Exhalation in Reading with Style

Jul 22, 2019 ☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ rated it it was amazing

Q:
We spoke for more than an hour, and my fascination and respect bloomed like a flower warmed by the dawn, until he mentioned his experiments in alchemy. (c)
Q:
We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.
Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is Q:
We spoke for more than an hour, and my fascination and respect bloomed like a flower warmed by the dawn, until he mentioned his experiments in alchemy. (c)
Q:
We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.
Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.
Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.
But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.
It would be easy for me to assert that literate cultures are better off than oral ones, but my bias should be obvious, since I’m writing these words rather than speaking them to you. Instead I will say that it’s easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us. Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, It would be easy for me to assert that literate cultures are better off than oral ones, but my bias should be obvious, since I’m writing these words rather than speaking them to you. Instead I will say that it’s easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us. Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are vulnerable to every kind of error, and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that.
When it comes to our individual memories, I live on the opposite side of the divide. As someone whose identity was built on organic memory, I’m threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events. I used to think it could be valuable for individuals to tell stories about themselves, valuable in a way that it couldn’t be for cultures, but I’m a product of my time, and times change. We can’t prevent the adoption of digital memory any more than oral cultures could stop the arrival of literacy, so the best I can do is look for something positive in it.
And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.
Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory? How much can you? You’re probably thinking that, while your memory isn’t perfect, you’ve never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I’m guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, “I know I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes.” I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. (c)
Q:
The Fermi Paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is disconcertingly quiet. (c)
Q:
Only a species of vocal learners would ascribe such importance to sound in their mythologies. We parrots can appreciate that. (c)
Q:
Lord, I place myself in your presence, and ask you to shine your light into my heart as I look back upon this day, so that I may see more clearly your grace in everything that has happened. (c)
Q:
... for myself, the most precious knowledge I possess is this:
Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough. (c) ...more

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Aug 29, 2022 Steph rated it really liked it

Shelves: ebook-kindle, stories-essays-speeches, poc-author, time-travel, tough-to-finish, dystopia-utopia-apocalypse-future, first-read-in-2022, youre-too-good-for-me

so my ebook copy of chiang's stories of your life and others also included the first half of exhalation (the first four stories), so i figured i ought to read the second half of the collection as well. my thoughts on the first four stories are at the end of my review here.

slow and steady is my MO with chiang, because speculative fiction takes a lot of brainpower for me. but i love dipping into chiang's odd little thought experiments and seeing where they go. i also appreciate his notes at the en so my ebook copy of chiang's stories of your life and others also included the first half of exhalation (the first four stories), so i figured i ought to read the second half of the collection as well. my thoughts on the first four stories are at the end of my review here.

slow and steady is my MO with chiang, because speculative fiction takes a lot of brainpower for me. but i love dipping into chiang's odd little thought experiments and seeing where they go. i also appreciate his notes at the end of the book, where he talks about the inspiration and thinking behind each story.

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DACEY'S PATENT AUTOMATIC NANNY is a short one about a mechanical nanny created to rear children better than any human can, but which is regarded as a failed invention. the concept reminds me of the horrible experiment of baby monkeys raised by robot monkey moms. of course this change will have a developmental impact on the poor things!

THE TRUTH OF FACT, THE TRUTH OF FEELING consists of two interspersed narratives. in one, a father discusses a piece of memory technology called Remem, which can instantly stream video memories of whatever recorded memory the user refers back to. in the other, a boy from a "primitive tribe" meets a european missionary and is introduced to literacy, which fundamentally changes the way he thinks. i really enjoyed jijing's story, and all the small epiphanies and moments of awareness as he begins to understand the concepts of words and recorded histories. these are things we take for granted if we learn to read and write when we're young; we're not even aware of how literacy affects our thinking. meanwhile, if we were raised using digital memory technology to give us a perfect memory, how would that affect our thinking? how do the narratives we attach to our memories influence our conceptions of our own identities? i really love how these two story threads seem different at first, but by the end it makes perfect sense to combine them. literacy itself is a form of technology, any technology we adapt to has the power to change us.

THE GREAT SILENCE is a brief story about humans' search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and specifically for vocal learners who can communicate with them verbally. this is something which parrots can already do, and the story is a bit of a love letter to humans, eternally searching in space for a species like the highly intelligent birds with whom we already coexist. "the great silence" refers to the eerie quiet of the universe, which one would expect to contain more life than just us here on earth. and as we destroy the earth and other species like parrots die off, they join the great silence.

OMPHALOS follows a common theme of chiang's: the intersection of religion and science. in the world of this story, science's principal purpose is to help humankind better understand the intentions of their god. time is finite, as their god created the universe approximately 9,000 years ago, and they have much physical evidence of this: primordial humans without navels, ancient trees with no rings at their centers. if time extended back infinitely, our narrator says, humans would feel despair. oof. the central conflict of this story is the question of whether earth is the center of the universe, the omphalos, or if it is merely a side effect of another more important creation.

ANXIETY IS THE DIZZINESS OF FREEDOM is, thankfully, one of chiang's stories that's written in a more accessible style, despite its intense subject. quantum physics shit. in this world, there are prisms that allow their users to access a parallel self from a version of the world where a different choice was made. sections alternate between the everyday life of nat, who works in a prism shop, and descriptions of the workings and cultural reactions to prisms. nat has big choices to make, and there is much pondering and discussion about what influences them. i like the message that making good choices will influence your future self to make more good choices. we can always work to make it easier for our future selves to be better.

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