Glen -
Good analysis with some extra angles, thanks... Card's
conception/formulation is not unlike all of his, wonderfully (by some
measure) clever and out-of-the-box whilst being derived from Card's own
nature/embedding in the culture he was born/raised to.
I like your invocation of the "holographic" principle in this context,
matching one of the uncountable aphorisms I've invoked here before: "I
am who you think I think I am". I like "dissipating wake" and "ambient
goo" as well. By some measure, we are all whatever mark we leave on
the world (recognized or not)?
Some more mangled aphorisms designed for the macro but relevant to the
micro? "History is written by the Victors"; "History is whatever story
we can all agree to"...
The only defense I can really mount to Card's "Speaker" conception is in
contrast to the standard approach to a Eulogy. His idea of taking it
seriously and making a profession of it, the implied respect a "full
accounting" offers, as compared to a superficial recounting of the
already-agreed-upon legendary achievements.
A good "wake" in some traditions does include a lot of blunt trashing of
the departed... I've witnessed some very well crafted compassionate
disrespect or candid irreverence at funerals/wakes/informal gatherings
after-the-fact.
I personally depend on the "amnesiac void" in spite of the fact that
these interwebs with their globe-spanning (and radiating outward into
the galactic void?) reach and (semi) permanent (semi-uncorruptable)
record (e.g. FriAM Archives, the Internet Archive, Search Engine cache,
LLM's galore...
I've recently become (yet more) aware of the equivalent of this from a
century or more ago which was the saved personal correspondences of
"persons of letters". Mary just read (much of it out loud to me) "The
Hemmingses of Monticello" chronicling the story of Jefferson's
slave-concubine Sally Hemmings and her myriad relations including being
Martha Jefferson's half-sister (being fathered through her slave mother
by Martha's father)... the author drew heavily on Jefferson's own
correspondences and diaries as well as those of the Plantation itself,
etc. Anecdotally, plenty of such personal "letters" were destroyed
along the way and many were (pre-digitization) buried in archives
(seemingly) too large to explore exhaustively. While focused on Sally
and her siblings and children it also serves as a reasonable alternate
view into Jefferson, including both damning and compassionate
perspectives on his nature and circumstance and behaviour.
<anecdotal divertisement/> I visited the LOC around 1993 when they
were just ramping up on getting their contents digitized and
online... it was a professional meeting on the topic of metadata and
markup languages they were hosting, and they were quite proud of
their (very limited) efforts at that time. As I understand it, they
are still working the problem. I also have a clandestine photo of an
artifact from a skunkworks project by some colleagues souping up DLP
projectors synced with high speed cameras to digitize books... a
carefully calibrated jet of air at a near-tangent angle to the book
pages would flip pages at high speed while the projector
strobe-illuminated the page and a synced camera captured images...
I don't believe it was ever fielded. This was circa 2011. </>
On 4/25/24 9:11 AM, glen wrote:
Both Knox (who's back in Italian court) and Robinson are atheists, but
I guess practice Zen. This leads to an interesting inside vs outside
conception of who they "are". It strikes me that no amount of studying
a person (or, more accurately, the detritus they've left behind and
the dissipating wake their behavior dredged through the ambient goo)
can capture that duality. I feel this despite my arguments in favor of
a kind of holographic principle for behaviorism where whatever
information is inside must be encoded on the outside. Even if we buy
such a principle, perhaps including a kind of information loss through
radiation, the "studying" of the person would be biased by when the
studying occurs. A year that starts right after they die? A year that
starts according to a validated [pre|retro]diction algorithm so that
the studying is finished when they die? A temporally fenestrated study
that happens in little bursts over one's entire lifetime, but
cumulatively sums to a year?
In the podcast episode, they publicly ask each other "how do you want
to die?" Robinson's waffle is interesting. Would a Zen person want to
die while in some mushin state?
Back to Dennett, OS Card, Lovecraft, and all the wonderfully
productive people with an Evil facet: Skeptoid had a recent episode on
EMDR <https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4928>, where Dunning concludes it
has its roots in the thoroughly debunked neuro-linguistic programming
tradition. Yet it may accidentally have some clinical benefit. But
again, I'm skeptical of the skeptics. This rationalist *need* we have
for a fully grounded, trustworthy map from inside to outside, thoughts
to actions, mind to body, just feels like arrogance ... an unjustified
confidence in our own brain farts. People are complex enough that we
can harvest what we want, cafeteria style, and leave the rest to
disappear into the amnesiac void. We neither need nor want a
*complete* understanding of anyone or any thing.
On 4/24/24 20:26, Steve Smith wrote:
I am lead by Glen's response to think of Orson Scott Card's "Speaker
for the Dead" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_for_the_Dead>
In Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead," the main and
titular theme revolves around understanding and compassion through
the truthful telling of one's life. The novel introduces the concept
of a "Speaker for the Dead," someone who tells the unvarnished story
of a person's life at their death in a way that aims to present all
aspects of the individual—their good and bad traits, their successes
and failures—in a balanced and empathetic manner.
This role of the Speaker is designed to allow those who are left
behind to truly understand the deceased, fostering forgiveness and a
more profound comprehension of the complexities of human nature. This
practice contrasts with traditional eulogies that often gloss over a
person’s flaws or reduce their life to a series of highlights.
The theme extends to broader philosophical and ethical questions
about how societies deal with truth and reconciliation, the nature of
forgiveness, and the possibility of understanding different forms of
life. This is particularly explored through the interaction between
humans and the alien species called the Pequeninos on the planet
Lusitania. The novel challenges characters and readers alike to
consider the ways in which understanding and compassion can lead to
healing and peace, even across the divides of culture and species.
"Speaker for the Dead" thus delves into the necessity and
challenge of empathy, advocating for a more comprehensive and
compassionate approach to understanding both the living and the dead.
This thematic focus on empathy and understanding is what drives the
narrative and the development of its characters.
A spiritual woo-woo treatment might imply that a person's soul would
not be fully free to "move on" until such a full accounting was done.
In the book, the "Speaker" would spend a full year fully researching
the person's life and relations to achieve this thorough/blunt eulogy
on the anniversary of the Dead's passing... I don't remember how this
was supported/funded but the idea moved me when I encountered it.
On 4/24/24 8:26 PM, glen wrote:
I could only wish I'd be criticized this well when I die:
"Dennett’s text is full of tirades wrought from petty grievances, is
disorganized to the point of being unreadable, and like the rest of
his books, will undoubtedly not have much influence."
<https://jacobin.com/2024/04/daniel-dennett-social-darwinism-philosophy>
There's this fantastic podcast by Amanda Knox called Labyrinths
(https://antennapod.org/deeplink/subscribe/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.megaphone.fm%2FDONSN6255278021&title=Labyrinths+with+Amanda+Knox
<https://antennapod.org/deeplink/subscribe/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.megaphone.fm%2FDONSN6255278021&title=Labyrinths+with+Amanda+Knox>)
where one episode is about death and things like 'how you want to
die'. My best hope is that all the ppl who think I was a hack, or an
idiot, or whatever would gather to trash me. The milquetoast
accolades we present when a person dies are literally disgusting.
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