Monday, September 6, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Wondering Woman
When I was a child I wanted to be Wonder Woman, armed with bullet-repelling bracelets and the lasso of truth. How many times they would have come in handy over the years, as well as that potentially problematic invisible plane. Now, if I were to possess these things, I would turn the lasso on my own neck to discover the truth. Would I be able to speak at all? Aren’t all words lies, only approximations of reality? The bracelets would make me drunk with power if they could repel the slings, arrows and sleights of the everyday. The everyday defeats the less-than-Wonderful Woman, I guess.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
The Zombie within!
Zombies are characterized as undead. This usually means that before they were zombies they were living humans who were exposed to zombies and “died”. Once dead as humans, they resurrect as zombies. Zombies exist because they are definitely not human, even though they look awfully human. Very awfully human. Ostensibly there is some definitive line drawn between human and zombie. It is this line that reflects back to us what it actually means to be human, rather than something else. Zombies are the appearance of humanity without any of its vital characteristics.
If zombies are lacking humanity, what is humanity? It obviously does not depend upon the appearance of being human. Zombies go shopping at the mall, they go to parties, they go camping. Zombies, like serial killers, have a necessary social component. Like serial killers they require victims, but zombies in turn also seem to hang out in groups. Is this simply a condition of infection? Unlike people, zombies may be social, but they don’t appear to enjoy it. Heck, they don’t appear to enjoy anything. They are simply driven.
Is the state of being a zombie the state of being in the thrall of the unrelenting urge to live even when it seems like death is really more appropriate? When in our living lives do we feel zombified? These are moments of hyperreality when the experience of death in life is like a cudgel knocking us senseless. That’s to say, they are remarkable. For most of the people I know, it is that continuing urge to go to work, to continue to function and rise in society with no sense to it, as though being hollowed out by some cosmic dessert spoon. Or, I guess, alienation is the fancy word for it. But we’re not talking about aliens here. They are another interesting metaphor worthy of further blogging but not right now.
Maybe zombification is a gradual process that occurs when we continue to comply with social and moral mores that are the antithesis of what we know and believe to be right. Auto-scooperation. We have seen the zombies and they are us! It is the degradation of moral selves that takes place in our social psyches. In this way it is definitely contagious and deleterious. The examples of diffusion of responsibility are legion: Kitty Genovese, the Milgram experiments, etc. But who is watching the watchers? Why aren’t we? Is it because we are We?
If zombies are lacking humanity, what is humanity? It obviously does not depend upon the appearance of being human. Zombies go shopping at the mall, they go to parties, they go camping. Zombies, like serial killers, have a necessary social component. Like serial killers they require victims, but zombies in turn also seem to hang out in groups. Is this simply a condition of infection? Unlike people, zombies may be social, but they don’t appear to enjoy it. Heck, they don’t appear to enjoy anything. They are simply driven.
Is the state of being a zombie the state of being in the thrall of the unrelenting urge to live even when it seems like death is really more appropriate? When in our living lives do we feel zombified? These are moments of hyperreality when the experience of death in life is like a cudgel knocking us senseless. That’s to say, they are remarkable. For most of the people I know, it is that continuing urge to go to work, to continue to function and rise in society with no sense to it, as though being hollowed out by some cosmic dessert spoon. Or, I guess, alienation is the fancy word for it. But we’re not talking about aliens here. They are another interesting metaphor worthy of further blogging but not right now.
Maybe zombification is a gradual process that occurs when we continue to comply with social and moral mores that are the antithesis of what we know and believe to be right. Auto-scooperation. We have seen the zombies and they are us! It is the degradation of moral selves that takes place in our social psyches. In this way it is definitely contagious and deleterious. The examples of diffusion of responsibility are legion: Kitty Genovese, the Milgram experiments, etc. But who is watching the watchers? Why aren’t we? Is it because we are We?
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Z-qualia
If zombies are lacking humanity, what is humanity? It obviously does not depend upon the appearance of being human.
Generally, zombies are vectors of a dehumanizing contagion. A case of the zombies strips anyone exposed to it of the qualities that give life to life. Symptoms include the loss of speech, loss of ability for complex planning or tool use, necrosis of the body, lack of fine motor skills, and the increased ability to sustain physical injury. These symptoms point to a being or sub-being that doesn’t appear to have an internal life, or qualia, as the philosophers like to say. What exists instead is a dead body driven to seek out the light of the living in order to extinguish it.
What do the features of zombiehood tell us about nonzombified humanity? It seems critical that there is no ability to speak or communicate, but it may in fact just be the obvious sign that there are serious deficits of some kind. Zombies lack the ability to talk, which often allows some unsuspecting fool to get within biting range. But more importantly, uncommunicativeness overcomes the questions regarding necessary evidence of qualia in another mind. If there is an inability to communicate or to use tools, then there is probably a lack of qualia, and therefore & voila, zombie! or maybe the neighbor’s dog. The Turing test cannot be administered to beings who cannot formulate any kind of parsable sentence.
This question of other minds is an interesting meditation on what is sufficient for anyone to believe in the existence of an external reality, or any intelligent life. Or at least intelligible life. In a way this is the crux of human life, at least to me. I can comprehend the idea of perception and can extend it to other beings that appear to behave in manners similar to my own, but I can just as easily remove the privilege of equal existence as soon as I feel their behaviour has breached my own personal criteria of acceptability. This hidden moral code is based solely on the concept of self, is egoistically driven, and is therefore egoistically flawed.
This is the place that zombies come from. Zombies on film are the projection of our own inability to deal with the problem of other minds. Zombies are instantly recognizable because they possess the lack of paradigmatic human traits, such as speech, vivacity, etc. It is the dehumanizing force of the ego that removes any humanity from zombies. Any good zombie movie worth its salt explores this dynamic. What was once a fight against death itself becomes a meditation on the difference between self and other. Is it just that eternal gap between one’s own sensation of life and its external appearance in an other?
This is the crux of human life because we insist on being social. If we were content to live purely solipsistic existences, then we would never have to extend our selves to include the idea of others. Of course, we might never have developed the idea of a self in the first place.
Generally, zombies are vectors of a dehumanizing contagion. A case of the zombies strips anyone exposed to it of the qualities that give life to life. Symptoms include the loss of speech, loss of ability for complex planning or tool use, necrosis of the body, lack of fine motor skills, and the increased ability to sustain physical injury. These symptoms point to a being or sub-being that doesn’t appear to have an internal life, or qualia, as the philosophers like to say. What exists instead is a dead body driven to seek out the light of the living in order to extinguish it.
What do the features of zombiehood tell us about nonzombified humanity? It seems critical that there is no ability to speak or communicate, but it may in fact just be the obvious sign that there are serious deficits of some kind. Zombies lack the ability to talk, which often allows some unsuspecting fool to get within biting range. But more importantly, uncommunicativeness overcomes the questions regarding necessary evidence of qualia in another mind. If there is an inability to communicate or to use tools, then there is probably a lack of qualia, and therefore & voila, zombie! or maybe the neighbor’s dog. The Turing test cannot be administered to beings who cannot formulate any kind of parsable sentence.
This question of other minds is an interesting meditation on what is sufficient for anyone to believe in the existence of an external reality, or any intelligent life. Or at least intelligible life. In a way this is the crux of human life, at least to me. I can comprehend the idea of perception and can extend it to other beings that appear to behave in manners similar to my own, but I can just as easily remove the privilege of equal existence as soon as I feel their behaviour has breached my own personal criteria of acceptability. This hidden moral code is based solely on the concept of self, is egoistically driven, and is therefore egoistically flawed.
This is the place that zombies come from. Zombies on film are the projection of our own inability to deal with the problem of other minds. Zombies are instantly recognizable because they possess the lack of paradigmatic human traits, such as speech, vivacity, etc. It is the dehumanizing force of the ego that removes any humanity from zombies. Any good zombie movie worth its salt explores this dynamic. What was once a fight against death itself becomes a meditation on the difference between self and other. Is it just that eternal gap between one’s own sensation of life and its external appearance in an other?
This is the crux of human life because we insist on being social. If we were content to live purely solipsistic existences, then we would never have to extend our selves to include the idea of others. Of course, we might never have developed the idea of a self in the first place.
Introduction
Don’t you just love philosophers? They find any topic worthy of examination, even though most are deemed “uninteresting”.
Zombies, in the above article, are another victim of their relentless debating. As defined in the article, zombies are exactly like humans but they are lacking “consciousness”. This take on zombies allows a little exploration of mind/body issues, but to me, really fires wide of the mark. Zombies are interesting precisely in that they were at one point “human” but no longer are, although they continue to carry out many human-typical activities. This begs the question: what characteristics are essential to our definition of "human", beyond the appearance of being alive? This is the simpler (and more interesting) version of the automata question which uses zombies as a tool to try & resolve the mind/body debate. In the above article, qualia are seen as important in locating consciousness. To me, qualia or lack of, are the essence of why zombies exist (in the human imagination) and therefore the essence of what it is to be actually human rather than just to appear to be human.
Other zombie characteristics that are intriguing are the concept of contagion, zombie mass psychology, the transformation from human into zombie, their animosity toward non-zombies and their state of decay. All of these characteristics speak volumes about what humans think it means to live a fully human life rather than some zombified half life. It looks as though this blog will be dedicated to this exploration for the next little while. Zombie fans rejoice! (Thank goodness my readership is small, possibly in the single binary digits...)
To sum up: if zombies are merely humans lacking qualia/consciousness which cannot be determined by physical testing or linguistic probing, they truly are uninteresting and irrelevant. That question can be addressed through the exploration of the Other minds problem or the question of animal consciousness. Hey philosophers, leave those zombies alone!
Zombies, in the above article, are another victim of their relentless debating. As defined in the article, zombies are exactly like humans but they are lacking “consciousness”. This take on zombies allows a little exploration of mind/body issues, but to me, really fires wide of the mark. Zombies are interesting precisely in that they were at one point “human” but no longer are, although they continue to carry out many human-typical activities. This begs the question: what characteristics are essential to our definition of "human", beyond the appearance of being alive? This is the simpler (and more interesting) version of the automata question which uses zombies as a tool to try & resolve the mind/body debate. In the above article, qualia are seen as important in locating consciousness. To me, qualia or lack of, are the essence of why zombies exist (in the human imagination) and therefore the essence of what it is to be actually human rather than just to appear to be human.
Other zombie characteristics that are intriguing are the concept of contagion, zombie mass psychology, the transformation from human into zombie, their animosity toward non-zombies and their state of decay. All of these characteristics speak volumes about what humans think it means to live a fully human life rather than some zombified half life. It looks as though this blog will be dedicated to this exploration for the next little while. Zombie fans rejoice! (Thank goodness my readership is small, possibly in the single binary digits...)
To sum up: if zombies are merely humans lacking qualia/consciousness which cannot be determined by physical testing or linguistic probing, they truly are uninteresting and irrelevant. That question can be addressed through the exploration of the Other minds problem or the question of animal consciousness. Hey philosophers, leave those zombies alone!
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
rising sap
what'suprising?
A jingling jangle of words and thoughts
kaleiding off the four corners of my brainbox.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The story thus far
After months of rain and sometimes snow, the skies cleared and opened into sun. The constant noise of falling wetness changed into a thousand birds and insects singing. Even the plants seemed to sound out their speedy growth under the sun. All these motions and waves lifted into the spacious blue canopy, and yet there was still room for hazy spring dreams.
I had at last returned home to the country after many years spent under an urban thrall. There had come a point that I identified myself as sick, but had no symptoms anyone recognized as anything other than “normal”. Seeing the doctors and therapists changed nothing except my certainty that I was unwell. I began to doubt my own veracity, then my own existence. Soon I had developed a full-blown anxiety disorder, apparently out of nowhere according to the health professionals. It was then I decided that I could no longer trust anyone but myself to discover and cure the source of my sickness.
I left the city, then, but it didn’t leave me. Trying to shake an awful emptiness, I flew from coast to coast, from country to country. The void hung tenaciously on. Eventually, I allowed myself to take some help and move in to a small house in the country. This self-imposed retreat was in fact not a retreat at all, but a return to reality. I began to see that the city was in fact not the centre of the universe, but only its periphery, a black hole on the edge of reality that desired to pull everything into it. In the middle of nowhere, I found the center of everything.
For years I had been trying to find out what my purpose was in life, what I was here to do. In the sound and silence of the forest, the trees told me the answer. What was their purpose? Certainly they did not exist to just provide oxygen for animals. I slowly became aware that I had learned in the city to take everything for granted. I assumed the entire world was aimed at humanity, either for or against us. My anthrocentricism reinforced my egocentricism, and so my sickness. Lying on my back in the sun and the dirt, I happily let go. Now there was only nature living and dying all around and in me.
I had at last returned home to the country after many years spent under an urban thrall. There had come a point that I identified myself as sick, but had no symptoms anyone recognized as anything other than “normal”. Seeing the doctors and therapists changed nothing except my certainty that I was unwell. I began to doubt my own veracity, then my own existence. Soon I had developed a full-blown anxiety disorder, apparently out of nowhere according to the health professionals. It was then I decided that I could no longer trust anyone but myself to discover and cure the source of my sickness.
I left the city, then, but it didn’t leave me. Trying to shake an awful emptiness, I flew from coast to coast, from country to country. The void hung tenaciously on. Eventually, I allowed myself to take some help and move in to a small house in the country. This self-imposed retreat was in fact not a retreat at all, but a return to reality. I began to see that the city was in fact not the centre of the universe, but only its periphery, a black hole on the edge of reality that desired to pull everything into it. In the middle of nowhere, I found the center of everything.
For years I had been trying to find out what my purpose was in life, what I was here to do. In the sound and silence of the forest, the trees told me the answer. What was their purpose? Certainly they did not exist to just provide oxygen for animals. I slowly became aware that I had learned in the city to take everything for granted. I assumed the entire world was aimed at humanity, either for or against us. My anthrocentricism reinforced my egocentricism, and so my sickness. Lying on my back in the sun and the dirt, I happily let go. Now there was only nature living and dying all around and in me.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
