S&S vs. SF in BotNS

David Stockhoff · 23 Dec 2011, 00:27 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:27:19 -0500
Subject: (urth) S&S vs. SF in BotNS
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.1112230810030.6412 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>
References: <SNT123-W188091270D9F984D184E75CFAA0 at phx.gbl><CAJ8=rtiiF1rc9--SXN88=i1JL-W4sK+XGexECUExDgifFr50xg at mail.gmail.com><3850EDE39C6542408D247D83E4BD7317@Rover>
	<CAJ8=rtiATymZxj-HuAJbOOD6vMdHLJrTSWKhRX-NV78FK58a8g at mail.gmail.com>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.1112230810030.6412 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>
Message-ID: <4EF3CAE7.4050705 at verizon.net>

On 12/22/2011 5:56 PM, David Duffy wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Dec 2011, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>
>> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>>> I don't think Wolfe talks much about souls as such.  I'm not sure we 
>>> can flatly state that he is postulating that they are an entirely 
>>> separate thing from the mind and its connection to the universe.
>>
>> ...but I think that talking about Lupine fiction, and _especially_ the
>> Briah cycle, without seeing souls everywhere, is akin to Dr. Crane's
>> explanation of Silk's enlightenment as a cerebral accident.
>
> It's pretty clear (to me at least) that Wolfe is very interested in 
> souls, and how they can be consistent with modern neuroscience and 
> "strong AI". That is, answering questions like
>
> If there is an immortal soul that underlies our personality and 
> cognition, what happens to it when a brain injury causes a permanent 
> change in personality or thinking?  What qualities persist despite 
> drastic changes in the personality and thinking?
>
> In split brain experiments, with competing sources of intentionality, 
> are there one or two souls?
>
> If there are multiple souls present in the same individual (eg demonic 
> possession, multiple personality disorder), how do they interact?  Can 
> they merge?
>
> If sufficiently advanced technology can replicate minds, are there 
> associated souls, and are they copies of the original?
>
> If sufficiently advanced technology can design, control, engineer 
> minds, what happens to the soul?
>
> Wolfe has played with various answers to all these questions in 
> different stories.  Broadly, his type of soul continues to make 
> choices in those domains where it is free to do so, but those domains 
> might be extremely narrowed eg Piaton [who is possessed, in every 
> sense], Sand [who cannot choose to reject orders, but can think freely 
> about other matters].

Also the replication of bodies via cloning.

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