interview questions

Lee Berman · 06 Jan 2011, 14:10 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 09:10:08 -0500
Subject: (urth) interview questions
Message-ID: <SNT123-W313C40B93C9724B6FA28F6CF0A0 at phx.gbl>

The elephant in the room for me still remains: Veil's Hypothesis. Gerry has
used some rather colorful adjectives to describe his opinion of its veracity and
those who might consider its veracity. I'm wondering, Gerry, has the ongoing discussion 
opened things up any for you?  

Borski devoted a chapter of Long and Short of It to this issue, with the premise that
Veil's Hypothesis must be considered as a possible conclusion. Some of his evidence
involves the appearance of lingering shapeshifting in characters we would expect to
rule out from being abos. I haven't seen Borski state it explicitly but I suspect he
tends to agree with my assessment of anti-Occam as a guiding principle when it comes to 
understanding Wolfe.

Somewhere in the text of 5HoC is the explication of a certain engineering priniciple or process; 
something about finding the heat distribution in irregular objects by a series of closer 
and closer approximations, iirc.

For me this is second only to Veil's Hypothesis as a key to explaining what is really 
going on in these two planets. I think it is a mistake to get stuck on a single example
of replacement, green eyes, tool use issues etc. and assume that's all there is.

Surely the human body, brain and psyche are irregular objects. I detect a subtext which implies 
that the imitation process is not a single event, but ongoing, with progressively closer 
approximations of perfect imitation. This subtext is subtle and vague.  By contrast, Veil's 
Hypothesis is so jarring a hammerblow that it leaves us stunned and mostly unable to detect the 
other fine-grained hints without multiple readings. (GRW you devious bastard!)

That is one of the purposes of "A Story". In Shadow Children we are shown a very poor approximation
of humanity. They can't be shown in the main text of the story because they would ruin the earthian, 
frenchy-colonial ambience Wolfe has established for St. Croix. But we NEED to see them to see the 
earlier stages of imitation/approximation which have been almost perfected in the main text 
characters we see.

This idea resonates with a certain recurring principle in Wolfe's work. Lamarckian evolution. Wolfe
may even have mentioned this term in an interview but I'm not sure. Back when 5HoC was written, 
the Central Dogma of Biology was the overwhelmingly domininant perspective. I can guess Wolfe is
pleased with research in the past 25 years suggesing the occasional reversal of  Central Dogma and
the environment feeding back to the organism and enacting permanent genetic changes within it, during 
the lifetime of the organism.

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