A dangerous sea voyage

Here is an amazingly entertaining account of a sea voyage between Alexandria and Cyrene in the fourth century. The author is Synesius of Cyrene.

Exposing the sick

Their sick they [those from Bastetania] expose upon the highways, in the same way as the Egyptians did anciently, in the hope that some one who has experienced the malady may be able to give them advice.

(Strabo: Geography, Book 3)

They [the Babylonians] bring their sick into the town square, since they do not use doctors. Each invalid is then approached and given advice by passerby who have either suffered from the same sort of ailment themselves or know someone else who has... These prescribe what they did to recover or what they know others did who recovered. You are not allowed to go by a sick person without asking what's the matter with him.

(Herodotus, quoted in Lionel Casson's Travel in the Ancient World)

When you are sick, people are always more than eager to share with you what treatment, recipe, or strange procedure cured them from the same ailment you are presently suffering. The ancient custom of exposing the sick exploits that compulsion, in lieu of professional medical advice that may not be available.

Apparently, in the Leon province of Spain sick people were still being exposed at the beginning of the past century. Or so says a footnote in my copy of Strabo.

A wildness more vicious

We are accustomed to think of the beasts of the forest and mountain as wild, and to think of the men who spring up, as it seems, from their soil as savage. But the truth is that there is a wildness more vicious (as we would know better if we were not so habituated to it) in certain domestic animals, despite their understanding so much human speech and sometimes even speaking a few words; and there is a more profound savagery in men and women whose ancestors have lived in cities and towns since the dawn of humanity. Vodalus, in whose veins flowed the undefiled blood of a thousand exultants - exarchs, ethnarchs, and starosts - was capable of violence unimaginable to the autochthons that stalked the streets of Thrax, naked beneath their huanaco cloaks.

(Gene Wolfe: The Sword of the Lictor)

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

(Walter Benjamin)

See also here. I don't know if Wolfe and Benjamin are right.

Defining science fiction

sfsignal asked several science fiction authors for his definition of the genre. John C. Wright's definition is extensive and thoughtful, and worth a read.

I also like another definition given here by Gregory Benford:

SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible.

A working mind-body dualism

Brain trauma. Alzheimer's disease. Chemobrain. The evidence for our minds being completely dependant on our brains is incontrovertible, and yet we shy away for it, almost instinctively, towards some form of mind-body dualism, to the belief that we are in some sense separate entities from our bodies.

Mental reductionism, turns out, is somewhat counterintuitive. Let's imagine a world where it would be even more so. People in that world have bodies pretty much like ours, that get sick, grow old, and die. With one important difference: their brains, instead of being located within their bodies, they are all sealed inside a mountain! In people's heads grow antennae-like appendages which relay sense data to their remote brains, and receive motor commands in return.

Those remote brains are all pretty well tended for -maybe by some automated mechanism outside the control, or even knowledge, of the population- and kept safe from trauma, degenerative diseases, and the like. When a person reaches a certain age, his brain is scheduled for destruction, which comes swiftly and suddenly, without allowing any hint of senility to manifest itself.

In such a world, people would not possess clear evidence for minds having a physical basis. Drugs wouldn't work. No trauma-induced loss of consciousness, either. At most, injuries to the antennae could sever the connection between brains and bodies, but when those injuries finally heal, the patient would speak about being fully conscious throughout, but trapped in a silent darkness, unable to move. No Phineas Gage in that world.

How could a reductionist theory of the mind be developed, in that state of affairs? I see it very difficult. Imagine that, for the first time in millennia, a brain inside the mountain starts suffering damage. How would the owner of that brain cope with that? How could he even begin to conceptualize the experience of his decaying mental faculties, without any previous cases to draw on?

Karmic midichlorians

When George Lucas postulated midichlorians as the origin of the Force, legions of discerning nerds were justifiably incensed. Such a prosaic, mechanistic explanation for something as mystical and spiritual as the Force! Even if the Star Wars universe was wholly Lucas's brainchild, he had no right to unweave the rainbow like he did.

And yet, there are real-world religions that possess a markedly mechanistic view of spiritual matters. Consider for example the conception of karma in Jainism:

According to Robert J. Zydenbos, Jainism can be considered a kind of system of laws, but natural rather than moral laws. In Jainism, actions that carry moral significance are considered to cause certain consequences in just the same way as, for instance, physical actions that do not carry any special moral significance. When one holds an apple in one's hand and then lets go of the apple, the apple will fall: this is only natural. There is no judge, and no moral judgment involved, since this is a mechanical consequence of the physical action.

(Wikipedia entry for Karma in Jainism)

In Jainism, karma is referred to as karmic dirt, as it consists of very subtle and microscopic particles that cannot be perceived by our senses i.e. pudgala that pervade the entire universe. [...] Karmic matter is actually the agent that enables us (our consciousness) to act within the material context of this universe. When attracted to our consciousness, they are stored in our interactive karmic field i.e. karmic sharira. They are attracted to the soul on account of vibrations created by activities of mind, speech and body and stick to the soul due to various mental dispositions.

(ibid.)

Karmic midichlorians, more or less.

Edit: Come to think of it, karmic dirt also resembles the "Dust" in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

A crappy "review"

Well, it would have been a review had the author even bothered to read the book.

The Darjeeling Limited

I have a doubt about this movie. At one point, there's a kind of flashback to the three brother protagonists stopping by a garage in their way to their father's funeral, in order to retrieve his car. The thing has a whiff of unreality about it (that could be said about the whole movie, but that sequence stands out). Is it a "true" flashback, or is it a dramatization of the story penned by the younger brother, who constantly asks the other two brothers for an opinion on it?

The movie was a bit too precious.

Lack of empathy for what we'll become

In the face of our universal inadequacy [...] man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favor of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether.

(H. G. Wells: Mind at the end of its tether.)

Some folks might argue that it would be worth sacrificing all that makes us human if in exchange we were to receive the eternal life that's held out here. But if we aren't going to be the ones to receive this life, if instead it's going to beings that are not human and who won't use that life in pursuit of the things that make us human, then what stake do we have in such a future? Does it make any sense for us to root against our own species? I'm glad my computer has a large memory bank and a couple of the programs are fairly neat, but I'm not willing to exchange my life for them. Why would someone hope for the day when we exchange all of humankind for nothing more than such computer memory and programs? There's just something creepy and antihuman about this kind of desire and it makes Mr. Egan's imagined future seem awfully cold and uninviting. This is a future worth fighting against, though it's mildly diverting for a few hundred pages.

(from this review of Greg Egan's Diaspora in Brothers Judd)

Imagine a world where, by some natural and ineluctable process, each generation is slightly different - physically, mentally, and culturally - from the preceding one, but not so much that the preceding generation can't relate to it.

However, there's a number of generations N at which the accumulated changes would make it impossible for generation x to feel any kind of empathy towards generation x + N. In fact, they may even regard the people at x + N as abominations. Of course, when generation x + N comes along, all the people in generation x have long been dead.

But still, they might be aware of the historical trend. Suppose it takes one thousand years for N generations to come and go. Members of generation x will we looking at the complete extinction of their world - or at least, of anything they hold valuable and relatable in themselves - in 1000 years. How they would cope with that knowledge? If they really hate what they'll become, they could even set some kind of doomsday device to be activated a millenium in the future...

On a more down-to-earth note, which reformers and revolutionaries would still pursue their programs for change, if given complete knowledge of the effects of their reforms across time?

Weather and War

I've just learned that the term "front", in the sense of "weather front", was first used by a norwegian meteorologist just after World War I and it clearly has a bellic inspiration. The transition zone between two air masses was conceptualized as a battleground. Once you know that, the similarity between weather maps and war maps depicting WWI front lines becomes obvious.

I wonder, if the idea of what we call weather fronts had first crystallized in peacetime, would have it been conceptualized differently, in a less bellicose manner? You could use a "shoreline" metaphor, for example. How many metaphorical terms we now take as obvious and fitting are just fossilized remains of some past mindset?

Other things we owe to the Great War: the expression "going over the top", wristwatches, trenchcoats (obviously!) and chemotherapy (not so obviously, but mustard gas is a distant ancestor of current chemotherapy treatments).

Edge.org

As always, the responses to the annual Edge.org question are endlessly fascinating. This year's question was: What have you changed your mind about, and why?

The questions of previous years, here.

Edit: Particularly interesting responses by Joseph Ledoux about the workings of memory, Donald Hoffman and Peter Trivers on perception and self-deception, Scott Atran on the religious politics of fictive kinship, and Rupert Sheldrake on the skepticism of believers.

Tor Norretrander's views about permanent reincarnation are reminiscent of Derek Parfit's conception of the self.

I once talked with a computational linguist who shared Marti Hearst's surprise at the amount of things you can do in the field of language processing using only relatively simple, statistical techniques. That so much of our speech can be characterized and analyzed with such low-level techniques - which involve no real "understanding" - is a bit chilling.

What's really chilling is Thomas Metzinger's contribution about neuroethics and the nonexistence of moral facts.

Life extension

Down at The Volokh Conspiracy there's a very interesting post on the ethical implications of life extension technology (spotted at The Fourth Checkraise.)

My review of To Live Forever, a Jack Vance novel dealing with life extension, is here.

Not a Golden Age

There's an interesting article in The Economist about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the invention of agriculture. It paints the lifestyle in a less rosy fashion than Jared Diamond does. So maybe agriculture wasn't such a bad idea after all.

From the article:

What's more, the famously “affluent society” of hunter-gatherers, with plenty of time to gossip by the fire between hunts and gathers, turns out to be a bit of a myth, or at least an artefact of modern life. The measurements of time spent getting food by the !Kung omitted food-processing time and travel time, partly because the anthropologists gave their subjects lifts in their vehicles and lent them metal knives to process food.

Travel time, omitted? What an oversight! The daily commute is the key to History!

The regeneration of Time

During the course of the akitu ceremony [the Babylonian New Year festivity] the so-called epic of the Creation, Enuma Elis, was solemnly recited several times in the temple of Marduk. [...] the akitu festival comprises a series of dramatic elements the intention of which is the abolition of past time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act.

(Mircea Eliade: Cosmos and Chaos)

It is also within the frame of the same akitu ceremonial that the festival called the "festival of the fates", Zakmuk, was celebrated, in which the omens for each of the twelve months of the year were determined, which was equivalent to creating the twelve months to come.

(ibid.)

See also the page for akitu on Wikipedia, and James Frazer's The Golden Bough.