Heidegger according to McCormack--The essence of a hammer is in its use--you can't sit back and meditate upon the hammer as hammer without implicating its use. a hammer is nothing to us without its ability to be held in a palm and fingers and struck against the head of a nail or used to dig one out. it is only our metaphysical imagination, our cling to the eternal, that makes us see the hammer outside of time and context.

I believe the point Dan was trying to make was that we have reached the status of a god when we replicate reality for ourselves...in the form of images, motion images, and 3-dimensional motion images. we enable this. we've reached a point, if one is to agree with darwin's discovery that the earth is extremely old, it is extraordinary that we may simulate the things we see as humans. these things ought not be separate from us. indeed they are us, just as birth and death.