[FRIAM] rip Dennett

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Good analysis with some extra angles, thanks...   Card's 
conception/formulation is not unlike all of his, wonderfully (by some 
measure) clever and out-of-the-box whilst being derived from Card's own 
nature/embedding in the culture he was born/raised to.

I like your invocation of the "holographic" principle in this context, 
matching one of the uncountable aphorisms I've invoked here before: "I 
am who you think I think I am".   I like "dissipating wake" and "ambient 
goo" as well.   By some measure, we are all whatever mark we leave on 
the world (recognized or not)?

Some more mangled aphorisms designed for the macro but relevant to the 
micro?  "History is written by the Victors"; "History is whatever story 
we can all agree to"...

The only defense I can really mount to Card's "Speaker" conception is in 
contrast to the standard approach to a Eulogy. His idea of taking it 
seriously and making a profession of it, the implied respect a "full 
accounting" offers, as compared to a superficial recounting of the 
already-agreed-upon legendary achievements.

A good "wake" in some traditions does include a lot of blunt trashing of 
the departed...  I've witnessed some very well crafted compassionate 
disrespect or candid irreverence at funerals/wakes/informal gatherings 
after-the-fact.

I personally depend on the "amnesiac void" in spite of the fact that 
these interwebs with their globe-spanning (and radiating outward into 
the galactic void?) reach and (semi) permanent (semi-uncorruptable) 
record (e.g. FriAM Archives, the Internet Archive, Search Engine cache, 
LLM's galore...

I've recently become (yet more) aware of the equivalent of this from a 
century or more ago which was the saved personal correspondences of 
"persons of letters".  Mary just read (much of it out loud to me) "The 
Hemmingses of Monticello" chronicling the story of Jefferson's 
slave-concubine Sally Hemmings and her myriad relations including being 
Martha Jefferson's half-sister (being fathered through her slave mother 
by Martha's father)...   the author drew heavily on Jefferson's own 
correspondences and diaries as well as those of the Plantation itself, 
etc.   Anecdotally, plenty of such personal "letters" were destroyed 
along the way and many were (pre-digitization) buried in archives 
(seemingly) too large to explore exhaustively.  While focused on Sally 
and her siblings and children it also serves as a reasonable alternate 
view into Jefferson, including both damning and compassionate 
perspectives on his nature and circumstance and behaviour.

      <anecdotal divertisement/> I visited the LOC around 1993 when they
    were just ramping up on getting their contents digitized and
    online... it was a professional meeting on the topic of metadata and
    markup languages they were hosting, and they were quite proud of
    their (very limited) efforts at that time.  As I understand it, they
    are still working the problem. I also have a clandestine photo of an
    artifact from a skunkworks project by some colleagues souping up DLP
    projectors synced with high speed cameras to digitize books... a
    carefully calibrated jet of air at a near-tangent angle to the book
    pages would flip pages at high speed while the projector
    strobe-illuminated the page and a synced camera captured images...  
    I don't believe it was ever fielded.  This was circa 2011. </>


On 4/25/24 9:11 AM, glen wrote:
> Both Knox (who's back in Italian court) and Robinson are atheists, but 
> I guess practice Zen. This leads to an interesting inside vs outside 
> conception of who they "are". It strikes me that no amount of studying 
> a person (or, more accurately, the detritus they've left behind and 
> the dissipating wake their behavior dredged through the ambient goo) 
> can capture that duality. I feel this despite my arguments in favor of 
> a kind of holographic principle for behaviorism where whatever 
> information is inside must be encoded on the outside. Even if we buy 
> such a principle, perhaps including a kind of information loss through 
> radiation, the "studying" of the person would be biased by when the 
> studying occurs. A year that starts right after they die? A year that 
> starts according to a validated [pre|retro]diction algorithm so that 
> the studying is finished when they die? A temporally fenestrated study 
> that happens in little bursts over one's entire lifetime, but 
> cumulatively sums to a year?
>
> In the podcast episode, they publicly ask each other "how do you want 
> to die?" Robinson's waffle is interesting. Would a Zen person want to 
> die while in some mushin state?
>
> Back to Dennett, OS Card, Lovecraft, and all the wonderfully 
> productive people with an Evil facet: Skeptoid had a recent episode on 
> EMDR <https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4928>, where Dunning concludes it 
> has its roots in the thoroughly debunked neuro-linguistic programming 
> tradition. Yet it may accidentally have some clinical benefit. But 
> again, I'm skeptical of the skeptics. This rationalist *need* we have 
> for a fully grounded, trustworthy map from inside to outside, thoughts 
> to actions, mind to body, just feels like arrogance ... an unjustified 
> confidence in our own brain farts. People are complex enough that we 
> can harvest what we want, cafeteria style, and leave the rest to 
> disappear into the amnesiac void. We neither need nor want a 
> *complete* understanding of anyone or any thing.
>
> On 4/24/24 20:26, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I am lead by Glen's response to think of Orson Scott Card's "Speaker 
>> for the Dead" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_for_the_Dead>
>>
>>     In Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead," the main and 
>> titular theme revolves around understanding and compassion through 
>> the truthful telling of one's life. The novel introduces the concept 
>> of a "Speaker for the Dead," someone who tells the unvarnished story 
>> of a person's life at their death in a way that aims to present all 
>> aspects of the individual—their good and bad traits, their successes 
>> and failures—in a balanced and empathetic manner.
>>
>>     This role of the Speaker is designed to allow those who are left 
>> behind to truly understand the deceased, fostering forgiveness and a 
>> more profound comprehension of the complexities of human nature. This 
>> practice contrasts with traditional eulogies that often gloss over a 
>> person’s flaws or reduce their life to a series of highlights.
>>
>>     The theme extends to broader philosophical and ethical questions 
>> about how societies deal with truth and reconciliation, the nature of 
>> forgiveness, and the possibility of understanding different forms of 
>> life. This is particularly explored through the interaction between 
>> humans and the alien species called the Pequeninos on the planet 
>> Lusitania. The novel challenges characters and readers alike to 
>> consider the ways in which understanding and compassion can lead to 
>> healing and peace, even across the divides of culture and species.
>>
>>     "Speaker for the Dead" thus delves into the necessity and 
>> challenge of empathy, advocating for a more comprehensive and 
>> compassionate approach to understanding both the living and the dead. 
>> This thematic focus on empathy and understanding is what drives the 
>> narrative and the development of its characters.
>>
>> A spiritual woo-woo treatment might imply that a person's soul would 
>> not be fully free to "move on" until such a full accounting was done. 
>> In the book, the "Speaker" would spend a full year fully researching 
>> the person's life and relations to achieve this thorough/blunt eulogy 
>> on the anniversary of the Dead's passing... I don't remember how this 
>> was supported/funded but the idea moved me when I encountered it.
>>
>> On 4/24/24 8:26 PM, glen wrote:
>>
>>> I could only wish I'd be criticized this well when I die:
>>> "Dennett’s text is full of tirades wrought from petty grievances, is 
>>> disorganized to the point of being unreadable, and like the rest of 
>>> his books, will undoubtedly not have much influence."
>>> <https://jacobin.com/2024/04/daniel-dennett-social-darwinism-philosophy> 
>>>
>>>
>>> There's this fantastic podcast by Amanda Knox called Labyrinths 
>>> (https://antennapod.org/deeplink/subscribe/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.megaphone.fm%2FDONSN6255278021&title=Labyrinths+with+Amanda+Knox 
>>> <https://antennapod.org/deeplink/subscribe/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.megaphone.fm%2FDONSN6255278021&title=Labyrinths+with+Amanda+Knox>) 
>>> where one episode is about death and things like 'how you want to 
>>> die'. My best hope is that all the ppl who think I was a hack, or an 
>>> idiot, or whatever would gather to trash me. The milquetoast 
>>> accolades we present when a person dies are literally disgusting.
>
>
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