Earth and Muck
by rsbakker
So Grimdark magazine has released the conclusion to “The Knife of Many Hands,” as well as an interview containing cryptic questions and evasive answers. It’s fast becoming a great venue, and a great way to spotlight grim new talent.
As for information regarding the next book, I wish I knew what to say. I submitted the final manuscript the end of January, and still I’ve heard nary a peep about possible publications dates. Rest assured, as soon as I know, I’ll let you know.
I’d also like to recommend The Shadow of Consciousness: A Little Less Wrong, by Peter Hankins. Unlike so many approaches to the issue, Peter refuses to drain the swamp of phenomenology into the bog of intentionality. In some respects, the book is a little too clear-eyed! For those of us who have followed Conscious Entities over the years, it’s downright fascinating watching Peter slowly reveal those cards he’s been stubbornly holding to his chest! I’m hoping to work up a review when I’m completed, OCD-permitting.
I’d like to thank Roger for stepping into the breach these past couple months, giving everyone another glimpse of why he’ll be turning fantasy on its ear. Why the breach? Early in February I began working on what I thought was a killer idea for an introduction to Through the Brain Darkly. The idea was to write it in two parts, posting each here for feedback. Normally, the keyboard sounds like a baby rattle when I do blog/theory stuff, but not so this time. I’m sure burn-out is part of the problem. I’m also cramped by a deep-seated need for perfection, I suppose, but I’ve never been quite so stymied by a good idea before. So I thought I would open it up to the collective, gather a few thoughts on what people think it is I’m doing here (aside from the predictable, paleolithic factors), and what it is I need to communicate this effectively.
Babette Babich has recently posted her own thoughts on Diogenes in the Marketplace–pretty much calls out all my defense mechanisms! Check it out. If only more couples would lounge in bed with The White-Luck Warrior. She’s given me a gift with that lovely image.
Despite my blockages, this post inaugurates a spate of guaranteed activity here on TPB. I’m pleased to announce that Ben Cain will be returning with a piece on eliminativism this upcoming Monday, then Paul Ennis will be posting on Bleak Theory the Monday following. Maybe a good old-fashioned blog debate will be just the tonic.
Three Pound Brain 
Go go Golgotterath!!
By the way, I bought Grimdark Magazine #3 yesterday!!
I enjoyed your interview though it was quite elusive…you should really
write a book on the cognitive failings of (post/whatever)modernist Literature
and why fantasy genre matters when everything else is devoid of meaning.
When I started my PhD in January 2012 I was expecting TUC in six months…it feels strange that in three days I will submit my thesis to my reviewers and that somehow I managed to survive a doctoral course while 60% of my brain was busy awaiting for all those answers (WHO AM I?)
Waiting the four books you’ve completed to come out soon!
Congratulations, Massimiliano. At least you’ve got a greater chance of having a PhD when you read the next volume ;).
Thank you Mike.
Right, then I can dedicate all my 3PBrain to TUC!!
yeah Congratulations! that shit is hard to do–stay sane!
Heh, totally understand this feeling. I was/am so obsessed, I even started my PhD thesis with a TDTCB quote (“Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”)!
I had a shudder, thinking that a PhD could be completed in the time it’s taken me!
Which is why NO MORE NEW PROJECTS is the rule.
Congratulations, by the way!
Thank you, Scott!
Hi, Scott,
Just wondering if you could divulge any tidbits on the other three drafts you are sitting on…are any of them part of The Series That Cannot Be Named?
Also, any chance you’ll be sending Pat another chapter from TUC?
Thanks so much, can’t wait to read more of your work!
houlios1
Note quite yet, I’m afraid. The details are still being thrashed out.
And thank you, for bearing with me, houlios!
“So I thought I would open it up to the collective, gather a few thoughts on what people think it is I’m doing here, and what it is I need to communicate this effectively.”
So you had idea but expect us to come up with a better one? 🙂
Me, I don’t know anymore what you’re doing. I can always track some segment you write about, but when it comes to figuring out some final grand vision it seems like you want it perfectly concealed.
Sometimes the Big Ideas don’t seem so different from the already widespread ones. There’s a need to focus on what’s truly paradigm-changing, and how it interpolates in various forms that are actually meaningful and significant. The consequences, so to speak.
A distinction from the technicality needed to be persuasive and convincing, and the actual significant revelation that is contained.
The core idea is re-wiring. We are here expecting the same as TDTCBF where Khellus teaches Cnaiur how to think, and so open a new world.
Well, the statement of the theory itself is pretty well-formed. It’s the counterintuitive gestalt that’s so difficult to convey. I’m literally asking people to see through both their biological cognitive defaults and around 3000 years of history.
The process of fishing is always helpful, no matter nibbles and strikes!
So I thought I would open it up to the collective, gather a few thoughts on what people think it is I’m doing here, and what it is I need to communicate this effectively.
Probably that it’s easier to jump on someone when they make a claim. When they don’t make a claim – well, you’re left not having anything to attack – you might even get stuck having to make a claim yourself! And who wants that!?
Plus the diversity – the reaction to self is wide and differing. Perhaps as diverse as the number of personalities around the world? Which one do you go for, when possibly for any particular one the group who share that philosophy of self might only be a few hundred, scattered around?
Or atleast that’s what I, an internet hobo, ran into in trying to write some stuff – I didn’t know who the truck I was talking to or about what? What intuition am I attacking when I’m the one starting something rather than someone else with a claim? Whoever thought a lack of claims could be a problem??
Also the ASOIAF forum doth ask of the second half of the teaser chapter with much need in their eyes!
Ayuh, the ductile nature of the subject matter is a tremendous part of the problem, the fact that everyone thinks something different is self-evidential. Part of the reason I’ve undertaken so many BBT interpretations of different positions and phenomena is to show just how comprehensive the view is, how so much can be resolved. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to recapitulate, even enumerate, the kinds of things that can be explained.
I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to recapitulate, even enumerate, the kinds of things that can be explained.
That doesn’t sound terribly fun, really. I was thinking about Ben’s idea of the conversation with the post human – if that was crossed with what they did in the movie ‘Her’, in as much as it goes from a ‘she’ to an ‘it’ – if the conversation could do that with the reader – possibly crossing back and forth several times from (s)he to it, from it to (s)he, from (s)he to it, with the posthuman even making a game of popping up like a wackamole here, then there on the human spectrum – well, it’d tie in nicely to the whole Alice in wonderland mirror thing. Back and forth through the mirror. There and back again. What can be explained, being explained, would probably be the greater part of the mirror steps.
But I dunno – just a list of thing – it doesn’t seem like it’d get at peoples primary commitments. But that’s just me – on concious entities you said you used part of the intro as a reply to someone and they said they really got it a lot better than before. So maybe you’re just being too hard on yourself? You’re not writing a bible here…are you?
I thought the interview was sufficiently awesome :). Buzz is everyone is most curious about those “four drafts” you so casually mentioned.
Also, I picked up your last recommendation, Social Physics – you should have a recommendation page, maybe? Looking forward to debate day.
lol, those ‘four drafts’ … i wager it is:
1) The Unholy Consult
2) The Unholy Consult for Kids (with pop-ups)
3) Achamian and the Terrible, Horrible, Not Good, Very Bad Day
4) Neuropath 2: The Post-Post-Human Brain
i liked the interview too!
I thought he was joking when he said four drafts, because my guess it that he has eight completed:
1. TUC.
2. Through the Brain Darkly.
3. LT&G.
4. Disciple 2.
5. First Apocalypse standalone.
6. Cûnu-Inchoroi Wars standalone.
7. The Black Semenillion (TSA Silmarillion).
8. Cheesemaking Practice 2.
cheese gromit!
Pretty close! You just need to figure out where to slot Thinner Thighs with Disciple Manning… 😉
Not really. Like many general science books, it concentrates on real world applications, and shies from any hardcore conceptual examination or contextualization. It wigged me out for the same reason Dataclysm has me troubled: the implicit, abiding faith that all this falls on some natural trajectory of human self-actualization.
Hey scott, eagerly awaiting through the brain darkly.
I just got started with Kahnmann’s book Thinking Fast, and Slow. I haven’t read more pages faster in a long time!
I was thinking, you mentioned a couple of papers before which I was interested in reading—One on ecological rationalism or ecological heuristics, and another on some Japanese researchers linking the second law and thermodynamics to heuristics. If you have those could you forward them to divisionbyz3r0 AT gmail.com.
These are going to hold me over until you release what you were talking about linking the infrastructural account of information horizons and encapsulation to the more in situ ecological heuristics angle.
oops i meant divisionbyzer0 AT gmail.com
One thing I consistently find is that people just don’t see what distinguishes the BBT from other forms of eliminativism, or even BBT from mechanical functionalist styles of thinking common in biological explanation or even familiar to programmers or people familiar with systems theory.
Prior to this site, while I had interest in Quine, Goodman, Chomsky and a couple of figures associated with analytic thought, my background was mainly continental philosophy / critical theory. It’s immediate to me what distinguishes your views from Dennetts or Rosenbergs. You are concerned with the form or shape, the limits and horizonalities, of the various characteristics that render consciousness, experience, or whatever difficult to integrate with naturalism, and you also purport to show that this has to be the case on BBT. Dennett, Churchland and Rosenberg, as well as other views close to eliminativism such as the earlier structural determinist strains of enactivism and cybernetics (maturana and varela) do not ever really broach this dimension at all. One of my interests in the way you approach consciousness is that you pay attention to a kind of temporal infrastructure, and this is obviously a concern that is in many of the post kantian strains of continental thinking. I think the way you show that the nunc stans of time consciousness has to seem like a hanging frame or an ever present identity is a powerful demonstration of the BBT approach to thinking consciousness. This is missing in some of the later polemical pieces, and it again is an aspect which differentiates the purchase of BBT from eliminativism in general.
I’m entirely in agreement. I’ve really come to appreciate the need to differentiate my position from previous eliminativisms, and I’ve taken this as a guiding principle for the introduction. The real problem faced by traditional eliminativism, what lies behind the perpetual question-begging critique, is the absence of any positive account. This means it has no horses in the explanatory game. Once you realize how much ‘inferences to the best explanation’ drive theory formation cognitive science, you realize that eliminativists like Rosenberg can only ever be peripheral to the debate. For me, the primary reasons to buy into BBT are abductive. It’s an eliminativism driven by explanatory power, not naturalistic epistemic scruples.
You’ve certainly put your finger on a division that I see between approaching these questions from a phenomenological angle (using cognitive science to systematically reinterpret the data of deliberative reflection) and from the cognitive angle (using bounded rationality to derive a (nonspooky) functional account of human cognition). I’ve also been tweaking the tools in my toolbox, trying to develop modes of explanation that are less likely to tweak an analytic reader’s ‘continental detector.’ The fact is, BBT comes out of a failed attempt to devise a fundamental ontology that actually possesses a theory of meaning. It all flows out of the realization that the now could be explained in terms of neglect.
One thing that almost disturbs me is the way the most analytically minded of the continental theorists really aren’t going near the BBT with a ten foot pole, except through various polemical cartoons (it’s a “flat ontology” which of course is alredy tied into “neoliberalism” according to some associated with that area of thinking!)
ok, i think you give the clue here. both the eco-functionalist level of cognition in situ in immediate action and the ‘inner’ shape of experience are linked together by what you term neglect. but i notice my own intuitions being triggered by this sometimes. we are trained to think of neglect with awareness. what is neglected is what the system is not aware of. many are likewise going to be tripped by nelgect and will simply see it as though you are still cashing in on an intentionalist loan unrepayed.
Exactly. Heuristic neglect is what does the work traditionally given to representations, providing a way to mediate our experience and our brain function. It’s the bridge (and as I’ve been attempting to show, a very fecund one). But where representation bridges via spookiness, giving at most a natural setting for an experience that remains inexplicable (because, among other things, it is ‘about’), neglect bridges via incapacity, explains experience as it appears in terms of perspectival conundrums–which is to say, how and where philosophical reflection finds itself in the greater set of nested systems that we know to be the case.
The ‘awareness’ problem is a problem, insofar as BBT does not naturalistically explain what consciousness is, only why some of it appears the way it does, and so perplexes us. The kernel of the ‘generation problem’ remains untouched, but most all the hardness is stripped away, leaving us with the question, not of subjectivity (which can be explained away), but of how and why this encapsulated pocket of neural sparking ‘lights up’ at all. This is why I’m keen on the possibility of EMFs. (Don’t believe the facile dismissals you’ll likely encounter: evolutionary utilizations of EMFs abound in nature).
It’s one thing to use neglect to explain why flickering lights appear to be continuous once their frequency passes a certain threshold (like the refresh rate on your monitor), but this doesn’t explain the ‘awareness’ of said fusion, the fact that there’s an integrated ‘experience’ to be reported at all. All we need is a mechanism. Because all the different ‘fusion effects’ BBT catalogues allow us to back out of the low-dimensional fairy tales that have plagued our ancestors, the account need not strike us as intuitively satisfying at all.
scott, did you have the reference to that paper you mentioned (buried in a comment to me on a post in the by now deep past as far as internet time is concerned… some time last year) about people japan looking at heuristics in terms of the second law and thermodynamics? or the one on ecological rationality? my email is actually divisionbyz3r0@gmail.com. on g+ somehow it just displays as DivisionbyZer0.
Shit. I must have missed that. I think you’re referring to some papers that Sheldon Chow sent me a couple years back… Let me have a look. If I don’t find them, I’ll send you a couple pieces that Chris Frith recently forwarded to me.
Awesome news about the TUC! Will it have an updated encyclopaedic glossay?
Really enjoyed The Knife of Many Hands but was a bit stumped about what actually happened at the end with Shinurta.
Mmm. Babbettes piece uses words like ‘moronicism’ and confuses whether you read something in print or in ‘e’ as profound.
This passes for thought?
Babette actually wrote to me saying that it was the product of a single burst of writing: a kind of ‘not-stop-response’ to the theme of my blog and my books. It’s not for everybody, I grant you that. Like anything philosophical, the interesting bits always lie fixed between the author and some particular reader.
Treating some words as ‘real’ and other words as ‘made up’ often passes for thought as well, it seems.
it’s a difference that makes a difference, so the heuristic does real labor. it’s mostly used as a tool for navigating people. someone who discursively equivocates features of made up worlds with real worlds is someone whose actions you are going to be very suspicious of because youd worry they equivocate real actions with made up actions and might do things that others would only do in fantasy or imagination. then there’s a kind brute fact about it that the world of baseball, though usually safe, is nominally more dangerous than the world of dungeons and dragons. a baseball can literally crack your skull, wheras the ogre’s club or tarasque’s tail swipe can not, unless your dungeon master is someone with a constitutive inability to distinguish made up and real events.
DBZ,
Really? So maybe Shakespeare, who is the author of a number of english words – which he just made up (and popularised with his works) would have been a raving dungeons and dragons DM, dragging his players into the steam tunnels?
Actually that’s pretty metal, so I might go with that!
It always strikes me like running into a tribe who has found the edge of the world (really just a massive cliff) when I run into people who have found the edge of words. As if words end sharply at ‘moron’ and could go no further into ‘moronicism’. Like there’s a special boundry.
Babette Babich’s post is tough to read since it’s stream-of-thought and thus predictably informed by perhaps too much continental philosophy. But I think her point about the sadism in science should be taken seriously. It’s consistent with my take on the upshot of radical naturalism, as I lay it out in “Are Minds Like Witches?” forthcoming on TPB.
I think the radical naturalist is left with instrumentalism or pragmatism, with the discovery that enlightened animals tend to evaluate anything in terms of its subjective utility to themselves or to that with which they identify, except that they would interpret the self monistically as just another natural system. If causal properties are the only real ones, doesn’t that mean Nietzsche was partly right about the will to power? More accurately, doesn’t that mean those at the cutting edge of naturalism, namely the scientists, should resemble the sadists in Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom? Of course, scientists aren’t generally psychopaths, so although their work entails that there’s no such thing as a human person in the sense given to those latter words by popular culture, they leave the laboratory in which they torture animals or at least routinely subvert all our cherished notions without which we’d likely all be tempted to kill ourselves, and return to their families, forgetting their radical naturalism and taking the naive person’s illusions for granted.
As I like to put it, would the posthuman mystic–who will be enlightened by radical natualism so that like the Buddha she’ll see absolutely everything as so many interacting natural mechanisms–also be a raging psychopath? There would be no morality to stop her from conducting inhuman engineering projects. Anyone familiar with sci-fi themes would recognize this threat of sadism for the rigorous naturalist, since the posthuman in question is often portrayed as the evil AI.
This prospect of the posthuman leads to how I’d write an intro to “Through the Brain Darkly”–which I take it is a nonfiction book about the TPB perspective. I think it would be cool if the intro were written in the posthuman’s voice, rather like in the TPB dialogues between the scientist and the enlightened alien. The posthuman could be speaking from the future via the possessed Scott Bakker, comforting or warning us about the approaching revelations and apocalypses.
were written in the posthuman’s voice
Hmm… Maybe write it from an Inchoroi’s perspective?
Cool… except that, you know, I’m trying to get people to climb INTO the Ark!
‘Sadism in science’
I don’t get the attribution here – that’s like saying ‘The murderous desire in guns’. As if guns desire things. As if the practice of science desires things.
they leave the laboratory in which they torture animals or at least routinely subvert all our cherished notions without which we’d likely all be tempted to kill ourselves, and return to their families, forgetting their radical naturalism and taking the naive person’s illusions for granted.
Kind of like the guys who pilot drones in vegas, killing people by video game remote control – but then go home to their families? The meat that shouldn’t be targeted by drones.
But given it’s likely theirs a few immunisations in your own body that are a product of science (which one might credit a few saved lives), why are you shooting at the practice of science first?
I’m not sure about all practioners of science, but perhaps if the drone killing seems human to us and to fall lower on the ‘to do’ list, maybe a rejection of some science practices is a rejection of relative saintlyness?
There would be no morality to stop her from conducting inhuman engineering projects.
I think really ‘morality’, if you look at it as infrastructure, is a way of staying alive – if we all just attacked each other for whatever scraps each other had, the jackals would eat the remnant survivors anyway.
Granted theft and criminal activity (a species predating on its own species) are ancient. But I don’t think you can do without some kind of morality…because jackals.
Granted maybe they work up a morality between them and the other higher functioners and that morality leaves us like we leave cattle on the abattoir floor. Or like gelitinous mice.
Ultimately though, I don’t know why the free spirit does anything. Surely the world would be like a blank page – and them with writers block. Everythings the same – why do anything? So they sit still until life functions cease.
Then again, maybe that’s why Lovecrafts creations had to sleep for so long – to dream up motivations…parochialisms?
“they leave the laboratory in which they torture animals or at least routinely subvert all our cherished notions without which we’d likely all be tempted to kill ourselves, and return to their families, forgetting their radical naturalism and taking the naive person’s illusions for granted”
Not all of us do Benjamin. I’m not a psychopath, but I do not put up a Chinese wall between what I do in my lab, and how I live my life on a day-to-day. I am all-too-keenly aware of the growing instrumentalization of the human mind, for instance. I can’t play a video game without seeing invisible strings, tugging at ancient evolutionary heuristics (and simultaneously gathering juicy data for the next iteration of video serotonin).
What *is* surprising, however, is how I don’t find any of it dismal. To quote HP-
“To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.”
For me it is not “nearly” it is “completely”.
But in a sense, this is Ben’s point, I think. It’s like Chomsky says: a good number of slave-owners were very decent people. It’s the social position that’s problematic. So the idea would be that as the penumbra of technical manipulations grows ever more sophisticated and (barring noise effects) efficacious, the position of the researcher becomes ever more fraught with moral ambiguities. The idea would be to look at yourself as a protagonist in a Coetzee novel, as someone who’s ‘intrinsic decency’ becomes more and more pernicious for the radical recontextualization of your social ecology.
like how norbert wiener thought he could be ethical by hiding his papers on rocket technology from the military while all his papers on time series were there for wall street stock men to mine. beyond a point how intentional intuitions even determine what is an isnt ethical in such an informationally dense scene.
The question of course is one of what you mean by ‘subjective utility.’ If you mean, ‘heuristic way of understanding behavioural attractors,’ I’m fine, but if you mean something ontologically extant, then you’ve signed on for different versions of the traditional spooks.
I actually think the relation is contrary, that pragmatism presupposes radical naturalism. I go days without pondering or parsing subjective utilities. After the fact, interpreting my behaviour as somehow driven by a target state–as the product of ‘goals’ or ‘interests’–is pretty handy, since consciousness neglects everything but those states, leaving reflection nothing else to blame it on.
The problem, I think, is bigger than sadism, perhaps even more frightening. At least the sadist cares how you feel!
Your posthuman suggestion is pretty close to the conceit I’ve been cracking my skull against, Ben–aliens, and the question of alien philosophy!
Can we have a sample chapter soon? What Truth may we exchange to get your to part with a merest fraction?
I need a time-frame, first. Once I have that, I can begin pondering excerpts.
Thanks again for writing this piece, Scott! I also have a publication in this same issue (if anyone’s interested) called “Grimdark and Gaming”.
But otherwise, I’ve enjoyed your stories and interview very, very much. I’d love to see more publications in that issue from you in the future, too!
– Jeremy
Thank you, Jeremy. I still haven’t been able to open my version yet! I’m having problems with mobi for some damn reason.
Try calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/
You could always use Caliber (it’s a free program) to convert the file to pdf. Failing that, just get Adrian to email you over a copy! 🙂
Have you ever considered doing a Reddit AMA, Bakker?
What is a Reddit AMA?
It means “ask me anything.” It’s basically a thread on reddit where people ask you questions and you answer what you want for some period of time. It’s not that much different from this thread now that I think about it… Except you have a much bigger audience, and it’s scheduled in advance.
For example,
Stene Erikson,
Robin Hobb,
Mark Lawrence,
Joe Abercrombie, 1, 2, 3,
Barack Obama,
*Steven Erikson
ooohhh, if you are going to do an AMA you could do it at second-apocalypse.com and then we could link it to Reddit and everything else!!!
it’s a fun thing for fans because it’s like a more ‘live’ encounter with the author. of course you don’t have to answer everything, but even cryptic answers are fun 🙂
Great news on the final draft being submitted! I’ve bought the Grimdark issue and look forward to reading it.
This is more on the writing craft side of things than is standard here (and is almost a month old, alas, but it was a busy month), but I write for a writing group blog called Fictorians. The monthly theme of the blog for March was Breaking the Rules, where we pick a rule of writing and discuss how one might break to the story’s benefit rather than it’s detriment. For my entry, I talked about your switch to present tense whenever you go to Mimara’s POV, which I always thought was an interesting stylistic choice.
http://www.fictorians.com/2015/03/03/shifting-tense/
Very cool post, and a very cool website as well, litg! And yes, the present-as-refuge was a big part of my decision. The bigger part, though, was the Judging Eye, and the way the immediacy of the tense facilitates the immediacy of the God, who is also timeless, albeit in a very different sense. There’s a way in which the present tense shrinks the action to a knife’s edge, makes eye of the beholder as small as now, a ludicrously flimsy bottleneck for Eternity, and somehow all the more appropriate for it.
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed! And even more glad I cottoned to some of your reasoning behind the decision. There’s an almost frenzied quality to her POV as compared to the others, as if not all of her emerged from her past and she’s gone feral to compensate.
I didn’t want to get too far into spoiler territory for the post (and also didn’t want to burst the dam of our soft word-count limit for the blog), but I did wonder if the Judging Eye itself informed some of the choice, just because it’s the way in which she’s different from every other character.
What really struck me is how much the *comparison* between Mimara’s present tense and the other past-tense POVs informs the sense of her character. In most books, whichever tense the author chooses tends to quickly fade into the background and the reader won’t even think about it. Here, you use that tendency and exploit the *gap* between present and past tense to do a lot of the heavy lifting. I love when the author can leverage stylistic choices like that. Great stuff.
I one-clicked Peter’s book. I hope to finish it in a few days. You hooked me with the “it’s downright fascinating watching Peter slowly reveal those cards he’s been stubbornly holding to his chest”
At this point, I imagine Peter has as much (if not more) to say about the issue than luminaries like Dennett, Tononi, and Chalmers. He really has been very thorough in documenting the (lack of?) progress in the field.
hello Mr. Bakker! i know you like your privacy, but could you answer this question for your fan club: is the next Aspect Emperor book going to be with Penguin Canada, or Overlook, or what?
God bless you!
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ezekiel+23%3A20&version=NIV
When it comes to the books, it’s just not cricket for an author to divulge on issues that bear on outstanding contracts–that’s the only reason I’m being cagey. Penguin has elected to distribute the Overlook edition, which sucks, but hey. Neither Overlook nor Orbit has made any troubling noises of any kind, despite being well within their rights to do so. The big issue is editorial turn over: my new editors need to do a helluva lot of reading to properly place TUC. Apparently asses have large emissions as well!
splendid! i do hope your new editors don’t try sneak in glittery-skinned vampires, S&M dungeons, or dystopian futures where teenagers are sorted according to character traits.
i think “Ass Issues” is a monthly about butts
Forgot to mention there was an episode of the TV sho ‘Elementary’ that touched on AI and even groups who study existential risk/apocalypse scenarios. An interesting touch was that the AI gave a lot of rote ‘I don’t understand. Can I have more information’ responces, making it seem not very human. At the end the protagonist is faced with a moral conundrum and so asks the AI the conudrum. It gives the rote responce – it doesn’t understand, can it have more information – which the viewer might be left saying themselves.
There was also some philosophy on AI’s that become obsessive on their feedback loops – ie, at first they get feedback from a button for solving problems, then they figure out how to press it themselves, then they figure what is a threat to it being pressed.
It was pretty good on the subject – it kept the ball in the air. It didn’t get to land anywhere comfortable.
Though a pop reference might be of interest.
Scott,
Thanks for linking to Prof. Babich’s musings regarding your blog and books. Any chance she might come over to TPB for a guest post? Personally, I wouldn’t mind an extended discussion on the depiction of phalloi. 🙂
I was thinking about the whole complain of performative contradiction – to me it seems like the issue is that words are kind of like clouds. When we try to use clouds to describe something that’s further down at a lower level and that the clouds are merely extension of the lower level (lots of little pools with evaporating water floating into the sky), they cry performative contradiction as we try to cancel clouds with…more clouds.
But maybe the words don’t help to direct them to consider a third dimension – words all seem to float in a two dimensional space. Perhaps the idea of evaporation from a third dimension might help?
Or perhaps I’m posting too much? Well, there’s worse kinds of posters than me!
I loved “The Knife of Many Hands.” You keep publishing Atrocity Tales and I’ll keep buying them from whoever is selling.
Some times I imagine ‘Through the Brain Darkly’ as a parody of Plato’s ‘The Republic’ but with the Socrates role played by a machine and the other characters played by recent and contemporary philosophers from Hume and Wittgenstein to Brassier and Dennett.
Vox Day enabling authoritarianism at the Hugos! http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/04/the-day-fandom-ended.html