| Author | Message | ||
| dave Username: dave Registered: 10-2006 |
What we need around here is less angst and more mountains. This is what I did last weekend: http://picasaweb.google.com/dhorton79/TomFieldWill eyTecumseh6146152008 I didn't think about McCain (or his balls) once the whole time. It was a great weekend. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Dodging the rain this weekend, I finally saw this on dvd: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Prestige-Christian-Bale/dp /B000K7LQS8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=121905948 8&sr=1-1 - but despite the plaudits (and Bowie managing to act for a change), it's a needlessly complicated costume drama with at least two gaping holes in the plot. I remember Priest's novel was over-egged as well. Oh, dear. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I felt Priest had began to repeat himself with The Prestige, and The Extreme; that he had lost what seemed to be the mystery of The Affirmation and The Glamour. The Prestige has an explanation at the centre of its plot whereas - unless I missed it - The Glamour really does not, which makes the latter, for me, far more interesting. Or perhaps that isn't quite accurate. The Glamour does have an explanation, but it is so wholly mentally based that it itself becomes a kind of hall of mirrors where the out door is in (and vice versa). I am saying all this for fun. The fun of being flabbergasted! | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
With the book, Priest seemed to write himself into a corner, and could only get out of it by identical twins and a matter transmitter (which is actually something else). This isn't plotting, but desperation. With the film, the problem becomes clearer. It's a variant on the Sorcerer's Apprentice, which would have worked far better as a love/trick triangle between an older conjuror, his female assistant, and his audience "plant." Instead, we get two plants (each of whom gets doubled), and a complicated love interest, which is altogether too many balls for anyone to keep in the air. Things fall apart completely at the end. We're asked to believe that a different drowned body can be smuggled out of a major London theatre on 20 or 30 occasions without anyone noticing; that (for no reason except gothic effect) Angier keeps them all in store, apparently undetected in a house well-staffed with servants; and - what no one seems to remark on - that, for once, a duplicate Angier did not appear in the theatre circle as usual. Why not? I don't think we're told. If he didn't appear, the trick has failed, he's undeniably dead, and half the plot can't proceed. If he did, the whole audience knows he's alive - and the other half of the plot collapses. Or maybe I missed that explanation on top of all the others. I did think with all this hidden stuff in box that we might get a sly nod to Schroedinger's Cat somewhere - or even the consideration that, if you had a machine which produces perfect copies of 3-d objects, you'd find a lot better things to do with it than stage tricks which can be accomplished by far simpler means. But by that point, there were way too many considerations for the story to sustain - and I was losing the will to live. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
The film doesn't sound like my cup of tea. But it must make Priest comfortably off at last. Maybe there is a balance to be struck between plot machinations and dreaminess. From your description above, when things depend on bodies, matter, it all gets a bit involved. Much better stick to mental smoke and mirrors. I am reluctant to reread any of those older books, the Glamour and the Affirmation or A Dream of Wessex because they baffled me so completely. When I read a Dream of Wessex I utterly lost the 'in door', and found myself walking around not being able to tell if I was awake or asleep - thinking "I bet Descartes never had this problem." It was a very interesting experience. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
I still like "The Affirmation" and "The Glamour" - but I'm sure Priest or his agent quickly realised that there's only a small audience for that species of epistemological fantasy. You have to try and yolk your concerns to costume drama ("The Prestige" ) or public events like war ("The Extremes") to find a viable readership. I think "Prestige" also runs foul of exactly that tension between fantasy and machination. It hinges on the idea of an impossible conjuring trick - but, in a rational fiction, this is an equally impossible feat to carry off. As author, you're reduced to a denoument of either windy explanations (and if you can explain, it stands to reason that the master conjurors you're writing about could reach the same conclusion far more quickly - your story just vanished), or else you have to resort to the fantastic - "Not so, Sir Ronald. For you see, Dorothy's levitation depended on - Cavorite!!!" Which is simply the van Vogtian, deus ex machina solution, and all your carefully nurtured historical detail dribbles straight off the page into the cyncical reader's lap. The only alternative, which is to leave the mystery intact and the reader guessing but satisfied, is much, much harder to achieve. Given its embedded structure of trick and revelation, Priest stood no chance of doing this with "The Prestige." Ironically, the narrative tricked him out of his own story. I've maybe mentioned this before, but King collided with a similar problem in "Pet Sematary." The book depnds on zombies (supernatural); but King makes his protagonist a doctor (pragmatic), and the two come togther with a clunk. You expect the doctor to whip out his stethoscope when he encounters the undead for the first time (as it happens, his zombie cat), because that's what doctors do: they pursue a rational agenda in irrational circumstances. But King fights shy of any such examination, because at that point he must have stared at the screen and thought: "Oh, shit." He'd boxed himself in. You might believe in "the living dead" as long as it's a fantasy construct - but introduce a pinch of logic, and you realise zombies are an absurd oxymoron. Scientifically, an organism is either living or it's not: there's no third choice. King is far too intelligent not to have grasped that. Yet the book has to go forward - and its protagonist can't be anyone who'd be squeamish about a corpse. Its burials depend on the coolness of a medic, to produce the necessary frisson of mould-covered resurrection. King was stuck with his rational front man if the plot (in both senses) was going to move. So he compromised. Like an adult intruding on a child's game, he tottered between the sublime and the mundane, and gave the cat a pulse - but a verrrry sloooow one. Yeah! Right! As if. Clunk! Caught between cool thought and inexplicable horror, the story stumbled, and (for me, anyway) never really got back on its feet. A bit like the cat, come to think of it. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
That is very interesting Martin. If you compare that with The Glamour in the incident where a 'glamorous' makes love to his girlfriend in a randomly chosen suburban front room with the occupying family continuing to watch their tv in apparent complete ignorance of them - Priest's explanation of how this is possible is to demonstrate the power of hypnotic suggestion in various clever ways. He shows that a chair can be made invisible to someone through mere hypnotic suggestion. The resonance this is that it makes (potentially) *anything* possible because by this token anything can be invisible. It raises the question: what might exist that we can't normally see? Might there not in fact be glamorous people shop-lifting their way through life, as Priest describes? It struck me as highly plausible. In anycase, it manages to symbolise not just a quantity unknown but a quantity unknowable. Your description of the King novel illustrates the literary trap that novelists who are too self-consciously rational can fall into when they want to write about such areas of fictional real-estate. Which is that they fail to symbolise the unknowable in their anxiety to keep everything in order rationally: they throw it out with the bathwater. It is odd in a way, because it is so easy to find. You just have to look through a window into lightnessness to find at least the suggestion that this lightlessness doesn't necessarily have an end, that it just goes on and on into infinite comfortless darkness. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Yes, I would say that in The Glamour; The Affirmation; and A Dream of Wessex; Priest found a resolution of infinity: a bottomless pit if you like; since in each case it doesn't end, in the questions he raises, of What is real, what is imaginary? In these terms the books have no resting place. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
King's trap is the one M.R. James highlighted - ghost stories work best when there's no spiritualist explanation involved, and are stripped back to the raw bones of revenge tragedy. This is the reason James chills to this day, but why Blackwood can be fairly tedious. Richard Matheson also got snared. His zombies depended on bacteria, I think (bad move: no one's interested ) - and his Shrinking Man infamously ran foul first of the inverse square law, which Matheson hadn't heard about, and then of the insoluble problem of tracing an organism's perceptions and abilities as it dwindles towards the molecular level. Simply. Too. Much. To. Think. About. Lovecraft was far craftier. You get a nod towards relativity, Riemann space, polar exploration, or astronomical discoveries - which is just enough to convince you that there's a rational narrator at work, and that we might still, just, be reading about events in the real world. But then he kicks the physical and chemical flummery aside and gets right down to business: "Awesome monsters! Look at the bargains over here, lady!!" This is what we came for - and the technique still works like a charm, as King showed when he wrote "The Mist." | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I disagree about Matheson: I think I am Legend is an outstanding example of its kind as rational or science fiction horror. There is no comfort to be got from the protagonist's realisation that he is seeing the evolution of a new species, and finding himself lost in the infinity of being the only remaining old-style human even amongst people he knew. Matheson is a genius because he manages to find a way of using ambiguity as the fulcrum in his stories. Same as in Bid Time Return. Is the whole time travel thing in that novel a mental hallucination or does it actually happen - or in any case what is the difference? This sort of device forces us to suspend our rationality or to halt it at a given point because it makes no sense to go any further. Laws are made to be broken after all. I can remember scientists categorically ruling out the idea of cloning in the seventies: it was physically impossible, they said. Similarly if you proposed the idea of a modern microchip with 500 million transistors aboard a postage stamp back then you would have been laughed at as being absurd. I have no problem with scientific silliness in stories as long as the story itself has its own integrity. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I think the resonance of I am Legend is its idea of a new normality. It's "Welcome to the new normal!" theme at the end of a story of relentless horror that begs a comforting resolution: it refuses that completely. It splits our idea of normality in two (old versus new) and thereby shatters it. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Martin, you say: >>>Scientifically, an organism is either living or it's not: there's no third choice. That just begs to be contradicted of course. As with a qubit in quantum computing. One might think for example that the statement, "Well, it's either one or zero, it can't be both at the same time" cannot be contradicted; but that is precisely what quantum computing does. A qubit is one and zero at the same time. A quantum computer can be *switched off* and still perform the calculation. Like Krevorkian (?) in The Simulacrum, it can play the piano while standing twenty feet from it and out of physical contact. As to whether an organism is dead or alive - which state is Schroedinger's Cat in? What seems a simple question ramifies into a set of benday dots like a table cloth with blue and pink spots that if you look at it from far enough away shows the living image of Richard Nixon. We are of course a civilisation intent on creating 'living machines'. Machines that think; that feel. That reproduce. That can get up stairs and vacume the living room and drive you to work or answer your question about the tiny Madagascan chameleon and what it eats. And things like that. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
S's cat may be love or dead (or both) in that box - but once the box is open, I think those uncertainties no longer apply. Quantum is one thing: but on a macro scale (and zombies are nothing but if not macro), we are (sadly) either living or dead. My point wasn't narrowly philosophical, though - I was simply pointing out that irrational fiction can rarely bear the introduction of a rational proof without tying itself in knots - witness Priest and King. Likewise, if Kafka had brought a trained etmologist to the Samsa flat, "Metamorphosis" would've ground to a halt or got derailed altogether. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
"We are either living or dead" - the way you argue that is ingenious Martin. I hadn't thought of it that way: quantum is micro. But even though I basically agree with you, especially with your point about irrational/rational fiction, in certain ways science does not, apparently - such as with the issue of AI for example. I cannot say that I fully understand the point of view (since it seems incoherrent) but there are very well funded research establishments, in Japan and America devoted to discovering living machines: machines that are definitionally alive - such as by Turing's definition - an ambiguity (fake/real; actual/virtual) that allows certain scientists to assert that there is no real ultimate different between a man and a machine. So we are back on the macro scale. The dead clay, the golem, the robot, comes to life. But - does it have a soul - ? Is it *fully* alive? We are in PKD territory. "If the robot is alive, how am I any better than it - then its dead mineral substance?" There is a metaphysical death here that is acute and real. Perfectly actual; and indeed we are living it out in the very logic of our culture: cf Dawkins. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Culturally the moment that we are in is peculiar and I wonder how determinate it is; if it is inevitable as a channel of historical determinism: how ultimate in the sense of its working as a 'search for God' inadvertent or otherwise. One could argue this. That 'subjectively' there are different levels of life or of being alive. From say Shakespearean genuis down to the activity of a thermostat: the thermostat is barely alive, if at all. (Some philosophers have argued, seriously, that a thermostat has a consciousness.) Similarly, one could say that a tiger or bear or elephant living in the wild is 'very alive': whereas the segment of a laboratory rat's brain used in the construction of a small robotic device is barely alive or 'not really alive' perhaps. Suppose in a few decades that our cars or airborne 'flapples' or whatever they are are guided by laboratory developed rat's brains. Where these rat's brain are construed as the vehicles' command and control centres. Could we say that the Flapple was alive? I suppose it could be argued but then again, one would have to argue *where* it was. For example if the headlamps were simple metal and perspex constructs one would be inclined to think of that as dead. (Like the hair on one's head or the immediate outer layer of the skin.) Or suppose - for example - that worker clones are developed. Broad shouldered squat men and women ideally suited to manual labour are cloned in their millions. You have a whole city of these clones. Some of us might be inclined to regard this city as peopled by robots. Faceless identical entities; beings all exactly the same, without individuality: soul-less - organic machines in fact and so of a lower order of being than we are ... creatures less 'alive'. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Where I think the science fiction idea of a machine one day acquiring consciousness is a non-starter is where it is supposed that a critical threshold can be reached through sheer numerical accumulation: the ... given enough transistors ... idea. It is just as if one were to build a billion washing machines and expect that eventually a washing machine consciousness would evolve through sheer numerical accumulation. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Ah, well! "Consciousness" vs. "life" is an interesting one (Descartes, anyone? And that worrying Dick story, "The Pre-Persons") - but, discounting the idea of a "soul" (metaphysics), we're still left with the basic signs of life any biology student knows: if something breathes, eats, excretes, moves, grows, shows perceptual response and is capable of reproducing, it's alive. Do zombies shit in the woods? I wonder.  | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
You see clear; I see fog. And the rat's brain in the robot body? (There is a report in the New Scientist, I believe.) Is that rat brain alive? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Since at least the early 2oth Century we have been synthesising new subtances. Kinds of substances that never existed before and that could never exist except artificially. I don't know what the technical terms are. Polymers or something. We have synthesised illnesses. Until quite recently there was no such illness as Hepatitis C. The sexualities of some animals have changed. Hermaphrodite. In terms of cultural and scientific logic at least if you advance that over the decades and centuries then very strange and exotic results are inevitable. What life is changes in definition. It is not merely the organic versus the inorganic for example. I am not really arguing with you Martin, just exploring the idea. I agree that a creature with all the characteristics you cite is alive. On the other hand the old verities have vanished. Physics versus metaphysics is not at all a clear distinction. All kinds of claims are made for physics that are in the main metaphysical in orientation: value based, except that this isn't properly recognised. Black and white have long since vanished. I would say that a thermostat is not alive. That a present day washing machine is not alive. But who knows in the future - seriously? Some kind of amoebic life form. Martian wub fur or something. What about cryogenic suspension? People are as a matter of fact spending serious money on betting on the future of their bodies being 'awoken' in a few hundred years and having their organs replaced with artiforgs or whatever. I refer you to Ubiq. One can't help wondering what sort of consciousness is synthesised in the interim - in a body that in its frozen state is classifiable as neither neither alive nor dead but in a condition of 'maybe'. So - fog. Strange syntheses of alien truths. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Exploring, indeed. Cryogenics: they're dead, mate. As yet, this isn't a re-run of Zelazny's "Graveyard Heart" or whatever - Walt Disney isn't breathing, there's no heart or brain activity, and he certainly isn't eating or (we hope) reproducing at present. So he's in the same logical category as a corpse in a morgue. He can simply afford a better class of fridge. The rat's brain is an interesting question. But what are we talking about? Is it a few nerves bonded into a circuit, making a cyborg extension? If not, all organic brains require oxygenated blood/lymph/sensory input to orientate their apperceptive process: you can't just poke a wire into dissected cranial tissue and say it's alive. So the rat's brain has to have some form of organic support, I think: in other words, a functioning body. And that, needless to say, dictates life. A self-conscious computer might imply "life" - but I suspect this is a step which will depend on successful quantum processing. And the issues surrounding that will probably make our debate here as irrelevant as queries about vitalism or phlogiston. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Medicine already confronts this question with people in so called 'vegetative states'. Here is a useful summary from Wikipedia: Medical definition Recent functional neuroimaging results have shown that some parts of the cerebral cortex are still functioning in 'vegetative' patients. Such studies are disentangling the neural correlates of the vegetative state from the minimally conscious state, and have major clinical consequences in addition to empirical importance for the understanding of consciousness (Laureys, 2000). The minimally conscious state (MCS) is a recently defined clinical condition that differs from the persistent vegetative state (PVS) by the presence of inconsistent, but clearly discernible, behavioral evidence of consciousness (Boly, 2004). Researchers have analyzed functional neuroimaging results and demonstrated that cerebral activity observed in patients in an MCS is more likely to lead to higher-order integrative processes, thought to be necessary for the gain of conscious auditory perception. (Sara et al, 2007). [edit] Legal/ethical definition As opposed to brain death and comatose, PVS is not recognized as death in any legal system. This ethical grey area has led to several court cases involving people in a PVS, those who believe that they should be allowed to die, and those who are equally determined that, if recovery is possible, care should continue. This ethical issue raises questions about autonomy, quality of life, appropriate use of resources, the wishes of family members, professional responsibilities, and many more. [edit] History A 23-year-old woman in a vegetative state after a severe brain injury due to a car accident in 2005 was able to communicate with a team of British researchers at Cambridge University in England via functional magnetic resonance imaging.[4][5] [edit] Classification Terminology in this area is somewhat confused. While the term persistent vegetative state is the most frequent in media usage and legal provisions, it is discouraged by neurologists, who favour the terminology of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) which refers only to the vegetative state, the continuing vegetative state, and the permanent vegetative state.[6] The vegetative state is a chronic or long-term condition. This condition differs from a persistent vegetative state (PVS, a state of coma that lacks both awareness and wakefulness) since patients have awakened from coma, but still have not regained awareness. In the vegetative state patients can open their eyelids occasionally and demonstrate sleep-wake cycles. They also completely lack cognitive function. The vegetative state is also called coma vigil. The continuing vegetative state describes a patient's diagnosis prior to confirmation of the permanence of the condition. The permanent vegetative state occurs when the vegetative state is deemed permanent; a prediction is being made that the patient will never recover awareness. This prediction cannot be made with absolute certainty. However, the chances of regaining awareness diminish considerably as the time spent in the vegetative state increases (Royal College of Physicians, 1996). This typology distinguishes various stages of the condition rather than using one term for them all. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Despite impaired cognition, VS sufferers still fulfil the basic conditions for life: they breathe, they require nourishment, they excrete, and they have at least a functional possibility of reproduction. In a philosphic sense, they're no different from someone who's asleep. By the same criteria, crystals aren't alive, although they can grow and multiply - nor are those polymers with "memory" that assume their original structure if you bend them out of shape. I'm trying to think of other borderline examples between the living and the inorganic, but (AI models apart) I can't! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
>>>> In a philosphic sense, they're no different from someone who's asleep. The point is that there is radical disagreement scientifically. It is very uncertain with someone in so called PVS: are they clinically dead or alive? Sometimes the patient wakes up after 20 years Rip van Winkle style. Sometimes they don't. Do you pull the plug or don't you? Certain autonomic functions aren't working but run by machines. Even breathing. They don't do it by themselves but a machine keeps them 'alive': in a state from which they may eventually recover or they may not. This is here and now medical science. It seems to me (not that I am arguing of course) that I have cited at least four exceptions to the idea that organically, scientifically, a person is either dead or alive. 1) At a quantum level (and isn't the quantum macro too? Isn't there scope for examining consciousness as a quantum phenomenon?) 2) Robotically: via AI 3) Living material used in making a cyborg 4) Cryogenically (you offer no proof that this is 'dead' and there are plenty of (sane?) people signing up for it. There are labs in America in which people are stored. ( I personally don't think it very viable; but there are grey areas.) 5) Persistent vegetative states: the clincher, as far as I can see. Many of the people in PVS cannot be classified with any certainty as to their being alive or dead. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Either / or: Obama is either black or white Either I am asleep or awake He is either lying or he isn’t Either he is intelligent or stupid He is neither dead nor alive Either either or either, not both. It’s either fact or fiction. Either way I choose without choice I am either rich or poor. I am either happy or sad, never both. The extreme never admits of degree. At the extreme edge of the cliff you fall off. Either that – or in fact you stay on the cliff. I didn’t half fall off the cliff. Neither either did the cliff half fall on me. But if indeed I half fell off the cliff “I drowned and died for five minutes.” When I awoke I realised I had died. I realised then that I was alive – alive still! Half dead I struggled ashore. He is either lying or standing. Standing I am lying: I am lying I am standing. I half fell off the cliff then the cliff half fell on me. Standing there, I realised I was lying. I lay. But there is more: It's either dust or it's dirt If it's dirt it isn't dust. But if dust then dirt But not both - dust is dust and dirt dirt But for dirt read dust and for dust dirt: if both. If neither then not either or again both but at least one or the other or all three. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Some hares are being split into white rabbits here, I am thinking. But as for cryogenics: this only happens to you once you're pronounced medically deceased. Nobody's lying in liquid nitrogen with a slow heartbeat. Those rich subjects have risked a great deal of money to be preserved, dead, and given new life by an as-yet unknown medical discipline - though the chances of their main resting place in the Rockies escaping earthquake damage in the next century or so is quite slim. Anyway, I suppose they hope for a sympathetic reception the world in which they'll find themselves. "And what did you do?" "I drew pictures of talking mice and ducks! It made me a multi-millionaire!!!" Even from here, you can sense the 25th century's disappointment - not to mention the creak as the freezer door is swiftly reopened. "Hey, put me down -" | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
What I find interesting about this debate is with the suggestion that there can be degrees of life, a concept that seems inevitable given how in the process of one's ordinary life one can be said to be nearer death in one instance (lying in a hospital bed; having a machine breathe for one etc) and nearer life in another - say hunting - one's senses at their most acute, one's body at its fittest; energised and so on. This idea of a sliding scale however: how absolute is it? And can it be applied without restriction to other more elementary life forms? Say to amoebas. Single cells. The debate over abortion concerns precisely the issue of when a body is alive. And really there is no scientific absolute to be had; but things shade into belief and uncertainty. I am of the view that the organism must be a fully fledged being after about 28 days: even if it isn't fully 'human' in any ordinary subjective sense. But original cellular life, what is one to say about that - this getting right down to the minature cogs and wheels of life? Human beings take a view about other creatures, including other mammals, according to generally shaky metaphysical belief systems. Descartes is the obvious example. He believed something to the effect that "Any animal other than a human being is a machine (made by God to serve mankind)." I don't think that at all. Watching an ant working away down at dust and dirt level negotiating holes and cracks in the pavement, I wonder if its life isn't as valid as my own; or even more so given that the ant seems to know what it is doing and my life seems to be keyed by the idea that I am ignorant in these terms. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I would imagine that Walt Disney, when (if) he is brought back to life will no longer be 'ensouled': will no longer be anyone (or anything, really). Like a person in PVS who never truly wakes up and 'awake' is still merely vegetative - unresponsive. Dead to all stimuli. Talking of the scientific criteria for life, one thing I don't very well understand is James Lovelock's Gaia thesis: that the Earth is alive as a kind of homeostatic system. That in such terms it has some sort of awareness. What I don't understand is this: does he mean that it is actually alive or instead that it is only alive by analogy. That distinction seems pretty unscientifally lost in his book, very interesting though his arguments are still. Looking at the issue in other terms (not as science) however, I am open to the suggestion that the Earth is alive somehow. It does seem to be. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Aquinas, I think, made the most sensible case for when human "life" begins. This is the argument that we don't lose part of our soul when we cut our hair or nails, or when we defecate. Any soul we possess isn't co-terminous with the body: it's a higher function, housed in the brain. Therefore, until the brain is fully developed in utero, the soul can't be said to be present. Ergo, a group of cells at 28 days is not a human being - a foetus with a devloped brain is. The shouting starts here, I think. Gaia: I always understood Lovelock to mean that the system is a vast homeostatic construct, not that it's a conscious, directive organism. Which rather begs the question of why he needed to give it an emotive, classical name, instead of just stating that we're subject to the laws of physics like any other effectively closed system. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
>>>This is the argument that we don't lose part of our soul when we cut our hair or nails, or when we defecate. Any soul we possess isn't co-terminous with the body: it's a higher function, housed in the brain. Therefore, until the brain is fully developed in utero, the soul can't be said to be present. Ergo, a group of cells at 28 days is not a human being - a foetus with a devloped brain is. It may be beautiful and philosophical to adopt the views of Aquinas. However, none of that is science. It comes after any facts are established; and is part of ethics and metaphysics. In essence neither I nor you nor anyone else knows what the soul is, rationally. I think that that is categorical (metaphysically). It exists *because* we don't know it, rationally: because it is a more than rational part of life. In that being so it has no quantifiable "now it is/now it isn't" criteria. There is a silly but useful philosophical question: as with a ship say. Over the course of its existence certain timbers are replaced. First the bow, then the stern; then the mast - then the cabin; then the deck - then the very spine (and so on). Eventually you have a ship made out of a completely different set of timbers. Is it the same ship? At a cellular level the body's parts undergo much the same process of replacement over a lifetime. On the Gaia idea; one of the moonlanders, I remember said that he realised walking on the Moon that it had a different 'soul' to the Earth. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Gaia: this must have been one of the co-pilots! Notoriously, the mission commanders have remained hyper-rational, whereas their colleagues have all gone mystic to one degree or another. >None of that is science ... True: but neither is establishing the existence of the soul from negative capability. After all, if you posit something that is "more than a rational part of life," how can it be susceptible to rational detection? Open this avenue, and you admit any amount of wishful thinking: astrology, fairies, a universe supported by a giant turtle. These notions may be fun; they may reassure; they may even give rise to beautiful systems of ethics. But if we're discussing a philosophic or logical proof of their existence, we need something more than high-minded assertion. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
>>>Open this avenue, and you admit any amount of wishful thinking Martin, it would certainly seem that way if what you think I am doing is simply opining; what could be sillier after all? But if you look at the kind of example I have given, it is not high minded but perfectly straightforward. Namely, what does one say of a ship that has had its timbers completely replaced? That it is the same ship or a different one? Rationally, the question is unanswerable because we have something like a qubit: both zero and one simultaneously. As a matter of fact, however, there isn't a problem because it just is "the same ship": because we continue to call it The USS Vanguard or whatever. I am still me despite my complete cellular transformation from when I was a child. But not because reason has figured out that this is the case: reason in fact isn't able to make any headway here. I am me because I still call myself John and so do others and so on. We may be rational beings but reason is not in charge of reality. We may be conscious beings but we don't know what consciousness is - rationally. This illustrates the degree to which we are hypnotised culturally. People assume rational knowledge where none exists and none can exist. This is illustrative of a great deal of our history. And one could say that it is a matter of 'more or less fact' that this is so: ie despite protestations to the contrary by those like Daniel Dennet, Consciousness is not explained and not explainable. Concsiouness is not a rational phenomenon. It never will be explained because it is not such a kind of thing as can be explained: any more than music can be explained say. Ir is not, primarily, a rational property but of life itself: a form of life. It merely exhibits a *degree* of rationality, in this sense: I merely exhibit a degree of rationality in what is otherwise a world that takes place of its own accord. Now, what I am saying here is not a high minded assertion - so much as a well-founded belief. If you look at the facts: here we are pin points of life in being for infintessimally small extents of time in eternity and death. It takes a special kind of idiocy to not see that there is more to this than reason can allow: it takes a special kind of megalomania: a self-obession or sense of self-importance to think that all this can be contained by a nutshell. To start on our little journey, our walk, through this realisation, we can briefly look at how reason cannot even say if "the ship is the same ship" in the example given: not with any consensus; not with any agreement or real conviction. (After all it is not as though "given new facts, further scientific discoveries, or new forms of technology" (or whatever) that we will eventually be able to decide that the ship is the same object ...) | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
With the hypothetical ship, I think if you keep the same name on the prow, it *is* the same vessel. Philosophically (and legally), the same parallel applies to heart transplant patients, or to any of us when we get a dental filling: the notion that replacing some bodily part offers us a new identity is a logical nonsense. I agree, we don't know what consciousness is - but I don't consider that state a cultural hypnosis, nor do I think consciousness a phenomenon that can't be analysed. It may depend on quantum processes we don't yet understand - but there's surely no conceptual barrier to exploring it, and ultimately assigning labels to those processes. And "a well-founded belief" doesn't constitute proof, I'm afraid. Reason may not allow us to contemplate our life as absurdly temporary - but in terms of observable, testable reality, that's all we have. Far from being a fancy in a megalomanic's nutshell, it's the humbling reality, so far as anyone can ascertain right now: the continuum was here long, long before we were; and it will still be here long after the whole solar system (and everything in it, from Saturn's rings to Shakespare) is background radiation and debris. Fun, isn't it? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
A PS: By coincidence, we can turn this argument to deal with the "Headline of the Day" - Petra the Blue Peter dog was a fake, since the "real" Petra died and an identical puppy substituted. So, here, the whole ship was replaced - but still called by the same name! Not sure where that leaves either of us, actually. None the less, it's an interesting bit of serendipity. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
We end up with the resurrection and (according to Houseman) that means either / or: If in that Syrian garden, ages slain, You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain, Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night The hate you died to quench and could but fan, Sleep well and see no morning, son of man. But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by, At the right hand of majesty on high You sit, and sitting so remember yet Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat, Your cross and passion and the life you gave, Bow hither out of heaven and see and save. | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Personally, Housman cuts closer to home when he imagines a non-Christian hereafter: Crossing alone the nighted ferry With the one coin for fee, Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting, Count you to find? Not me. The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry, The true, sick-hearted slave, Expect him not in the just city And free land of the grave. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Just finished reading New York Dreams, a quite impressive novel. What is eerie for me is the way that its plot mimics this conversation. *Here follows a spoiler* One of the main characters from New York Nights, who died in that book, Barney someone, reappears, resurrected in NY Dreams. Or rather, a copy of him does. Unbeknownst to him he has been downloaded into a VR world just at the point of death. It is there that he continues to 'live', as a copy, until he is offered a 'zombie' body to be uploaded back into, into the real world - which subsequently happens: he finds himself as a slightly taller man, better muscled with a harder face. Probably an assassinated assassin. He also now has a tracer in his head so he can't escape his 'owners' (the people who uploaded him). The process of the extraction of this tracer device reveals the extent of Barney's existence. The body he is in is brain dead. He exists as a miniaturised metal digital computer of some sort electrically plugged into the body. Thus the body is a zombie and he doesn't truly exist - even to himself. He drinks himself into a coma trying to come to terms with his new state. He feels the real Barney died over a year ago. And so forth. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I found this debate intriguing. It never occured to me but of course this thing we are talking about begins with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: here is where modern science fiction sparks into being. Mary Shelley was born in and grew up in Somer's Town, a place I lived a stone's throw from for many years. Shelley and she used to have trysts in St Pancras graveyard just up the road from there. Given my associations with those places, all this seems very strange. At that particular juncture of the 18th and 19th Centuries there was a belief in Galvanism - itself associated I think somewhat with Hypnotism and Mesmer: all hocus pocus but still anticipating our endlessly destructive Now. Is this the distillation of science fiction? Our inability to say what is dead and what is alive? I mean beyond custom: beyond ordinary medical practice and law. The way that we intuitively measure life (for instance, judging that a child is 'more alive' than a 90 year old who barely moves from his chair from the day's beginning to the day's end) finds itself baffled by questions of what PARTS of us are alive. How much 'dead matter' we might contain (not to put too fine a point on it). The whole thing quickly descends into morbidity (as we find with Frankenstein) but it remains interesting ... For instance, imagining time going backwards as in Counter Clock World where some individuals sitting in a stuffy smoke filled room unsmoke their cigarettes, return their cigarettes to their packets and clear the air breathing ever more healthily as they go, resurrected from the earth and moving forwards into childhood. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
What is to be called alive? Should the criteria derive from that which resembles a human heing? Moss growing between paving slabs, fungi, a lightning bug (midge), a dust mite, bacteria, spermatozoa, the fallopian egg, the amoeba in a drop of water, cells separating, plankton, viral life, a mayfly, silverfish, anteater: we say that it has no consciousness so it is not alive in the same way that we are alive. But what does that amount to more than saying that a tree is a different thing from a stone? Certainly, a dust mite isn't alive as I am alive but vice versa too. The statement is a verbal redundancy, and a platitude, but it seems to provide the basis for distinguishing something. ("I am the king of the castle") | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
"All we can ever know for certain about death is that a living person grows strangely still." Steady on, old girl. There's a bit more to it than that! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/e arth/2008/09/30/scigod130.xml |