology' onwards ...

""Artists, scientists and indeed philosophers are all engaged in evolving new descriptions of the world that are more enabling than the pre-existing interpretations. We should be considering 'what is the point of creative thought and action' as opposed to repetitive actions resulting from an unquestioned acceptance of already established concepts. .... Although these primates use rudimentary tools no animal other than ourselves has a complex conceptual or material culture nor do we in fact need one in order to exist. .... So what is the benefit that has caused culture to survive. In psychological terms, each new advance in our material and conceptual culture provides a brief appeasement of our innate desire for comfort and security. However .... Fine artists (that is artists whose work is principally intended to affect and satisfy the mind or the spirit rather than to fulfil a utilitarian function) are a major factor in cracking the shell of cultural rigidity and restoring the adaptability to changing circumstance on which our survival depends. As they do so, along with theoretical scientists and philosophers they are also creating the new shell, art and science function as the growth point of culture. Let us consider how creativity works.

How artists, or scientists, do it? Basically the creative process is a matter of what Arthur Koestler calls biassociation. That is simultaneous awareness in two or more pre existing matrices or patterns of conceptual apprehension. .... creative individuals are psychologically perhaps even neurologicaly more neotenous than the rest of humanity. With an increased ability to play and discover, and an enhanced degree of freedom from cultural conditioning and preconception. .... genius consists of the ability to apply a child's freedom from prejudice to an adult's experience and accumulated data. .... educated perceptions of a particular observer able to recognise qualities inherent .... we all share with any artist at any time or place the context of the human condition and of a shared original basic human culture. Thus the observer, listener, reader etc. does have the potential to read levels of meaning intrinsic to a work although it may be rendered obscure by more superficial alien cultural references."

http://www.twocrows.co.uk/the_point_of_art.html

lchic - 05:33pm Jan 31, 2003 EST (# 8423 of 8426)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think

R.W. Emerson

http://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/genqtpg.html

lchic - 05:38pm Jan 31, 2003 EST (# 8424 of 8426)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Genius . . . is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

Ezra Pound

Arthur Koestler

Jonathan Swift

lchic - 05:47pm Jan 31, 2003 EST (# 8425 of 8426)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Synergy - Genius

The 'think-tank' swims in genius. Together a team works out all possible 'ways to go'. Options are shaped.

Yet the adoption of 'good paths to travel' then becomes a political decision.

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