On Bullfighting

Bullfighting inhabits a place where two conflicting moral influences overlap: one linked to aesthetics (which also justifies us in killing animals for meat, which we eat mainly for taste in Britain rather than out of medical necessity), the other inspired by sympathy, a utilitarian ethic and a non-religious sense of piety, all of them inducing us not to cause suffering in animals for our pleasure.

(from Alexander Fiske-Harrison's article A Noble Death at Prospect Magazine)

Bullfighting could be justified on utilitarian terms, too. The suffering of the animal is weighted against the aesthetic pleasure induced in the audience, and the latter is found to be greater according to some measure. Maybe this could be used to justify some kind of Most Dangerous Game-Death Race-The Running Man-Hard Target kind of show, too. Or gladiatorial games.

Considering that somewhere in the region of 37,000 bulls die each year in Spanish bullrings, there must be hundreds of thousands of Iberian cattle living in idyllic conditions across Spain paid for by the bullfighting industry. Compare that with how British beef cattle are kept and the fact that they are all slaughtered aged between one and two years old, and one wonders if that 15 minutes in the ring is not a worthwhile price for the life the bulls have led before.

(ibid.)

If I were abducted by aliens, and given the choice of spending the rest of my life trapped in horribly cramped quarters before being sent to die anonymously in a featureless and aseptic gas chamber, or pass the time exploring a Barsoom-like world cavorting with beautiful green-skinned princesses along the way before dying in an epic if doomed battle with a bizarrely-clad alien warrior sporting futuristic weaponry, I know what my choice would be.

ciudades inmensas habitadas por cyborgs

El otro día en el curro a la hora del café, hablábamos sobre el timo de las energías renovables y la necesidad de construir nuevas centrales nucleares. Pregunté si les sonaba la canción Nuclear sí de Aviador Dro. Ni uno solo de ellos la conocía. ¡Pero qué incultura, por Dios!

"Nuclear sí" destila un ansia futurista de retirar la obsoleta humanidad del escenario de la Historia, y sobre sus ruinas construir una civilización de alta tecnología, mecánica, alienígena e impersonal.

(Aclaración: no estoy a favor de convertir la Tierra en un erial atómico, es sólo que quiero tener disponible electricidad abundante para que me funcione la PlayStation.)

En el vídeo al que enlazo no se pronuncia la línea "ciudades inmensas habitadas por cyborgs", que recuerdo haber oído en otras versiones de la canción. Esa línea siempre me recuerda a Moderan de David R. Bunch, originalísima distopía, injustamente olvidada, que precisamente trata sobre una civilización postapocalíptica formada por cyborgs empeñados en dejar sus orígenes atrás, muy atrás, en una huida hacia adelante de continua deshumanización.

Bunch no llegó a conocer las recientes esperanzas milenaristas en torno a la Singularidad, comedura de tarro también conocida como "the Rapture of the nerds". No creo que le sorprendiesen, la verdad. No cuesta mucho imaginarse a Ray Kurtzweil como uno de los cyborgs de Moderan.

give me a time machine

Some time ago I saw posters in my city announcing a Ladytron concert. They looked intriguing (lets be frank: I though the chick at the front was really hot). But since I hadn't listen to anything by them at that point, and was too lazy to search for a sample of their music, I let the concert slip.

How dumb was I! Turns out I totally dig their electropop. Like the song Destroy Everything You Touch from his latest album.

Band member Mira Aroyo seems to be a quite smart gal. Reminds me of Chromeo's David Macklovitch, who is currently earning his Ph.D in French Literature. Maybe electropop/funk musicians tend to be just plain smarter than other pop musicians?

mirrors are scary

So, that Kiefer Shuterland movie about mirrors is not exactly receiving glowing reviews from critics. Too reliant on played-out clichés they say, too derivative of Asian horror films.

And yet, the fictional tale which scared me the most features mirrors.

I once caught a dramatization of a horror story on the radio, already started. It was about a person standing in an room of a mysterious house, watching himself and his dog in a huge mirror that occupies the greater part of one of the walls. The dog loiters near the room's half-open door.

Suddenly, the man sees the reflection of a gnarled hand which darts from the doorstep, grabs the puppy, and disappears with him into the darkness! But as he, startled, turns away from the mirror and towards the door, he sees the puppy prancing around as before! The whole episode happened only in the mirror.

Such horror! I nearly fainted at that point^*.

Since I didn't catch the beginning of the story, I didn't got its title. I spent years trying to identify that tale. When at last I managed to do so, the author turned out to be someone decidedly unexpected: none other than animal-lover Gerald Durrell! The story is called The Entrance.

I have another terrifying story involving mirrors, this one culled from real life. In the bathroom this morning, when examining my drowsy and unshaven visage, I discovered two white hairs in my beard. What's worse, I suspect this is just the beginning of a terrible series of revelations my bathroom mirror is going to dispense throughout the coming years.

Talk about scary!

^*Hyperbole.

alien atmospheres

Edgar Atemiev's Meditation theme from Tarkovsky's Stalker.

György Ligeti's Lux Aeterna from Kubrick's 2001.

Cliff Martinez's First Sleep from Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.

Brian Eno's Prophecy theme from David Lynch's Dune.

concept ships

Fascinated as I am with the image of the science-fictional starship, it's no wonder that I subscribe to the blog concept ships.

Does anyone know of a similar blog that collects images of fantastic/futuristic cities, like the ones of this awesome post in BLDBLOG?

They are not terrorists

It’s striking that several people in the movie call him [the Joker] a terrorist, an appropriate term only in a very loose sense. He certainly terrorises people, in the movie and in the cinema. But terrorism, strictly, is a political weapon, and the Joker doesn’t have any politics, any more than he has any morals. In this respect he resembles the slouching killer of the Coen brothers’ recent No Country for Old Men.

(Michael Wood at The London Review of Books, discussing The Dark Knight)

Another strained comparison of a classic villain with a terrorist can be found in this New Yorker piece about Milton:

In America, where God and the Devil live alongside Western rationalism, Milton seems right at home. After the attacks of September 11th, it was possible to find Milton invoked to remind us of the nature of absolute evil—his Satan really is a model terrorist, who, having abandoned hope of a happy home, devotes his energy to destroying the lives of others—and at the same time quoted to uphold the rights of individuals whose distasteful views might be curtailed during a time of war.

In Paradise Lost, Satan doesn't employ terror to bring about the damnation of Adam and Eve, he uses temptation and deceit. That passage is a lazy attempt at making Milton's work resonate with current concerns.

Dubious Heaven

Indian Mahayanists conceived of the universe as consisting of an infinite number of spheres and as going through an infinite number of cosmic periods. In the present period there is, according to this belief, a sphere called Sukhavati, the beauties and excellences of which are described in the most extravagant terms by certain of the Mahayana scriptures. Among its advantages is the fact that it is free of the temptations and defilements which characterize the world inhabited by mortals (for example, the presence of women).

(William Theodore de Bary, editor: The Buddhist Tradition)

En qué se nota la crisis

• Fin de semana concurrido; camareros en la puerta de sus establecimientos.

• El arreglazapatos te comenta que últimamente tiene más clientes.

Where Dennet goes wrong

Centuries of ethical research and reflection, by philosophers, political theorists, economists, and other secular thinkers have not yet achieved a consensus on any Grand Unified Theory of ethics, but there is a broad, stable consensus on how to conduct such an inquiry, how to resolve ethical quandaries, and how to deal with as-yet unresolved differences.

(Daniel C. Dennet, interviewed here.)

Conversación con un primo segundo de 6 años

Él: Tengo seis tebeos de Tintín.

Yo: Yo tengo veintipico, la colección completa.

Él: ¿Ah, sí? ¡Pues a ver quién se muere antes!

Murder, or not murder? A question about AI and Moral Theory

Imagine a computer that runs a program which generates a mind. The program runs with no input at all from the external world.

Shutting down that computer would be tantamount to murder, I think.

Now imagine another computer somewhere else that is running the exact same program. Since the execution is deterministic, the AI in this computer has the exact same sequence of thoughts and qualia as the AI in the original computer, the same phenomenal consciousness. This seems redundant, in a way... is shutting down this second computer as bad as shutting down the first one? Is it bad, but not as bad? Maybe it is not bad at all? What if the computers are not running at the same time, and the original execution of the program happened years ago?

If you think that shutting down the second computer is murder:

Imagine that the computers are Turing Machines whose parts (the tape, the head...) are very thin and positioned on a bidimensional plane. You could put two of these machines in parallel, separated only by a distance of millimeters, executing the same program at unison, the exact same pieces moving at the exact same time. Now imagine that you close the millimeter-long gap, gluing corresponding pieces of each machine together using Loctite. Now we have only one computer. But wait a minute... there were two AIs a moment ago! This is surely as bad as shutting down one of the computers... and yet the material components of both are is still there, working as before, and doing exactly the same things. Murder, or not murder?

If you think that shutting down the second computer is not murder:

Imagine that the scheduled lifespan of the AIs is forty years. We modify the program so that no interaction with the external world is allowed for the first thirty years but, after that, previously dormant input-output devices on both machines are activated and, from that time on, the AIs can chat with people outside their computers. Since their respective environments are bound to be different, program execution will start to diverge at that point. If, knowing this, you meet the second AI when "he" is only ten years old and you shut it down, do you still think that your action wouldn't be murder?

Edit. I have just found Daniel C. Dennet's essay Where Am I? that touches on similar themes (only, in his story, one of the brains is biological). Dennet mentions the extreme difficulty of maintaining two minds perfectly synchronized:

Since several of the most remarkable features of "Where am I?" hinge on the supposition of independent synchronic processing in Yorick and Hubert, it is important to note that this supposition is truly outrageous--in the same league as the supposition that somewhere there is another planet just like Earth, with an atom-for-atom duplicate of you and all your friends and surroundings,* or the supposition that the universe is only five days old (it only seems to be much older because when God made it five days ago, He made lots of instant "memory"-laden adults, libraries full of apparently ancient books, mountains full of brand-new fossils, and so forth).

I would say that, if we assume that the two minds are not biological, but instead programs running on a digital computer, the supposition of independent synchronic processing becomes much less outrageous. One can conceive supercomputers specifically designed for extremely reliable and reproducible execution of programs.

Soteriologic treadmill

I think I read somewhere that the early Rigvedic religion didn't concern itself with the afterlife that much, and instead centered on obtaining from the gods benefits for the here-and-now. But this came to be seen as unsatisfactory: "Is this all there is?". So the religion changed to give a more pronounced emphasis on ethical behavior and the afterlife. The Axial Age and all that.

But once people started mulling on the whole future state thing, disturbing thoughts started to insinuate themselves. What if souls dwelling in heaven are not serene and imperturbable, but in fact may fall again into the world? The doctrine of reincarnation developed from there. And, once accepted, the perspective of an infinite cycle of deaths and rebirths began to grate on the nerves. So religions like Buddhism and Jainism appeared that promised a way to escape samsara.

Closer to home, Luther felt that meriting one's salvation through one's own works was too great a responsibility for fallible, sinful humanity to bear. "Salvation by faith" ameliorated that terrible burden. But it brought its own source of anguish: the uncertainty of knowing if one is among the elect.

Bugs and erratas

According to Joyce scholar Jack Dalton, the first edition of Ulysses contained over two thousand errors but was still the most accurate edition published. As each subsequent edition attempted to correct these mistakes, it incorporated more of its own.

(Wikipedia entry for Ulysses)

11.24 Fixing a defect has a substantial (20 to 50 percent) chance of introducing another.

(Fred Brooks: The Mythical Man-Month)

Trying to correct the text of Ulysses must be akin to trying to debug a very complex program, poorly documented, whose original author has left the company (the company of the living, in Joyce's case) and is unavailable for questioning.

Two people I tend to get mixed up

Joseph de Maistre, reactionary political philosopher, and Julien Offray de La Mettrie, author of L'Homme Machine. Not at all the same person! Quite antithetical, in fact.

Also, a thinker I didn't know about: Juan Donoso Cortés. He seems to be a spanish analogue to Joseph de Maistre.

Edit. Another spanish traditionalist: Jaime Balmes.

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.