Effluenza
by rsbakker
So I made the mistake of declaring, “Hey, the flu shot actually worked!” a couple of weeks back. This time it landed squarely in my head, more specifically behind the eyes. The last time I had a head cold like this I ended up in the hospital for emergency eye surgery of all things: the pressure apparently caused the inner lining of my right eye to shift, which in turn ripped my retina. Even as I write this, I can see the ‘floaters’ caused by the debris of the tear (and subsequent surgery): black spots and tangles—like a Pollock in spattered suspension. No such drama this time, fortunately, but it still feels clumsy putting words together, like assembling complex molecules out of glass marbles.
It’s either snot or words for me, apparently. Only one effluent at a time.
Luckily, the shot seems to have worked for others—either that or they’re more scrupulous when it comes to washing their hands! My brother Bryan has released the full version of the Second Apocalypse trailer, one which reveals how wonderfully Jason has mapped the sacred nooks and profane crannies of the World—images my brother has conjured into animate life. Meanwhile, Adam has reposted his original reviews of the The Prince of Nothing over at The Wertzone, as has Pat over at Fantasy Hotlist. Aside from running two of the most successful speculative media blogs on the web, they have been critically-minded supporters of the series since the very beginning.
We have marched to the limits of our supply lines, so far that we must consume our enemies to continue. The slog has been long, I know. But Golgotterath grows near.
Three Pound Brain 
Feel better! I heard a good country cure is to get some chicken soup, bring it nearly to a boil, and then dump it on your face. Supposedly it takes your mind off of other things. 🙂
I hope you feel better soon. The first time I read the Second Apocalypse I borrowed the books from the library. This time I bought them from Amazon. I hope that cheers you up. Every little bit helps.
Get well soon. I’ve heard that analysing the phenomenology of discomfort reduces the discomfort; but turns out to be even less fun…
Ouch – floaters are really annoying. Like they keep popping up as if to grab attention…like commentators! 😉 Shitty you got landed with them if you didn’t develop them naturally beforehand.
Anyway, a sranc a day keeps the doctor away! The doctor for humans, anyway!
And so the brave and bold, the naive and insane said, “let us consume our foe…”
Get better, Bossman. The altar of the world awaits. Strength on the journey.
PODCAST-Members of second-apocalypse.com discuss a reread of The Judging Eye! https://soundcloud.com/tsa-cast/tsacast-13-apr-1816-the-judging-eye-reread-cast
Hope you feel better. Here’s a little story I found on Facebook that’s pretty fascinating, and possibly relevant, although I’m not sure how? Brains are weeiird.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504
it exemplifies the whole thing, really. specifically sufficiency/saturation/asymtotic limits, as well as principle of informational adumbration. as rsb puts it elsewhere:
“Among other things, the Blind Brain Theory (BBT) proposes that these informatic thresholds play a decisive role in the apparent structure of consciousness experience. All you need do is attend to the limits of your visual field, to the way vision simply peters out into visual oblivion, in order to apprehend a visual expression of an information horizon. Since visual information enables sight, the limits of visual information cannot themselves be seen. The conscious cognition of the absence of information always requires more information: I call this the Principle of Informatic Adumbration (PIA), and as we shall see, it is absolutely crucial to understanding consciousness.”
Yeah, there’s hardly an ‘End of file’ marker around the outside of ones vision! Why would nature bother? Only when something like a migraine blocks out a chunk of vision does it instinctively provoke thought. Otherwise it takes a lot of spare calories, time (as in centuries) and navel gazing to get to the point of identifying absences.
Though I suspect PIA was a matter of choosing the acronyms letters first, then making up the words second (PIA = Pain In Ass lols!)!
“Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, describes being like this too. I’ve been trying and failing to dig up the reference, but I recall it being in his early (1980s) writings on Heterophenomenology.”
If you can’t fantasize how do you masturbate?
It’s not nerve damage. They still receive sensory signals from nerves in their genitalia. I’d imagine they could become disposed to autoerotic paraphelias
I was being facetious, but given that men are supposed to be ‘visual’ in their sexuality I wonder whether a man who does not have a visual imagination can arouse himself. I suppose such a man can use pornography, but absent it, can he arouse himself? If so, how? I guess I understand why he didn’t answer the masturbation question in the piece but a candid answer would have been interesting.
Feel better! A guy said that in the last stages of the slog you are supposed to eat sranc? Not sure if that applies.
Weirdly I’m writing this from a departure lounge in Montreal Airport, so occupying yr very own national entity for another forty minutes or so. Get well soon! Looking forward to shooting the virtual shit. D
The Great Ordeal … by Johan Fabricius http://www.ebay.ie/itm/The-Great-Ordeal-Johan-Fabricius-1951-ID-15653-/371432683735
Good news from Overlook Press! Grimdark Magazine will publish an excerpt of #TheGreatOrdeal on May 16th & give away a copy in June! #RScottBakker
Yes! Great news. Copies exist! I’m starting to believe that the book is actually coming out this year!
Way to release the info before grimdark got to it. You’re the best.
Oh how I’d love to get my hands on a sweet, sweet ARC of TGO. Hopefully they give details soon.
I hear that PON ARC’s are golden with two great horns. Also they are delivered from orbit and may cause moutains to form upon delivery.
Well damn, that sounds way better than whatever it is I have. I’ll be forming a group to trek through the wilderness in order to find it I guess. Waiver of liability required for all participants regarding accidental death and/or dismemberment.
The full length trailer is awesome.
Take care of yourself and I hope you feel better soon.
Also, new cover for the TGO is up on Amazon. Its no better than the last one…. But maybe this time it isn’t a direct copy from another of their publications.
If only there was some better artwork readily available for them to draw from.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/
Thought TPB fans would enjoy this.
It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.
It’s sad this defintionally true statement sucked me in for awhile. Of course a creature ‘tuned to fitness’ is better…it’s always better because somehow it’s tuned to the one right solution ever for survival. Definitionally so! Which is totes a thing that can be going on.
And mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival? The guys right to be looking at his perception of reality as an illusion/a convenient construct, because he’s painting reality in classroom colours – teacher describes things to you and here it’s more of what is described – what is explained. It’s like saying a lottery ticket number describes how well it achieves the goal of being the same as the numbered ping pong balls that drop from the lottery draw. Of course we are prone to fall to ‘description’ as how information moves about because that’s what we deal with. So does the ticket describe how much it will match with the ping pong balls, before they drop? Or is there an impersonal connection there?
I’m not sure what’s happening with the double slit experiment and it’s observation issues (no on ever seems to describe the range at which the observation starts/ceases to affect the electrons), so there’s some ambiguity going on to think about. Just doesn’t seem to be this one.
The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.
When I looked at AI, I figured I’d need to ape nature and use ‘good’ feedback (like we ape nature with planes in the design of the wing). But what is ‘good’ feedback – how on earth would you make that? Then I realised you wouldn’t. It would just be a +5 volt charge on the wire – and through a vast array of transistor/logic gate interactions it would ‘feel’ ‘good’ to the mechanism, as the mechanism would enact what might in an overview be called pursuit behaviours. Though I didn’t think it in words, in the moment I could semi visualise/feel the array of processing hotballing into a general behaviour. Because I’d make it that way, that’s what I was pursuing in making AI. And I was aping nature.
He raises the blue rectangular icon example, but then he still somehow makes that icon his ultimate reality?? I guess he’s just trying to say that about the chocolate, but not his ‘real taste’ of chocolate. Because there could never be screens inside of screens, of course.
http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ompref.html
Some selected art from Quint Von Canon
http://quintvc.deviantart.com/art/Onethought-577885973
http://quintvc.deviantart.com/art/Kneel-601421596
http://quintvc.deviantart.com/art/Thunderous-Cataracts-582966047
Selected art from Jason Deem
http://spiralhorizon.deviantart.com/art/Wracu-603914600
http://spiralhorizon.deviantart.com/art/Golgotterath-603912573
http://spiralhorizon.deviantart.com/art/Ishual-2-602432324
That Golgotterath, wow! That has become my reference image now! The streaking light amidst the dark…like it’s nailing theme!
And it’s nice to find that someone else imagined Ishual in a similar way – just need little guys on the parapets, heading down to go kill themselves in an early WTF moment!
But dat Golgotterath, tho!!
They’re there. Just gotta look closely 🙂
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/technology/moores-law-running-out-of-room-tech-looks-for-a-successor.html
Is the no god ad blocker?
that’s awesome
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2373
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2296
Right in my meatlands! But I don’t get what you mean – need more context!? (really – genuinely not getting what, if anything, is being said?)
Callan not go to meatland!
Two months until The Great Ordeal! Overlook press again confirmed that July 5th is the anointed day!
Lol – after all this time, it seems so soon!
Real excited for TGO and bakkerfans hype, MG :)!
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-157-dr-herculano-houzel-on-what-made-the-human-brain-spec.html
I keep buying the first five books and, having read them again, give them to stout people with no money for high literature.
I will do it again soon, and none of us can thank you enough for your tale.
Nice 🙂
A few links. (trying to break the links, several attempts at avoiding the spam filter)
The first is about a cognitive scientist claiming the world is actually made of rainbows and unicorns. Okay.
www . quantamagazine. org /20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/
The second is the best one. The very best “science” article I’ve read this year. It’s just about Scott Aaronson answering all possible questions. But it offers an insight on how the world looks if you had an otherworldly mind like his. Also gives a very good idea of what science is doing these days:
blogs.scientificamerican. com /cross-check/scott-aaronson-answers-every-ridiculously-big-question-i-throw-at-him/
The third link is about Massimo Pigliucci new book, that is appearing in blog form first:
platofootnote .wordpress. com /2016/04/25/the-naturalistic-turn-i/
In the comments he writes:
“Husserl and phenomenology are still big. But this is a book about my views on philosophy, not an encyclopedia…”
The fourth is by Sabine Hossenfelder on setting a baseline for lack of Free Will:
backreaction .blogspot. com /2016/01/free-will-is-dead-lets-bury-it.html
The fifth is a video by Gregg Caruso on the positives of lacking Free Will:
youtube . com/watch?v=rfOMqehl-ZA
The sixth, I didn’t quite grasp. Sounds like the third way, as set by Thomas Nagel.
philosophyofbrains . com /2016/05/10/hylomorphism-and-mind-body-problems.aspx
in the comments:
“Hylomorphists reject the picture in at least two ways. First, they deny that physics by itself succeeds in giving an exhaustive characterization of the physical universe. We arrive at physical descriptions and explanations of the world by ignoring or bracketing the various ways in which matter and energy is structured. This kind of bracketing is necessary to discover the basic materials that can be structured in any way whatsoever, but bracketing structure doesn’t mean it’s not there playing the roles that hylomorphists describe. Failing to appreciate this, say hylomorphists, is the mistake that motivates physicalism: forgetting that physics is able to do its work only by bracketing the structures that exist. From a hylomorphic perspective, physicalists mistake the limited task of accounting for one thing (the basic materials that get structured in any way whatsoever) with the unlimited task of accounting for everything.
Second, hylomorphists reject the idea that there is a single thing called ‘consciousness’ which must somehow be accommodated within a philosophical account of the world. We think, we feel, we perceive – these and related phenomena are structured activities in which we engage. We engage in them because we have the ability to coordinate the way our parts manifest their powers. Our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are just manifestations of the power we have of imposing structure on things. On a hylomorphic view, this is where some kinds of explanations come to an end – that’s what it means to say that structure is *basic*.”
Maybe someone can make sense of it better than I could.
Sure. Hylomorphism is the metaphysical doctrine which holds that matter and whatever it can do isnt enough to shape itself from it’s own dynamics into forms and structures, that we need some kind of residual transcendent conditioning agencies required to give shape or organization to matter — unformed matter / pure hyle — from without. But nobody believes in unformed or bare hyle, “raw materialis”, so it’s a straw man from the start.
physics dispensed with hylomorphism when faraday came up with the idea of the field line, and it further dispensed with it when einstein showed that the container of space time itself gets it’s curvature from the actual distribution of matter-energy
Hello Mr Bakker, I am a big fan of your books.Do you know when will Reddit fantasy host your AMA??
Hey Bakker. You know GdM just released a two chapter excerpt from TGO? Good stuff mate.
Grimdark Magazine has an excerpt from The Great Ordeal!!! https://grimdarkmagazine.com/blogs/news/104286406-excerpt-from-r-scott-bakkers-the-great-ordeal
Just me or was that the biggest excerpt yet and really significant content!? Who’s head on a pole boy? Is Moenghus still in the game? Maybe the Moe conspiracists had something going after all?
Not sure how you got Moë is still in the game, but how come you’re not on Westeros anymore, Callan?
Well how many characters in the story would have some capacity to apparently dodge the damnation torture machine? For me, Moe came up as someone who could and is dead.
With westeros I’m just on a different comp, haven’t recovered my password and this comp doesn’t auto log me in to westeros. I guess it’s gunna get charged up on the Bakker threads there now!
About the password, you can email Ran (webmaster@westeros.org) for a reset. I did that when I lost my pass and got a quick response.
Thanks. Their forgotten password service usually works.
Actually rereading it now, the whole ‘his heart beats still’ probably means it’s not Moe.
Yo! RSB, if you’re going to write a post about the Grimdark magazine extract can you please give us a general update on the state on things concerning your other works? Like what happened to Light Time and Gravity? Are there any other Atrocity Tales your planning to release in the near future? The story A Crack in the Wall you once mentioned? etc…
Where is Bakker, anyway? Usually he posts about excerpts. He hasn’t even tweeted in two days… is he okay?
apparently consciousness isnt a problem anymore
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html?_r=0
It’s the hard question, really, that when unasked leads to a hard problem.
Excerpt on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist of the entire first Ishual chapter.
It’s a pretty big deal in terms of revelations:
http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/extract-from-r-scott-bakkers-great_18.html
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3179