The Serpent's Wisdom

cowgrrl and i have been working our way through the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series. We're at the beginning of season 2.5.

It dawned on me recently that it is in some ways a more faithful representation of Philip K. Dick's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" than the '82 movie Blade Runner was.

I say that because in the book, unlike in Ridley Scott's very-loosely-inspired movie version of it, one of the main themes was the capacity for humans to feel compassion for something that looks and acts convincingly human enough. In the book, the androids exploit this for everything they can get from it -- because to a one they are ruthless, calculating, selfish, and utterly remorseless. They are, in human terms, psychopaths.

Similarly, a major theme in Battlestar Galactica shows humans reacting with sympathy and sometimes compassion towards the outward expressions of suffering or grief from the human-form Cylons. It's left to the viewer to wonder (as of the point she and i are at in viewing the backlog at least) if there is any authenticity behind these Cylon displays of emotion.

It's an interesting question. If there is no authenticity to their experience, if it's all an act, then any hesitation or compassion towards a Cylon is literally a weakness. At the same time, telling yourself it's okay to commit any cruelty or atrocity against something that is only acting when it seems to suffer in response would not prevent these acts from having a psychological toll on people anyway, and presumably the Cylons know this.

On the face of it, compassion would appear to be a flaw when one is in competition. And yet... and yet many species on Earth evolved with the capacity for compassion. In fact i would venture to say that in many species it is as strong a drive as hunger or survival or reproduction. It is not uncommon for example to hear about the abandoned or lost young of one species being adopted by members of another species -- even sometimes by species who typically prey on them. Compassion is quite evidently a winning species-survival strategy and not a losing one.

Would robots, left to their own devices, capable of making themselves more and more complex, eventually work out for themselves the advantage of compassion?

Lately I have been going through some of the old books in my book collection that I haven't read in some time. Last week I zipped through the three books by Philip K. Dick often referred to as "the Valis triology," though of course it is nothing of the sort.

Valis makes much more sense the second time -- instead of striking the mind as a lengthy ramble with too many obscure and scholarly references, the underlying unstated patterns in the book jump out at you. The message of the book kind of spirals outward from the center, meaning that there is some repetition as the spiral moves past certain themes and events again, but each time with more elaboration and slight variation in emphasis. It is designed to present reality as a maze, an eternally shifting present which is constructed by the conscious mind by help of shifting mirrors.

The Divine Invasion is straightforward yet loving and sublime. I could attempt to summarize its vision of the interaction of Yahweh and Sophia but to do so would lessen the impact. Just read it.

I got much more out of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer this time around. Before it struck me as mundane and plodding, but therein lies the effectiveness of the book. It was meant to convey the sense of everyday life and then the subtle but undeniable intrusion of the greatly mysterious, which we then find ways to deny and explain away.

Now I am re-reading Clive Barker's Imajica and falling in love with it all over again. This is a masterful and sublime work, rather "pulpy" in its execution but laced throughout with a good deal of compassion. I feel an intense jealousy at Barker's description of the mystif, a marvelous being of literally third gender who weaves a spell of delicious illusion, being perceived as the ultimate expression of one's desire, whether male or female. It takes an intense act of will though to perceive the mystif as zie really is. The mystif reminds me of my take on Mohini and describes perfectly the way I idealize myself; to a striking extent this is the essence of me staring back at me from the pages of a book.

I've been thinking of an exercize that mommybird initiated a few days ago, a recounting of the five books that most influenced her. Sometime today or tomorrow I will make this post.

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
--Philip K. Dick, VALIS