The idea I felt was most significant was Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's comments on how "sometimes our tools dominate us." He mentions that "human activities are being shaped to conform to computers." This is extremely evident today by the following examples: E-mail, Internet research, and especially the so-called Y2k bug. Practically the entire world, including myself, adjusted their lives for the worst possible scenario of Y2k: a computer meltdown. Subsequently if that had occurred, everything that is part of our lives that conforms to computers would be disrupted, possibly leading to human chaos. However the world's countries spent tons of money to conform to the Y2k bug and everything surrounding the event seemed to be fine. Weizenbaum's comments make one think: Is technology worth conforming our lives to computers? That question maybe answered when questioning where we'd be without computers. Though I feel that Joseph Weizenbaum's comments were most significant in the passage, I feel humans will progressively maintain computers as tools designed to serve our needs.

I felt that Edmund Husserl's special technique of phenomenological reduction was most disagreeable to me. Husserl states "we need to focus on one particular sense/experience and bracket off all of our beliefs" With that approach, we won't be able to truly see the whole human experience. Phenomologists focus on the "interconnectedness of all experience, rather than isolating individual objects" That isolation is what Hasserl promotes. I feel one needs to examine the whole picture to truly understated the human experience. Isolating one experience limits one's knowledge to define the human experience. Moreover the "branching" will be limited to the original, isolated experience. To me this seems ineffective.

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2000