The Serpent's Wisdom

I just finished reading China Miéville's The Scar. It is excellently written, I enjoyed it quite a lot (as much as one "enjoys" something so gothy).

But, what the heck did I just read?

( questions that will only make sense to people who've read the book )

I just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science in the Capital" trilogy: Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). Longtime fans of KSR, global warming wonks, and dedicated SF readers may want to give it a try; i fear, though, that i can't recommend it beyond that.

There's two things going on here: the first is a brewing global climate disaster, developing at the speed of life. Which is to say, not exactly cinematically fast, but climate change caused by global warming is still more rapid and vast than our ordinary consciousness can easily grasp. Droughts, rising sea level, more and more violent storms, and the shutdown of the North Atlantic Gulfstream, leading to arctic temperatures in Europe and the Northeastern US, are some of the problems that come up in the trilogy. The second thing going on here is a kind of panoramic portrait of what everyday life is like for people in the science bureaucrasy of Washington, DC.

Guess which gets about 90% of the trilogy's bandwidth?

Ordinarily i'd be disinclined to knock KSR's desire to make his trilogy fundamentally a story about people. Character development is what really makes science fiction tick, IMO. KSR recognizes that if he writes about people working in Washington to stave off the worst side effects of global warming and force human society to stop its destructive ways, that he is still fundamentally telling a story about people.

Normally though the way you'd handle this is, the early parts of the story would involve some exploration of representative but relatively brief episodes in your characters' lives so that we find out who they are and what they want and why they want it. As the story progresses, the tension should rise. The real guts of the story should take center stage, and should become gripping, absorbing, growing to a climax.

And i, the reader, certainly want to spend more time reading about what the heck we're going to do if we're faced with the sudden prospect of sea level rising 20 feet, than the protagonist's appreciation of Emerson and his endless navel-gazing about his love life. Especially in the third book of the trilogy. By the end of the third book i was bored out of my skull. Actually i'd have to say the majority of the problems i have with the trilogy involve the third book. The first two books felt like they were paced just right, and had a lot of interesting events in them.

Along the way there was some discussion of several very interesting ideas and practical solutions, and some descriptions of environmental disasters in progress, but these took up far too little space in the book.

The third book also gets too tidy in wrapping things up. It doesn't have the ring of truth to it, IMO.

Seen in discworld: Neil Gaiman interviews Terry Pratchett.

This morning i finished reading The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. Now it's time for my review of the His Dark Materials trilogy to which this is the conclusion.

I've been writing this review in my head through half the trilogy, but i wanted to actually finish the trilogy before setting any of it down.

The quality of Pullman's writing craft i'll give a B. It was particularly uneven with regard to vividness. In many parts, there was no attention given to the senses at all - no description of sights, sounds, smells. Now, typically, i don't like prose which is bogged down in elaborate descriptions of things. But a few hints here and there, just to tickle the senses, would have been effective - especially given the (literal) otherwordliness of many of the book's settings. In other places the setting descriptions were so elaborate the scene felt bogged down.

Dialogue was good though, and the characterization was (with one exception) superb. I love that the protagonist is an untidy, poorly-behaved, stomping-in-the-mud, neighborhood-warfare-waging, prank-pulling, truth-challenged 12 year old girl.

The exception is Marisa Coulter, a femme fatale who wields charm, seduction, and manipulation to achieve supernatural results. Coulter is the hardest character to read, because one never knows when she is being upfront and when she is lying until she actually acts. I know this is by design, and that element of not knowing would be laudable if it were done via any different means; but it's still unfortunate to see a character play an essential role mainly because everyone who meets her is stunned by how she looks.

Still, i have to give Pullman some points for writing a work of fantasy in which female characters are just as strong and prominent -- if not, on balance, a little more so -- as male characters.

The plotting and storytelling i'll give an A. As a whole the work is superbly conceived and structured. It's set in an elaborate multiverse and the reader finds herself wishing she could take tangents, just to learn more about this or that. Lyra's world, where the story starts, is fascinatingly different from our own. Even the experience of day to day life as a human being is vastly different there, because every person has a companion, a dæmon, who is an extension of their individual being and nature.

In many ways, this is the ultimate "underdog" story. The heroes are figures usually cast as villains: witches, fallen angels (esp. gay ones), dæmons, harpies, users of divination, gypsies ("gyptians" in Lyra's world), African kings, rebels, dissidents... while the villains of the book are figures of authority: various members of the European upper class, bishops and other church functionaries, and upper ranks of angels, including God himself.

Wait, so God is a villain in His Dark Materials? Well, it's more complicated than that. ( spoilerish stuff starts here )

Hmm, not sure how to characterize the last few paragraphs, but since they gel with my own views, i'm going to give it an A. Which means that my overall grade for the trilogy is about an A-.

So, i'm reading Stephen Baxter's Manifold Time, and it's okay, not great, not horrible. Towards the outset of this book the protagonist is introduced to, and convinced by, the Doomsday Argument, which holds that we consistently underestimate the likelihood of human extinction in the near future and that we have 150-220 years to live. ( Read more... )

Or, to summarize it even more succinctly (again adapting from anthropic-principle.com), based on the principles of statistics you should not expect to be one of the very first or very last human beings who ever lived. Other things equal, you should expect to find yourself to be among the middle 95%. At present, the human population of Earth comprises 15% of all the humans who have ever lived. Assuming that the population will continue to double every 20-25 years, as time passes you and i each slide out further from the statistical norm on the bell curve of historical human population. If humanity thrives for another million years, then you and i will have "self-sampled" to find ourselves in a statistically unlikely place on the bell curve.

IOW, based on a bundle of statistical laws and categorizations some philosophers claim they can predict with near certainty that humanity will go extinct in the next 200 years, even without stipulating a mechanism by which this may occur.

As Nick Bostrom, who compiled anthropic-principle.com admits, most people when exposed to this argument have an intuitive sense that it is wrong. He's complied a long list of arguments demonstrating why he thinks the Doomsday Argument (which he does not seem to personally believe, BTW) is not so easy to refute or dismiss.

But i think it doesn't hold water, and here's why. It is a case of inductive reasoning run amok, and all of the arguments for it and against it all play by the rules, by implicit agreement to accept certain frames and limitations on our conceptualizations. IOW they contain a hidden agenda. Western philosophers spend a lot of time dealing with "paradoxes" like this because they cannot rid themselves of troublesome arguments like this one, or the Simulation Argument which bears many similarities, or the Goedel Incompleteness Theorems, or the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and so on, without questioning the couch-cushion fort of conceptualizations and abstractions they've built up around themselves and upon which their livelihoods depend.

First (not stepping entirely outside the philosophical box but stretching it a little) i contest this idea of "all the humans who will ever live" as an easily-delineated set. Each one of us as individuals exists as a special case, born with unique DNA bearing variations on themes of the DNA of previous organisms. Each one of us has mutations in our DNA and so we are part of a continuum of evolution. It is not "humanity" that will live for millions of years, because the descendants of this generation will continue to evolve and will at some point, which may or may not be easily discernable, constitute one or more new species. If our descendants take to the stars and eventually inhabit the entire galaxy, it is likely that they will branch out into hundreds or thousands of new species. Some branches of this evolution may even be consciously guided by genetic engineering. Will such people still be "humanity," for the purposes of this thought experiment, as we now know it?

[I suspect this may be the direction Baxter is actually going in his book, but if you know don't tell me, i'm only 100 pages in.]

Secondly (and this is where my objection really begins) this notion that we can self-sample to find our location on an indexical continuum of "all the humans who will ever live" is based on an unspoken but assumed body-soul duality. It assumes that there is something special about humanity, that at some very clear point we stopped being "mere beasts" and became "humans with souls" qualitatively distinguishable from the beasts around us.

Suppose that instead of seeing myself as "one of a finite number of beings with souls" i see myself as a little bit of the universe folded on itself in a particular way, a unique unfolding of the holomovement renewed in every instant. What i see as "me" is a persistent pattern of unfoldings associated with a subjective consciousness. I exist in the now, and any human being who perceives and contemplates the mystery of their existence will be, similarly, a little bit of the universe folded on itself.

Taken this way, there is no logical imperative for me to see myself as a member of any given indexical continuum. If i were to self-sample and place myself on an indexical continuum of "all the humans who will ever live," why not "all the organisms who will ever live" or "all the conscious unfoldings that will ever perceive themselves to exist"? Why must i necessarily interpret my understanding of myself qua humanhood? The only answer is that the argument presumes there to be something special about the experience of "what it is like to be human" that indicates a meaningful and unique divergence from all other kinds of system... IOW a presumption analogous to saying that humans have souls and other beings do not (or do not at least have souls like ours).

Subversive literature arrived in the mail last night, always a cause for celebration.  :-D

I received Feminism is for Everyone by bell hooks, and Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology.

In the intro to her book bell hooks calls it a short primer she could give to anyone who wanted to know more about feminism, but 10 pages into it i disagree that it is any sort of primer at all.  It's too polemic to be a primer.  See, i can tell that hooks is the sort of person who, very much like me, thinks that getting people to agree with her is primarily a matter of explaining the facts and theories clearly enough, and that with understanding will come agreement.  And while i agree with the picture she paints of careerism and white privilege undermining the feminist movement's momentum (my own first exposure to feminism was in the academic environment and it was not the most positive experience), her words on that subject, this early into the book, make it into the sort of book that i would not hand to someone inexperienced in thinking radically.  If it was me, and i was writing a book nominally directed at everyone, i wouldn't put controversial stuff like this at the very beginning where it's more likely to turn people away.

The anthology looks like deep academic stuff that i'll probably have to digest in small bits.  But i'm eager to dig in because what i've seen of INCITE!'s perspective excites me a great deal.  Also i've come to the conclusion, after everything i've seen at the Network La Red, and in the blogosphere, and in other places, that radical women of color are the best allies that transpeople have.  Transactivists have spent a lot of energy forming alliances with the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities but i think we need to consider their willingness to sell us short to meet their own goals.

A few weeks ago i finished reading Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper. This novel examines an interesting question, first posed about halfway through: what would be the effect on religion if we had a God who actually worked?

She means of course outside of cosmology, because of course either God has created/is creating the whole universe, or not. The question concerns the direct and clear involvement of God in our individual lives.

I wonder what people point to as evidence, to them, that God has been involved in their lives?

In my case, there have been hints of a presence which i've felt in moments of stillness. But i don't know whether this presence is God, or my own self reflected back at me, some kind of cosmic mind, or an illusion created by my brain responding in its limited way to qualia it doesn't know how to handle otherwise.

But from a certain practical perspective, my conceptual interpretations don't matter. It doesn't matter if the presence is God, or my self, or the cosmos, or a neurochemical chimera, because i react to it the same way regardless. What matters is that i feel the presence there and it affects me, it calms me and makes me feel connected to something larger than myself.

More "direct" evidence of God, gods, deities, divinities, spirits, fairies, ancestors, poltergeists? There's been none in my experience. People's experiences vary widely in this regard, though, and it does not disturb nor hearten me to hear of more concrete sorts of experiences with the numinous.

So here's part of what i think happens. The following is, of course, just a theory. But tell me if it resonates with you.

I have come to suspect that people who latch very strongly onto dogma and doctrine and scripture do so because they don't otherwise have a strong link to the divine. That is, the only glimpse they've had of any sort of divine presence is the glimpse they get by way of doctrine and scripture. I can't say this for certain, but it is something that i have come to suspect in many cases.

(Of course there must be exceptions; frankly i find it puzzling that i ever have to say that a general statement has exceptions, but i daren't leave out that disclaimer!)

But what i have found is that people with a sense of connection to the divine seem to find a way to see eye-to-eye, even if they disagree about many of the particulars. It's like they can sense and acknowledge this connection in one another, and they grok that talk about doctrine or scripture is just that -- it is talk about concepts, and does not usually "cut deeply" to the connection each has with the divine.

Suppose God was a part of our lives just as plainly and clearly -- and doubtlessly -- as our friends or coworkers or classmates. Suppose God heard our requests and perceived our needs and acted on them. Then there wouldn't be room for doubt the way there is now.

In that case, sacrifices and rituals and other observances or obeisance would be nothing more than a kindness; it wouldn't be sacred in the way we think of it, because it would not be "set aside;" if we were following a request or a demand from God it would be the same as if we did so for a friend or supervisor.

Moreover, we wouldn't pour over scripture and engage in endless niggling debate about doctrinal details, because God would be right there to answer the question. Any debating we did would not seem like "theology" or "philosophy," it would be imminently practical.

Could the social edifice and prominence of religious institution survive? I do not think it could... in a recognizable form at least. A good chunk of religious practice is an unending attempt to stave off bad things from happening, under the assumption that bad things happen because gods get angry and punish us. If God was right there with us to give us clear input on what to do and what not to do, there would be no need to speculate on what God finds morally objectionable. If bad things happened, we would know whether or not it came from God.

People who perceive some sort of connection to the divine tend to take religious edifices, and people who piously rely on religion, less seriously than they should. I think this is part of why the piously religious are occasionally able to grab power, especially in societies where large segments of the population are psychologically damaged by cannibalistic oppression and are spiritually stunted.

I just finished reading this last night, and here's what i think is going on.

( major major MAJOR spoiler )

cowgrrl loaned me the first two books of Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, Dawn and Adulthood Rites. She does not have the third book Imago, so this review is based on the first two books alone. The third book may contain points that argue against this interpretation, but i don't anticipate that.

( analysis with major spoilers )

Since I was tagged by kyrene:

1) Total number of books owned?
I'm not sure exactly, I'd estimate around 150.

2) The last book I bought?
Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer, Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan, and The God Part of the Brain by Matthew Alper. Since I bought these at the same time, I have to list them all.

3) The last book I read?
Religion Explained, currently reading Understanding Media and the Schaum's Outline book on Probability. I've also recently read the graphic novels V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and the first volume of Promethea, also by Alan Moore.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me?
The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm
The Hidden Gospel by Neil Douglas-Klotz
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

5) Tag 5 people and have them fill this out on their LJs:
bifemmefatale
_raven_
ubiquity
cowgrrl
badsede
Bonus sixth person tagged: novapsyche