Selves and Souls under Suns: a Sermon or Summary of Sorts

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 28 May 2002, 19:53 · from urth-v0205.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: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: (urth) Selves and Souls under Suns: a Sermon or Summary of Sorts
Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 12:53:21 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-1110 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0205/1110.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

A reading from EXODUS:

	After a monent of silence, [Mint] added, "You've lost your=20
	faith, or most of it, I think. What's happened to us?"
	     Potto laughed loudly.
	     Quetzal, seated between Oosik and Loris at the other=20
	end of the table, murmured, "Circumstances have changed,=20
	Maytera. That's all, or nearly all. There is an essential=20
	core at the center of each man and woman that remains=20
	unaltered no matter how life's externals may be transformed=20
	or recombined. But it's smaller than we think."
	     Silk nodded his agreement.
	     "If I - ah - permitted." Remora pushed back the errant=20
	lock of lank, black hair. "The General and I were companions=20
	in, um, adversity. The - ah - spirit. The inalterable core,=20
	as His Cognizance has, um, finely. The spirit that survives=20
	even death. It grows when trod upon, like the dandelion. I=20
	have learned it, eh? So may you, if you -um - reflect."

I think this is the key passage for one of the things LS, and indeed=20
the whole Lupiverse cycle, is about: the nature of the self and the=20
soul. Quetzal makes the key point, and receives support from both=20
Silk and Remora: that the "essential core," i.e., the "soul," is=20
"smaller than we think" ... meaning, I suggest, that much of what=20
we think of as our "self" or "identity" is not a part of the "soul."

The Lupiversal approach to identity and to souls seems to me very
much motivated by a desire to make clear just what the soul is _not_.=20
I mean that, in a universe where a whack on the head can radically=20
alter personality, where is there a place for the immortal and=20
immaterial soul? Similarly, in a world where certain neurological=20
disorders can cause a person to be incapable of the freedom to make=20
certain types of moral choice*, is that person damned for his or her=20
immorality? Is the "soul" something separate from the body, or just
an epiphenomenon of a certain level of behavioral organization (and,
if the latter, how is a "resurrection" possible)? And does it have=20
anything to do with what we normally consider our self or identity?

-----
* Start with simple intellectual incapacity, move up to Tourette's
  and certain rare epilepsies, and go on from there...
-----

Beginning with _The Book of the New Sun_, we have been presented
with a series of physical phenomena that radically question our
usual concept of personal identity: the Revolutionary; the alzabo
and its related analeptic; the serially resurrected Severian; his
very different "mergers" with Thecla and the line of the Autarchs;=20
the aquastors; robots and chems, taluses and Talos; the gods of=20
Mainframe; their ability to possess and "enlighten"; Mucor; the=20
inhumi; the uncountable Neighbors; and the very mysterious nature=20
of the Narrator of tBotSS.=20

I don't know that we can draw any really solid conclusions from=20
this -- indeed, I'm not at all sure that Mr Wolfe has a clear
theory to offer -- but I think it's clear that this _question_=20
is one of the fundamental things that he has been grappling with
through much of his career, not only here but in, at a bare=20
minimum, 5HC and the "Soldier" books.=20

All of which is kind of "why I _DO_ like Short Sun."

--Blattid

--=20

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