Search this blog

Monday, May 3, 2010

Reflection 14: Don't Stop Believing

I spent this past weekend reading Krista Tippet's Einstein's God, Weber's Vocation Lectures and Look to Windward. To my surprise, they all kind of complemented each other.

Look to Windward was a fascinating book and it was probably the best way to conclude our semester-long exploration on how to contact beings so different from ourselves. But I guess, how and in what form contact happens is equally important as who should carry out the initial contact. I guess, I will therefore have to follow Ellen Arroway's example and assume that if the aliens contact us in the language of science, then we should not talk to them about our prophets at first instance. However, it is possible that in any given circumstance contact may go unnoticed, as in K-pax. Perhaps we have been contacted many years ago and given vast amounts of technology well beyond our capabilities and we owe our civilization to a superior civilization. It is also possible that we are being studied and when global warming reaches a certain level, we will be contacted again. In any case we should not actively sit and wait for a contact to take (or not take) place.

I think Weber's Science as a vocation should have been one of the required readings we discussed in class. However, it almost feels as if we read it, for most of what we read and discussed tiptoed around Weber's Science as a Vocation lecture. In his lecture Weber contrasts the American and the German paths in becoming a faculty member, and explains how not every scholar is not a teacher (real story) and proceeds to his discussion about having an inner vocation- the actual subject of his lecture. He submits that "in the realm of science, the only person to have "personality" is the one who is wholly devoted to his subject." Furthermore, one who accepts to wholly devout him/herself to his subject should also accept to become obsolete in the years to come.With every progress, science supersedes itself. What interests me most about Weber's lecture is his conclusion that "the growing process of intellectualization and rationalization (to which he calls the "process of disenchantment")   does not  imply a growing understanding of the conditions under which we live" (12). He takes this point further and says that science is meaningless because "it has no meaning to the only question that matters to us: What shall we do? How shall we live?"(17). Science, according to Weber, can provide us with methods of thought and clarity and comes with its presuppositions (which makes me think of Palmer in Contact). Along with Weber's line of thought, the best possible encounter experience would probably be of D.W. Yarbrough's, given his scholarly attitude of not letting his beliefs to evangelize any aliens. So I think, I wouldn't mind having D.W. in a potential crew.

I really enjoyed taking this class, and I am looking forward to next semester when I'll be taking changing views of the universe. Hopefully, I will be presented other opportunities to spend more time studying social science fiction.

 Take away lessons from this semester? Here are a couple:
1. We cannot isolate ourselves from outside world, because we are surrounded.
2. We cannot isolate ourselves from ourselves, because there is no escape.
3. Communication or understanding is no panacea for conflict. 
4. Final frontier is none other than the walls of our own imagination.


I'll leave you with two quotes:

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.
 ~ Voltaire
 Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. 
~ Philip K. Dick

Don't stop believing.
Ciao.

Look No Further

I guess I liked Look to Windward, for the same reason I liked Caprica: I am really fond of the idea of being able leave a little bit of me after I die. And when I say "die," I mean experiencing a physical death not a spiritual / mental death. However, I have to agree with Phil that, soulkeepers are not holding the authentic copy. Back in high school when I was preparing for my art exam, one of the exercises I had to go through was "repetition & variation." I remember drawing a number of apples, from different angles, different techniques and etc. Ultimately what I was drawing was the same apple but in each trial I was capturing a small nuance. So I think, I agree with Phil that the soulkeepers are exposed to some form of variation with every form they come to contain.

I have been hooked on this mind/body split since the Sparrow and I read a chapter in Krista Tippet's new book Einstein's God over this weekend where Dr. Mehmet Oz was talking about healing process being a mental and a physical process, and how one's close relatives can play just as an important role in the healing process as science/medication itself. He proposes that the mind and body need to be healed simultaneously, and in different ways. Only then a patient can achive the "maximum healing," he says.

I also found amazing how in Look to Windward, humans are capable of creating planets. I think the universe that we were introduced to in this book was ultimately the most fast-paced and dynamic one. I am quite settled with the existence of Hub though, I do not know what to make of it. I do not know if I should feel more bad about its existence or its destruction. The system in The Culture has become so self-sustained, and so self-centered, and so ever lasting that the inhabitants of the Culture are doing all sorts of wacky things with their lives--because they can. Though book does not say anything, the only reason why Culture works so well is because every inhabitant of the Culture has an endless faith in the system and they put their trust in the mighty Culture. Is it possible that the Hub would like to harm its components?  How does it work for assasins? Do we need to think as if they are sacrificing their bodies for the sake of their minds (i.e. ideologies)? Would mind want to kill its body, then? Perhaps with every near death experience of its inhabitants, the hub might be dying a hundread time.

Funny, that's probably how my Mac feels everytime I run 50 different apps simultaneously on it.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Patterns and Protocol

I really enjoyed Look to Windward. Tons of aliens, plots, intrigue, and not just floating continents, but living floating continents. It feels like I'm reading the novelization of some Prog Rock concept album, and I mean that in the best possible way.

I was happy to find a story set outside of the human perspective, but I also found it intriguing how human everyone sounded. I find it amusing that most intelligent species seem to develop following the same basic patterns of milestones: "to flourish, make contact, develop, expand, reach a steady state and then eventually Sublime was more or less the equivalent of the stellar Main Sequence for civilizations" 198. Even though humans arrived late to the party, to join the galactic club of the Involved, it feels as thought they are part of the greater tradition of intelligent races in the universe. I like that feeling.

It does however start to dilute the alienness of anyone in the book. It has been very easy for me to just anthropomorphize these aliens, turning them into humans. I keep having to remind myself that this or that character has three legs. I actually have two different mental images of Quilan, one human and one.... whatever. I think there's a possibility that the sheer number of species in this book could possibly take away from the experience. On a more profound note, it could be instead a dilution of the term "humanity" because that is now just a drop in the bucket of all the aliens out there.

This book makes me wonder how long it would have taken for civil war to break out on Rakhat, or if indeed that sort of cataclysm only happens when "Culture" steps in to make things right