John C. Wright's Blog, page 161
May 23, 2011
The Argument of Antimonogamy
The sacred view of sex is sane, for sanctity is sanity, which is to say, it reflects reality: any deviation from that is insane, but the insanity takes any number of forms. In much the same way, there is only one way for one to stand upright, but any number of directions in which one can fall.
The Christian view is that man is made in the image of God, hence human life is sacred. The reproduction of human life is sacred, and the sexual joy in which this is done is sacred. Because it is sacred, it is not to be shared or treated lightly, but solemnly, with joy, with happiness, with delight, for sexual joy is a divine joy, a gift of the Creator and a participation in a act of creation. In the same way we do not share the sacred host of the Eucharist with passing strangers, heathens, or scornful enemies, or feed it to dogs and swine, Christians do not share their wives and daughters with the unclean world, or with the gutter.
May 22, 2011
The Enlightenment of the Benighted
There is a pattern in leftist thinking I have seen often enough to disturb me, but not often enough to declare it by any means universal.
They act like dumb people who desperately want to be thought bright; they act like immoral people looking for some easy way to clothe themselves in the mantle of morality, but not a morality that makes any demands or imposes any duties.
May 21, 2011
Damon Knight and Mundane SF
I was chided for being too harsh when (too me) my comment seemed mild and not at all disrespectful to Mr. Knight. I was told that one ought not to speak ill of he dead: I admit I had no idea ya’ll Yankees were as delicate and precise in your sense of honor as we thin-skinned Southern Gentlemen, or that Mr. Knight was beyond even mild rebuke.
I admit I would perhaps have been harsher had I read this essay by Jordan S. Bassior, which I fully recommend.
http://fantasticworlds-jordan179.blogspot.com/2011/05/damon-knight-and-conceptual-ancestry-of.html
[The] Mundane movement, far from being rooted in “hard science,” operates by ignoring those aspects of “hard science” which would render the limitations they propose on the human future to be silly, short-sighted and absurdly parochial in a vast Universe.
Recently, I discovered a forty-year old article, “Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye,” by Damon Knight (1922-2002), in Clarion II (1972), which demonstrated even older roots to this attitude, way back in the American branch of the late New Wave. Knight shows in this essay both a greater grasp of science than the modern Mundanes (though he makes a major error in his understanding of cultural evolution) but also more nakedly displays the hatred of humanity which lies at the core of the Mundaniacs, and for this reason the article is highly interesting.
The Rapture is Tomorrow
Okay. If you are actually worried about it, go to confession.
The Church will remain open for business.
May 19, 2011
Philosophy Corner: Burrowing out of a Dead End
If all this time you have not understood what I meant by final versus mechanical cause, or qualitative versus quantitative statements, or measurable phenomena versus non-measurable numena, then, despite my many many examples and very patient explanations, the conversation has been in vain.
As I said when we reached this same impasse last year, you are motionless in a set of axioms that you have not (I assume) yet examined. Because have not examined them, you are reduced to merely repeating your axioms as if it were self evident.
Just take my word for this: it is not self evident that all things both material motions and non-material ideas and their non-moving logical relations can be reduced to a description of a material motion. I have given you not once but many times an argument that alleges to show that the matter is not only NOT self-evident, that it is in fact self-contradictory. Whenever I do, you start talking about your magical brain atoms or going off on some unrelated tangent.
These kind of communication failures happen for one reason and one reason only: one of the two persons involved, or both, are making an assumption not yet articulated at a more basic level of philosophy.
In order for the conversation to continue, that more basic level has to be addressed.
The idea that either one of us is deliberately being stupid, or deliberately not listening, or deliberately is ignoring the evidence or the argument is childish. It may happen among politicians or public speakers or other persons with a reason to treat the argument like an opportunity for rhetoric, but if either one of us were merely trying to score points and not have an earnest conversation, we both would have quit months ago.
We did not quit months ago. Both of us are serious. Both of us are listening to the other. Neither is making sense to the other. Ergo: what is the hidden assumption that severs our worldviews one from the other?
Read more
May 14, 2011
Philosophy Corner: Trapped in a Chinese Room with Alan Turing
Do you think that the biggest barrier to building artificial intelligence is that we’ll never be able to build a computer program that can dynamically realize final causes?
Do you think this would actually be impossible?
If it would remain impossible, would this then equal proof that humans have souls?
(feel free to use this for a blog post)
Thanks, I will.
Before answering the question, ” Do you think that the biggest barrier to building artificial intelligence is that we’ll never be able to build a computer program that can dynamically realize final causes? ” surely we should answer the question, “Can anyone build a computer program that can realize anything?”
A computer program is not a thing, it is a set of instructions telling a person how to push buttons to push electrons to push one group of material things that have no innate meaning from one shape into another shape, also which has no innate meaning.
A second person, looking at the shape with the help of an instrument called a monitor screen will ascribe or attribute to it some anthropomorphic meaning to it, or, if he is wise, to the joint actions of the programmers and builders.
The concept “realize” has meaning only in the context of living and self-aware beings, that is, being which have a point of view of their own. Computers and instructions given to people who manipulate the parts of a computer do not have life, do not have awareness, do not have a viewpoint.
Challenging SF
My answer is below. Use the link to see answers others gave.
May 10, 2011
Star Treasure by Laumer, Sleepwalkers World by Dickson
Reading with adult eyes a favorite novel from one’s youth is always an interesting experiment, because it brings to the forefront the changes the passing decades have visited (or inflicted) upon the reader, and upon the genre.
I recently reread THE STAR TREASURE by Keith Laumer and SLEEPWALKER’S WORLD by Gordon R. Dickson. These novels, being neither the best known nor the least of these two science fiction authors, who are neither the most celebrated nor the least in the genre, may serve as apt examples of SF of the Silver Age, provide us some entertaining comment on the evolution of the genre.
Comments on the devolution of the reader is less entertaining, and can be summed in a sentence: I was easier to please. In my carefree youth, I would not have cared about whether the light reading of a summer’s day contained a deeper meaning.
Before discussing the books, let me discuss their age of origin.
It's Done!
BUT YOU SAY YOU’D LIKE A FREE SAMPLE OF MY BOOK?!
Glad you asked! The premise is … ah, stuff is happening.
I think someone gets shot, or falls in love, or is frozen in suspended animation like Buck Rogers or Rip van Winkle. There must be space ships involved in some capacity, because this is science fiction.
April 30, 2011
Superman Renouncing American Citizenship?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13237795
Editorial on the same topic, Breitbart’s Big Hollywood website:
In which Supes announces that the America Way is too small an ideal for him, the world being so modern and interconnected, donchyano.
While I am all in favor of elliptical interpretations of the First Amendment which allow protesters to trample the cross and burn the flag, my dislike of censorship has a limit. I, for one, would welcome an intrusive, nay, Cesarean law that ordained Superman, Captain America, and other beloved and iconic exemplars of the American Dream to be immune from casual Leftwing desecration.
Of course, since desecration is the prime, at times the sole, entertainment and pasttime of these poor and limited souls, perhaps it would be cruel to remove their sadistic hobby from them, merely for the peace, safety, comfort, mental and moral healthy, joy and wellbeing of the immense majority of the rest of us.
Moreover, from a legal point of view, Superman and Captain America are private property and taking it for public use without due compensation would be problematical. Unlike condemning private property and selling it to put up a privately owned mall on the grounds that the construction may increase tax revenue, which is Constitutional in our postmodern, postlegal, leftomaniacal society.
No, to avoid the legal implications, I suggest we, the comicbook-loving community, merely appear at the offices of DC comics, and stage a riot, have the level of violence spiral out of control, drag the editors and owners bodily out of the building, and hang them from lampposts, and laugh and tell Monty Python jokes while their legs kick, dancing with spasms, in the air, inches from the ground. Then we can scratch their car paint with keys.
I agree, this might cast a pall over the comicbook-loving community, and folk may look down upon us as barbaric—which is why we should all dress in headscarves and Bedouin robes for the bloody event, whereupon the news media and all righthinking people will take great care to present our side of the story in the most sympathetic possible light, and any one who points out, truthfully, that our barbaric act of vigilante multiple murder over an issue of trivial comicbook geekdom nerdification was, well, barbaric, any such feckless abecedarian naif can be silenced and ostracized by being called a racist.
And if famed science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon criticizes our actions in the most mild and indirect terms, the bold yet anonymous souls of the WisCon steering committee can decree with Olympian fortitude that they fear for their lives and safety, and ban her from appearing as guest of honor there.
And if anyone raises the objection that, no, being a fan of Superman, or of any comic book, does not constitute a “race” in any way, shape or form, any more than Cassius Clay and Cat Stevens are members of the same “race” we can always say —
ah, foolish of me. No need to ponder how to answer. No one will raise that objection, will he?
John C. Wright's Blog
- John C. Wright's profile
- 449 followers
