Study Notes: Feb 8-14, 2015: "Religion in the Age of Cyborgs", &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

• Post, "Religion in the Age of Cyborgs" by Egil Asprem
• Post, "Making Sense of the Tenth Doctor's Regeneration" by Morgan Gudgin
• Post, "A Study of Regeneration: The Mind Problem" by Andrew Bohman
• Post, "The Children of the Night, What Music They Make: Horror in Music" by Sam Keeper 
• Post, "The World is a Cruel Place: Theme in Attack on Titan" by Sam Keeper

Other notes: 

• Notes to: "Your Inner Fish"
• Philosophy 313 Reading: "The Meaning of Life" and others

Homework for the future: 

• Go through at least five entries in in my "P Articles" bookmark folder. Let's go with: (1) 
• "Into the (Mind of the) Dalek"; (2) "Good Works?"; (3) "From The Ashes Of Angels: The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race"; (4) "Definitions Master List"; (5) "11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox"
• Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
• Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
• Also need to do some reading on polyamory. 
• Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 

"Religion in the Age of Cyborgs"

• "Some advocates, such as Ray Kurzweil, even see the singularity as a way to create God by rearranging all the matter in the universe and making it conscious." 
• "In Origins of the Modern Mind (1991), Donald suggested that human cultural evolution has gone through three main stages: mimetic culture (arising early in human evolutionary history) mythic culture (arising soon after the invention of language), and theoretic culture (taking shape only as late as the Enlightenment)." 
• "It was not a sudden expansion of brain mass that inaugurated the era of cognitively and behaviorally modern humans, but rather drastic changes in the distributed cognitive networks that individual brains are part of: networks that engage many brains in coordinated ways to create 'cognitive ecosystems.' Cultural evolution is based on changes in these distributed cognitive networks rather than sudden mutations in individual brains."
• "Donald holds that ritual behavior emerges extremely early, and plays a significant role in 'mimetic culture'. Religions of the doctrinaire type depend on more extensive language use, and emerge around powerful narratives and myths in the transition to 'mythic culture'."
• "Theoretic culture, on the other hand-- ostensibly secular, reflective, scientific, and disenchanted-- is a much more fragile thing. Its deepest roots lie in the 'exographic revolution' (i.e. the invention of systems for externalizing memory), which started with simple carving and painting techniques in the upper Paleolithic and kicked off around 5,000 years ago with the invention of writing. It became possible to externalize thought and distribute abstract concepts to such an extent that difficult, reflective thinking could emerge." 
• "The new nation states notably made use of all the strategies of mythic culture in creating grand narratives of the folk and their soil, united under one flag, one anthem, one canon of art and literature-- and kept safe under the watchful eyes of one government." 
• "Theoretic culture is extremely fragile, because [it is] entirely dependent on complex cognitive distribution networks spanning numerous interdependent institutions." 
• "If current trends of speculation among spiritual transhumanists are any indication, worship of the emerging Internet of Things as itself 'conscious' and 'divine' seems one path." 
• "It appears that to build well-functioning godless societies we must first become Scandinavian-style social democrats." 
• "Social and economic equality, managed by a big welfare state that citizens trust, are the strongest correlates for irreligion." 
• "The question of religion's evolutionary future, then, has little to do with whether or not we become cyborgs. We already are cyborgs, and have been for tens of thousands of years. It has more to do with what kinds of cyborgs we become, and how we organize ourselves when we're there." 

"Making Sense of the Tenth Doctor's Regeneration"

• "Most of the Doctor's previous regenerations happened fairly quickly and without any considerable lead-up, and are often a product of necessary sacrifice. By the time it's upon him, the Doctor has already been fatally injured and so likely welcomes regeneration to the alternative, which would in most cases be a decidedly unpleasant death. The Tenth Doctor, by comparison, is warned of his approaching fate quite some time in advance and while he is still fit and well, so he is left with plenty of time to deliberate on the cause, meaning and consequences of something that he is told he won't survive." 

"A Study of Regeneration: The Mind Problem"

• "What separates Ten's regeneration from the others, among other things, is the early warning he received about his 'death.'... His regeneration was predicted several episodes in advance and its imminence was clear to him well before it occurred. The knowledge of it wore on him and he spent a long time trying to escape from it... He really didn't want to go, and that's the first time we've ever seen anything like that with the Doctor. Nearly all the others accepted it, but Ten fought back. This, I believe, tells us more about the actual process of regeneration than any of the predecessors." 
• "I think it is without much question or debate that the matter constituting a Time Lord's body has continuity. That is, the pre-regeneration Doctor is made up of the same atoms as the post-regeneration Doctor. They are both the same organism, but they have changed. The only other alternative is to say that somehow, perhaps by Time Lord technology, the bodies are 'swapped.' That takes an extreme in which the Doctors are all physically distinct beings with a shared, general title (like 'The King of England')."
• The Doctor: "I can still die. If I'm killed before regeneration, then I'm dead. Even then, even if I change, it feels like dying. Everything I am dies. Some new man goes sauntering away, and I'm dead." 
• "One could argue that the Tenth Doctor is vainly mourning over a lost personality and appearance, but it doesn't really fit with his character to get so upset over that."
• "My theory is that from the pre-regeneration Doctor to the post-regeneration Doctor, the mental continuity is broken. The former incarnation actually dies, from his point of view. His consciousness-- his soul, if you wish-- ceases. How can this be, you might ask, if the latter incarnation retains his memories? To answer that, I would say that there is mental continuity from the latter. From his point of view, there has just been a change." 
• The Doctor: "A man is the sum of his memories, a Time Lord even more so." 
• "Imagine a theoretical teleportation system in which you go into a chamber and you are scanned. Every atom, every neuron position, is exactly copied. Then, it sends the information to a distant planet where an exact replica of you is generated using the information. The generated person shares every memory with the original, he just felt like he was transported. He goes on living your life, the same memories but different matter. You, however, are dead." 

"The Children of the Night, What Music They Make" 

• "Maybe it's not fair for me to start an article on horror in music by picking on Darwin. After all, he was writing in an earlier, barbaric era-- a time before humanity developed its pinnacle of artistic brilliance, Marilyn Manson." 
• "I take issue, though, when the obsession with a Darwinian model of sexual selection as the sole driving power behind human achievement leads people to say shit that's just fucking stupid!" 
• Denis Dutton: "Darwin would not deny, presumably, that a musical soundtrack could be appropriate for a horror movie; he is only claiming that the raw horror a dramatic story might incite could never be produced by music, any more than anger or fear could be produced by music. Music's natural ground is-- as you would expect from an adaptation of sexual selection-- romance." 
• "It's actually difficult to know where to start with this quote. It's such a mess of nonsensical ideas tossed together." 
• "You know I'm not satisfied with the presence alone of creepy things. There's gotta be something more to a horror poem than just mention of vampires and zombies." 
• "The slow delivery masks the meaning quite a bit, actually... These are the kind of games these gothic poets play with the lyrical structures. The movement from line to line, and the way those lines are delayed and separated by the vocal treatment and the structure of the song, demands attention and forces the audience to put the pieces together. Which is quite powerful when used to create a sense of uncertainty, foreboding, and fear." 
• "The song is thus unsettling not just for its dark, surrealist subject matter, but for its very structure, which is fraught with fissures of discontinuity. It is unsettling because any resolution that we find is then counterbalanced by another misstep." 
• "But ok, you might say, this is still working on the level of lyrics rather than sensation. It's not, like, really music. Now, granted, that's a bullshit argument because love songs have lyrics too, but sure, I'll indulge this train of thought for a moment." 
• "Anyway, the point of all this is that there's some rich potential for horror in music that shouldn't be overlooked, there's some really incredible gothic music out there that you might not be familiar with, and you should never get so carried away with a singular theory that you are forced to warp the history of art and music in a really nonsensical way in order to make your theory work." 

"The World is a Cruel Place" 

• "All joking aside, browsing porn based on Harry Potter is a true descent into madness, and I need to process what I have seen before I can write anything coherent about it. So, let's talk about something a little more sane, like giant naked photosynthesizing cannibals. Significantly more sane." 
• "Eren Jaeger's character arc seems to largely consist of his need for freedom and his reluctance to face the responsibility that accompanies this freedom. It's kind of the classical Existentialist problem, actually-- if you have absolute freedom, you also have absolute responsibility for everything that happens, and often you can't actually determine what the outcomes of your choices will be." 
• "One of the critiques spinning around on Tumblr right now of the series or season or whatever finale is that the studio made a number of unwarranted changes to the narrative. People tend to fall into two camps on this sort of thing. On the one side are the Originators, who (some might say slavishly) adhere to the 'original' work. On the other side are the Isolators, who claim to see each work as fundamentally independent and judge each upon its own merits." 
• "The issue with the Originator position is that it assumes an Author capable of writing a definitive Work that is not subject to error, ambiguity, flaw, changeability, accident, and so on. You see this with some Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fans-- any change is considered bad simply because it is a change from what the author intended." 
• "If you've been following along for a while, you know how skeptical I am of authorial intent. If there's one thing 20th Century theory taught us, it's that meanings can emerge that are outside of the author's ideas, because our minds are association-generating engines." 
• "On the other hand, though, it seems ridiculous to me that we should simply ignore alternate versions of a work while doing analysis. This would be the equivalent of saying that we must read each article analyzing Attack on Titan completely independently, never weighing any argument against another, never comparing which reading is the most effective of [sic] most pleasing, never allowing ideas to cross-pollinate or interact in any way." 
• "It's ludicrous to suggest that we can ever close out the other material we have synthesized in order to judge works completely independently. In that sense, the Isolators enact the same folly that the Originators do, prizing the work as an isolated entity associated only with itself." 
• "Viewing an adaptation alongside alternate versions lets us see where the different versions succeed or fail."
• "There's a lot in the show that points to a traditionally existentialist outlook, particularly the idea of the world being a cruel and absurd place in which humans must construct meanings and their own identity but in which the ultimate responsibility for meaning and choice fall upon them. That's where the whole idea of angst comes from, the pain of growing up and being responsible for your life, being forced by your father to pilot Eva to become a Titan-shifter, &c. &c. That's great! It's solid material for a story about an adolescent, particularly, and it's well explored here." 
• "The existentialist dilemma, the existentialist angst, comes from the realization that limits are internal and once you abandon those limits you can jump off any cliff you want with the absolute responsibility of the outcome." 
• "This injection of a fundamentally Libertarian or Anarchist ethos unsettles the existentialist ideas in the show because it moves the conflict from the introspective to the external world. It's basically the opposite of what happens in Evangelion, interestingly, where the conflict appears to be external but gradually becomes more and more existential as the show goes on until the final battles are fought in the mind, and Shinji must confront the fact that he is responsible for his own happiness."