by Feel Think Act » Wed Sep 07, 2011 2:46 pm
If I was content with providing an imprecise answer to the question formulated in the header of this page, I would probably answer with “reading John C. Lilly's ‘Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer’”, “filing my nails”, “thinking about ways to make money”, or something similar.
However it would be more adequate to answer with “tapping my keyboard in such a manner that characters appear, in a way which by definitions of an English language speaker give a person looking at those characters and consciously decyphering their meaning the information that I am currently typing a response to the forementioned question”, although it would be equally true to answer the question with “existing”, “breathing” etc. Upon further examination, the answer could differ to a huge extent, depending on the definition of ‘right now’ – by the time my answer arrives at the server on which the Uncommon Knowledge website is hosted, I will have just pressed the ‘submit’ button below the text field into which I am typing these sentences and the information I have just provided will already be in the near past (again, merely by definition of what constitutes ‘near past’ to most human beings), and by the time this information arrives at a reader's brain via their optical nerve, the answer could be one of an infinite range of possibilities.
I could of course be more precise, but will leave it at that for the sake of simplicity.