Works Cited

This God embodied a single idea (he had no other wishes or concerns): he forbade extramarital sex. He was therefore a rather comical God, but let's not laugh at Alice for that. Of the Ten Commandments Moses gave to the people, fully nine didn't endanger her soul at all; she didn't feel like killing or not honoring her father, or coveting her neighbor's wife; only one commandment she felt to be not self-evident and therefore posed a genuine challenge: the famous seventh, which forbids fornication. In order to practice, show, and prove her religious faith, she had to devote her entire attention to this single commandment. And so out of a vague, diffuse, and abstract God, she created a God who was specific, comprehensible, and concrete: God Antifornicator.

Milan Kundera, Eduard and God

Works Cited

This is not so difficult to understand. Those who had fought for what they called the revolution maintained a great pride: the pride of being on the correct side of the front lines. Ten or twelve years later (around the time of our story) the front lines began to melt away, and with them the correct side. No wonder the former supporters of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts; thanks to religion they can (in their role as atheists struggling against believers) stand again on the correct side and retain their habitual and precious sense of their own superiority.

But to tell the truth, the substitute front was also useful to others, and it will perhaps not be too premature to disclose that Alice was one of them. Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa's shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God.

Milan Kundera, Eduard and God

Works Cited

Although the palace at Gatchina had nine hundred rooms, Nicholas and his brothers and sisters were brought up in spartan simplicity. Every morning, [Tsar] Alexander III arose at seven, washed in cold water, dressed in peasant's clothes, made himself a pot of coffee and sat down at his desk. Later when Marie was up, she joined him for a breakfast of rye bread and boiled eggs. The children slept on simple army cots with hard pillows, took cold baths in the morning and ate porridge for breakfast. At lunch when they joined their parents, there was plenty of food, but as they were served last after all the guests and still had to leave the table when their father rose, they often went hungry. Ravenous, Nicholas once attacked the hollow gold cross filled with beeswax which he had been given at baptism; embedded in the wax was a tiny fragment of the True Cross. "Nicky was so hungry that he opened his cross and ate the contents--relic and all," recalled his sister Olga. "Later he felt ashamed of himself but admitted that it had tasted 'immorally good.'"

Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra

It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing

David sent me this.

Works Cited

(Chs. 11-15) [of Leviticus] form an important section on ritual purity and pollution. An explanation now almost universally rejected is that the various laws in this section have hygiene as their basis. Although some of the laws of ritual purity roughly correspond to modern ideas of physical cleanliness, many of them have little to do with hygiene. For example, there is no evidence that the "unclean" animals are intrinsically bad to eat or to be avoided in a Mediterranean climate, as is sometimes asserted.

The Oxford Bible Commentary

Herbert

Hanah: Charlie has learned that really annoying technique where I ask him to take one bite of his food, so he picks up a nearly invisible molecule of food and eats it.


Scott: Time to put him up for adoption.


Hanah: Fortunately, he's being extra-cute at the same time.


Scott: Very clever of him.


Hanah: Yes, it's all part of his plan to take over the world.


Scott: He's the Kwisatz Haderach!


Hanah: the what?


Scott: I can't believe you thought you could bring forth the Kwisatz Haderach before his time!


Hanah: ok...


Scott: Ah. Apropos of nothing, you should read Dune.


Hanah: I did once, but I didn't understand it.


Scott: It's Dune, not Finnegan's Wake.

Works Cited

This is the one and only passage in the New Testament in which Jesus is called a carpenter. The word used, TEKTŌN, is typically applied in other Greek texts to anyone who makes things with his hands; in later Christian writings, for example, Jesus is said to have made "yokes and gates." ... How could someone with that background be the Son of God?

This was a question that the pagan opponents of Christianity took quite seriously; in fact, they understood the question to be rhetorical. Jesus obviously could not be a son of God if he was a mere TEKTŌN. The pagan critic Celsus particularly mocked Christians on this point, tying the claim that Jesus was a "woodworker" into the fact that he was crucified (on a stake of wood) and the Christian belief in the "tree of life."

And everywhere they speak in their writings of the tree of life... I imagine because their master was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. So that if he happened to be thrown off a cliff or pushed into a pit or suffocated by strangling, or if he had been a cobbler or stonemason or blacksmith, there would have been a cliff of life above the heavens, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a blessed stone, or an iron of love, or a holy hide of leather.

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus

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This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand a text. ... what would it mean to say lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable? Was this a normal or a supernormal event?

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus

Works Cited

Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death.

Hunter S. Thompson, "Security"

The Inebriation Hypothesis

If you're not a linguistics nerd, you'll have to trust me. This is hilarious.

One of the standard activities amongst Indo-Europeanists is the attempted adducement of the causative factors underlying the expansion of Indo-European languages, at the putative expense of surrounding tongues, most of which are no longer attested but which were doubtless related to both Basque and Etruscan and possibly Japanese. The explanation long considered standard was that the Indo-Europeans, or IEs as they are usually familiarly termed, were of a warlike mien and simply exploded out of their homeland via what in military circles is termed “a forceful display of occupational intent” or “spirited attainment of autochthon-nonvoluntary advisorial status”. Most scholars accepted this explanation, and for a long period debate was limited to the locus of the original expansion, with most European scholars except for the Poles claiming the Urheim for their own portion of Europe (the Poles had long recognized that Autochthhon-Involuntary Advisorial types came from any other region than Poland and were afraid that if they claimed the Urheim, the Germans would invade them to get it back). In recent years, Marija Gimbutas’ claim that the original IEs were in fact the Khurgan culture of the steppes has gained wide acclaim, since it positions the Urheim in an area that no-one wants to claim anyway and thus reduces friction at important Indo-Europeanist social events. In addition, the Khurgani were apparently a rather vigorous bunch, whose major artifacts were (a) hand axes and (b) rapidly built tombs, both of which are consistent with the traditional view of the IEs.

There are several problems with this scenario, however, foremost of which is the fact that the warlike expansion hypothesis was originally formulated by 19th century Germans, who also proposed that the spread of glaciers during the ice-age was the result of the military superiority of northern ice floes as compared to decadent Mediterranean lakes, and who invented the term “spirited attainment of autochthon-nonvoluntary advisorial status”, which in German constitutes a single word of such breathtaking length and consonantal density that many opponents of said attainment strangled in the act of attempting to oppose it. In addition, Indo-Europeans had a plethora of words for (a) trees, and (b) pigs, neither of which are found in notable profusion in the steppes and which certainly were not particularly valued by the Khurgani, who liked to gallop uninhibitedly about spiritedly advising those in their path and, according to Gimbutas, beating up feminists.

William C. Spruiell, A Reinterpretation of Some Aspects of the Indo-European Expansion

Works Cited

"My dear Narcissus, you have money in corn, I have money in corn, lots of people have money in corn. The more corn that can be landed in winter the lower the price will be. That worries me."

"That could be construed as a very selfish point of view."

"Are you saying there is less selfishness in wanting the price of corn to be low rather than high?"

"But there are more people who want it to be low!"

"Doesn't that add up to more selfishness rather than less?"

BBC: I, Claudius,

Works Cited

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

Works Cited

Not good. The parameters breed like mosquitoes in the bayou, faster than he can knock them off. Hunger, compromise, money, paranoia, memory, comfort, guilt. Guilt gets a minus sign around Achtfaden though, even if it is becoming quite a commodity in the Zone. Remittance men from all over the world will come to Heidelberg before long, to major in guilt. There will be bars and nightclubs catering especially to guilt enthusiasts. Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves, tickled and shivering with guilt.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Works Cited

"I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven," Gustav argues, "but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom--he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur."

"So?" is Säure's customary answer to that one. "Which would you rather do? The point is," cutting off Gustav's usually indignant scream, "a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland."

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

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One night he set fire to twenty pages of calculations. Integral signs waved like charmed cobras, comical curly ds marched along like hunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash. But that was his only relapse.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Works Cited

Slothrop goes hunching paranoically along the street, here's "God Bless America," a-and "This Is the Army, Mister Jones," and they are his country's versions of the Horst Wessel Song, although it is Gustav back at the Jacobistrasse who raves (nobody gonna pull an Anton Webern on him) to a blinking American lieutenant-colonel, "A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant, back again to tonic. Grandeur! Gesellschaft!"

"Teutonic?" sez the colonel. "Dominant? The war's over, fella. What kind of talk is that?"

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Works Cited

When it was sufficiently raised for me to peer inside, I saw to my dismay that the queen was not there - the sarcophagus was empty! Turning to Reisner, I said in a voice louder than I had intended, 'George, she's a dud!'

Whereupon the Minister of Public Works asked, 'What is a dud?'

Reisner rose from his box and said, 'Gentlemen, I regret Queen Hetepheres is not receiving.'

Works Cited

Ah, well ! for us all some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes

Whittier

Deportolitics

SERBIAN COWORKER: I'm sorry, I'm having trouble concentrating. Serbia's playing France in an hour.

SCOTT: Very exciting.

SERBIAN COWORKER: And do you know what happens if we win?

SCOTT: They give you Kosovo back?

Works Cited

What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Pater Ṇsere

Pater Ṇsere, jos kemeloisi essi,
Nōmṇ Twom sqenetoru.
Regnom Twom cemietōd.
Woliā Twā dhidhētoru,
ita kemelei jota pḷteuijāi.
Qāqodjūtenom bharsiom ṇserom edjēw dasdhi-nos
joqe dhaleglāms ṇserāms parke,
swāi skeletbhos pārkomos.
Enim mē noms peritloi enke prōd,
mō upelēd nosēie-nos.
Estōd.

Dear DC Metro

Let us henceforth call the escalators "staircases" and end the farce.

Yours,
Scott Scheule

Draughts

SCOTT: I had a great line in Russian class. In the book, there was a blurb about how all Russians like to play chess, so I asked the professor if she played. She said, yes, and checkers, too, though in Russia checkers has different rules. And I said, 'Like what? Red team always wins?'

JAY: That's pretty good.

SCOTT: Right, but the first time I said it, no one responded. So I had to say it again louder, and then it killed.

Works Cited

Ojo a la cita: "Que nadie me malinterprete, pero yo nunca fui uno de esos niños 'tories' con acné que tuvieron sueños semieróticos con Margaret Thatcher. Ella nunca me visitó por las noches enfundada en su vestido de azul imperial y con ese peinado magnífico de color de piña. Nunca me la imaginé inclinándose sobre mí, abriendo sus labios rojos y susurrándome al oído cosas sobre el monetarismo y el final del poder de los sindicatos".

Eduardo Suárez, "Fantasías sexuales con la 'Dama de Hierro'"

Works Cited

40.

Fe, alegría, optimismo. --Pero no la sandez de cerrar los ojos a la realidad.


46.

¿No crees que la igualdad, tal como la entienden, es sinónimo de injusticia?


54.

¿Contemporizar? --Es palabra que sólo se encuentra --¡hay que contemporizar!-- en el léxico de los que no tienen gana de lucha --comodones, cucos o cobardes--, porque de antemano se saben vencidos.

Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, Camino

Works Cited

In 1919, [Joseph Schumpeter] agreed to join a commission on the nationalization of industry established by the new socialist German government. A young economist asked him how someone who had so extolled enterprise could take part in a commission whose aim was to nationalize it. "If someone wants to commit suicide," Schumpeter replied, "it is a good thing if a doctor is present."

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

Works Cited

Lockstock
Of course, it wasn't long before the water turned silty, brackish and then disappeared altogether. As cruel as Caldwell B. Cladwell was, his measures effectively regulated water consumption, sparing the town the same fate as the phantom Urinetown. Hope chose to ignore the warning signs, however, preferring to bask in the people's love for as long as it lasted.

Little Sally
What kind of musical is this?! The good guys finally take over and then everything starts falling apart.

Lockstock
Like I said, Little Sally. This isn't a happy musical.

Little Sally
But the music's so happy!

Lockstock
Yes, Little Sally. Yes it is.

Josephine
Such a fever. If only I had a cool, tall glass of water, maybe I'd have a fighting chance.

Hope
But don't you see, Mrs. Strong? The glass of water's inside you, it always has been.

Josephine
It has?

Hope
Of course it has.

Mark Hollmann, Greg Kotis, Urinetown

Works Cited

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is.

Terry Eagleton, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

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Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides, having attempted to kill the tyrant Demylus, and failing in his design, maintained the doctrine of Parmenides, like pure and fine gold tried in the fire, that there is nothing which a magnanimous man ought to dread but dishonor, and that there are none but children and women, or effeminate and women-hearted men, who fear pain. For, having with his own teeth bitten off his tongue, he spit it in the tyrant’s face.

Plutarch, The Moralia

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“Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of labouring under pulmonary consumption, and after an impartial trial before a jury of your countrymen, you have been found guilty. Against the justice of the verdict I can say nothing: the evidence against you was conclusive, and it only remains for me to pass such a sentence upon you, as shall satisfy the ends of the law. That sentence must be a very severe one. It pains me much to see one who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise so excellent, brought to this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious; but yours is no case for compassion: this is not your first offence: you have led a career of crime, and have only profited by the leniency shown you upon past occasions, to offend yet more seriously against the laws and institutions of your country. You were convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year: and I find that though you are now only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than fourteen occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful character; in fact, it is not too much to say that you have spent the greater part of your life in a jail.

“It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that— questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this— namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly.["]

Samuel Butler, Erewhon

The Windlover

I caught your cadence, cooed in another’s voice—her choice of clauses
Cleaved with air, there! the twin of your tattoo, which clip-clops
Down the cobbled pitch of a cathedral tone—that yours alone: how it drops
In caverns of caramel and buckles stone. Tempo, pulses and pauses
Beating fresh between the terms, the rhythm draped on the stranger’s verbs, flung
As high as a bird unbound, each sound unwound and set to soar
On the winged wish of the word—I almost heard the thrumming reeds that moor
The silken syllables you swirl in the world behind your tongue.

Not you, I knew, but each trace chased, each collage cut collected by hand
One more mote of the wild winter that whirls
From the bursting pane of glass. And my love has lit each shard with a band

Of light so rare it colors the numbing night—and the coming white pearls
Of snow. So my heart hears the hum, the substance and the sand
Of you, not you, you, Osiris in the dew of a thousand scattered girls.

Existential Prayer

Ah, Meaning, you who contoured the neural muck and set its slave limbs to dance,
You who left Eden’s door ajar for the coming of the waddling snake,
Seduce my soul and crease my mind
And tug me taffy-thin
So the mortician will know how to paint the expression I merit.

Ah, Meaning, you who splash us with sticky sex and lay mines in the moments of our love,
You who ruined the children and pushed them into the labyrinth stinking of meat,
Retreat into the citadel of the cells
Where you play the piper for the meiotic march:
Ride the cramping crests of our hearts while you plot.

Ah, Meaning, you who dangled duchies before the eyes of Caesars and Khans,
You who drew borders in the sand and summoned cyclones,
Keep the blood of the enemy honey-sweet,
Candy the brains and salt the muscle;
Hide the ploughshares up your sleeve like the ace.

Ah, Meaning, you who infected God and passed from Him with the Genesis spark,
You who gild the seraphim they nailed to our eyes,
Ring us now with our halos of thorns
And electrodes of brotherhood;
Cull our daughters so we remember the lands where the daughters are already dead.

Ah, Meaning, the bisque of my veins and the cosmological constant,
You who evade scientific vagaries and rule stronger as myth,
Give no quarter, spare no dime,
Litter no breadcrumbs and ignore my prayer.
Only flash once a decade out of some desperate dusk, so we may clutch a thousand dawns undeterred.

Works Cited

Twelve hundred million men are spread
About this Earth, and I and You
Wonder, when You and I are dead,
"What will those luckless millions do?"

None whole or clean, " we cry, "or free from stain
Of favour." Wait awhile, till we attain
The Last Department where nor fraud nor fools,
Nor grade nor greed, shall trouble us again.

Fear, Favour, or Affection -- what are these
To the grim head who claims our services?
I never knew a wife or interest yet
Delay that pukka step, miscalled "decease";

When leave, long overdue, none can deny;
When idleness of all Eternity
Becomes our furlough, and the marigold
Our thriftless, bullion-minting Treasury

Transferred to the Eternal Settlement,
Each in his strait, wood-scantled office pent,
No longer Brown reverses Smith's appeals,
Or Jones records his Minute of Dissent.

And One, long since a pillar of the Court,
As mud between the beams thereof is wrought;
And One who wrote on phosphates for the crops
Is subject-matter of his own Report.

These be the glorious ends whereto we pass --
Let Him who Is, go call on Him who Was;
And He shall see the mallie steals the slab
For currie-grinder, and for goats the grass.

A breath of wind, a Border bullet's flight,
A draught of water, or a horse's firght --
The droning of the fat Sheristadar
Ceases, the punkah stops, and falls the night

For you or Me. Do those who live decline
The step that offers, or their work resign?
Trust me, To-day's Most Indispensables,
Five hundred men can take your place or mine.

Rudyard Kipling, The Last Department

Works Cited

"It seems to me," said Sancho, "that the knights who did these things were provoked and had a reason to do senseless things and penances; but what reason does your grace have for going crazy? What lady has scorned you, and what signs have you found to tell you that my lady Dulcinea of Toboso has done anything foolish with Moor or Christian?"

"Therein lies the virtue," responded Don Quixote, "and the excellence of my enterprise, for a knight errant deserves neither glory nor thanks if he goes mad for a reason. The great achievement is to lose one's reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause?"

Cervantes, Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman.

Works Cited

Like the Druzes, like the moon, like death, like next week, the distant past is one of those things that can enrich ignorance. It is infinitely malleable and agreeable, far more obliging than the future and far less demanding of our efforts. It is the famous season favored by all mythologies.

Who has not, at one point or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, like the songs of Mendelssohn. The magazine Crisol, in its issue of January 30, decided to gratify my retrospective hope; it speaks of my "Jewish ancestry, maliciously hidden" (the participle and the adverb amaze and delight me)...

Two hundred years and I can't find the Israelite; two hundred years and my ancestor still eludes me.

I am grateful for the stimulus provided by Crisol, but hope is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link to the Table of Breads and the Sea of Bronze; to Hein, Gleizer, and the ten Sefiroth; to Ecclesiastes and Chaplin.


Jorge Luis Borges, I, a Jew

Works Cited

Before his blindness, Borges was so shy that, on the few occasions when he was asked to lecture, he sat on the stage while someone else read the text...

Readers will immediately notice that the same phrases, sentences, paragraphs and on occasion, pages recur throughout the book. The first reaction may well be that Borges, who was earning his living by writing hundreds of articles for diverse publications, was merely cutting corners by repeating himself. This is quite clearly not the case... Borges nearly always uses the same sentence to make a different point, or as a bridge between points C and D that are not the points A and B that were linked the last time the sentence was used. The repetitions are part of his lifelong fascination with the new way old elements can be reassembled, by chance or design to create new variations, something entirely different, or something that is exactly the same but now somehow different.

Eliot Weinberg, Preface to Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions

Works Cited

Of course it may be objected that Wellington himself was Irish, but a patriotic English pen does not stoop to answer such quibbling.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Works Cited

It must be said, however, that Sir William Pole's patronage was a somewhat mixed blessing. Though liberal in his praise and always courteous and condescending to the shop-people, he was scarcely ever known to pay a bill and when he died, the amount of money owing to Brandy's was considerable. Mr Brandy, a short-tempered, pinch-faced, cross little old man, was beside himself with rage about it. He died shortly afterwards, and was presumed by many people to have done so on purpose and to have gone in pursuit of his noble debtor.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Works Cited

Almost twenty years ago, Carl Hempel posed a dilemma for those attempting to define the physical in reference to microphysics. On the one hand, it seems that we cannot define the physical in terms of current microphysics since today's principles of microphysics are, most likely, not correct. Despite some physicists' heady optimism that the end of physics is just around the corner, history cautions prudence... Yet on the other hand, if we take microphysics to be some future unspecified theory, the claim that the mind is physical is extremely vague since we currently have no idea of what that theory is. Geoffrey Hellman sums up this dilemma nicely: "either physicalist principles are based on current physics, in which case there is every reason to think they are false; or else they are not, in which case it is, at best, difficult to interpret them, since they are based on a 'physics' that does not exist." Faced with this dilemma, what is a physicalist to do?


Barbara Montero, "The Body Problem"

Works Cited

The books were the ghosts--or maybe the avatars--of what had been destroyed.

They made sounds, groaning, hissing, whispering. Conspiring. Deep in the alleyways, some of the books were in chains.

"Gotta watch out for Das Kapital," said Rivera.

______________________________________


There had been a few debacles in the late teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or Zones of Thought?


Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End

Works Cited

He looked down at the book in his hand. Kipling. Damned jingoistic elevator music. But it's a start.

Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End

Works Cited

Notice a general tendency in philosophy: When working in one area, we feel free to presuppose positions in other areas that are (at best) highly controversial among practitioners in those areas. To take a limiting example, philosophers nearly everywhere outside epistemology presuppose that we have some knowledge of the external world. If we do have it—as I too presume we do—epistemology has delivered not one tenable account of how that can be so. (Except possibly my own; see my etc.)

William J. Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due

Available here.

Works Cited

You keep running your mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you.

Big talk.

Just keep it up.

That's what she said.


Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Works Cited

When they rode out of the hollow both Rincewind and Twoflower were sharing a horse with one of their captors. Rincewind perched uncomfortably in front of Weems, who had sprained an ankle and was not in a good mood. Twoflower sat in front of Herrena which, since he was fairly short, meant that at least he kept his ears warm.

Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

Works Cited

To analyze consciousness in terms of some functional notion is either to change the subject or to define away the problem. One might as well define "world peace" as "a ham sandwich." Achieving world peace becomes much easier, but it is a hollow achievement.

David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind

Works Cited

An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A'Tuin [the turtle upon which Discworld rests] was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.

Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

Works Cited

Arguments for materialism are few. Tyler Burge and others have maintained that the naturalistic picture of the world is more like a political or religious ideology than like a position well supported by evidence, and that materialism is an article of faith based on the worship of science.<4> That is an overstatement. But Ryle (to start with) gave no argument that I can recall for materialism per se; he only inveighed against the particularly Cartesian “dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” Ullin Place, founder of the Identity Theory, gave none; he was originally a Behaviorist who bravely and honestly acknowledged that introspectible occurrent sensations were a problem for Behaviorism and, while making an exception for them, tried to account for them within the materialist framework, but without defending the need to do so.

J..J.C. Smart was perhaps the first to offer reasons. First, he appealed to the scientific view of the world:


[S]ensations, states of consciousness,…seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just cannot believe that this can be so…. That everything should be explicable in terms of physics…except the occurrence of sensations seems to me frankly unbelievable….

The above is largely a confession of faith…. (pp. 142-43)


Just so, and just so. I too simply refuse to believe in spookstuff or surds in nature. But this argumentum ad recuso credere is no argument at all; it is at best, in David Lewis’ famous phrase, an incredulous stare.

William J. Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due

Available here. I have omitted footnotes.

Breaking the Spell

Dennett's Dilemma -- to give it a name -- is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific)assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I wll surely agree on this point.

But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality, and the rest.

This is not the place to repeat the many arguments against naturalism. Suffice it to say that a very strong case can be brought against it, a case that renders its rejection reasonable. Dennett's reliance on it is thus dogmatic and uncompelling.

-William Vallicella


It's a fair point. Science comes with its own religioust trappings, valid or not, e.g., the constant chanting of falsifiability, or third-person verifiability. Dennett stresses that religion is unfairly protected from skepticism. Could be. But the scientific mythos and its philosophical underpinnings deserve just as much skepticism, if we're to be fair.

People advocating skepticism usually mean: "Express skepticism towards those things I don't believe in, but not towards those things I do believe in." Hence, if you doubt religion, you're a free-thinking bright, but if you doubt science, you're a ridiculous solipsist.

Works Cited

Far from being a breathtaking development, postmodernism is rather like the tinea vulgaris of legal academe. Years ago, athlete's foot was the scourge of involuntary but unselfish institutions: the military, the penitentiary. Now, one catches it by spending time in gyms, one variety of the many contemporary palaces of self-indulgence. It is not life threatening, nor even likely to affect the host's performance in crucial functions such as aerobics or weight training for the self-absorbed, education or legal decision-making for academics. It remains an annoying itch, isolated to the extremities, occasionally discomforting, not seriously harmful, but not likely to go away either.

M.B.W. Sinclair, POSTMODERN ARGUMENTATION: DECONSTRUCTING THE PRESIDENTIAL AGE LIMITATION

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The existence of a God meme is no better established than the existence of God.

H. Allen Orr, The God Project: What the Science of Religion Can't Prove, The New Yorker

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Another thing about PREACHER, and I'm damn sure not giving anyone who has read it a news flash: It's scary as a psychopathic greased gerbil with a miner's hat and a flashlight and your bare asshole in sight...

This stuff is unique. It's intriguing. It touches on a base level. Makes things crawl around in the viscera (Where is that gerbil with the flashlight anyway?) and the brain.


Joe. R. Lansdale, Foreword to Preacher

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The manner in which Arcesilaus taught would have had much to commend it, if the young men who learnt from him had been able to avoid being paralysed by it. He maintained no thesis, but would refute any thesis set up by a pupil. Sometimes he would himself advance two contradictory propositions on successive occasions, showing how to argue convincingly in favour of either.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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Pyrrho's disciple Timon, however, advanced some intellectual arguments which, from the standpoint of Greek logic, were very hard to answer. The only logic admitted by the Greeks was deductive, and all deduction had to start, like Euclid, from general principles regarded as self-evident. Timon denied the possibility of finding such principles. Everything, therefore, will have to be proved by means of something else, and all argument will be either circular or an endless chain hanging from nothing. In either case nothing can be proved.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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"Because my son or my wife is dead," says Teles, who was one of these popularizing Cynics, "is that any reason for my neglecting myself, who am still alive, and ceasing to look after my property?" At this point, it becomes difficult to feel any sympathy with the simple life, which has grown altogether too simple.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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When political power passed into the hands of the Macedonians, Greek philosophers, as was natural, turned aside from politics and devoted themselves more to the problem of individual virtue or salvation. They no longer asked: how can men create a good State? They asked instead: how can men be virtuous in a wicked world, or happy in a world of suffering?


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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There is in Euclid the contempt for practical utility which had been inculcated by Plato. It is said that a pupil, after listening to a demonstration, asked what he would gain by learning geometry, whereupon Euclid called a slave and said "Give the young man threepence, since he must needs make a gain out of what he learns." ... No one, in Greek times, supposed that conic sections had any utility; at least, in teh seventeenth century, Galileo discovered that projectiles move in parabolas, and Kepler discovered that planets move in eclipses. Suddenly the work that the Greeks had done from pure love of theory became the key to warfare and astronomy.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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If they are metaphysicians, they may hold, like Hegel, that whatever quality is good is an attribute of the universe as a whole; but they will generally add that it is less mistaken to attribute good to a State than to an individual... We can attribute to a State various predicates that cannot be attributed to its separate members--that it is populous, extensive, powerful, etc. The view we are considering puts ethical predicates in this class, and says that they only derivatively belong to individuals. A man may belong to a populous State, or to a good State; but he, they say, is no more good than he is populous. This view, which has been widely held by German philosophers, is not Aristotle's, except possibly, in some degree, in his conception of justice.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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There are two uses of a thing, one proper, the other improper [says Aristotle]; a shoe, for instance, may be worn, which is its proper use, or exchanged, which is its improper use. It follows that there is something degraded about a shoemaker, who must exchange his shoes in order to live. Retail trade, we are told, is not a natural part of the art of getting wealth. The natural way to get wealth is by skillful management of house and land... Wealth derived from trade is justly hated, because it is unnatural. "The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest... Of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural."

Medieval philosophers were churchmen, and the property of the Church was mainly in land; they therefore saw no reason to revise Aristotle's opinion. Their objection to usury was reinforced by Anti-Semitism, for most fluid capital was Jewish. Ecclesiastics and barons had their quarrels, sometimes very bitter; but they could combine against the wicked Jew who had tided them over a bad harvest by means of a loan, and considered that he deserved some reward for his thrift.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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The Aristotelian view, that the highest virtue is for the few, is logically connected with the subordination of ethics to politics. If the aim is the good community rather than the good individual, it is possible that the good community may be one in which there is subordination. In an orchestra, the first violin is more important than the oboe, though both are necessary for the excellence of the whole. It is impossible to organize an orchestra on the principle of giving each man what would be best for him as an isolated individual. The same sort of thing applies to the government of a large modern State, however democratic. A modern democracy--unlike those of antiquity--confers great power upon certain chosen individuals, Presidents or Prime Ministers, and must expect of them kinds of merit which are not expected of the ordinary citizen.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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A father can repudiate his son if he is wicked [says Aristotle], but a son cannot repudiate his father, because he owes him more than he can possibly repay, especially existence. In unequal relations, it is right, since everybody should be loved in proportion to his worth, that the inferior should love the superior more than the superior loves the inferior: wives, children, subjects, should have more love for husbands, parents, and monarchs than the latter have for them...

The best individual, as conceived by Aristotle, is a very different person from the Christian saint. He should have proper pride, and not underestimate his own merits. He should despise whoever deseerves to be despised. The description of the proud or magnanimous man is very interesting as showing the difference between pagan and Christian ethics, and the sense in which Nietzsche was justified in regarding Christianity as a slave-morality.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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The true elements of the material world, Timaeus says, are not earth, air, fire, and water, but two sorts of right-angled triangles, the one which is half a square and the one which is half an equilateral triangle... The above two sorts of triangles, we are told, are the most beautiful forms, and therefore God used them in constructing matter. By means of these two triangles, it is possible to construct four of the five regular solids, and each atom of one of the four elements is a regular solid. Atoms of earth are cubes; of fire, tetrahedra; of air, octahedra; and of water, icosahedra. (I shall come to the dodecahedron presently.)...

The regular tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron, have equilateral triangles for their faces; the dodecahedron has regular pentagons, and cannot therefore be constructed out of Plato's triangles. For this reason he does not use it in connection with the four elements.

As for the dodecahedron, Plato says only "there was yet a fifth combination which God used in the delineation of the universe." This is obscure, and suggests that the universe is a dodecahedron; but elsewhere it is said to be a sphere. The pentagram has always been prominent in magic... It seems that it owed is properties to the fact that the dodecahedron has pentagons for its faces, and is, in some sense, a symbol of the universe.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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These [Pythagorean] studies are not to be pursued in any utilitarian spirit, but in order to prepare [the young man's] mind for the vision of eternal things. In astronomy, for example, he is not to trouble himself too much about the actual heavenly bodies, but rather with the mathematics of the motion of ideal heavenly bodies. This may sound absurd to modern ears, but, strange to say, it proved to be a fruitful point of view in connection with empirical astronomy...

The apparent motions of the planets, until they have been very profoundly analysed, appear to be irregular and complicated, and not at all such as a Pythagorean Creator would have chosen... The problem thus arose: is there any hypothesis which will reduce the apparent disorderliness of planetary motions to order and beauty and simplicity?... Aristarchus of Samos found such a hypothesis: that all the planets, including the earth, go round the sun in circles. This view was rejected for two thousand years, party on the authority of Aristotle... It was revived by Copernicus, and its success might seem to justify Plato's aesthetic bias in astronomy. Unfortunately, however, Kepler discovered that the planets move in ellipses, not in circles, with sun at a focus, not at the centre; then Newton discovered that they do not move even in exact ellipses.


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the "vision of truth." It is not purely intellectual; it is not merely wisdom, but love of wisdom... Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth, or beauty, appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory...

This experience, I believe, is necessary to good creative work, but it is not sufficient; indeed the subjective certainty that it brings with it may be fatally misleading. William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."


Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

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[Pythagoras] founded a religion, of which the main tenets were the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans. His religion was embodied in a religious order, which, here and there, acquired control of the State and established a rule of the saints. But the unregenerate hankered after beans, and sooner or later rebelled.

Some of the rules of the Pythagorean order were:

1. To abstain from beans.
2. Not to pick up what has fallen.
3. Not to touch a white cock.
4. Not to break bread.
5. Not to step over a crossbar.
6. Not to stir the fire with iron.
7. Not to eat from a whole loaf.
8. Not to pluck a garland.
9. Not to sit on a quart measure.
10. Not to eat the heart.
11. Not to walk on highways.
12. Not to let swallows share one's roof.
13. When the pot is taken off the fire, not to leave the mark of it in the ashes, but to stir them together.
14. Do not look in a mirror beside a light.
15. When you rise from the bedclothes, roll them together and smooth out the impress of the body.

Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy

The News

Metro.

GIRL on cell phone: What? Where are you? Oh, one second. (Holds up cell phone)) Listen! My friend's at a Sting concert. Here, you can actually hear him performing.

SCOTT: Wow. Sting over the phone is better than Huey Lewis in person.

ANOTHER GIRL: You're terrible. (Punches me in the arm and gets off the Metro.)

FIRST GIRL: Did you know that girl?

SCOTT: No.

FIRST GIRL: She hit you really hard.

SCOTT: I guess she's a Huey Lewis fan.

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In the center of that open space, a bony woman in a threadbare garment was hunched over a dead plant.

Sword of Divine Fire's reaction was succinct: "Fuck!" The woman cringed as if he'd hit her with a bullwhip. Then: "What has happened to our potato?"


Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

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love's function is to fabricate unknownness

(known being wishless; but love, all of wishing)
though life's lived wrongsideout, sameness chokes oneness
truth is confused with fact, fish boast of fishing

and men are caught by worms (love may not care
if time totters, light droops, all measures bend
nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star
- dreads dying least; and less, that death should end)

how lucky lovers are (whose selves abide
under whatever shall discovered be)
whose ignorant each breathing dares to hide
more than most fabulous wisdom fears to see

(who laugh and cry) who dream, create and kill
while the whole moves; and every part stands still:


E.E.Cummings

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voices to voices, lip to lip
i swear (to noone everyone) constitutes
undying; or whatever this and that petal confutes . . .
to exist being a peculiar form of sleep

what's beyond logic happens beneath will;
nor can these moments be translated: i say
that even after April
by God there is no excuse for May

- bring forth your flowers and machinery: sculpture and prose
flowers guess and miss
machinery is the more accurate, yes
it delivers the goods, Heaven knows

(yet are we mindful, though not as yet awake,
of ourselves which shout and cling, being
for a little while and which easily break
in spite of the best overseeing)

i mean that the blond absence of any program
except last and always and first to live
makes unimportant what i and you believe;
not for philosophy does this rose give a damn . . .

bring on your fireworks, which are a mixed
splendor of piston and pistil; very well
provided an instant may be fixed
so that it will not rub, like any other pastel.

(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

each dream nascitur, is not made . . .)
why then to Hell with that: the other; this,
since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid.

E. E. Cummings

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The impulsive creator of "overgrown forests" of music might seem a more powerful and more important and more rugged fellow. Speaking for myself, I am bored with undisciplined talent. The intertwining vines and aimless vegetation that spring from careless genius are of little use to a world which suffers from obscurity, and not from too much clarity. Life is so short that no musician has the right to expect any appreciable number of people to devote any appreciable part of their listening lives to the wild free notes that dribble from his talent but casual fingers. A large number of musical compositions, a large number of grand operas and light operas, are too long, too carelessly put together, and fail for this reason. They are not above the heads of the public. They are just not worthy of the public because the creative artist involved has been too self-indulgent actually to finish off his job.

Oscar Hammerstein II

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Never will we know his fabulous head
where the eyes' apples slowly ripened. Yet
his torso glows: a candelabrum set
before his gaze which is pushed back and hid,

restrained and shining. Else the curving breast
could not thus blind you, nor through the soft turn
of the loins could this smile easily have passed
into the bright groins where the genitals burned.

Else stood this stone a fragment and defaced,
with lucent body from the shoulders falling,
too short, not gleaming like a lion's fell;

nor would this star have shaken the shackles off,
bursting with light, until there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rilke, Torso of an Archaic Apollo

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The sort of [ethical] non-naturalism that I find appealing is one that bears a very close structural parallel to certain non-reductionist theories in the philosophy of mind. According to these latter views, mental properties are not identical to physical ones; mental facts are not physical facts; but mental properties are realized by instantiations of physical properties. At least in worlds relevantly close to ours, there would be no mental life without the physical stuff that constitutes it.

For purposes of making a comparison with the ethical realm, there are three important features of this type of non-reductionist approach in the philosophy of mind: (1) it captures our convictions about the non-identity of mental and physical properties; (2) it is not ontologically extravagant; (3) it emphasizes a supervenience relation that obtains between the mental and the physical. Each of these three features has a natural correlate in the moral domain.

Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence

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For an extreme example, those neurons of the cerebellum known as Purkinje cells have about 80,000 excitatory synpatic endings.

__________________________

The second point is that, at least in my own opinion, parallel classical computation is very unlikely to hold the key to what is going on with our conscious thinking. A characteristic feature of conscious thought (at least when one is in a normal psychological state, and not the subject of a 'split-brain' operation!) is its 'oneness'--as opposed to a great many independent activities going on at once.

__________________________

Suppose that a photon arrives at the retina, having been previously reflected off a half-silvered mirror. Its state involves a complex linear superposition of its striking a retinal cell and of its not striking a retinal cell and instead, say, travelling out of the window into space. When the time is reached at which it might have struck the retina, and so long as the linear rule U of quantum theory holds true (i.e. deterministic Schroedinger state-vector evolution...), we can have a complex linear superposition of a nerve signal and not a nerve signal. While this impinges upon the subject's consciousness, only one of these two alternatives is perceived to take place, and the other quantum procedure R (state-vector reduction...) must have been effected... Thus, according to the viewpoint I have been putting forward, the procedure R could have been already effected well before we perceive the flash of light, or not, as the case may be. On this viewpoint, our consciousness is not needed in order to reduce the state-vector!

___________________________

...consider the ruthless process of natural selection. View this process in the light of the fact that, as we have seen in the last chapter, not all of the activity of the brain is directly accessible to consciousness. Indeed, the 'older' cerebellum--with its vast superiority in local density of neurons--seems to carry out very complex actions without consciousness being directly involved at all. Yet Nature has chosen to evolve sentient beings like ourselves, rather than to remain content with creatures that might carry on under the direction of totally unconscious control mechanisms. If consciousness serves no selective purpose, why did Nature go to the trouble to evolve conscious brains when non-sentient 'automaton' brains like cerebella would seem to have done just as well?

...why should natural selection bother to favour such a race of individuals, when surely the relentless free market of the jungle should have rooted out such useless nonsense long ago!

___________________________

One view that I have heard expressed is that awareness might be of an advantage to a predator in trying to guess what its prey would be likely to do next by 'putting itself in the place' of that prey. By imagining itself to be the prey, it could gain an advantage over it.

It may well be that there is some partial truth in this idea, but I am left very uneasy by it. In the first place, it supposes some pre-existing consciousness on the part of the prey itself, for it would hardly be helpful to imagine oneself to 'be' an automaton, since an automaton--by definition unconscious--is not something that is possible to 'be' at all!...

The idea alluded to above seems to relate to a point of view about consciousness that one often hears put forward, namely that a system would be 'aware' of something if it has a model of that thing within itself, and that it becomes 'self-aware when it has a model of itself within itself... Despite the claims that seem to be frequently made, the real issues concerning awareness and self-awareness are, in my opinion, hardly being touched by considerations of this kind. A video-camera has no awareness of the scenes it is recording: nor does a video-camera aimed at a mirror possess self-awareness.

_____________________________

It has, indeed, been an underlying theme of the earlier chapters that there seems to be something non-algorithmic about our conscious thinking. In particular, a conclusion from the argument in Chapter 4, particularly concerning Goedel's theorem, was that, at least in mathematics, conscious contemplation can sometimes enable one to ascertain the truth of a statement in a way that no algorithm could... Indeed, algorithms, in themselves, never ascertain truth! It would be as easy to make an algorithm produce nothing but falsehoods as it would be to make it produce truths. One needs external insights in order to decide the validity or otherwise of an algorithm... I am putting forward the argument here that it is this ability to divine (or 'intuit') truth from falsity (and beauty from ugliness!), in appropriate circumstances that is the hallmark of consciousness.

______________________________

Why do I say that the hallmark of consciousness is a non-algorithmic forming of judgements? Part of the reason comes from my experiences as a mathematician. I simply do not trust my unconscious algorithmic actions when they are inadequately paid attention to by my awareness. Often there is nothing wrong with the algorithm as an algorithm, in some calculation that is being performed, but is it the right algorithm to choose, for the problem in hand?

______________________________

One may start from some axioms, from which are to be derived various mathematical propositions. The latter procedure may indeed be algorithmic, but some judgement needs to be made by a conscious mathematician to decide whether the axioms are appropriate.

______________________________

To my way of thinking, there is still something mysterious about evolution, with its apparent 'groping' towards some future purpose. Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind-chance evolution and natural selection. It may well be that such appearances are quite deceptive. There seems to be something about the way that the laws of physics work, which allows natural selection to be a much more effective process than it would be with just arbitrary laws.

______________________________

We must first consider the possibility that different mathematicians use inequivalent algorithms to decide truth. However, it is one of the most striking features of mathematics (perhaps almost alone among the disciplines) that the truth of propositions can actually be settled by abstract argument! A mathematical argument that convinces one mathematician--providing that is contains no error--will also convince another, as soon as the argument has been fully grasped. This also applies to the Goedel-type propositions.

_______________________________

Poincaré describes, first, how he had intensive period of deliberate, conscious effort in his search for what he called Fuchsian functions, but he had reached an impasse. Then:

"...I left Caen... The incidents of the travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea: I should not have had time, as upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for convenience sake, I verified the result at my leisure."

___________________________

Aesthetics in the arts is a sophisticated subject, and philosophers have devoted lifetimes to its study. It could be argued that in mathematics and the sciences, such criteria are merely incidental, the criterion of truth being paramount. However, it seems to be impossible to separate one from the other when one considers the issues of inspiration and insight. My impression is that the strong conviction of the validity of a flash of inspiration (not 100 per cent reliable, I should add, but at least far more reliable than just chance) is very closely bound up with its aesthetic qualities. A beautiful idea has a much greater chance of being a correct idea than an ugly one.

___________________________

A striking example is given vividly by Mozart:

"When I feel well and in a good humor, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish. Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it. Those which please me I keep in my head and hum them; at least others have told me that I do so. Once I have my theme, another melody comes, linking itself with the first one, in accordance with the needs of the composition as a whole: the counterpoint, the part of each instrument and all the melodic fragments at last produce the complete work. Then my soul is on fire with inspiration."

____________________________

To speak of 'Plato's world' at all, one is assigning some kind of reality to it which is in some way comparable to the reality of the physical world. On the other hand, the reality of the physical world itself seems more nebulous than it had seemed to be before the advent of the SUPERB theories of relativity and quantum mechanics... The very precision of these theories has provided an almost abstract mathematical existence for actual physical reality. Is this in any way a paradox? How can concrete reality become abstract and mathematical? This is perhaps the other side of the coin to the question of how abstract mathematical concepts can achieve an almost concrete reality in Plato's world.

___________________________

Of course mathematicians sometimes make mistakes. It seems that Turing himself believed that this was where the 'loophole' to the Goedel-type arguments against human thinking being algorithmic lay. But it seems unlikely to me that human fallibility is the key to human insight!

___________________________

It seems to me that the fact that animals require sleep in which they appear sometimes to dream (as is often noticeable with dogs) is evidence that they can possess consciousness. For an element of consciousness seems to be an important ingredient of the distinction between dreaming and non-dreaming sleep.

Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind

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It seems, also, that the various observers' aesthetic judgements might well get involved in what they deem to be 'order', rather than 'disorder'. We could imagine some artist taking the view that the collection of shattered glass fragments was far more beautifully ordered than was the hideously ugly glass that once stood on the edge of the table! Would entropy have actually been reduced in the judgement of such an artistically sensitive observer?

In view of these problems of subjectivity, it is remarkable that the concept of entropy is useful at all in precise scientific descriptions--which it certainly is! The reason for this utility is that the changes from order to disorder in a system, in terms of detailed particle positions and velocities, are utterly enormous, and (in almost all circumstances) will completely swamp any reasonable differences of viewpoint as to what is or is not 'manifest order' on the macroscopic scale.

_________________________

This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full, in the ordinary denary notation: it would be '1' followed by 10^123 successive '0's! Even if we were to write a '0' on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe--and we could throw in all the other particles for good measure--we should fall far short of writing down the figure needed.

_________________________

If the photo-cell indeed registers, then it is virtually certain that the photon came from the lamp and not from the laboratory wall! In the case of our time-reversed question, the quantum-mechanical calculation has given us completely the wrong answer!

The implication of this is that the rules for the R part of quantum mechanics simply cannot be used for such reversed-time questions.


Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind

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One day, Churchill entered a men's room in the House of Commons and noticed Attlee at a urinal. Without saying anything, Churchill chose a urinal at the opposite side of the room. When Attlee took notice of Churchill, he said, "Feeling a bit standoffish today, Winston?" Churchill, who may have been waiting for this moment for years, replied: "That's right, Clement. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it."

Marcus Grothe, Viva la Repartee

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By some miraculous insight Plato seems to have foreseen, on the basis of what must have been very sparse evidence indeed at that time that: on the one hand, mathematics must be studied and understood for its own sake, and one must not demand completely accurate applicability to the objects of physical experience; on the other hand, the workings of the actual external world can ultimately be understood only in the terms of precise mathematics--which means in terms of Plato's ideal world 'accessible via the intellect'!

___________________________

It is a striking fact that all the established departures from the Newtonian picture have been, in some fundamental way, associated with the behaviour of light... It is reasonable to speculate that Newton himself would have been ready to accept that deep problems for his picture of the world lay hidden in the mysterious behaviour of light.

Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind

Works Cited

["]But, Warren, please remember how it is:
He’s come to help you ditch the meadow.
He has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him.
He may not speak of it, and then he may.
I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud
Will hit or miss the moon."

It hit the moon.
Then there were three there, making a dim row,
The moon, the little silver cloud, and she.

Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man

Works Cited

Why then is there so much confidence in these numbers for the accurate description of physics, when our initial experience of the relevance of such numbers lies in a comparatively limited rage? This confidence--perhaps misplaced--must rest (although this fact is not often recognized) on the logical elegance, consistency, and mathematical power of the real number system, together with a belief in the profound mathematical harmony of Nature.

_____________

How 'real' are the objects of the mathematician's world? From one point of view it seems that there can be nothing real about them at all. Mathematical objects are just concepts; they are the mental idealizations that mathematicians make, often stimulated by the appearance and seeming order of aspects of the world about us, but mental idealizations nevertheless. Can they be other than mere arbitrary constructions of the human mind? At the same time there often does appear to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided towards some external truth--a truth which has a reality of its own, and which is revealed only partially to any one of us.

Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind

Works Cited

10. A Prayer in Spring


OH, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.

Robert Frost, A Boy's Will

Works Cited

In his memoir of the Sixties, Radical Son (1997), David Horowitz says that when a friend found out that Horowitz had never taken LSD, he said, "You have to take LSD. Until you've dropped acid, you don't know what socialism is."

Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art

Works Cited

At first glance it would seem that contemporary society in the West suffers mainly from a lack of politeness... Reviewing a contemporary memoir, a critic in an English newspaper said: "Frey [the author] can really write. Brilliantly. And if you don't think so, f*** you."

______________________

In the mid-twentieth century many writers--among them Jean-Paul Sartre and Mary McCarthy--praised neo-Spartan regimes (China and North Vietnam) but preferred to live in Neo-Athenian regimes.

______________________

Addison and Steele refer to many fictitious clubs. There is the Widow-Club, where the conversation "often turns upon their former Husbands, and it is very diverting to hear them relate their several Arts and Stratagems, with which they amused the Jealous, pacified the Cholerick, or wheedled the Good-natured Man, 'till at last, to use the Club-phrase, They sent him out of House with his Heels foremost." There is the Lawyers Club, whose members discuss "several Ways of abusing their Clients, with the Applause... given to him who has done it most Artfully."

______________________

When the Earl once said to Wilkes: "You will die, sir, either on the gallows or from the pox," Wilkes replied: "That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

______________________

In Ben Jonson's Epicene (1609), a fatuous windbag and lecher named Sir Amorous La Foole brags of his French ancestry. Listening to his blather, another character says: "Did you ever hear such a wind-fucker as this?"

______________________

After implying that the Apostles often were pompous bores, Woolf says their conversation improved immeasurably as a result of a peculiar incident, though she jokingly says that she may have invented the incident... "Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold... He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa's white dress. 'Semen?' he said." The word changed things utterly, Woolf says. "We burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us."

______________________

Washington is a city of conversation because there is "a social indifference to the vulgar vociferous Market... Nobody was in 'business'--that was the sum and substance of it; and for the one large human assemblage on the continent of which this was true the difference made was huge."

...Going to Washington, he says, makes one "forget an hour the colossal greed of New York." Yet James may not have been as enamored of Washington as he claimed. Writing to Mrs. William James, he confesses: "to live here would be death and madness."

Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art

Works Cited

I have met many intellectuals whose conversation was bad for my mind: Marxists, existentialists, postmodernists. A Marxist colleague at the National Enquirer, where I worked for several months in the mid-1960s, never stopped ranting about the evils of "the System." (He had a Ph.D. in history.) A colleague at a Washington think tank, where I worked in the mid-1970s, talked continually about the negative effects of modernity. (He had a Ph.D. in philosophy.) If I hear someone say modernity or dialectical or existential or psychoanalytical, I can no longer pay attention, for I am thinking--perhaps unfairly--that this person is going to bore me to death.

Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art

Works Cited

I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as, in a way, against each other we are pitting them,

And that is, don't bother your head about the sins of commission because however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn't be committing them.

It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,

That lays eggs under your skin.

The way you really get painfully bitten

Is by the insurance you haven't taken out and the checks you haven't added up the stubs of and the appointments you haven't kept and the bills you haven't paid and the letters you haven't written.

Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,

Namely, it isn't as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every time you neglected to do your duty;

You didn't get a wicked forbidden thrill

Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;

You didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,

Let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round of unwritten letters is on me.

No, you never get any fun

Out of things you haven't done,

But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,

Because the suitable things you didn't do give you a lot more trouble than the unsuitable things you did.

The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of sin you must be pursuing,

Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

Ogden Nash, Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man

Works Cited

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

Millay

Works Cited

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feeble-minded.

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

Works Cited

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Frost, Reluctance

Works Cited

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve--
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless good fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

Mary Oliver, The Black Snake

Works Cited

May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

Robert Frost, Birches

Works Cited

Those who think that they have had religious experiences of their own have to judge for themselves the quality of that experience. But the great majority of the adherents to the world's religions are relying not on religious experience of their own but on revelations that were supposedly experienced by others. It might be thought that this is not so different from the theoretical physicist relying on the experiments of other, but there is an important distinction. The insights of thousands of individual physicists have converged to a satisfying (though incomplete) common understanding of physical reality. In contrast, the statements about God or anything else that have been derived from religious revelation point in radically different directions. After thousands of years of theological analysis, we are no closer now to a common understanding of the lessons of religious revelation.

Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

Works Cited

A firm whose behavior was consistent with a myopic pricing strategy [a strategy involving maximizing current profit even if it results in strengthening competitors in the long run] was the Reynolds International Pen Corporation. Reynolds was one of the inventors of the ballpoint pen. Starting in 1945, it sold its ballpoint pen for between $12 and $20, while unit cost was only 80 cents. In response to this high price, a hundred competitors rushed into the market. By 1948, Reynold's market share was zero! However, it made off with considerable profits over that three-year period.

W. Kip Viscusi, et al Economics of Regulation and Antitrust

The Last Question

Jacob linked to this Asimov story. I enjoyed it.

Works Cited

The working of the emotional mind is to a large degree state-specific, dictated by the particular feeling ascendant at a given moment. How we think and act when we are feeling romantic is entirely different from how we behave when enraged or dejected; in the mechanics of emotion, each feeling has its own distinct repertoire of thought, reactions, even memories. These state-specific repertoires become most predominant in moments of intense emotion.

One sign that such a repertoire is active is selective memory. Part of the mind's response to an emotional situation is to reshuffle memory and options for action so that those most relevant are at the top of the hierarchy and so more readily enacted. And, as we have seen, each major emotion has its hallmark biological signature, a pattern of sweeping changes that entrain the body as that emotion becomes ascendant, and a unique set of cues the body automatically sends out when in its grip.


Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence

Works Cited

A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

...

If there must be a head, why the man? Well, firstly, is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman? As I have said, I am not married myself, but as far as 1 can see, even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door. She is much more likely to say "Poor Mr. X! Why he allows that appalling woman to boss him about the way she does is more than I can imagine." I do not think she is even very nattered if anyone mentions the fact of her own "headship." There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the husbands whom they rule. But there is also another reason; and here I speak quite frankly as a bachelor, because it is a reason you can see from outside even better than from inside. The relations of the family to the outer world--what might be called its foreign policy--must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or, if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?

...

War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semipacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage--a kind of gaity and wholeheartedness.

...

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want "to spend eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.

...

But to point out that I, who use Whitesmile's (and also have inherited bad teeth from both my parents), have not got as fine a set as some healthy young Negro who never used toothpaste at all, does not, by itself, prove that the advertisements are untrue.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Works Cited

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no "swank" or "side," no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls "busybodies."

If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, "advanced," but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned-perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Works Cited

The law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the [second World W]ar were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Works Cited: Cryptonomicon

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo--which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

...

This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell n a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators.

...

Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit... No one took it personally. Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't being told that they were wrong that offended them, though--it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything.

...

"Just kill the one with the sword first."

"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe’s direction. "Smarrrt —you target them because they’re the officers, right?"

"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill ’em because they’ve got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?"

...

The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.

...

. . . free of governmental interference. Randy can’t believe he’s hearing this. If the sultan was a scruffy hacker talking to a room full of crypto anarchists, that’d be one thing. But the sultan is a government, for god’s sake, and the room is full of card-carrying Establishment types.

...

Pesky untermenschen! They’ve really gone and done it now! It won’t be twenty-four hours before the milchcow is located and sunk by the Allies. There is a good chance that a few U-boats will be hounded to their deaths as part of the bargain. That is not a good way to die—being chased across the ocean for several days, suffering the death of a thousand cuts from strafings and bombings. Stuff like this really drives home, to the common ordinary Obertorpedomaat, the wisdom of the Führer’s plan to go out and find all of the people who aren’t Germans and kill them.

Meanwhile, our basic Kapitänleutnant has got to be asking himself: what the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean?

You could probably work it out, given the right data:

Nn = number of Negroes per square kilometer

Nm = number of milchcows

Aa =Area of the Atlantic Ocean

. . . and so on. But wait a sec, neither Negroes nor milchcows are randomly distributed, so the calculation becomes immensely more complicated. Far too complicated for a Kapitänleutnant to mess around with, especially when he’s busy trying to effect a dramatic reduction in Nn.

...

Waterhouse gets there late—that transportation thing again. All the gasoline is being used to hurl enormous bombers through the atmosphere so that high explosives can be showered on Nips. Moving the wad of flesh called Waterhouse across Brisbane so he can try to deflower a maiden is way down the priority list.

Neal Stephenson