Is Jonas a Man?

Peter Stephenson · 16 Jun 1999, 11:46 · from urth-v0027.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Peter Stephenson <pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it>
Subject: Re: (urth) Is Jonas a Man?
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 13:46:56 +0200
Message-ID: <urth-v0027-0097 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0027/0097.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

"Roy C. Lackey" wrote:
> I wrote:
>=20
> >>I think the all-too-human tendency to anthropomorphize is evident both
> in Wolfe's writing about Jonas and our speculations about him.<<
>
> Animals, cartoon characters, gods and machines,
> whatever fanciful human attributes they may be imbued with, do not in fact
> possess them.
>=20
>     Hey, it's only a story!: I know that and have posted in that spirit. =
If
> you want to label Wolfe's work as fantasy, then anything goes, and I
> withdraw my reality quibbles.

I still can't really agree with this for two reasons.

In the first place, it's not at all so clear that reality is like that.
There are plenty of people arguing for one extreme or another, i.e. either
for a religious fundamentalist form of strong dualism, or that by next
Friday someone will have invented a machine which has all (and the strong
AI people do seem to mean all) the characteristics of a human being (plus a
whole lot of others just to show how clever the inventor is).  Plus there
are plenty of possibilities in the middle depending on your attitude to
emergent phenomena and what constitutes duality, humanity, `attitude',
`what', `the' and every other word in the dictionary; it's not simply a
question of science versus religion.  In plain English, nobody knows.  So I
can't accept that you can so easily point the finger at possible violations
of this corner of reality in a work of science fiction.  (And we'd better
not get started again on what constitutes realism in a work of fiction.)

In the second place Wolfe knows that perfectly well, and that there are
real questions which he can't answer but can put in different ways.  Mr
Million is a good example; I think Wolfe is quite openly saying he doesn't
know when a machine becomes a human being --- and all this goes way beyond
orthodox theology.  The chems on the Whorl have such complex human-like
behaviour that simply to deny flat out that they can possess human
characteristics seems to me to miss the whole point.  The same goes for
Jonas.  Such beings are there in the form of a question about human nature
to which, as far as I can see, neither we nor Wolfe have the answer.

corncrake

Brief bibliography (I shall be posting a test on this next week -- not):

A. Asimov, The Bicentennial Man
R. Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind; Shadows of the Mind
etc. etc.

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net