
De Abaitua interview (1998)
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)
De Abaitua interview (1998)
As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard
Context: The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit. Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years.
These meaningless crimes are much more difficult to explain than the 9/11 attacks, and say far more about the troubled state of the western psyche. My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.
Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)
Source: Reengineering the Corporation, 1993, p. 30; cited in: Huey B. Long (1995), New Dimensions in Self-Directed Learning, p. 323
“Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries”
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)
Context: Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries: the näive assumption of objectively real indivisible pieces of matter, and the sophisticated view that "atom" is merely a name given to abstractions which it is convenient to assume in simplifying complex phenomena. The second perhaps stems from Ockham, who wrote in 1330 of "the fiction of abstract nouns"; from John Troland, who in 1704 interpreted material particles as mental fictions; and from countless others down to Ernst Mach, who after starting as a physical atomist came to regard atoms as "mental artifices" or "economical ways of symbolizing experience."
Both views have advantages...
"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)