Viven en tus entrañas -que para ellos son montañas- y te ven de dentro a fuera. El mundo exterior es para ellos el interior de la Tierra.
Que baje tu nivel de colesterol en sangre debe parecerles una especie de primavera arterial. Por fin las carreteras se despejan, después de las intensas precipitaciones de de nata y azúcar glaseado del pasado Invierno.
Se discute la conveniencia de reducir las emisiones de grasa, como método de atajar el "tocinamiento global".
The Mosquito anti-teen device is a wonderful invention, that punishes those unruly creatures with shrill and unpleasant sounds while leaving people over twenty unscathed.
It is almost as good as the Invisible Teenager, a piece of technology dreamed up by R. A. Lafferty in one of his stories. Like the Mosquito, it is explicitly designed to target teenagers:
You remember that once there was a teenager problem? You remember when those little buggers used to be mean? Albert got enough of them. There was something ungainly about them that reminded him too much of himself. He made a teenager of his own. It was rough. To the others it looked like one of themselves, the ring in the left ear, the dangling side-locks, the brass knucks and the long knife, the guitar pluck to jab in the eye. But it was incomparably rougher than the human teenagers. It terrorized all in the neighborhood and made them behave, and dress like real people. There was one thing about the teenage machine that Albert made. It was made of such polarized metal and glass that it was invisible except to teenager eyes.
"Why is your neighborhood different?" the people asked him. "Why are there such good and polite teenagers in your neighborhood and such mean ones everywhere else? It's as though something had spooked all those right around here."
(R. A. Lafferty: Eurema's Dam)
"Invisible except to teenager eyes" may be a little harder to achieve than "inaudible except to teenager ears", but we should stay hopeful. Until then, the Mosquito will be a good enough substitute.
"I wonder what time is the next mass." Thomas said. "Or the mass that is not quite a mass. I'm not sure that I understand you on it."
"Oh, put in a stoimenof d'or in the slot, and push the button. Then the mass will begin."
Thomas did. And it did.
The priest came up out of the floor. He was not human, unless he was a zombie human. He was probably not even a programmed person. He may have been a mechanical device. He wore a pearl-gray derby hat, swish-boy sideburns, and common green shorts or breechcloth. His depilated torso was hermaphroditic. He or it smoked a log weedjy-weed cigarette in a period holder. He began to jerk and to intone with dreadful dissonance.
Then a number of other contrivances arrived from somewhere, intoning mock chorus to the priest, and twanging instruments.
[...]
At the Consecration, a sign lit up:
"Brought to you Courtesy of Grailo Grape-Ape, the Finest of the Bogus Wines"
(R. A. Lafferty: Past Master)
Mmmm... I wonder what was Lafferty's opinion on the changes to the mass after Vatican II. Maybe not very positive. Anyway, this is a great depiction of a debauched religious ceremony. A black mass, in a sense. The book goes on to mention that the wafers were "ancient-style hot-dog rolls".
The "Thomas" in the quoted passage is none other than Thomas More, or at least Lafferty's interpretation of him.
The shells with black smoke, which the old-timers called "Americans" or "coal boxes", ripped with incredible violence. [...] The odd thing was that the little birds in the forest seemed quite untroubled by the myriad noise; they sat peaceably over the smoke in their battered boughs. In the short intervals of firing, we could hear them singing happily or ardently to one another, if anything even inspired or encouraged by the dreadful noise on all sides.
(Ernst Junger: Storm of Steel. Translated by Michael Hofmann)
At the corner of a stricken wood [...] at a moment when lyddite and shrapnel and machine-gun fire swept and raked and bespattered that devoted spot as though the artillery of an entire Division had suddenly concentrated on it, a wee hen-chaffinch flitted wistfully to and fro, amid splintered and falling branches that had never a green bough left on them. [...] There was a battered orchard alongside the stricken wood, and the probable explanation of the bird's presence was that it had a nest of young ones whom it was too scared to fed, too loyal to desert.
(Hector Hugh Munro "Saki": Birds on the Western Front)
Saki did not survive the war.
Recientemente he adoptado algunos cambios en mi rutina diaria que han contribuido a mejorar mi calidad de vida.
El primero consistió en deshacerme de mi despertador y pasar a depender de la alarma del móvil. El despertador era un artefacto infernal, con una alarma estridente que sólo sería apropiada para avisar de una invasión alienígena. De hecho, quizás el artefacto mismo fuese de origen extraterrestre, porque sus extremadamente crípticos controles a duras penas conseguía manipularlos.
Lo peor de todo es que, una vez que la alarma comenzaba a sonar, me veía obligado a levantarme inmediatamente para apagarla. El despertador se encontraba al otro lado del dormitorio, único lugar próximo a un enchufe. Y la alarma no se detenía por sí sola al cabo de un tiempo, al contrario: aumentaba progresivamente de volumen hasta amenazar con reventarme los tímpanos. Me estremezco al recordar los ¿mil? ¿mil quinientos? peregrinajes urgentes pero somnolientos al otro lado de mi habitación. ¡Cuánto sufrimiento innecesario! Si se concentrase en un sólo día, equivaldría al de romperse una pierna, como mínimo.
El otro cambio es utilizar el metabuscador de la red de bibliotecas de Galicia antes de pasarme por el Fórum Metropolitano o la González Garcés. Hasta ahora, cuando iba a una biblioteca sucedía algo de lo siguiente: o bien los puestos de consulta estaban ocupados, o si estaban libres no había traido bolígrafo para apuntar la signatura, o si lo había traído no tenía papel en el que apuntar. Y no queda bien mostrar a la bibliotecaria una signatura que te has escrito en la mano.
Calculo que estos dos cambios me han hecho un 1.7 por ciento más feliz.
I didn't expect to see Lafferty mentioned in the New York Times; I was pleasantly surprised. Quoting from Bill Hader's recommendation of the story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers:
You get the feeling like it’s a guy just writing to amuse himself: “I don’t care if any of this makes sense, but I want to see weird stuff happen.” One of his stories starts off, “He began by breaking things that morning.” There’s a short story called “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” and it’s just about this little girl who’s super strong, running around, picking things up. You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something.
Actually, beneath his crazy brilliant ebullient prose Lafferty is often dead serious. See for example stories like "The World as Will and Wallpaper" or "You can't go back".
By the way, "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun" is an apocalyptic tale full of allusions to the Book of Revelation. The title refers to the "woman clothed in the sun" of Revelation 12:1-10, who was the subject of a famous painting by William Blake. One character is called Krios, which is greek for "lamb". He is killed at the end. Ginny is going to "stay in a cave for twelve hundred and sixty days". That is reminiscent of:
And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.
(The Bible, King James Version. Revelations 12:6)
I suppose there are more biblical references, but I didn't catch them. I'm also puzzled about the overall meaning of the story. Because it seems to have a meaning, only I can't make head nor tail of it.
Anyway, if only this were the beginning of some kind of RAL revival! A chance to get some of his more elusive volumes back in print. Or printed for the first time...
Here is an amazingly entertaining account of a sea voyage between Alexandria and Cyrene in the fourth century. The author is Synesius of Cyrene.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
