You can’t help those who do not want to be helped and you can’t teach those who do not want to learn. Unfortunately for me, I learned those lessons late in life. In fact, I am just now learning them, so I mistakenly still believe that we should help the needy and educate those who need it. But, alth…
Blog posts : "General"
The end of the world as we know it is near (not a joke or a prophecy)
Western Civilization, now technologized and globalized, already has an expiration date: it will disappear in the coming decades and it will be replaced by a meta artificial intelligence (Meta-IA) in control of the planet, while each human being will live enclosed within his/her own techno-bubble, ac…
If I say, “I know it”, then I don’t know it
A situation I face too often (for my taste) when presenting a new topic or a new idea to a group of students (whether young or adult) is the reaction "I already know that", followed by the mention of some kind of "source", mostly a movie, where a topic remotely related to the new idea previously pre…
You say I know a lot? No. Actually, I don’t know anything
“You know a lot,” one participant told me after a recent presentation about the challenges of social and cultural integration. Obviously, that person is wrong in his appreciation of my knowledge and, after expressing sincere gratitude for his words, I told him so.
“Thank you very much,” I sai…
The Titanic sank by “strictly” following the rules. So, what rules are sinking your life?
According to a book recently published by investigative journalist Senan Molony, one of the reasons that led to the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, was that the crew in charge of the ship “strictly followed the naval protocol.” In other words, if, instead of being so strict, they had been …
What color is your straitjacket?
In 1970, the well-known book What color is your parachute? was published for the first time. In it, Richard Nelson Bolles provided advice on how to look for and find a job. Half a century later, with all due respect to Bolles, the question has changed and now the book should be called What color i…
“I have a question for you: Which one is your spirituality?”
In the context of a recent and interesting conversation, my unexpected interlocutor asked this question without warning: “Which one is your spirituality?” He didn’t say “How is your spiritual life?” He said “which one”, suggesting that, in answering, I was expected to specify which, among many spiri…
We all suffer from existential myopia, but we don’t recognize it
Sometime ago I read an interesting fact: up to a certain age, babies only see it up to 12 inches in front of their eyes. Anything located at a greater distance is simply out of their sight. For them, the world ends very close to their eyes.
And not only that, because, at the same time, it takes…
We don’t know who we are, and we will probably never know it
This is the issue: artificial intelligence is changing our language and, therefore, changing our brain. And, in doing so, it makes us doubt about ourselves and, as a consequence, it generates an increasing uncertainty about what it means to be human and about our own future as humanity. Now, let's e…
Existential paradoxes, yes. Narcissistic contradictions, no.
Existential paradoxes have been part of humanity since humans become humans precisely because we, humans, are not yet totally sure of what or who alone really, much less of what our purpose or destiny is, here or in the most there (if there is one).
For that reason, the Greek philosopher Heraclit…
What can be done, if anything, when our own leaders are our own worst enemies?
The task seemed simple: to talk with a certain community leader to present her with a free long-term personal training project, focused on solidifying the financial foundations of the family. But neither the task was simple nor was there communication.
"I'll be clear, Francisco," this person -who…
We will soon be replaced by intelligent robots and they are already watching us
Francisco Miraval
I must confess that I don’t like it when I watch a TV series that it is presented as only fiction and then, later, I discover that the technology presented in that series was not fiction at all. It really upsets me when I see that years after the TV series ended the fictional te…
We have lost the ability to communicate rationally and intelligibly
This is the time of the year when I have to pay the municipal taxes for my business and, to do it, I went to the same municipal web site I have used for years, to pay online. Yet, to my surprise, the payment was not accepted. An automatic message said the information I entered was incorrect.
I …
The government shutdown is, sadly, a reflection of the closing of our minds
Everybody in the United States is talking about the government shutdown, that is, the partial closing of the government for the last month. Few, if any, however, talk about the full closing of the American mind for the last three decades, as described by American philosopher Allan Bloom.
Even if …
What do we see when we can only see ourselves?
Anais Nin once said that we don’t see things as they are, but as we are. And in his book The Burnout Society, philosopher Byung-Chul Han said that we, postmodern humans, have lost the ability of “taking time” in front of objects, including, for example, works of art, which we simply ignore.
…It is not just reading: it is meeting other minds
Several years ago, a good friend of mine, also an avid reading like myself, asked me, “How many books are you reading?” “Books”, in plural, because he shared and still shares that passion for reading several books at the same time.
Times are different now and books are no longer as popula…
How come “Captain America” always knows when I will be at a certain street?
Because of my work, several times a week I travel from east to west through the city where I live, always following the same direction and the same street, but seldom at the same time. Yet, regardless of the time of my trip, “Captain America” is always there. I have no idea how he knows my schedule.…
Orwell’s dystopian world is now painfully obsolete
I recently found in the latest issue of a well-known academic journal an interesting argument: the best way to end the discrimination and exploitation of certain groups is to expand discrimination and exploitation to every group, without exclusions or distinctions.
Given the fact that the article…
Today’s imagination is tomorrow’s reality
It is becoming increasingly clearer to me that the future will not be, but already is. And if we do not see it, it is not because it has not arrived yet, but because we have not taken our imagination to the necessary level of development to see the future and, in that way, allow the future to emerge…
Bitter narcissism distorts the present and stops the future
The well-known myth of Narcissus –told, among others, by Ovid in his Metamorphosis– says that Narcissus, seeing his own image reflected on the still waters of a pond, decided to die thirsty to avoid distorting the image, his image, on the water. As it happens will all myths, Narcissus reveals psyc…
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