Sunday, February 22, 2015

Study Notes: Feb 15-21, 2015: "Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox", &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 
Other notes: 
Homework for the future:

"Into the (Mind of the) Dalek"
  • "The criminal mind is a fascinating thing-- dark, elaborate and twisted with actions stemming from a range of complicated environmental and genetic factors. The Dalek is the ultimate criminal." 
  • "In Trevor Baxendale's Prisoner of the Daleks, it is noted that 'On full power, they [Dalek guns] can blast a human being into atoms in a split second. But they never do that. Every Dalek dials down the power on its gun-stick to the specific level that will kill a human being. Then they lower the power setting just a tiny bit further, so that the beam burns away the central nervous system from the outside, meaning that every human being dies in agony. So it takes a full two to three seconds for a Dalek to exterminate one of us-- and that's deliberate'."
  • "In Asylum of the Daleks, it is revealed that the Daleks have a sense of beauty: they find hatred beautiful." 
  • "Where Daleks are concerned, it's not a case of getting the job done, but doing it in the nastiest, most painful way possible. And through all that warped pleasure, they just get angrier." 
  • "Most Daleks exist to fight, and the Asylum shows that battle-hardened Daleks can be left with traumatic neurosis. You could even flip the concept and say that certain Daleks-- such as the Parting of the Ways Daleks or the Cult of Skaro-- are angered because they don't get enough conflict." 
  • "Other Daleks have also displayed evidence that they have a flair for poetry, even through their battle cries, which is an effective style of self-expression." 

"Good Works" 
  • "The fact that a 'good person' (not meant ironically) does 'good work' (again, not meant ironically) with resources taken by force from an unwilling victim doesn't negate the fact that a victim has been created. This is the essential point.[ ]Someone else has been harmed-- perhaps even killed-- in order to provide the alleged (or even actual) good. At minimum, some other person-- some victim-- has been cowed into submission using the implied threat of physical violence." 
  • "Violence by proxy-- via the flim-flam of the ballot box and by having other people do the actual dirty work on our behalf-- allows us to blank out the true knowledge of what's going on. It is very hard-- for most people-- to contemplate threatening to assault their next-door neighbor for any reason."
  • "[Working for the government even in a nominally peaceful capacity is] very bad, indeed. It normalizes moral obscenity. Moreover, a principle has been established-- and a precedent set-- when one accepts blood money for whatever purpose." 
  • "If it is ethically okay to insist I hand over my money-- and threaten to cage/kill me if I say no-- for the sake of one thing, then logically, it is ok to do so for another thing." 
  • "Theft is theft-- and violence is violence. It's important, I think, to be both honest about that as well as ethically and intellectually consistent. Otherwise, we have no basis for objecting to it when it's done to us." 
"Definitions Master List"
  • "Bigender: both male and female, either simultaneously or alternating"
  • "Pangender: all the genders, (either simultaneously or) alternating between them"
  • "Genderless: a person with no conscious gender identity; a person who would be comfortable in any body"
  • "Neutrois (sometimes FtN or MtN): a person who wishes to have a blank, sexless body" 
  • "Binary's Bitch: A state of being in which the individual is ambivalent about their relationship with the binary. On the one hand, they feel restricted and confined by its limits, but on the other they find it inescapable. In some respects it is the opposite of agender; rather than having no gender, the Binary's Bitch has far too much gender going on for their own comfort. A specific subset of androgyne." 
  • "Genderqueer: an umbrella term for non-binary identified people"
  • "Genderweird: a term used to describe those who gender cannot be described by any existing label, or cannot be pinned down as such."
  • "Genderfluid: a person with no set gender identity, e.g. a genderless or bigender person (?)"
  • Demigirl: 1. someone assigned female at birth who feels but the barest association with that identification, though not a significant enough dissociation to create real physical discomfort or dysphoria; 2. someone assigned male at birth who is transfeminine but not wholly binary-identified, so that they feel more strongly associated with 'female' than 'male,' socially or physically, but not strongly enough to justify an absolute self-identification as 'woman.'"
  • "Demiguy: Reverse of demigirl"
  • "Transyada: 1. (loosely) a person who identifies outside the binary (i.e., not strictly as male or female); 2. Those which don't fit into the gender binary, and who hang out in the 'transwhatever' thread or their own Yada Forum."
  • "Transmasculine: a person born female who, on the binary spectrum with male at one end and female at the other, is on the male side of the midpoint, even slightly"
  • "Transfeminine: reverse of transmasculine" 
  • "Fancy: anyone who is nominally agender but displays many mental characteristics opposite to their biological sex, yet isn't completely one way or the other"
  • "Androgyne: a gender which is a mix/blend of male and female (sometimes this term includes agender). from the greek(?) andro (male) and gyne (female)." 
  • "Sie, Hir, Hir, Hirs, Hirself"
  • "Co, Co, Co's, Co's, Coself"
  • "En, En, Ens, Ens, Enself"

"11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox"
  • "Though it sounds like something from a Twilight Zone episode, it's quite possible that we're stuck inside some kind of celestial cage. ETI's [sic] may have stumbled upon our tiny blue marble a long time ago, but, for whatever reason, they're observing us from afar... This idea was first proposed by John Ball in 1973, who argued that extraterrestrial intelligent life may be almost ubiqitous, but that the 'apparent failure of such life to interact with us may be understood in terms of the hypothesis that they have set us aside as part of a wilderness area or zoo.'" 
  • "The cosmos is [possibly] filled with perils-- whether it be an imperialistic civilization on the march, or a wave of berserker probes set to sterilize everything in its wake. And to ensure tht nobody bothers them, advanced ETIs could set up a perimeter of Sandberg probes (self-replicating policing probes) to make sure that nobody gets in." 
  • "Imagine if there's a kind of Prime Directive in effect, but that ETIs are hovering over us with a giant hammer to smack it down should it suddenly not like what it sees... One possibility is the technological Singularity. In the space of possible survivable Singularities, a sizeable [sic] portion of them might result in an extremely dangerous artificial superintelligence (SAI). The kind of SAI that could set about the destruction of the entire Galaxy. So, in order to prevent the bad ones from emerging-- while giving the good ones a fair chance to get started-- the Galactic Club keeps watch." 
  • In a simulated universe it could be that "there really isn't a true universe out there, it just appears that way to us within our simulated bubble (It's a 'If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?' type thing)."
  • "Another more bizarre possibility is that the simulation is being run by a posthuman civilization in search of an answer to the Fermi Paradox, or some other scientific question. Maybe, in an attempt to entertain various hypotheses (perhaps even preemptively in consideration of some proposed action), they're running a billion different ancestor simulations to determine how many of them produce spacefaring civilizations, or even post-Singularity stage civilizations like themselves." 
  • "It's possible that everyone is listening, but no one is transmitting." 
  • Michael Michaud: "Let's be clear about this. Active SETI is not scientific research. It is a deliberate attempt to provoke a response by an alien civilization whose capabilities, intentions, and distance are not known to us. That makes it a policy issue." 
  • "As an aside, it could also be dangerous to listen: SETI may be at risk of downloading a malicious virus from outer space." 
  • "Sophisticated intelligent communities will tend to migrate outward through the Galaxy as their capacities of information-processing increase. Why? Because machine-based civilizations, with their massive supercomputers, will have huge problems managing their heat waste. They'll have to set up camp where it's super cool. And the outer rim of the Galaxy is exactly that. Subsequently, there may be a different galactic habitable zone for post-Singularity ETIs than for meat-based life. By consequence, advanced ETIs have no interest in exploring the bio-friendly habitable zone. Which means we're looking for ET in the wrong place. Interestingly, Stephen Wolfram once told me that heat-free computing will someday be possible, so he doesn't think this is a plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox." 
  • "Aliens spark life on other planets (like sending spores to potentially fertile planets), and then bugger off. Forever. Or maybe they eventually come back." 
  • The Phase Transition Hypothesis "suggests that the universe is still evolving and changing. Subsequently, the conditions to support advanced intelligence have only recently fallen into place... According to [James] Annis, a possible regulatory mechanism that can account for this is the frequency of gama-ray bursts-- super-cataclysmic events that can literally sterilize large swaths of the galaxy." 
  • James Annis: "If one assumes that they are in fact lethal to land based life throughout the galaxy, one has a mechanism that prevents the rise of intelligence until the mean time between bursts is comparable to the timescale for the evolution of intelligence... The Galaxy is currently undergoing a phase transition between an equilibrium devoid of intelligent life to a different equilibrium where it is full of intelligent life."

"Our Love is Synthesis"
  • "There's a Thesis-- this is a state of being, a power structure, a dominant idea. Then there's an Antithesis-- the alienations and contradictions and things left disenfranchised by the Thesis. And then, when the two ideas come together, as when your beer sloshes into my wine while you're waving your cup around angrily, they create a Synthesis, an [sic] new form that arises from the clashing of a state of being and its contradictions."
  • "For Marx, who's going to be important for this essay, these referred to material states of being-- i.e. the thesis is a way of ordering society that leads to a series of problems and people who have been disenfranchised-- antithesis-- resulting in a revolution of the ordering of society. The synthesized society then becomes a new thesis with its own contradictions." 
  • "No one actually agrees on anything about the Dialectic. Some scholars even claim that Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis has nothing to do with Hegel's real ideas! It's basically a giant, hideous mess." 
  • "Compare, for example, William Blake's idea that you need to merge Heaven and Hell in order to create something new..."
  • "It's less important to me what Marx and Hegel really, truly said and more important to see this powerful notion of a thing smashed against its opposite in order to create a new thing." 
  • "The video makes heavy use of the 'montage' technique, which is widely known in pop culture as 'that thing where they show a bunch of clips of people doing stuff really fast so that it seems like lots of stuff is getting done,' but which really means a series of cuts between different footage meant to draw out associations between the things depicted. It's a major feature of early Russian cinema... incidentally, while we're on the subject of Marx." 
  • "This is pretty wild, actually. 'Love' being linked to an army of riot police marching in time to crack the heads of the proletariat, or to a guy following a woman through a subway station? Kind of Orwellian, and more than a little creepy, no?" 
  • "The suggestion, then, is that the social upheaval seen in the video is analogous to the kind of emotional turmoil experienced in the song, where the singer has to reconcile himself to a love that doesn't fit within his narrow understanding. Love IS Madness in the end, and the singer acknowledges, as the state ultimately must, that it 'could be wrong' and may be 'too headstrong,' too in love with authority, too tied to existing power structures." 
  • "We have here nothing less than a romanticization and eroticization of revolution and uprising. By drawing these notions parallel to one another, Muse suggests that social disorder like we are experiencing now should be seen as an exhilarating start of a confusing, as yet undefined state of being." 
  • "Theory writers, it turns out, are kinky as fuck."
  • "Synthesis is therefore both threatening and compelling, a creative force that we should welcome rather than fear, as the Thesis might." 

"A Company of Heroes" 
  • "I'm bored of heroes but really into heroism right now. That's kind of the quick, pithy summary of this article, I suppose. I'm bored of, to be more precise, the notion of the Exceptional Hero (nearly always straight, while, male) that a story's arc is built completely around and whose gaze we largely inhabit throughout the text. I am not, on the other hand, bored of the idea of heroism." 
  • "I'm not too into cynicism and grimdarkness these days, in part because I think it's sometimes used as a lazy way to achieve an illusion of philosophical depth." 
  • "It's not that people think heroism must come in the form of the square-jawed action hero, it's that they have trouble finding another kind of heroism."
  • "I think there's a deeper toxicity to the Monomyth-- the idea of the Campbellian Hero's Journey that seems to so fully pervade our modern thinking-- that's worth addressing. See, the Monomyth, which follows a familiar form involving a Chosen One rising to greatness through a series of trials and becoming a hero, ultimately suggests that heroism is: 
    • "Extremely rare and frequently a product of destiny or birthright 
    • "Ultimately a symbol of not just righteousness but rightness-- i.e. the authority to make decisions unilaterally
    • "A force of overwhelming gravity upon the plot--i.e. a hero warps the narrative around himself (infrequently herself), and the arcs of other characters are either nonexistent or risk truncation to further the hero's own arc. The pull of the hero's arc hauls everything within its event horizon." 
  • "Consider what virtues and themes are excluded by the very nature of the hero's journey, at least without a strong conscious effort on the part of a creator to pull the narrative in a different direction: 
    • "Democratic consensus.
    • "Companionship.
    • "Teamwork.
    • "The ability to defer to others.
    • "The need for multiple intelligences and viewpoints.
    • "The betterment of society through mass action.
    • "The ability of anyone to behave heroically."
  • "Now, consider the culture that might emerge from such a media narrative. I don't think it would be difficult to link the Monomyth with such ideas as Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, unprecedented executive power, unilateral decisions made on both a global and local scale... [ellipsis original]"
  • "The strange thing is, none of this is inevitable. In fact, in fantasy, the genre most would associate with the Monomyth, we've long had alternatives. The great progenitor of the genre in its modern form, The Lord of the Rings, is a story with a vast cast of characters whose actions compound across time and space to result in victory." 
  • "You may have gone in [to Pacific Rim] expecting nonstop kaiju-crushing action and were annoyed by the scientist segments. And that's ok, I guess, although I'd suggest that it's also reasonable to adapt your expectations as a film proceeds rather than just comparing it to the film that is in your head, but fine, alright, you didn't like them." 
  • "There's a great parallel between the overall construction and the story of Newt and Hermann: in the end, their information is not in opposition. Both of the scientists are right, and it is only through the synchronization of their knowledge, rather than their petty squabbling for attention from their benefactors, that the key to the Rift becomes apparent." 
  • "The thing about this movie [Iron Man 3] is that it could easily have involved Tony Stark rising on his own from ruin and clawing his way singlehandedly to victory. It could have involved the removal of all his allies so that he alone would have to face the Mandarin and defeat his diabolical opponent. That's not what happens, though." 
  • "Note that Harley is the first person who asks him if he should be getting psychological treatment for his PTSD, and Stark finally responds affirmatively, admitting that he has a problem."
  • "Hell, look at one of the pivotal scenes in the movie, the plane rescue sequence. That whole scene revolves around the idea that Tony can't save all these people on his own, so he needs to literally bind them together via electrical impulses in order to effect a full rescue. What a perfect metaphor for the film's overarching message." 
  • "So, part of the message of the film, like Pacific Rim, is that anyone can be heroic, and the heroism of teamwork is more profound than the heroism of the solitary ubermensch-- or the villainy of a man who uses and discards his associates, even literally using his team as human bombs." 
  • "The intriguing thing about Cloud Atlas the film is that the stories all channel towards a conclusion at the same time (in contrast to the book, which has a stepped pyramid structure). This means that the tragic ending of one story is counterbalanced and, arguably, undercut by the triumph of another."
  • "These moves are wholly intentional and the film is stronger for this undercutting, because it reinforces the central message of the film: through countless actions, great and small, humanity as a whole moves forward out of ignorance into light." 
  • "By the end of Cloud Atlas, however, the recurring enemy gradually loses materiality and acquires a purely symbolic, conceptual nature." 
  • "The point is, evil over time degrades while good strengthens (and, interestingly in the case of Sonmi, also becomes an abstraction-- a goddess figure)." 
  • "Because Weaving's characters are unable to see beyond themselves, they degrade through time until they lose substance entirely and become a formless boogieman. This is a fascinating and powerful transformation, as it suggests that the monomythic hero is actually potentially quite weak. If our ability to form attachments to others-- loyalties, as the Vulture article puts it-- we fail to develop and ultimately devolve." 
  • "I'm reminded, actually, of another entity that goes on a similar journey away from knowledge and contact with other beings. I am speaking of Milton's Satan, who manipulates his followers, strikes off alone to Earth to spoil God's creation, and ultimately devolves from heroic titan to crawling serpent." 
  • "Cloud Atlas does not exactly promise a hopeful future, but it does assert that the countless small cuts in our history caused by humanity's inhumanity's can be bandaged, can be healed, can be restored in time. A single messianic figure cannot, however, heal these cuts on her own. She is accompanied by other agents of change, some coming far before or after her life, and humanity's ultimate salvation is due not to messiahs but to a collaboration between two lowly humans just trying to get by on a decaying world." 
  • "Each film, on its own, would be an argument that you can make that specific kind of film. Together, they show that there is a stunning range of storytelling possibilities opne to writers willing to construct an ensemble-driven story rather than a monomythic story." 
  • "Each one is a hero in its own right, a triumphant warrior of the silver screen. Their heroism is in no way diminished by the presence of other heroes. On the contrary, it is compounded, made stronger, and allowed to diversify, just as within the films the ensemble casts allow for far more room for the underrepresented to find a voice, and just as the heroism of individuals is made stronger by unity. As above, so below. The message is clear: heroism can be distributed far more widely, and the benefits to opening our narratives to such distribution are enormous." 
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1 comment:

  1. Micheal AlexanderJanuary 25, 2020 at 1:17 AM

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