Category: Novel

Spice & Wolf

I’ve been home alone for the last couple of days. To fill the time and unwind from the stress of building at Bunker Hill, I started watching a random anime called “Spice & Wolf”. OMG! I’ve become an instant fan. Binge-watched all the episodes, and am now reading a novella that picks up where the series ends.

In case you’re wondering, Spice & Wolf is a love story about a traveling salesman who stumbles upon a goddess. More precisely, she stows away in his wagon to escape the village where they no longer believe in her. The story is actually squeaky clean, which makes it have even more tension. It goes on and on and on, and you wonder when something is ever going to happen between them. In the meantime, they alternate between fighting and being sweet.

And this is where all my precious writing time has gone.

The Golem and the Jinni

I recently finished the book “The Golem and the Jinni” by Helene Wecker. I read and write hard science fiction, but this book is magic realism, so a bit out of my genre. However, I suspected that the Golem’s story would be much like that of a robotess, and it was. If you change the labels a little, it becomes awesome scifi.

The characters in this book are absolutely gorgeous, even the bad guys. The first 25% or so consists almost entirely of character sketches which lead onto each other like winding paths in a forest. Each one loses an important part of themselves, and you feel driven by the hope that they might get it back.

The central characters was, of course, the Golem named Chava. I’d like to give you a very brief sketch of her arc, just to give you some sense of how compelling she is. My writing here can’t do it justice …

Chava is created by an evil wizard to be the wife of some loser who can’t get a proper woman. As a golem, she has a kind of telepathic link to him that makes her do his every wish. You can imagine where this is going, but it never gets there. Her great loss is that he dies of an illness within a few hours of activating her. This tears a giant hole out of her being, but it also frees her to become a better creature. The ragged end of that magic is now drawn to the inner voices of everyone nearby, and she has to resist them to keep from revealing herself.

Chava is horrified by her monster side—and she truly is a monster. When humans get violent toward her, or someone threatens her friends, her personality drifts away and she becomes capable of maiming and killing.

SPOILER ALERT

She marries a man in an attempt to get back to the role she was created for. When he discovers what she is, he is revolted. She starts to go golem on him, but with the last of her fading good side she tells him to flee.

At the end, she trades away her individuality for the life of a friend. She returns to being just a golem, but remembers everything she was before. Yet now she happily beats up the Jinni, the person she truly loves. She takes pleasure in her golem nature, and considers herself finally at peace. The semi-happy ending is that she gets her soul back when the wizard gets stuck in the Jinni’s bottle. However, she can never be fully free from the bargain she made until the wizard dies, which will only happen when the Jinni dies.

The book pretty much ends there, but leaves the implication that the Golem and Jinni work out some kind of relationship within the bounds of their damaged freedom and diametrically opposed natures.

“Atlas Shrugged” belongs to all of us

The title of this post is a deliberately inflammatory reference to my previous post 1984 belongs to all of us. That post offended a few of my readers, in one case specifically because it flew in the face of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Because of that, I was compelled to read Atlas Shrugged. At the end of this post I will justify that assertion about 1984, and extend it to include Atlas Shrugged. But first let’s give it a proper review…

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Rand possessed enormous talent to create enough interest in her characters to keep me going for over 500,000 words. That’s equivalent to 3 full-length epic novels!

This book challenged me to rethink my attitude and approach to life. I had grown slothful and disinterested in my work. This book encouraged to put my heart and soul into it. Of course, that is contingent on having work where one’s heart and soul belong. For the last 3.5 years, my heart and soul have gone into my writing rather than my science. I had a choice whether to pour my spare energy into creating a tool to help decode the brain, or a book that says something about the condition of our world and its future. I chose the book, but the tool could have been equally valuable.

Rand’s book also challenged my world view. It is the main vehicle by which she presents the philosophy of “Objectivism”. Conveniently, someone provided a concise summary of the philosophy in the appendices, since the novel itself is anything but concise. (A good portion of those 500K words are dedicated to rambling rants about the philosophy.) Here is a condensed version:

  • Metaphysics — There is an objective reality that exists independent of the human mind.
  • Epistemology — Human perception and reason are sufficient to know that reality.
  • Anthropology — The essence of a human being  is mind. The use of our mind is necessary for survival in the real world, but we have a choice whether to think or not.
  • Ethics — Everyone must live for their own sake, not sacrificing themselves for others, and not sacrificing others for themselves.

How does this stack up against my philosophy?

  • Metaphysics — 100% agree. The Universe existed before I was born and will continue exist after I die. It follows rules which my thoughts cannot modify. Furthermore, my mind is implemented by a physical machine (my brain) which is part of the Universe. Thought and consciousness are the effects of information processing inside that machine, a physical process which converts energy and does work on matter.
  • Epistemology — 50% agree. I am a cognitive scientist, not a philosopher. I try to understand how the mind operates so that I can build machines in its likeness. With our limited knowledge, I can write programs that recognize 3D objects or control robots. Fifty years ago the field of Artificial Intelligence naively tried to do it Ayn Rand’s way. It proved to be a dead end. Now we know that probabilistic reasoning (partial truth) actually works better than simple all-or-nothing syllogisms. Human (and machine) perception is limited to a very small fraction of the Universe, and is subject to well-known errors, such as optical illusions. I am convinced that our brains, and thus our minds, always work on partial and unreliable perception, doing imprecise reasoning about partial beliefs. The modern skeptic says that belief should be proportional to evidence.Even though the rest of the Universe is an objective reality, the only universe I experience is the one constructed in my own mind (limited Constructivism). When I die, that universe will end.
  • Anthropology — 80% agree. Our experience of “fee will” is the product of ongoing processing our brains do in the real world. We never stop reasoning (unless our brain is physically sick), but we may use reason to work around painful truths. The job of our brains is to bring our state in the world into alignment with certain hard-wired goals. We do this by some combination of actions to change the world and adapting our thought processes.
  • Ethics — 50% agree. My highest value is the conscious experience of the Universe. Thus I strongly value the individual. Any time someone is asked to die for the collective, something is terribly wrong with the system. OTOH, Rand’s vision of a society of purely self-interested agents with no higher-level regulation results in exactly that. The classic counterexample is the Tragedy of the Commons. Dawkins does a much better job than Rand of analyzing selfishness and altruism in his book The Selfish Gene, using the mathematics of game theory. System Dynamics is an even more powerful mathematical analysis of the world, which leads to even more dismal results.

Now, back to the topic of why 1984 belongs to all of us. Copyright and patent protection are forms of government regulation (that horrible thing hated by Rand), introduced by British royalty and echoed in the US constitution. The basic notion is to control the use of an idea for a limited period of time so that the originator can profit from it. It was never intended to create exclusive ownership of an idea for all time. Instead, all ideas are supposed to eventually pass into the public domain, enriching everyone. (There is a passage in Galt’s radio speech where he says that products of the mind enrich everyone, so even Rand would see this.) Yet there are powerful corporate entities in the US that wish to continue extending copyright protection until it becomes perpetual. In Rand’s terminology, I would call such people “looters”.

IMHO, it makes no sense to extend copyright or patent protections beyond the lifespan of the creator. After that, it is no longer possible for the creator to directly benefit from the product of their mind. You could argue that extending it for some fixed period after the creator’s death gives it value in the creator’s estate. But why, in a Randian world, would one want to give value to people who did not create value themselves? Maybe to pay for bringing their children to adulthood, but nothing more. That argues for no more than 20 years beyond death of author.

The reality, of course, is that the big proponents of perpetual copyright are not the individual creators, but corporations that provide no additional value. They want to hoard the value of the work, long after the true creative genius has passed from this world.

So back to the original comment about 1984. Orwell is dead, yet some entity still has the right to charge me for access to his story and the truth it contains. Ayn Rand is dead, and her book is in the same situation.

There is another view of intellectual property, a collectivist view that would be abhorrent to Rand. Yet it has proved highly successful at producing wealth for many people, both private and corporate. I’m speaking, of course, of free/open-source software (FOSS). A classic paper on this is Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Example’s of its success are Wikipedia and the Android OS (built on top of Linux, which is a huge success in its own right).

There are vastly more moochers of FOSS than producers, yet the contributors gain so much wealth from the process that it is still of value for them to share their intellectual products freely. With modern technology, the cost of sharing a such a product is trivial. It is not like an industrial product where each copy represents substantial investment.

Orwell was wrong

Among other things, 1984 is a mid-life crisis: Winston is a middle-aged man with declining health, estranged from his wife in a loveless marriage. He realizes that everything he built his life on is wrong, and goes on a journey to figure it out. Along the way he has an affair with a younger woman (Julia). Then the system catches up and crushes his newly awakened soul out of existence. The end.

Ugh! I hear Orwell laughing from behind the pages, “See, I have destroyed all reason and hope in you by destroying my characters.” Why make such a journey of despair? I suspect there is a bit of satire in this meaningless ending, and Orwell is daring us to prove him wrong by doing better.

One of the many aspects of satirical meaninglessness is that we never find out Why. Sure, O’Brien (Mr. Bad) gives a reason for how the Party operates, but it is completely empty: power for power’s sake. At least in Brave New World there is a reason for everything, and it sort of makes sense. In 1984, the people in power have abandoned any vestige of rationality.

I feel motivated to prove Orwell wrong. Not because I want to be lazy and do nothing to prevent 1984, rather because 1984 could never happen. Sure, every bad thing in the book has happened (and in some places still happen). There are police states. People get tortured and brainwashed. Governments built on cult of personality try to rewrite reality. North Korea is probably at the top of the list.

However, there are logical contradictions and scientific errors in the book. There is a reason why the world never turned out the way Orwell describes, and he can’t simply take the credit for scaring us out of it.

  • The Party is forever — They try to stop the perpetual cycle of history, the constant turnover of human government, by fully embracing the evil of absolute power, with no illusion of any redeeming quality. Nonsense! Human nature is a constant, and the people in power will act according to it. At a minimum they will be self-interested. They will seek pleasure and their own advancement. This will naturally destabilize the system. That is the true cause of repeated “purges”, not the ever-tightening grip of absolute power. Note that “Big Brother” does not really exist. He is an imaginary figurehead (perhaps a satire of God). That means the Party is run by a collective of elites. What could be more ripe for internal conflict?
  • Brainwashing that actually changes how you think — Since we can’t test this in a laboratory (at least not ethically), all we have is historical cases. According to this brainwashing article on HowStuffWorks, the success rate on American POWs during the Korean War was something like 0.1%. Anyone can be made to do anything under duress, including say that 2+2=5, but it is very difficult to make them believe it.
  • Power — O’Brien says that power is ability to make others suffer, and it has no higher purpose. IMHO, power is the ability to influence the actions of others. Its purpose is to couple us into a larger functioning organism called “society”. The larger an organization becomes, the more power it has over the individual. I consider oversized organizations to be a force of evil, but such things emerge naturally from human nature. In 1984, the Party is trying to destroy human nature (such as eliminating natural affection and pleasure in sex) for the sake of power. This shows a deep misunderstanding.
  • Big Brother is watching you — Even today, it is very hard for computers to watch a video and figure out what is happening. The world of 1984 is peppered with cameras and microphones, but they must all be monitored by humans. That means that most of the time, most people are not being watched. It also means that the watchers have human motivations. In a world of decaying science and technology, the infrastructure necessary to move such an enormous volume of data must be spectacular, and highly vulnerable to sabotage. It wouldn’t be necessary to disable your own viewscreen, simply go and cut the main communication wire in your area. (BTW, where do the viewscreens get power when they shut off the electricity at night?)
  • Newspeak — Mercifully, there is almost no Newspeak dialog in the book. It is merely an idea that Orwell is playing with. I like the idea of simplifying English vocabulary and grammar. OTOH, that notion that reducing vocabulary could limit people’s ability to think and communicate subversive ideas is utter rubbish. Language is not dictated by a dictionary. It is constantly created and negotiated between people. If they want to share something and lack a word, they simply create a new one! Some philosophers believe that thought requires language. They are wrong, of course. Language is processed in one corner of the human brain, but that brain does a lot of other things that we call conscious thought. Example: visual reasoning.

As with most of my posts, here is an obligatory mention of my novel SuSAn. It contains the concept of the “Fourth Order”, which fills a role similar to the Party in 1984. Not nearly as scary on the surface, but every bit as implacable. The 4th Order is a super-organism that emerges naturally from our DNA, and is inherently self-destructive. It keeps us trapped in the endless cycle of history, the growth and decay of civilizations.

In the sequel (Time of the Stones) the cycle is broken and civilization enters a steady-state. Exactly how this happens is surprisingly simple. It certainly won’t require two full chapters of drivel didactic. However, I won’t spoil it here.

1984 belongs to all of us

I recently took the plunge and decided to read George Orwell’s 1984.

Turns out that because I am a US citizen, I cannot have free access to 1984 until 2044! But that is only if Congress does not pass another law, extending copyright length yet again.

I paid to read the book. Along with the privilege of viewing it only on Kindle devices that Amazon controls, my $5.74 bought me the moral high-ground to complain about it.

I hold this truth to be self-evident: We have the inalienable right to experience the expressions of fellow human beings. We have the right not only to speak freely, but also to hear freely. Anyone who proposes to control this proposes to control our minds. This is what 1984 is all about.

I agree with the notion of temporarily granting an author control over the dissemination of their work, so they can gain some material benefit from their act of service to the rest of us. This is not the only way, and probably not the best way, but it is the way we have chosen.

However, some works of art are so deep, so important, that they are greater than their creator. The needs of all our souls far outweigh the material needs of the artist. Such works should pass immediately into the public domain (and to be fair, we should reward the artist generously by some other means than copyright control).

1984 is one of those works.