Sci-Fi Friday

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Something Different

Dear Copyright Adam Durrant Feifdom, I'm not doing one today. I know this comes as a shock. Some of you, right now, might be crying, or preparing to cry. That corner of the room might be looking mighty comfortable for curling up in the fetal position and rocking back and forth, questioning the very nature of the universe. But, its okay, you don't need to do that. Tune in tomorrow, when we're going to be doing something a little different here at Copyright Adam Durrant. I know it might be a lot to ask, coming to my corner of the internet twice in one week, but I’ll make it worth it.

Ad Astra Per Aspera

Office hours are a mostly dull and uneventful time. There are, however, a few exceptions. These exceptions occur mostly when a due date is impending and undergrads need last minute reassurances that their ideas are not as weak as a Frenchman’s courage in 1940. After the first office hour I spent climbing the walls out the sheer boredom of being confined to a windowless Teaching Assistant office, I learned to always bring something to read. So there I sat today, feet resting upon the furniture like I owned the place, reading. One character in the book asked another why he went on a four hundred mile trip through the mountains and his answer was, “[for] The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life.” Sufficed to say I was enthralled by those words. Thanks to Ursula K. LeGuin I now have the perfect answer when somebody asks me the most asinine question in the universe, “Why would you want to do that?” This brings me to the topic that I want to address this week: Sentience. An interesting word, and an even more interesting condition. Tackled quantitatively it is relatively simple to define. The axiom of cogito ergo sum is the historic proof. I think, therefore I am. Possessing the awareness to recognize the fact that you are a thinking creature validates your existence. If life is a dream of the divine, your own sense of awareness validates your role within the dream. But does sentience end there? Is fusion of self-awareness and consciousness limited to the realm of the quantitative? Does our sentience plateau upon the first utterance of the first person singular? Maslow would argue that it doesn’t and then cite his infernal hierarchy of needs. However that still seems like quantification and reduction of sentience to a dualism of needs met and left wanting. Besides, his discourse is weak. (Just for you RK) Is sentience lost in some people? Somewhere in a person’s cognitive, physical and spiritual development can you lose the self awareness to turn your perception inward? A person like that would regress to nothing more than a being responsive to conditioning and training. Insert stimulus, observe reaction, repeat as necessary for sixty to one hundred years. As an acute observer of humanity I could give more than a dozen examples of people that I think exist on a day to day basis responding only to outside stimulus without any sense of awareness in their life. If the qualification for sentience is nothing more than a childlike statement from Descartes, where you recognize yourself as a thinking creature, should it not follow that as we grow to adulthood the definition of sentience must be expanded? Simply being aware of your location within a room, going to work, doing your taxes, can not qualify as sentience. A job is worked to satisfy basic needs of home and hearth. Taxes are paid because you are told to pay them lest go to prison. Red lights obeyed for self preservation and because you are trained to stop. But Adam, you say, I am aware of the fact that I am doing my taxes and working my job, doesn’t that make me sentient? No. That’s called being awake. We must be measured by what we are capable of achieving. A dog who knows not to go into traffic is doing quite well for itself because the average dog thinks its tail isn’t part of itself. Humans have minds with the capacity to think any thought that we have the will and courage to conjure. The limits of our consciousness are only those that we place on ourselves. We are all born titans of thought, even if some of us either lose our way or choose to abandon sentience in lieu of a path more easily traversed – a Newtonian life of actions and reactions. Sentience must be something that is grappled with throughout life, not as a goal but the journey itself. The pursuit of sentience therein must take on the form of an individually directed purposeful introspection for the sake of the augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. In considering the nature of sentience I am more than willing to entertain the notion that I am wrong. Perhaps, all that is necessary is the ability to speak the first person pronoun and be aware that you are talking about yourself. So if that is the case, then it would mean that this is the world that sentient man, gifted with limitless imagination, has created. If this is what we have created at the height of human conscious thought and awareness then I am left with no other conclusion than there is something rotten within the essence of humanity. That being the case, Terra should be wiped clean humankind before we pollute the cosmos. However, if we admit that we still have much to learn as a species, then this place will come to pass as more people grapple with their sentience and shape the world as one that befits a race with limitless potential.

Wordacus Maximus

Language: Twitching muscles and an expulsion of air from the lungs disrupt the space surrounding a body. A limited scale Doppler carries the disruptions through tympanic membranes, cochlea and other science words that really don’t mean much to anybody other than scientists and Gill Grissom. Then, if the brain has been trained properly, those wavelengths and sonic disruptions are conceptualized into mental images both abstract and tangible. From its humble origins as “grunt, counter-grunt, club in the head” to the most the erudite lectures of academia, humans have dug themselves in a nice rut of using sound to convey various messages to each other. At some point we, as a species, decided to start writing down our ideas. Cuneiform to glyphs to characters, this fad called writing seems to be one that is not going to die any time soon. Over the last sixty years the diffusion of spoken and written language, fueled by unprecedented technological advancement, has allowed for near limitless communication. Anybody with an internet connection can read my blog and then instantly respond. Voice over internet protocol technology is rendering telephones archaic and allowing for free as ISP fees communication around the world. While I am still a proponent of face to face conversations and negotiations whenever possible, I am content with the current electronic exchange of thought and idea. However, there is one sine qua non for successful electronic interchange, the ability to write clearly and effectively. (Insert grammatical/ironic pokes at Copyright Adam Durrant here!) But, it seems that when you open something up to the masses, the masses have a way of bringing it down to their level. Shorthand for cell phones, gamer talk, abbreviations that are not real abbreviations and this bastard here, “ :) “ devastate written English. For example, telling a person they are “l33t” carries with it such a subtext that an entire volume could be written on the subject, “The cultural significance of being l33t”. So rather than contextualize the abstract notion, the transcendental awe and respect such that you will deem another mortal soul l33t humbling yourself and all progeny yet to come, an act which would require considerable perspicacity, we shuffle along rather than forcing ourselves to truly grasp the notion by calculating it in our heads and translating into our language of choice. Of course, some would argue that this is the growth of the language. English expanding to reflect the technophile nature of Western civilization and “greifers” like myself are just literary Luddites. But growth of language isn’t my issue. My gripe is net jargon being used as an excuse for bad writing, or worse still the only form of writing that people are capable of producing. Not withstanding the fact that our broken high school system does not train people in how to effectively write, that is a different post for a different day, do we really want to live in a world of where English is subject to slang jargon phonetics? ‘Net talk is nothing more than a new way to justify the ugly fact that most of us can’t write to save our lives. But since everybody is doing it, we are all too willing to chalk it up to the times and wave the white paper of appeaement. "Oh Durrant," you say. "You just couldn't think of anything better to talk about this week so you picked something at random." Fine, don’t listen to me. Just keep on LOLing, ROFLing and LMAOing your way through communications and wonder why when it comes to matters of importance, the written word fails to communicate the complexity or even subtlety that you had imagined it would. Enjoy the forty pieces of sliver made manfiest through a few less keystrokes. If what we write is how we are remembered by history, do we really want to be the generation that led to the utter stupefaction of the English language? The clockwork apathy of people will allow for the translation of written trends into spoken language. And then one day, rather than laughing at a joke somebody will adapt the ‘LOL’ abbreviation into an actual word. On that day, I will have one more reason to shake my head at the world. For now, I hope those of you who assimilate without understanding and further demolish the language that I work in won’t be too upset from being Pwn’d so utterly and throughly. Oh irony thy name is Durrant.

Heretic Nation

I would like to begin this week with a little thing that scared me out of a bar one night (thank you very much Merchant Ale House and your attempts to culture those who seek escape through inebriation), a poetry slam.

There's a plot to beguile

An obstinate isle.

Great Britain, that heretic nation.

Why so slyly behav'd

In the hope to be saved

By the help of the curs'd reformation.

There's power enough

And combustile stuff

In thirty and odd trusty barrels,

We'll send them together.

The Lord can tell whither

And decide at one blow all their quarrels.

When the King and his son

And the Parliament's gone

And the people are left in the lurch,

Things will take their old station

In the curs'd nation...

And I'll be the head of the Church.

(Author Unknown, but possibly a Jesuit priest) - For the record, I did not write the part in brackets, they came with the poem. But, if I had to field a guess who wrote this poem, or on whose behalf it was written, I would have to go with hmmm oh well I don’t know THE POPE!!!! Click here for the webpage where this was originally located.

While desperately trying to come up with a pun that worked with the word Heretic, I stumbled across this poem. I read it, it made me smile. Because within the words of that AABCCB rhyming scheme, which incidentally fails at line fourteen, is more ammunition for the Tommy Gun of enlightenment that I brandish today. Today, Copyright Adam Durrant takes a swing at religion. One of the most devious means of control that mankind has ever loosed upon itself. Make no mistake, I am not talking about a supreme being that may or may not have created the universe. This is about religion. Religion defined as all of the stories, belief structures and institutions that we as humans have created over the last few thousand years. Yes most of them feature a deity at one point or another. And I’m sure that some of you are gearing up to tell me that religion is divinely inspired. But to use that argument against itself, just so we can move on with things, I will employ some sharp as a bear trap logic. Point 1 – I, Adam Durrant, was created by the Judeo-Christian-Muslim ‘One God to Rule Them All’ Point 2 – The ‘One God’ is active in the life of Adam Durrant and has set a path for me in all its determinist glory. Point 3 – That path is to be a writer and to use my brain. Therefore, that which I do is then an act of god. Therefore, my writing is inspired by god. And as god is infallible, everything that I have to say today is correct. Have fun with that one kids. And, if you think that my Ontology is self serving, allow me to cite one of Descartes’ proofs of ‘One God’ and then you tell me who is self serving. Point 1 – Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing. Point 2 – I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence is contained in the idea of God. Point 3 – Therefore, God exists. One goal Team Durrant, one goal Team Descartes, see you in overtime bitch. In case that show of irreverence did not make things painfully clear, I champion the cause of the Heretic. Heretics: those individuals who do not agree with the orthodox doctrine and choose to develop their own views toward the metaphysical. Born into the Christian faith, anointed in an Anglican Church before I achieved sentience, I, Adam Durrant am a heretic. And I will make no apologies for it. The heretic has no reason to apologize for making other people uneasy in their beliefs. Furthermore, the heretic should be praised for they have the courage to stand alone in the religious world and be counted apart from the masses. Religions formed because people are willing to listen and then hold has truth that which others have to say. The power of any church lay in the collective groupthink of those who attend, thus giving meaning and weight to that which is taught. No better (satirical) example of this can be pointed out than in Monty Python’s Life of Brian when, in an attempt to escape from the Roman centurions, Brian spouts off random rhetoric which stirs the hearts of the crowd. Praised as a messiah, his symbols the gourd and sandal, Brain is chased into the mountains by his unwanted disciples where he runs a foul of a naked man. Any groupthink par excellence will then lead to a measure of control over those people participating. You can start to create moral and value structures around your groupthink and before you know it you have people talking, dressing and eating the same…like say not eating meat on Friday? Everybody having to wear hats and bonnets? Sure it might not be law, but when everybody else is doing it and not doing it is ‘bad’ rather than ‘illegal’ it is potentially more powerful than law. Let simmer a few hundred years and what started out as an innocent groupthink has evolved into an entity that has both temporal and spiritual investment (control) in the lives of the people it guides (oppresses). This can pose some problems. Today, it only leads to awkward first dates where you start quoting Nietzsche to your companion who has just mentioned that she goes to church every Sunday. In days past, it would get you seasoned with the inquisitions’ special herbs and spices while cooking in your own juices on a rotisserie. Then the inquisitor would really start to work you over. Which brings me to my point this week; the heretic is not a person to be shunned. The heretic is one of the most courageous personality archetypes in the lexicon of human behavior. Where other people are content to accept the status quo, never questioning doctrine, never wavering from the establishment, the heretic is willing to suffer personal injury to exercise their right to say, “Why?” Why should I think the way you think? Why should I do everything that you do when you don’t even have a good reason for doing it? Why should I be afraid of something that is only made manifest because your resolute support of it? Why should I be afraid at all? The heretic dares to stand aside. In doing so they are shunned by the community at large. Facing exile from social and political circles, the heretic confidently steps forward from the ranks. Think, how many openly atheist, agnostic, spiritualist or other non conformist religion devotees have been elected to public office? Every Prime Minister and U.S. President that I can think of all tout themselves as followers of Christ in one fashion or another. Who is the worse person then? The heretic honest in their questioning of orthodoxy and tradition or the fraud who boasts piety for votes? The heretic risks damnation. “Believe what I tell you to believe or else you will burn,” says the evangelist to the heretic. It is something that every heretic must consider. The last time it was brought to my attention was over beer and chicken wings. Desipte my virtue, I was told that everything I have done in my life is for naught because I do not accept the proper deity as my salvation. A heretic will send away the clergy at their death bed and die well aware that they may have made a mistake. Choosing not to shoulder the burden of inherited social and moral conventions, the heretic dies with self confidence in their life’s value. The heretic does not need to be saved. A heretic sees clearly. Attempts to convert persuade or enlighten only reaffirm a heretic’s belief that the minions of orthodoxy have been blinded and so thoroughly conditioned by their religion that they refuse to, or have lost the ability to, conceptualize other possible dynamics of the universe. Within this one chosen dynamic the orthodox find comfort, safety and security. The heretic lives without that comfort, standing strong and steadfast in their own values and virtues. Courage, self confidence – not pride or arrogance but self confidence – and an open mind are the companions of the heretic; things that are virtues and classically defined as part of “the good”. Embrace the heretics, for they think the thoughts that others are not willing, or have lost the ability to ponder. The universe is infinite, and only the heretic who is willing to reject conventions that would limit that their view will ever be able to glimpse that which has been laid out before us. Mythology will not awaken you to that which surrounds you. Only the courage to stand alone and think will provide that opportunity. Now, my challenge to all of you that read this is to think genuinely and honestly about what you have seen. Have a reaction and go with it, anger, insecurity, support, the desire to throw cabbage at me whatever you choose. Ask me nicely and I might even let you throw that cabbage at me…well maybe not a cabbage but a lettuce. I would also invite everybody, and I do mean everybody, to post commentary on this. As a proud heretic I always enjoy the ideas of others, even if I don’t agree, even if I think they are wrong.

Until next week...unless the Inquisition tracks me down and decides to persecute me for my blog. If that happens then well who wants my playstation?