Mac Tonnies

Two years ago, on October 18, 2009, Mac Tonnies passed away at the age of 34. Mac was one of my two or three closest friends, a kindred spirit, and a collaborator on a number of projects that were in development (and one, a play called Doing Time, that had been finished and staged in Halifax, and then Boulder, Colorado, a year before he died).

A favourite memory that I haven't related before: when Mac was here in November, 2007, for the run of Doing Time, we went out for a drink with the cast after one of the performances. The actors bailed on us after maybe an hour, so Mac and I had a couple more drinks, which was out of character for him (but not for me, so he gamely played along), and then we went for a walkabout around Halifax. We eventually made our way down to the waterfront, where we found a perch on one of the piers, and stared out at the harbour, with the buoy lights bouncing up and down on top of the restive black water. It was cold, and the wind whistled past us, almost like a song, as we sat there for five or six minutes. Neither of us said a single word - we just took all of it in. Then I looked at him, and while I could spend an hour sitting on a pier staring at the night (and have, many times), I figured maybe he had had enough. "Want to head back?" I asked. He shook his head, just a bit, and said, "No. This is perfect." And so we remained at the end of the pier, for another forty-five minutes or so, intermittently breaking the comfortable silence of friends to talk about the state of our love lives (or what passed for them at the time).

I haven't been quite the same since he passed away. I still wander down to that pier every now and then, look out at the blackness of the night, and when the wind plays, I can hear Mac's "song" again. The notes might not be there anymore, at least not in the same way, but I can still feel the rhythm, and hear the melody.

I always will.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 18 October 2011

"He watched a bus pass, oval windows cataract-blank. He found a gutted telephone booth and dialed up the girl's address on his watch. He was surprised how close he was, and how far he had come, simply by wandering, committing himself to the anarchy of the pavement." - Mac Tonnies

From a story fragment he posted at his blog on January 26, 2009.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 16 October 2011

"Ultimately, I wonder if we really want free will. Is it worth the effort? Considering how accustomed we’ve become to a numbed, automated existence, the phenomenon of consciousness could be on the brink of fading out." - Mac Tonnies

Skeptics, Debunkers and Believers

Mac Tonnies on skepticism, disbelief and belief.

Cults, governments, advertisers, religions, schools, and the news media have an abiding interest in infecting you with their beliefs. If you're not vigilantly skeptical, it’s all too easy to succumb. The moment you do, you trap yourself in a given “reality tunnel”. The Earth of the early 21st century is a deceiving, perilous place, and we may ultimately pay for the luxury of our zealously guarded tunnel realities with our own extinction. Wrench your mind out of its routines. Eviscerate your most cherished notions, leaving “belief” severed and twitching on the dissection tray where it belongs. And the invisible fog begins to part; the idiot chatter of our collective human television channel (all ads, all day) fades to a whisper somewhere in the distance.

Read his entire essay here.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 15 October 2011

"Intelligence is not a phenomenon. It's an information-impregnated pattern, as reproducible in its own way as a photocopy or the unruly lines that divide a shag carpeting. There is no reason my self-pattern cannot be synthesized, reconstituted, modified, relayed through space in the form of modulated radio waves or laser pulses, hacked, distributed as freeware to denizens of some future Internet, or uploaded to artificial bodies that may or may not resemble my present meatware incarnation. Electronic communications activists proclaim that 'information wants to be free.' So do I." - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 14 October 2011

"We are the universe's means by which to realize its own genesis and undoing." - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 10 October 2011

"I foresee a future in which memories - real and simulated - are routinely swapped between consenting (and not-so-consenting) parties. What will this do to the concept of empathy? Will we become more or less 'human'?" - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 9 October 2011

Mac Tonnies created this version of a photo of him speaking at the 2006 New Frontiers Symposium to sum up the gist of his presentation that day, and his philosophy about humanity and our future in general.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 8 October, 2011

"You're no longer surfing the Web; the Web is surfing you, scouring your mind for new and better footholds." - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 7 October 2011

"I suppose the philosophically inclined can argue that science requires a sort of faith, but hardly the kind that governs religious thought. Personally, I've never understood the perceived need to wed science and religion. Politically expedient? Sure. But it's fundamentally dishonest, both to scientists and theologians." - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 5 October, 2011

"I want to keep gazing into the void, even if doing so invites the void to gaze back." - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 4 October 2011

Mac in Los Angeles with actress Veronica Reynolds, May 2006.

"Sex drive is perhaps the ultimate con. While it can lead to wonderful things (or so I'm told), it's essentially a hormonal undertow, faceless and mechanistic." - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 30 September, 2011

"The survival of democracy as we know it hinges increasingly on the inherently decentralized nature of the Internet. So I'm annoyed by Netizens who remain forever anonymous behind "clever" usernames and handles in a vainglorious attempt to keep their "real" lives and online lives discreet. If you have something important to contribute to the datasphere, speak out! Use your real name! The Net is not one big chatroom; it's one of the central forces keeping our world from dissolution at the hands of mega-corporations, chomping-at-the-bit neo-fascists and "protective" watchdog government agencies out to fulfill the usual list of Big Brother power fantasies." - Mac Tonnies

As anyone who has read or heard one of my rants against Internet anonymity is aware, I couldn't agree more. People need to take ownership of what they say, and write, or else it's worthless. How can I respect someone's opinion when they don't have the courage to put their name to it?

The answer is that I can't, and I don't.

After all, John Hancock didn't sign the Declaration of Independence "IHateGeorgie47".

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 29 September, 2011

"Bureaucracy is a parasitic lifeform. It will continue feeding until human existence is a mere shuffle of commodity and idiotic smiles." - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 27 September 2011

"The world we've created for ourselves is a shadow of our reproductive imperative, and our institutions are symptomatic of our devotion to our short-lived physical selves. The activities of a typical day betray our dedication to maintaining reproductive viability. But the chemical phenomenon that gives the single-celled amoeba its raison d'etre seems somehow less-than-noble for a species that has evolved the singular and promising faculties of foresight and imagination. I think the human species is approaching a point where the need to create (in the biological sense) will be superseded by the sheer pleasure of thought itself. We will continue to be creators. But our slavish attachment to the physical world and all of its superficial excess will be left behind as we plunge forward, breaking down the perceived barriers between mind and brain, thought and flesh, sentience and circuitry." - Mac Tonnies

Note: The quote above is taken from Mac's short but thought-provoking essay, Sentience and Circuitry: Meat is Memory.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 15 September 2011

"Consciousness is a potential technology; we are exquisite machines, nothing less than sentient patterns. As such, there's no convincing technical reason we can't eventually upload ourselves into matrices of our design and choosing. It's likely the phenomenon we casually call "intelligence" will cease to be strictly biological as we begin to merge with our machines more meaningfully and intimately." - Mac Tonnies

Thought du jour - 17 August 2011

"I don't think any transhumanist thinkers want to create a 'perfect' being; the operative goal is to empower the human species on an individual level. In a foreseeable future scenario, instead of being saddled with the genome one blindly inherits, one can choose to become an active participant - and I find that possibility incredibly liberating and exciting. Transhumanism is not eugenics." - Mac Tonnies