Glad you wrestled this one to the ground Dan! Two thoughts:
For generations like the millennials who grew up without the "luxuries" (internet, grocery pick-up etc. dating organically) It can be easy to undervalue the benefits of NOT having them. A reminder to give ones children what one had by default and recognize the increased effort needed to provide it today, and perhaps to resist them ourselves.
Ill preface this is not intended to be a political statement about trans issues. As I was reading the passage about the appendectomy I thought both about the voluntary appendectomies that were carried out not too long ago and current trans surgeries that remove appendages. It seems a real possibility that after these surgeries there can be a distress felt similar to that of traditional appendectomy patients when bodily signaling is disrupted.
Perhaps a follow-up at some point on the transhumanist movement which seems at odds with what our bodies, and consequently our minds crave? (I'm not literate in this area)
On the first thought: Hear hear! I completely agree.
On the transhumanist issue...there's a lot more there than outsiders (even well-read critics) understand. In the transhumanist space there is ALSO a war between the Platonists (the Matrix folk) and the Neitzcheans (the ape-bone folk), and it gets very thorny.
In short, though, the former sort cares about alleviating suffering and abolishing human limitation as much as possible in order to escape from the misery and frustration of being such a limited creature. In science fiction, this sort is exemplified in Star Trek's The Borg and other such hive-mind species, as well as (along a different vector) the Q. This crowd was anticipated by H.G. Wells in his Fabian futurist book The Island of Dr. Moreau, and this way of thinking is all over David Brin's Uplift saga.
The latter sort, on the other hand, has a deep lust for life and doesn't want it to end for "stupid" reasons (i.e. old age, cancer, illness, etc.) and instead to end for highly agentic and/or heroic reasons (mishaps doing crazy stunts, creating new generations, exploring the universe, sacrifice in furtherance of one's values, deciding you've had enough, etc.). This sort is exemplified in John Oldman from The Man from Earth, Lazarus Long from the Heinlein novels (especially Time Enough for Love), Conner McLeod from The Highlander, etc.
There is, of course, a wide gray border between the two, and people often slip between one or the other as their baseline worldview evolves from Platonism to Aristotelianism and/or Neitzcheanism, while the techno-optimist paradigm remains at the next level up.
In my novels, the latter sort is normally what shows up. It's on full, rambunctious display in Suave Rob's Awesome Adventures, and it shows up in a very grim and somber form in The Resurrection Junket. It will play a *huge* roll in my upcoming 6 book epic about the first interplanetary war.
we see these things happen at the macro levels and micro levels.
personal experience of this is painful and current in my family.
It's one thing to study this stuff, as it were to most of us in prior decades, as "abstract" and "theoretical", or "history". It's another thing entirely to live it, witness it, experience it right now IRL.
Being an experiential thing now, it makes our analysis of it much deeper and more potent (and maybe more prone to being "wrong" also).
It's not a model anymore, neither is it history.
We are now heretics. Crazy aunts screaming fire in the attic. Cassandras. It seems like the people that have not yet opened their minds to critical "heretical" thinking are sliding even farther along into the abyss of nonsense, while us "Cassandras" are more committed than ever to witnessing and experiencing truth as it sits with us today.
I see what you're talking about regarding lack of orientation at my job. I teach biology at a community college. Most of my students have very poor language skills, which I suspect limits their ability to understand complex concepts. When I ask questions, frequently the answers I receive from students appear random (Q: what's the tissue type in the tunica externa of a blood vessel? A: aorta! Blood pressure! etc.). And when I teach the higher level courses that we offer, I typically find students don't know basic biology concepts, ex. what gene expression is. Which makes me think they are graduating with biology degrees while knowing little more than the average person does about biology. This is all bad news, but it doesn't get reported up the chain of command to administration - administration wants to hear only about student engagement and retention. When I go to graduation and they ask students whose GPA is above 3.0 to stand, almost every person stands up, and ~20-25% are still standing when they are asking about GPAs of 4.0 - to the administration this looks like evidence of student success, where to me it looks like evidence of grade inflation (that is, faculty understanding what administration wants and giving it to them the only way feasible). I've recently become responsible for running/reporting assessments of the core education in biology, which is done at the behest of the state - and it is the same thing there. Junk data meticulously collected and reported up to an entity that might react negatively to hearing bad news. I have no clue how to fix education in this country but I know it would necessitate honesty about failure, and there is no incentive for that. I think we're fucked.
Glad you wrestled this one to the ground Dan! Two thoughts:
For generations like the millennials who grew up without the "luxuries" (internet, grocery pick-up etc. dating organically) It can be easy to undervalue the benefits of NOT having them. A reminder to give ones children what one had by default and recognize the increased effort needed to provide it today, and perhaps to resist them ourselves.
Ill preface this is not intended to be a political statement about trans issues. As I was reading the passage about the appendectomy I thought both about the voluntary appendectomies that were carried out not too long ago and current trans surgeries that remove appendages. It seems a real possibility that after these surgeries there can be a distress felt similar to that of traditional appendectomy patients when bodily signaling is disrupted.
Perhaps a follow-up at some point on the transhumanist movement which seems at odds with what our bodies, and consequently our minds crave? (I'm not literate in this area)
On the first thought: Hear hear! I completely agree.
On the transhumanist issue...there's a lot more there than outsiders (even well-read critics) understand. In the transhumanist space there is ALSO a war between the Platonists (the Matrix folk) and the Neitzcheans (the ape-bone folk), and it gets very thorny.
In short, though, the former sort cares about alleviating suffering and abolishing human limitation as much as possible in order to escape from the misery and frustration of being such a limited creature. In science fiction, this sort is exemplified in Star Trek's The Borg and other such hive-mind species, as well as (along a different vector) the Q. This crowd was anticipated by H.G. Wells in his Fabian futurist book The Island of Dr. Moreau, and this way of thinking is all over David Brin's Uplift saga.
The latter sort, on the other hand, has a deep lust for life and doesn't want it to end for "stupid" reasons (i.e. old age, cancer, illness, etc.) and instead to end for highly agentic and/or heroic reasons (mishaps doing crazy stunts, creating new generations, exploring the universe, sacrifice in furtherance of one's values, deciding you've had enough, etc.). This sort is exemplified in John Oldman from The Man from Earth, Lazarus Long from the Heinlein novels (especially Time Enough for Love), Conner McLeod from The Highlander, etc.
There is, of course, a wide gray border between the two, and people often slip between one or the other as their baseline worldview evolves from Platonism to Aristotelianism and/or Neitzcheanism, while the techno-optimist paradigm remains at the next level up.
In my novels, the latter sort is normally what shows up. It's on full, rambunctious display in Suave Rob's Awesome Adventures, and it shows up in a very grim and somber form in The Resurrection Junket. It will play a *huge* roll in my upcoming 6 book epic about the first interplanetary war.
6 book epic? Where do you find the time 😉
LOL you *really* don't want to know
Really good work here, more to think about.
we see these things happen at the macro levels and micro levels.
personal experience of this is painful and current in my family.
It's one thing to study this stuff, as it were to most of us in prior decades, as "abstract" and "theoretical", or "history". It's another thing entirely to live it, witness it, experience it right now IRL.
Being an experiential thing now, it makes our analysis of it much deeper and more potent (and maybe more prone to being "wrong" also).
It's not a model anymore, neither is it history.
We are now heretics. Crazy aunts screaming fire in the attic. Cassandras. It seems like the people that have not yet opened their minds to critical "heretical" thinking are sliding even farther along into the abyss of nonsense, while us "Cassandras" are more committed than ever to witnessing and experiencing truth as it sits with us today.
Yup
Your work is fascinating
I'll take that as a compliment :-)
I see what you're talking about regarding lack of orientation at my job. I teach biology at a community college. Most of my students have very poor language skills, which I suspect limits their ability to understand complex concepts. When I ask questions, frequently the answers I receive from students appear random (Q: what's the tissue type in the tunica externa of a blood vessel? A: aorta! Blood pressure! etc.). And when I teach the higher level courses that we offer, I typically find students don't know basic biology concepts, ex. what gene expression is. Which makes me think they are graduating with biology degrees while knowing little more than the average person does about biology. This is all bad news, but it doesn't get reported up the chain of command to administration - administration wants to hear only about student engagement and retention. When I go to graduation and they ask students whose GPA is above 3.0 to stand, almost every person stands up, and ~20-25% are still standing when they are asking about GPAs of 4.0 - to the administration this looks like evidence of student success, where to me it looks like evidence of grade inflation (that is, faculty understanding what administration wants and giving it to them the only way feasible). I've recently become responsible for running/reporting assessments of the core education in biology, which is done at the behest of the state - and it is the same thing there. Junk data meticulously collected and reported up to an entity that might react negatively to hearing bad news. I have no clue how to fix education in this country but I know it would necessitate honesty about failure, and there is no incentive for that. I think we're fucked.
Holy smokes! This is brilliant.
You are most kind. Thank you!