Everything about the reading was going well for me until I reached the part on page 266 where it says that there is “the need for error correction”. The text points to the idea that without the presence of error-correction, all knowledge creation is necessarily bounded. I think I spiraled down into a philosophical rabbit hole after reading this – I thought that it was the opposite. If we don’t have the creation of such thing as right and wrong, shouldn’t our knowledge not be bounded then as there are infinite opportunities to think in any way possible? Wouldn’t error correction be something like manipulating DNA and creating superhumans?!!?
I was stuck in this rabbit hole for a while but decided to accept the idea that was stated on the paper in front of me and continued to read onwards. I realised that the text does explain more about the phenomenon I had just described and I eventually figured out that I was misinterpreting and misreading the whole idea – I had disregarded the fact that this jump to universality and its error correction was in the context of computers. This realisation assured me a lot more because for a good while I was convinced that the author was basically saying that it’s ethical to manipulate DNA, and other theoretically unethical practices.
Overall, I thought it was really interesting for the author to pick out so many examples of the jump to universality in many fields. This reading connected, in many cases, to my other class’ learning about globalisation and how homogeneity and uniformity are influencing and impacting nations, which leads to universality.