Science Fiction Microstory Contest discussion
***JUNE 2016 MICRO STORY CONTEST - COMMENTS ONLY
You should write that idea, Gary! It immediately produces that 'zinging sound' in the mind that a great hook into a fabulous AH (Alternative History) story does!
As a Midwesterner here in America (Norwegian heritage area of Wisconsin), I am not familiar with politics, government organizations, social systems in Scotland and the UK, even less so the EU. Even if I was to research them, I doubt it would be enough not to make fatal errors that would kill any story based on the region. I mentioned the storyline thought for those in the group that might have the background. I release the concept to the public domain of the group, enjoy.
Heather, writing nonfiction is good. You have a real knack for it. It's not "science fiction microstories" but it is good stuff.*
And Richard, I hear ya!
*
Really, people, having a very active fb page on which I get lots and lots of political commentary (more than enough), I'd be for strongly limiting any political hassling on this (group) site. . . Seriously.
This is a sociological observation, not a political one - apparently the top trending questions on UK social media at the moment are:Which countries are in the EU?
What is the EU?
I guess these questions are not from any of the 33 million who voted ...
Gary - interesting you mention that.I think history has overtaken my political/environmental novel written a few years back but set in the near future - as it involves Scotland as part of the UK and the UK as part of Europe.
I may need a revised 2nd edition before hitting the sequel button.
(I was keeping my fingers crossed during the last Scottish referendum, for selfish literary reasons. Just squeaked through unscathed that time!)
Well hell, Andy, my as yet unpublished Sound-Bytes of the Garbage Era! novel, involving catastrophes from nuclear near-annihilation to quasi-bubonic viral plague to near-212 Fahrenheit global "warming" to the Apparitions (never clarified but you don't want them catching you) to the Triads of Ascending Clouds has nearly been overtaken already in several details; but do we let such matters bother us? No--non--nein--lolo--lala--etc. Just dig deeper. And harder. And faster.
I see the pro EU British are saying one of the leading causes that they did not win were young people who did not understand that voting on facebook did not count.
I almost wonder if those Google searches on the EU were a gag. Maybe some group heard that a few folks were Searching for that and so everyone piled on to make it go viral. It does seem a mite suspicious to me.
I like Andy's phrase 'sociological observation' (as opposed to political.) It's a good writerly phrase ... sounding like the ability to stand back and observe at the same time as the changes are whirling around in the society/the era in which one lives. Immediately the word 'political' is brought into the mix it can be too easily seen as a weapon of bias.p.s. Gary, I saw on the telly last night (I didn't watch for long as I had to catch up on some sleep) that Scotland's First minister Nicola Sturgeon is in fact approaching EU leaders to see if there is a way Scotland can remain in the EU (even before there is another Scottish Independence referendum, if there is one.)
Andy wrote apparently the top trending questions on UK social media at the moment are:Which countries are in the EU?
What is the EU?
Maybe the politicians should have thought to have tried to influence screenwriters of Coronation Street (or whatever the latest 'soapies' are in Britain) to get these questions into the mix of the stories there! Its one thing having a local referendum that affects the rest of the world (except America - nothing affects America, so I'm told ... though that could be just a Google rumour - sounds a 'mite suspicious'! lol) It's another when the locals don't even know what they're voting on. [disclaimer: this is a sociological observation lol for writerly research purposes.]
For those woried that this conversation is a little too 'NOW-politcal' and not enough OTHERTIME e.g. FUTURISTIC s/f ... here's a turning point podcast to perhaps return us to 'the (politically ha ha) correct co-ordinates.' http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/po...
(In a, back on track, Parrallel Universe lol) it's about Spacexit advocates!
I believe Space X-it has been privatized, not politicized, however.
Possible story tags- "Trusting people with democracy, or not."
"Bankers, Wankers or Democracy."
"Can robotic persons make decisions that are more rational than those made by biological people."
"Is 'small is beautiful', (Schumacker et al) actually true."
"Will the selfish gene and the self-righteous gene destroy every human influenced planet; and have those genes already destroy Mars?"
"Are biological being logical when distrusting those that look and behave differently?"- noting, that even those on the left and right dress differently, and possibly 'hang' differently."
Best Story Tag:- "For Solutions Without Stress: Just Leave Borders & BoundryLine Issues To The Experts!" https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/7... (video of completely unfazed corgi/corgi cross type little dog with a way to solve an otherwise unsolvable problem ... N.B. the video's twitter poster calls it "Perimeter defenses vs Hackers" - very cute!)
Interesting that my story post for this month talks about the increasing amount of unlikely science and social outcomes pinching off parallel alternate universes. Wonder what the butterfly wings in the future resulted in this Brexit vote. What an interesting variation in Chaos Theory. I read a paper recently that claimed, based on an series of experiments that disproved Free Will.The experiments hooked up test subjects to EEG machines and were able to measure that the subjects were actually doing an action before their brains were producing the decision to do them.
Although the fact that people also have instincts hardly disproves Free Will...
Free will is just another way of looking at what can equally be termed "chance" or "determined" or "caused" (by this or that physiological/historical/or etc. factualty). It's not a dispute, just a choice (so to speak) among theories and/or rhetorics. Not a conflict.
Too true, the fact that your hand jerks back from a hot surface faster than the thought could actually travel all the way to your brain and back to the muscle of your hand, does not disprove Free Will. My reaction to the study was you have to be thinking about an action and just because your body might jump the gun and not wait for the order from your brain, does not mean you lack Free Will. Just that your brain might not be in complete control of that Free Will. There is a Pixar animation movie out that is called "Inside Out" to was a fun watch.
@JeremyI have long believed that free will is just a myth anyway. Each of our brains are hard-wired to view the world with a certain perspective. Yes, nurture can expand that a bit, but only a bit. Many people are ruled by fear, hatred and an aversion to change. We know scientifically that their amygdala controls a great deal of that. Most of them can't choose to view the world in a rational manner. Many of the ultra religious are the same, or in the same group. If that research is accurate, and there is ample evidence for it, free will just comes down to making decisions based a range that is available to you.
People in life-changing circumstances can change, but those have to be severe and another part of the brain has to supersede they way they normally view things. Anyway, I could write forever on that topic. To me, it just means that the concept of free will is appealing but not really as relevant as we like to believe.
People have precisely as much free will as they chose to have. :)
Well, thanks, Jeremy. Good to know someone else here chooses to respond to a philosophical issue with something other than science hypotheses. . .
Well I could start blabbering about the non-deterministic nature of neural networks...
Jack said,"People in life-changing circumstances can change, but those have to be severe and another part of the brain has to supersede they way they normally view things. Anyway, I could write forever on that topic."
and also that
"To me, it just means that the concept of free will is appealing but not really as relevant as we like to believe."
Those two concepts (or two parts of the one concept) certainly ring true to me ... my life experiences (and life observations) empirically supporting it, life-changing experience by life changing experience!
I think maybe your story "The Place Where Hope Goes" (Nov. contest) is about an irreversible change in perception - beyond freewill. Given your excellent story telling skills, Jack, it would be good to read some more stories about 'one part of the brain's normal way of viewing things being superseded by another part's ways/will-free-or-otherwise/limited range available to it ... as life changing experiences roll on ... and on ... and on ... (basically just to get more 'angles-of-view' on something that I already have experienced to be true, from my angle of view!)
Free will presupposes some kind of awareness to make (informed??) choices - and to me the limitations on self-awareness are also interesting. Especially when people are looking for such self-awareness in AI (or other animals) etc.Actually we're not very self-aware at all. We have no moment-to-moment idea of most of what is going on in our bodies, and in the symbiotic/parasitic ecosystems inhabiting them - or rather, of which our bodies are part.
The mind/reflective self provides an illusion of control or at best partial control (= free will?) of what we do and who we are.
It would be fun to write a story about someone who wants to create sentient AI in our own image - but as we really are*, rather than as we delude ourselves into thinking we are ....
* 'as we really are' = 90% self-ignorant and floating on the random
There is no such thing as free will, but given enough choice and enough information there is no measurable gap between the inevitability of action and the perception of the will to enact that action. We believe we have free will because many of the inputs to the mind are variably random, or appear to be. They give us the illusion that we can make equally random choices.
A computer can come up with truly random numbers, we can't, except in that we can design the machine that can.
If we don't have free will when it comes to moral choices, then how can we hold people responsible for their actions?
We can't do so rationally. But if those people are doing 'damage' survival demands that we 'justify' action.
I tend to think of the issue of free will as inseparable from human, or indeed animal, evolution. As one moves up the historical chain of animal complexity arising from evolutionary pressures, creatures that somehow manage to fashion more choices of survival actions for themselves probably have a better chance of surviving dangerous situations, hence surviving to have more offspring, and so evolution works its merry way. I think we humans evolved to generate more and more choices - do we run behind the rock to avoid the sabre-tooth, or fashion a tool to kill it and have food for later - and so our ability to generate more choices has helped us immeasurably. So now we have evolved to think we are capable of becoming totally untethered from the instinctive behaviors that have generated us. I don't think we are that far removed from our even long-ago ancestors that we can say we have divorced ourselves totally from those behaviors. Those ancient bonds of instinct still bind us.
That doesn't address free will, but I totally agree with what you say, Andy. I certainly think I'm closer to the chimpanzee than you are. And actually, I don't give a toss about free will so long as I get to sit in a shady tree, with plenty of friends to keep me 'groomed' and a good supply of bananas. Well, I'll settle for a daily shower, a hammock, my Kindle, and a good supply of nuts and beer.
What about the evolution of instinct, Andy?As we become more complex, behaviours can become routinized and encoded. They are (no longer) thought about or voluntary, and become, in the inaccurate metaphor, 'hard-wired'.
BTW, this clip from the Waterboy sums up the debate over the origins of some instinctive behaviour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfC4u...
That sounds like a good life, Richard. Good choice!So, on the other hand, everything is a choice, and we are 'condemned to be free'.
There is definitely a gradation of power to choices, with some hot-wired from birth, all the way to the apparent choice between a pint of London Pride or Guinness.
Yup..So maybe the word 'choice' is too fuzzy or too broad to have a useful meaning.
You mean you've never sat in agony, struggling with the options of a complex decision?
Constantly!Even the simplest decisions can be challenging.
But the guiding forces behind the agonistic struggling and weighing of alternatives may be a) unknown to me or b) not entirely what I think they are or c) definitely not what I think they are.
(I used to be indecisive but now I'm not so sure)
Richard - I agree that it doesn't directly address free will, but my badly-framed point was only that having options for behavior and knowing that one has options is itself an evolutionary adaptation that seems to be advantageous to creatures. And my leap (into the conceptual abyss) is that seeing that we have choices is not the same as saying that we can uninstinctually choose among them. And please toss me over a banana if you have one to spare... and choose to do so.Andy/ Jeremy - Sure, lots of agonizing among decisions, but isn't the issue rather that the calculus for making a decision is not entirely controlled by a strictly rational (whatever that means) process?
I think that just means that a) people do have underlying instinctive reactions, b) it takes real effort to examine our own motivations, and c) some (but not necessarily all) of those motivations are forever opaque to us.To me, none of that obviates our ability - when we so decide - to exercise our free will.
Thankfully, we aren't confronted all of the time with serious moral choices.
Jeremy saidThankfully, we aren't confronted all of the time with serious moral choices.
Well actually we are ... but we would be driven mad if we didn't choose to filter out most of them ... which is probably why artists tend to be more 'unstable' than the average person is: because of their hypersensitivity to the constant barrage of moral choices when we "have eyes to see" them. (I think the artist's way of getting out from under that weighty dilemma is to behave as simply the recordist of that concert barrage ... "just showing the truth, not trying to make a judgement one way or the other!" the artist virtually says in order to wave away the 'moral barrage's' affect on themself.)
eg Where does your carpet or floor rugs come from? If any part of it originates in Pakistan you might be 'confronted,' consciously or otherwise, with a moral choice everytime you walk accross it, enjoy the lovely ambience it lends to your home, etc, etc http://www.rugidea.com/child_labor_ca...
The same goes for all the food you buy ... the choices may seem 'trivial' but for those on the receiving end of harm done by consumer choices those choices are serious!
Heather, I was reading about Lucien Freud's 14 children (that's the acknowledged ones - there are said to be many more ...) and his treatment of womenNot sure how much hypersensitivity or struggling with moral choices there was there :-)
Heather - You aren't really saying that artists somehow demonstrate/have moral superiority over other people , are you?
No! Artist's as human beings can be complete bastards, that's not the point! What is an artist if not someone who can 'see' and 'express' truths in a way that rings true/engages/entertains/makes a serious dent in the way of thinking of others ... engages The Inherent Creative latent within everyone!
Nothing to do with personal superiority, just a talent (or hyper-sensitivity) for perceiving and recording in a way that moves the observer/audience of their art.
Look at the portrait of a man here http://www.npg.org.uk/freudsite/Has Lucien Freud not perceived and recorded a truth about something in a way that moves the viewer?
Which truth did he record? The drama within humanity or as he puts it
"'I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.'" ~ Lucian Freud
Not all artists want to portray the same truth ... but every truth is capable of being uncovered by some artist interested in doing so ... and since there is a 'Latent Creative' (a person capable of greater perception of truths AND, importantly, expression of that) within everyone then there is a sense in which we are all constantly confronted, by truths!
EDIT: ... and who's to say that in that very dramatic portrait (is it a self portrait?) he wasn't non-verbally, even non-consciously confronting that dramatic complexity within himself: a truth about himself - a truth that also found expression via 'behaving badly'?
And Andy L, the point was that artists don't have to go about "struggling with moral choices" because they expunge the struggle by recording it so others can be moved enough to struggle, to take on that burden! (though the artist has to experience 'the struggle' during the process, so as to 'get it down right'! ... but then its done and dusted, cathartically gotten out of the system {though that may take a whole lifetime for some artists who rework the same theme over and over}, but for other artists 'that truth' might then be left alone, apart from some going back and tinkering with the artwork.' Then its the audience's/readers' turn to 'struggle', be moved.)
Paula wrote: "Oops--yes, I did. Thanks. Heather. I've never been good at remembering names exactly, but . . . yes, I mean Carrie. Well--no hurry; we can all quiz her when she returns."I'm here! I'm here!!
Busy month, an impromptu Cape Cod trip to curate content for my Shark Week episode, camping and helping a friend launch his podcast, plus I have actually been setting aside time to work on my novel.
I've been out of the loop - although I did manage to read through the stories and vote!
Reading through the comments over lunch and saw this here. Question about tweets Paula?
Probably I had then such a question, Carrie, but I've been tweeting considerably since and don't now recall the then issue. "shark week episode"--wow. TELL us about it--those are great.
Working on one's novel/s is always good. Also on one's short story collection/s. Everyone here is busy with one or other of these, it seems. More news on these, people?!
Meanwhile, I'm sticking with my "view" (if so it's termed) that free will ("decision") is simply one perspective on what some others would call random and most would call, in some form or other, "caused" behaviors.
But the evolution of our decision apparati is incredibly interesting. As is Richard's point re what happens to a society lacking some sort of concept of morality/responsibility . . . theoretically, anyway; most successfully surviving animal groupings seem to do without (as far as we know :) ) one.
It's interesting that there were 12 different stories in first place out of 22 entrants.I wonder what different things people were responding to in selecting their first choice?
I had a first 3 that were, I think, the most historically robust. I guess it's like wanting 'hard SF', to appreciate 'hard history' in an alternative history story.
But of course that's far from necessary - it's probably because of my 'previous life' of studying and teaching history that I appreciated the thoroughness and insight in constructing the context for each of these stories.
And for the same historical reasons, I was less inclined towards ones that depend on the 'great men' view of history, where a single change for an individual creates a whole alternate universe. That to me has been a key weakness in several of the alternate history novels I have read.
These are just some of my foibles - it's perfectly possible to write great stories with interesting characters, plot twists etc that deliberately sidestep the actual history.
That might make for an interesting alternative history foundation.