multijimbo

I think a lot about the toolmaker koan; if you’re so minded, some of these earlier speculations can be found HERE.

Loosely, a koan is a Zen device, a short story that’s intended to illustrate a point of Zen. A koan often involves what seems to be an internal contradiction, intended to stimulate consideration. The classic koan is, what is the sound of one hand clapping.

Strictly speaking, the toolmaker koan may not be a koan. Rather, it is a question: why is that the development and use of tools so outpaces the wisdom in the use of tools. This touches on one of those fundamental points that we find in the news a lot these days, in various guises: the difference between whether we can do a thing, versus whether we should.

The thought I had recently during a long drive is the connection between the toolmaker koan and one of the other topics of occasional contemplation, doomsday devices, see THIS and THAT.

I haven’t written about doomsday devices for a long time, though I do have some ideas, but the thought I had was, what do we get when we bring together doomsday devices and the toolmaker koan.

It is an obvious thought, in some ways. Doomsday devices are somehow archetypal tools, vis a vis the toolmaker koan, but strangely the connection between the two hadn’t occurred to me before. And so this is what I’ll be trying to working through over the coming weeks and months. We’ll see where we go with it.

~ by Jim Anderson on 22 September 2024.

Posted in bizarre and random things