Archive for the ‘Beings and Gentlebeings’ Category
We are all Platonists now
We are all Platonists about human behaviour, in the sense that we assume that reality cannot be what we see in front of our noses. Consider a person who behaves decently 90% of the time, and badly the remaining 10%; everyone says, pointing to one of the bad things, ‘Ah, that shows what he is [...]
Cats and Neanderthals
Palaeontological classification is more important than it looks. If the Neanderthals were human, whatever that means, then we and they are different subspecies of human; but if not, then the ‘slot’ of subspecies is available to be filled by the various human ‘races’, and we all know where that leads. Were a community of [...]
Personality in the great chain of being
We tend to talk as if what we are pleased to call ‘personality’ is something that sets us aside from the animals and – especially when considered in tandem with the very confused concept of ‘soul’ – contrasts with the animal or bodily agenda. In fact animals have plenty of this thing called ‘personality’ too; [...]
The Ascent of Tedium
Geoffrey Miller’s ‘Dionysus’ theory, namely that the evolution of the big human brain was driven by runaway sexual selection for interesting mates, implies that, even however boring many moderns may be, our remote ancestors must have been even more boring people. Or even more boring apes, depending on how far back we go.
But this [...]
Azi and born-men
The SF writer C.J. Cherryh hypothesised that any interstellar expansion would run up against an acute labour shortage. She therefore envisaged the grunt-work being done, not by robots, but by vat-grown humans, whom she whom she called ‘azi’ (Artificial Zygote Insemination). Where most authors would have left it at that, or tried to gross us [...]
Cartesian automata
My old philosophy tutor held that animals did not have human-type awareness, so that one could not say that Fido ‘knew’ that getting the lead out meant a walk, or that he had no business lying on his master’s bed. All we could say, he claimed, was that when you showed him the lead he [...]
In the Beginning was the ‘bot
They say that the leading spammers are making millions – from whom exactly is a mystery, since no one is admitting being the customer. Below these top players are the wannabes, who purchase packages they hope will make them millionaire leading spammers. But when we get to spambots that self-replicate and talk only gibberish [...]
Top modelling
The entire animal world is perpetually engaged in economics; although a better way to express this truth might be to suggest that economists should regard their field as a special case of ecology. Every creature has to apportion its energy budget between reproduction and survival, or between reproduction and some other individual utility. From this, [...]
Emotions and calculus
What we call sentiment is often the expression of a reproductive calculus common to the entire animal kingdom. The value of offspring increases through infancy, because more has been invested in them; consequently, the risks that a mother will run in order to defend her young increases with their age, until they are big enough [...]
You have to really feel it
Mine is the generation that most firmly believed in sincerity of emotion, that it was wicked to pretend to be experiencing any feeling, even the good ones. Consequently, we were highly resistant to the notion of performing any outward action associated with the emotion unless we not only actually felt it, but felt it first. [...]
