My mind is expanding

...thanks to this comprehensive bibliography of the Philosophy of the Mind, edited by David Chalmers.

Foundation movie in the works

...according to the Hollywood Reporter. I wonder if they'll tap into the current climate of declinism.

Hari Seldon is oddly reminiscent of Osama bin Laden in some ways: an inaccessible, charismatic figure who is likely dead but periodically resurfaces in the form of video recordings in order to encourage his followers and utter oracular pronouncements. The difference is that Laden is a bit more proactive in bringing about the Fall of the Empire. (Also, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult was a total fan of the Foundation novels and apparently used them as a blueprint for the group's command structure and long-term plans.)

My favorite moment in the novels is when everybody in the First Foundation expectantly awaits the day when a new Hari Seldon recording is scheduled to play. They hope that Seldon's address will offer solutions to the current problems facing the polity, and reassure them of their predetermined destiny of prosperity and greatness. (The comfort, the respite from the terror of history afforded by the Seldon Plan is not unlike the one peddled by Marxism. There are also shades of Manifest Destiny.)

The grand day arrives at last. However, as the tape plays and they listen to Seldon's speech recorded centuries earlier, an horrific realization slowly dawns on them: Seldon is wrong this time. The current situation in nothing like the one he prophetised. The Seldon Plan has been derailed by The Mule, and the citizens of the Foundation are left adrift on a sea of uncertainty.

I'm not exactly a fan of Asimov's writing, but that is a truly sublime moment of cognitive dissonace. I hope they'll do it justice in the movie.

One for impiety, one for lawlessness

Dicaearchus (d.196 BC) was an Aetolian commander and pirate. [...] Dicaearchus had a tradition in which where ever he landed he would built two temples, one to Asebeia which means impiety and another to Paranomia which means Lawlessness.

(Wikipedia entry for Dicaearchus of Aetolia)

Aristomenes caused Scopas and his family to be put to death by poison; but did not allow Dicaearchus to die until he had had him racked and scourged, thus inflicting on him a punishment which he thoroughly deserved in the name of all Greece. For this was the Dicaearchus whom Philip, when he resolved upon his treacherous attack on the Cyclades and the cities of the Hellespont, appointed leader of the whole fleet and the entire enterprise: who being thus sent out to perform an act of flagrant wickedness, not only thought that he was doing nothing wrong, but in the extravagance of his infatuation imagined that he would strike terror into the gods as well as man. For wherever he anchored he used to build two altars, to Impiety and Lawlessness, and, offering sacrifice upon these altars, worshipped them as his gods.

(Polybius: Histories)

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

The song that plays in the trailer for Watchmen is "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning" by The Smashing Pumpkins, which is a slower, moodier version of another song of theirs called "The End Is the Beginning Is the End".

That inversion in the titles reminds me of a pair of Gene Wolfe stories, "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" and "The Death of Doctor Island". I wonder if that trope has a name, and what are other examples of it.

José Padilha's "Tropa de Elite"

This movie would give Frank Miller an erection.

It is at its best when detailing the mechanisms of corruption (see also the mexican film La Ley de Herodes). When the movie centers on how badass BOPE members are, it veers into more cartoony territory. After films like Full Metal Jacket and Heartbreak Ridge, the "grueling training" trope has become something of a cliché.

"Unha colimaia de xente"

La sección Palabras con Memoria de la web de la AELG es una lectura fascinante. Recoge palabras del idioma gallego que son muy poco usadas, y que no figuran en los diccionarios. Por ejemplo:

colimaia/colimaiada.- Fato de trastes, chusma, caninea, gandallada. Lugar de escoita.- Corme (A Coruña). Fonte.- Xulio López Valcárcel

Colimaia me resulta muy interesante porque muchas veces se la oigo decir a mi madre, con el sentido descrito arriba. Me sorprendió cuando se la escuché por primera vez; la busqué en el Diccionario Xerais da Lingua pero no estaba. Es curioso que López Valcárcel se encontrase la palabra en Corme; mi madre es de Lugo, de la zona alrededor de O Cebreiro. Para ser una palabra tan poco usada, está bastante extendida.

Mi madre ha pronunciado otras ocasiones palabras que no figuraban en los diccionarios, pero el caso es que no las apunté en su momento, algo de lo que me arrepiento. Ahora no me acuerdo cuáles erán... estaré con el oído atento en caso de que vuelvan a surgir. Claro, no puedo simplemente preguntarle "Mamá, ¿cuáles son esas palabras raras que usas de vez en cuando?" Para ella, no son raras en absoluto.

Otra palabra gallega que desconocía y que acabo de escucharle a mi madre es moxena. Aunque ésta sí la podemos encontrar en el diccionario; al parecer, significa "Partícula de lume que se desprende das chamas; tamén recibe of nome de charamusca, chareta, faísca, muxica, etc."

Westerns with odd punctuation

The book also features McCarthy's somewhat unusual writing style – there are, for example, many unusual or archaic words, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to note dropped letters.

(Wikipedia page for Blood Meridian)

Another western novel where the author experiments with punctuation (or the lack of it) is R. A. Lafferty's Okla Hannali, first published in 1972. In the book, all the dialogue uttered by choctaw characters (like the protagonist) has no punctuation at all:

"Maybeso you exaggerate," his son Travis would say. "Of course I do with a big red heart I exaggerate the new age has forgotten how I remember that the corn stood taller and the ears fuller nine of them would make a bushel and now it takes a hundred and twenty that doesn't consider that the bushels were bigger then the men were taller and of grander voice the women of a beauty to be found nowhere today except in my own family the girls sang so pretty with voices they walked so fine when they carried corn they could soft-talk you like little foxes those girls."

Lafferty offers a rationale for his stylistic choice, which may or may not have some historical basis:

Hannali did not speak in that manner because he was a clod, but because he was a Choctaw. Whether in English or Choctaw, all Chocs run sentences together with no intonation for either period or question. The educated Choctaws of that day -those who wrote in their own hands- punctuated either not at all or excessively. In official depositions one will find page-long screeds with no break at all. Or one will find random punctuation, with commas between almost every word, and perhaps a colon or semicolon between an article and its following noun. Someone had told them that they must punctuate, but nobody would ever be able to tell them how.

It could also be understood as an external form of Molly Bloom's internal monologue. I think it succeeds in giving the dialogue a sense of immediacy.

Calendario Floral

Ayer por la mañana vi cómo un operario de mono azul cambiaba la fecha del calendario floral en los Jardines de Méndez Núñez.

He de reconocer que la escena me decepcionó un poco... no sé, quizás esperaba descubrir que la fecha la cambiaba algún trasno mágico que viviese en una cueva secreta bajo el jardín y saliese cada mañana por el hueco de un árbol para hacer su trabajo.

Propongo adoptar medidas para rescatar la operación de cambio de fecha de su embrutecedor prosaísmo. Primero, contrátese a alguien afectado de enanismo, o, en su defecto, adminístrense a un niño las mismas hormonas retardantes del crecimiento que le dieron a Joselito.

Como uniforme, una chaqueta de vivos colores bordada de arabescos, pantalones bombachos, y zapatitos con pompones.

Los mismos que están haciendo las obras en el Parrote, podrían construirle al nuevo operario una casita subterránea en el parque, estilo Bilbo Bolsón o David el Gnomo. Insonorizada, claro, no le vaya a molestar el ruido del botellón.

Considero ésta una inversión necesaria y urgente, un uso productivo de los fondos públicos que redundará en beneficio de todos.

Reasons not to kill a stranger

In traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other.

(Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Not unlike those Greek and Trojan warriors from the Iliad who, when they met in the field of battle, embarked on a prolix enumeration of their respective ancestors before coming to blows. Diomedes and Glaucus not only refused to fight each other, but even exchanged armors.

Also reminiscent of Oedipus, who met Laius at a crossroads and killed him for pretty flimsy reasons.

Jared Diamond, psychohistorian

Prediction in history, as in other historical sciences, is most feasible on large spatial scales and over long times, when the unique features of millions of small-scale brief events become averaged out.

(from the Epilogue of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. [...] Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered a quintillion.

(Wikipedia page for Pyschohistory [fictional])

Another candidate for real-world psychohistorian is Peter Turchin, who uses equations derived from population dynamics -modified to take Ibn Kahldun's concept of asabiyah into account- to model the rise and fall of precapitalist empires.

I'll have to check out War and Peace and War one of these days. I doubt I'll find it convincing, but nevertheless it has a fascinating thesis. (Turchin's name for his discipline, "Cliodynamics", sounds way better than "Psychohistory". Furthermore, this latter name is already taken.)

Assorted links

• Nick Szabo's essay on the origins of money. See also this other one.
• A survey of player-NPC dialogue systems in games. See also Dialog System on Wikipedia.
• An interview with Lee Kuan Yew. See also Social Development Unit on Wikipedia.
• My favorite part of David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature".

Henry Crabb Robinson

Henry Crabb Robinson residió en A Coruña como corresponsal de The Times durante la Guerra de la Independencia.

El periodista Elías Durán de Porras ha escrito un libro sobre su estancia: "The Times y La Guerra de la Independencia. Henry Crabb Robinson y la corresponsalía de The Times en A Coruña (1808-1809)". Ver los artículos en La Voz de Galicia y La Opinión Coruña.

Tres volúmenes de sus diarios y correspondencia están disponibles en el Internet Archive:

• Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. (Volume 1. Volume 2. Volume 3.)

(Hablando de ingleses en Galicia, aquí hay un blog escrito por uno.)

Ginny Wrapped in the Sun

I wrote here about the biblical allusions R. A. Lafferty weaved into Ginny Wrapped in the Sun. This post in the blog Bookfeed mentions a few more I didn't catch, and offers an interpretation of the story's meaning which I find very convincing.

Escapism

He cannot realise, he cannot make a tale of his own life; which crumbles in discrete impressions even as he lives it, and slips between the fingers of his memory like sand. It is not this that he considers in his rare hours of rumination, but that other life, with was all lit up for him by the humble talent of a Hayward - that other life which, God knows, perhaps he still believes that he is leading - the life of Tom Holt.

(Robert Louis Stevenson: Popular Authors)

That sounds almost parasitic on the part of imaginary character Tom Holt. Perhaps we shouldn't consider as part of our own lives the time spent daydreaming we are someone else.

Historical demography question

In books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples I have seen mentioned that, until relatively recently in history, cities were demographic sinks ravaged by disease which required a steady stream of newcomers from the countryside to be able to sustain their population level.

How, then, did predominantly urban minorities, like medieval Jews, manage to sustain their numbers?

Sagan's response

Continuation of this post.

Frank Tipler used the possibility of self-replicating spacecraft to argue against the existence extraterrestrial civilizations. If such civilizations existed, at least one of them should have already developed self-replicating probes. These probes would have overrun the galaxy -including our solar system- in a comparatively short time. We don't have evidence for these probes, and therefore it is likely that humans are indeed alone in the Universe.

Carl Sagan tried to answer his argument in his paper The Solipsist Approach to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He argued that self-replicating probes (also called von Neumann Machines) would end up going rogue and posing a threat to the original builders. Advanced civilizations, being aware of the danger, would not build them in the first place:

these implacable replicators will not stop until the entire Universe has been converted into ~10^47 von Neumann machines, which then presumably cannibalize each other. If anything like this were a real danger, an emerging interstellar civilization would be wise, as a matter of self-preservation, to take steps to prevent it. No civilization could be sure of the ultimate fidelity over > 10^6 years of the self-replication programs of the von Neumann machines, and whether they ultimately might pose as grave a threat to the planets of their builders as to any other world. [...] Thus, the prudent policy of any technical civilization must be, with very high reliability, to prevent the construction of interstellar von Neumann machines and to circumscribe severely their domestic use. If we accept Tipler's arguments, the entire Universe is endangered by such an invention; controlling and destroying interstellar von Neumann machines is then something to which every civilization -especially the most advanced- would be likely to devote some attention.

I find Sagan's response unconvincing, for a number of reasons. Firstly, he assumes that all civilizations would care enough about their long term prospects to renounce the shorter term gains promised by a dangerous technology. This hasn't always been the case here on Earth (see the book Collapse by Jared Diamond.) And von Neumann machines only need to be invented once. What about a civilization that knows it is doomed due to some impending cosmic disaster, like a supernova? They wouldn't have a future that could be imperiled. What about two warring civilizations, like the ones depicted in Stanislaw Lem's novel Fiasco? They could resort to dangerous measures in their attempts to win the war.

Secondly, I doubt that "responsible" civilizations could defeat a rogue probe outbreak initiated by an irresponsible one. Von Neumann machines are likely to be though foes, because of their rapacious, unrestrained, endlessly proliferating nature. (If you want proof of this, try fighting the Slylandro probes in Star Control II.)

Lastly, maybe machines could be constructed that would never go rogue, even after 10^6 years. It's a matter of putting enough checks and controls in the design to ensure accurate replication. Of course, absolute safety is impossible, but perhaps the probability of a replication error could be reduced enough to make it unlikely to happen within the Universe's lifespan. Knowing that, civilizations would not be afraid to build them.

Mathematics as magic, magic as mathematics

I have often admired the mysticall way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magicke of numbers

(Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici)

In this fashion did Turjan enter his apprenticeship to Pandelume. Day and far into the opalescent Embelyon night he worked under Pandelume's unseen tutelage. He learned the secret of renewed youth, many spells of the ancients, and a strange abstract lore that Pandelume termed "Mathematics."

"Within this instrument," said Pandelume, "resides the Universe. Passive in itself and not of sorcery, it elucidates every problem, each phase of existence, all the secrets of time and space. Your spells and runes are built upon its power and codified according to a great underlying mosaic of magic. The design of this mosaic we cannot surmise; our knowledge is didactic, empirical, arbitrary. Phandaal glimpsed the pattern and so was able to formulate many of the spells which bear his name. I have endeavored through the ages to break the clouded glass, but so far my research has failed. He who discovers the pattern will know all of sorcery and be a man powerful beyond comprehension."

So Turjan applied himself to the study and learned many of the simpler routines.

"I find herein a wonderful beauty," he told Pandelume. "This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity."

(Jack Vance: Turjan of Miir)

The Vance snippet come from the Mathematical Fiction site.

The rude, dissolute manners of the people

Some young man, possessed of fortune, health, and leisure, should make an autumnal voyage into that kingdom [Spain], and should spend a year there, investigating the natural history of that vast country. Mr. Willughby passed through that kingdom on such an errand; but he seems to have skirted along in a superficial manner and an ill-humour, being much disgusted at the rude, dissolute manners of the people.

(Rev. Gilbert White: The Natural History of Selborne)

White is referring to this Willughby.

The epidemiology of Madame Bovary

Towards the end of chapter six in Part II of Madame Bovary, Charles, Emma, and Monsieur Homais discuss the dangers that may await Leon in the city of Paris:

‘That is true,’ said Charles; ‘but I was thinking especially of illnesses—of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the provinces.’

Emma shuddered.

‘Because of the change of regimen,’ continued the chemist, ‘and of the perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the water at Paris, don’t you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever people may say of them, a good soup.’

The greater susceptibility of people form the countryside to infectious diseases is mentioned in William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples:

in the nineteenth century, before inoculations became standard, draftees into the French army from the countryside suffered-sometimes seriously-from infectious disease to which their city-bred contemporaries were almost immune, having already been exposed. As a result, robust peasant sons had a far higher death rate in the army than did undernourished weaklings drafted from urban slums.

Enmendándole la plana a Flaubert

Al llegar al pie de la cuesta, Rodolphe aflojó las riendas. Arrancaron al unísono, de un solo impulso y una vez llegados a lo alto, los caballos se pararon de repente y el gran velo azul del sombrero de Emma volvió a caer sobre su rostro.*

* Aquí me he permitido enmendarle la plana a Flaubert, que se limita a decir "son grand voile bleu retomba" , o sea "su gran velo azul volvió a caer", pero lo he hecho porque me parece que quedaba confuso. Y además, más adelante se ve que Emma llevaba un sombrero con velo. (N. de la T.)

(Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary. Tusquets Editores, Colección Fábula. Traducción de Carmen Martín Gaite.)