Jorge Luis Borges' foreword to Star Maker (William Olaf Stapledon, 1937)

The foreword to a Spanish translation of Star Maker by Borges as follows:

Around 1930, well into his forties, William Olaf Stapledon approached the practice of literature for the first time. This late initiation is due to the fact that he never learned certain technical skills and that he had not developed certain bad habits. Examination of his style, which shows an excess of abstract words, suggests that before writing he had read much philosophy and few novels or poems. As for his character and his destiny, it is better to transcribe his own words: 

I am a congenital bungler, protected (or spoiled?) By the capitalist system. Only now, after half a century of effort, have I begun to learn to perform. My childhood lasted about twenty-five years; it was shaped by the Suez Canal, the small town of Abbotsholme and the University of Oxford. I tried various races and periodically had to flee in the face of impending disaster. At school, I memorized entire chapters of the Bible, the eve of the sacred history lesson. In an office in Liverpool I messed up cargo lists: in Port Said, I candidly allowed the captains to carry more coal than was stipulated. I set out to educate the people: mine laborers and railroad workers taught me more than they learned from me. I remained peaceful during WWI. On the French front I drove a Red Cross ambulance. After: a romantic marriage, children, habit and passion for domesticity. I woke up as a married teenager at thirty-five. I painfully passed from the larval stage to a shapely backward maturity. Two experiences dominated me: philosophy and the tragic disorder of the human hive... Now, with one foot on the threshold of mental adulthood, I notice with a smile that the other steps on the grave.

The trivial metaphor of the last line is an example of Stapledon's literary indifference, if not his almost limitless imagination. Wells alternates his monsters — his tentacular Martians, his invisible man, his underground and blind proletarians — with everyday people; Stapledon constructs and describes imaginary worlds with the precision and much of the aridity of a naturalist. His biological phantasmagorias are not contaminated by human mishaps.

In a study of Poe's Eureka, Valery has observed that cosmogony is the oldest of the literary genres; Despite the anticipations of Bacon, whose New Atlantis was published at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it can be said that the most modern genre is the sci-fi or fantasy. It is known that Poe approached the two genres in isolation and perhaps invented the latter; Olaf Stapledon combines them in this unique book. For this imaginary exploration of time and space, he does not resort to vague unconvincing mechanisms but to the fusion of one human mind with others, to a kind of lucid ecstasy, or (if you will) to a variation of a certain famous doctrine of the Kabbalists, who supposed that many souls can inhabit a man's body, as in the body of a woman who is about to be a mother. Most of Stapledon's colleagues seem arbitrary or irresponsible; Stapledon's work, on the other hand, leaves an impression of sincerity, despite the singular and sometimes monstrous of his stories. He does not pile up novelties to distract or astonish readers; he follows and records with honest vigor the complex and dark vicissitudes of his coherent dream.

Since chronology and geography seem to offer the spirit a mysterious satisfaction, we will add that this dreamer of Universes was born in Liverpool on May 10, 1886 and that his death occurred in London on September 6, 1950. To the mental habits of our century, Star Maker is, in addition to a prodigious novel, a probable or plausible system of the plurality of worlds and their dramatic history.

Jorge Luis Borges

A few stories by Peter Watts

Peter Watts writes good hard scifi that illustrate good ideas. But unfortunately, like just about all "good" storywriters, he writes stories that bury good ideas under heaps of obfuscation, fragmentation, recombination, misdirection, personal touches, and irrelevant asides. 

And what's worse, NONE of his stories have an Abstract section, like any good scientist would do... But again, no story, EVER, has an Abstract section.

Today I write the Abstracts for him, for some of the stories available here.

I put in quotations, because sometimes Peter Watts just writes so beautifully. They can still be skipped. Think of them as turning my abstracts into extended abstracts.

Ambassador

A heavily genetically modified human is sent on a spaceship Zombie to meet an alien ship, codenamed Kali. Zombie sent some greetings to Kali, and Kali replied with a short message that promptly crashed all the quantum computers on Zombie. The pilot of Zombie started running by hyperspace jumps, but Kali kept finding it.

Eventually Zombie and Kali simultaneously jumped into the homerange of Super-Kali. Super-Kali hit Kali with a missile and that destroyed Kali. For some odd reason, Zombie was left alive. The pilot turned off all but the essentials, as if holding its breath, afraid to draw Super-Kali's attention.

Over the course of a few days, the pilot observed quietly. Turns out Super-Kali is like a space spider: it has somehow managed to turn spacetime such that hyperspace jumps often end up in its homerange (a ball of space, two or three light-days across). Super-Kali fires missiles at those preys it caught to utterly destroy them. But there are some preys that manage to escape.

The pilot contemplates about why everyone is so hostile out there. It thinks back to the human sociologists' theory:

Any intelligence capable of advanced spaceflight must also be able  to   understand  peaceful  motives;  such  was  the  wisdom  of Human sociologists.   Most had never left the solar system.   None had actually encountered an alien.   No matter.   The logic seemed sound  enough;  any  species  incapable  of  controlling  their aggression probably wouldn't survive long enough to escape their own system.  The things that made me nearly didn't.

The pilot decided that this theory is wrong. Instead, life is war, and technology implies belligerence.

I've stopped trying to reconcile the wisdom of Earthbound experts with the reality I have encountered. The old paradigms are useless. I propose a new one: technology implies belligerence.

Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony. What need of fusion reactors if food is already abundant, the climate comfortable? Why force change upon a world which poses no danger?

Back where I come from, some peoples barely developed stone tools. Some achieved agriculture. Others were not content until they had ended nature itself, and still others until they'd built cities in space. 

All rested, eventually. Their technology climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—and so they do not stand before you now. Now even my creators grow fat and slow. Their environment mastered, their enemies broken, they can afford more pacifist luxuries. Their machines softened the universe for them, their own contentment robs them of incentive. They forget that hostility and technology climb the cultural ladder together, they forget that it's not enough to be smart. 

You also have to be mean. 

You did not rest. What hellish world did you come from, that drove you to such technological heights? Somewhere near the core, perhaps: stars and black holes jammed cheek to jowl, tidal maelstroms, endless planetary bombardment by comets and asteroids. Some place where no one can pretend that life and war aren't synonyms. How far you've come 

The pilot decided to initiate a trade with Super-Kali. The pilot would tell Super-Kali everything it knows about humans, hoping it would buy its life. It has no idea whether it will work, but the alternative is certain death.

Terror Management Theory

Sources of this post: Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory: From Genesis to Revelation (2015). The Denial of Death (1974).

TMT was proposed to answer 3 basic questions:

• Why do people need self-esteem?
• Why do people need to believe that their own way to understand the world is the only correct one?
• Why is it so hard for different people to get along?

Self esteem

First though, what's self-esteem? A theory of self-esteem (2002):

an individual's overall positive evaluation of the self. It is composed of two distinct dimensions, competence and worth. The competence dimension (efficacy-based self-esteem) refers to the degree to which people see themselves as capable and efficacious. The worth dimension (worth-based self-esteem) refers to the degree to which individuals feel they are persons of value.

The part about "competence" is pretty simple: it is your evaluation of how likely it is for you to reach your goals. Since thinking is for moving, we should always give examples in motion. So here are some ur-examples are the motor questions:

• How high can I jump? Can I outrun this person? Can I climb this tree? How far can I throw this rock?

Let's read: Immediate-Return Societies (Martin, Shirk, 2008)

All modern societies are "delayed return societies", but there are some societies called "immediate return societies". They look very weird to us. Today we read from Immediate return societies: What can they tell us about the self and social relationships in our society (Martin, Shirk, 2008)

Immediate-return societies represent an extreme minority in the world today. They are scattered across the world (e.g., Africa, India, South America, Asia), but their combined population can be counted only in the tens of thousands (Stanford, 2001). Despite their small numbers, these societies are important to us in at least two ways. First, they are the best approximation of what life was like for our evolutionary ancestors (Marlowe, 2002)

Immediate-return hunter-gatherers live in small, temporary, autonomous camps spread out among the landscape as part of a larger population. There is frequent movement of individuals in and out while a camp remains at one site, and the camps themselves may move every few weeks (Woodburn, 1979). When it comes time for a camp to move, the members may either move together or they may move separately, and they may either establish a new site or they may move to a camp already established by others. There are no special criteria for acceptance in an existing camp. When members from one camp arrive at an established camp, they are allowed to share equally in the camp’s resources while they live there. 

In immediate-return societies, it is very easy for individuals to leave and join different camps. This so-called fission and fusion is simply a part of their life. Because the composition of camps changes so frequently, each camp is defined primarily in terms of its present membership. There may be some stability in the composition of a camp (e.g., a family may move with the wife’s mother), but nothing formally holds the members together except each individual’s involvement in the current round of activity. 

There are no formal long-term, binding commitments (Woodburn, 1979). In immediate-return societies, individuals generally choose which relationships to pursue or abandon. They do so through visits, meal sharing, cooperative work, and even through the positioning of the openings of their huts.

Let's Read: The Human Predicament (2017)

Benatar, David, The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

We are born, we live, we suffer along the way, and then we die— obliterated for the rest of eternity. Our existence is but a blip in cosmic time and space. It is not surprising that so many people ask: “What is it all about?” The right answer, I argue in this book, is “ultimately nothing.” Despite some limited consolations, the human condition is in fact a tragic predicament from which none of us can escape, for the predicament consists not merely in life but also in death.

Benatar is mostly famous for previously writing Better Never to Have Been (2006), another pessimistic book, but this book is not a sequel.

While the subject matters of Better Never to Have Been and The Human Predicament are very different, and while the arguments in the latter do not presuppose anti-natalism, they do provide further support for that view. 

Benatar is largely pessimistic. However it's good to define them carefully: 

For example, in chapter 6, I discuss and evaluate the view that an immortal life would be bad because such a life would become tedious. Is such a view pessimistic because it offers a negative evaluation of immortality, or does it count as optimistic because it says that the actual state of affairs— human mortality— is better? 

At least some writers have suggested that it is a pessimistic view. I find this usage odd and thus propose to use the terms “optimism” and “pessimism” as follows. Any view of the facts or any evaluation thereof that depicts some element of the human condition in positive terms I shall call an optimistic view. By contrast, I shall describe as pessimistic any view that depicts some element of the human condition in negative terms. (Thus, the claim that immortality would be bad counts as optimistic because it suggests that the fact of mortality is not as bad as we would otherwise think. If we were in fact immortal, then the view that immortality is bad would be pessimistic.)

Pessimism-optimism is a spectrum to be used to measure attitudes. You can be very pessimistic about meaningfulness, mildly optimistic about the possibility of using drugs to feel happier, and neutral about possibility of immortality.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 4)

 Chapter 6: The Empathic Ego

This chapter adds more complexity to the ego model. In previous chapters, Metzinger assembled up from minimal phenomenal self, to minimal subject, to minimal agent, and now he would describe human egos as agents with extra modules for living in a human society.

Metzinger gives a shocking observation that suggests even emotional self-consciousness is learned, rather than innate:

Have you ever watched a child who has just learned to walk run toward a desired object much too quickly and then trip and fall on his face? The child lifts his head, turns, and searches for his mother. He does so with a completely empty facial expression, showing no kind of emotional response. He looks into his mother’s face to find out what has happened. How bad was it, really? Should I cry or should I laugh?  

The toddler does not yet know how he should feel; therefore he looks at his mother’s face in order to define the emotional content of his own conscious self-experience. His self-model does not yet have a stable emotional layer to which he could attend and, as it were, register the severity of what just happened. The fascinating point is that here are two biological organisms that just a few months ago, before being physically separated at birth, were one. Their Egos, their phenomenal self- models, are still intimately coupled on the functional level. When the toddler gazes at his mother and starts to smile in relief, there is a sudden transition in his PSM. Suddenly, he discovers that he didn’t hurt himself at all, that the only thing that happened to him was a big surprise. An ambiguity is resolved: Now he knows how he feels.

Neuroscience of empathy

What are mirror neurons? According to Imitation, empathy, and mirror neurons (2009):

neurons with motor properties in premotor and posterior parietal cortex that fire not only during action execution, but also while observing somebody else performing the same or a similar action.

 and 

Empathy is implemented by a simulation of the mental states of other people. A large-scale network for empathy is composed of the mirror neuron system, the insula, and the limbic system. Mirror neurons were selected because they provide the adaptive advantage of intersubjectivity.