[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Consciousness After Descartes

My inital reaction to the virtual lesbian threeway depicted in the second edition of Masamune Shirow's manga Ghost in the Shell, back when I first read it in January, was that it was just a throwaway scene aimed at a teenage male market. I'm not so sure now.

To be sure, the teenage-male demographic does play a major role. Consider the plausibility of a government that allows Motoko Kusanagi--an elite agent from a top-secret rapid response team--to prostitute herself in exchange for proscribed sensory technologies. The fact of her apparent heterosexuality isn't such a major issue, considering the relative pliability of many people's sexual orientations. The thing that redeemed this ménage à trois, even partially, was the reaction of an uninvolved fourth party to the affair. An onlooker, the male Bato, is sent to interrupt the virtual scenario, tapping into the mind-to-mind transmissions to and from Motoko, data streams which (of course) reflect the ways in which these three women feel and relate to their bodies. Bato finds himself sickened, since things aren't supposed to feel that way. "It's all slimy and sticky, like copulating slugs."

Descartes' mind-body dualism--his separation of mind from body--seems radically untenable, given what we know in the 21st century about the ways in which human consciousness is determined by human physicality. The writings of Oliver Sacks, to name a single author of many, go into enough detail to make the Cartesian ideal of a mind detached from material reality certainly inachievable. The final failure of this ideal, though, leaves wide open the question of just how portable human experiences actually are, and how much for human personality is determined by the specific form of one's physical self.

I've often wondered what it would be like to invert my sexual orientation with some future medical treatment, to shift from 5.0-5.5 on the Kinsey scale to 0.5-1.0. Four necessary qualifiers: reality-based (not be a simple redefinition like that of ex-gays); safe; inexpensive; and, reversible. What is it like to feel heterosexual? I wonder. Not the least interesting possibility would be the question of how I'd relate to previous homosedxual encounters and relationships.

Three questions for further debate.

• How much empathy can we actually feel for other people? I'm an individual from the species Homo sapiens sapiens, I'm male, I'm white, I wear glasses to compensate for my poor eyesight, I'm mainly homosexual in orientation, I'm left-handed. Without living within the skin of another person--and how to do this, barring truly stupendous leaps in multiple technological fields, I leave to the science-fiction writer--how can we understand what it feels like to be them? We can make estimates, yes, but only estimates.


• If we can inject an individual of the species Pan troglodytes troglodytes with the SIV-cpz virus in order to gain insight into the origins and epidemiology of the HIV-1 virus, why not inject a mentally disabled individual of the species Homo sapiens sapiens with HIV-1 to study the progress of the disease? Yes, the latter would be a monstrous act: Lethal medical experimentation has been recognized as a crime against humanity since the Nuremberg Trials, and there is a clear responsibility. But why is it monstrous? In both cases, you're dealing with individuals from tool-using, language-using species which manifest a certain degree of consciousness. Should physical forms determine so much about the treatment of conscious individuals?


• GURPS' Transhuman Space RPG setting is one of a variety of fictional future settings that describes the proliferation beyond the expected artificial intelligences, with animals uplifted into sentience and human personalities copied over to computer storage. This diversity is all well and good for fiction, and perhaps it isn't an impossible goal for a relatively distant future. How will we be able to relate to these new peers of ours, though, existing as they would in subjective states so different from those of human beings?

UPDATE (12:35 AM) : Crossposted at GNXP.

[BRIEF NOTE] One More Paradroid Note

I'm still playing the Windows version of Paradroid that I wrote about earlier this month. It's a fine game, though I wish I could save the game. Not that I really want to, since Paradroid is all about process instead of conclusions. While partaking in process by googling for hints and tips, I found a message posted at comp.sys.cbm pointing to the existence of not only a script for a Paradroid movie but fictitious reviews of said.

Checking the URLs, I found that the sites had gone dead. Fortunately, I could turn to the Internet Archive and find the latest archived versions (here and here, respectively). Interesting material, certainly enough for an entertaining little sci-fi shoot-em-up movie. If Hollywood wanted to make some British game designers rich, they could hardly find better ones.

[NON BLOG] Commuting Hopes

The streetcar that I was riding to the Osgoode subway station had a minor accident en route, smashing the bumper of a car throughly. It was interesting, after I disembarked following the driver's despairing remark that the car would be taken out of service, to see the solid pieces of curved plastic lying on the pavement.

The collision happened at the corner of Queen and University.

May all of my mass-transit collisions be so well-timed.

[BRIEF NOTE] Simone Weil, Or How Celebrity Overrides Everything

I picked up Simone Weil's Lectures on Philosophy (Cambridge UP: 1978) out of sheer surprise. The book is unique among Weil's oeuvre in that strictly speaking she did not write Lectures on Philosophy, but rather that they were assembled from the notes taken by a student of hers, one Anne Reynaud-Guérithault, while Weil was a teacher at Roanne, in southern France.

She taught me at the girls' secondary school at Roanne during the school year 1933-4. Our class was a small one and had a family atmosphere about it: housed apart from the main school building in a little summer house almost lost in the school grounds, we made our first acquaintance with great thoughts in an atmosphere of complete independence. When the weather was good we had our lessons under the shade of a fine cedar tree, and sometimes they became a search for the solution to a problem in geometry, or a friendly conversation (24).

The book appealed to me for three reasons. Firstly, in preserving Weil's various lectures as thoroughly as she did, Reynaud-Guérithault's work left for future readers an indirect impression of Weil's personality, notoriously honest even at great personal cost. Secondly, the fine detail evident in her notetaking reminded me of the detail in my own notetaking, in five of my six years at the undergraduate level and in my year at Queen's. Thirdly, and lastly, I was interested in an overview of Western philosophy as it was known in the 1930s by one of the world's best philosophers.

I'm grateful that I own this book. Alas, I haven't yet sat down to systematically read it. I hope that I will sooner rather than later; I'd hate to think that I acquired this title out of a silly desire for trivia better satisfied by a good biography.

[NON BLOG] There, done

I've not got my living will put together yet. I have sent a message home expressing my desire, should I ever be certified by doctors to either be in a permanent vegetative state, to have suffered irreversible brain damage, or to require life support to sustain me as I lay dying or--worse--in that nether realm between life and death, to have the responsibles pull the plug.

Here's hoping that I never have to go through that situation. But. If the worst ever happened, I want my family to find themselves in a situation that's only sad. I want at all costs to avoid a situation where my family's behaviour could become bad.

[NON BLOG] Choir Notes

Rehearsal went quite well, with more chatting between fairly painless rehearsals. The most painful was that of "Bobby Shaftoe," but I like this song, layered as it is by different voices and hidden meanings.