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<p>Glen -</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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)? <br>
</p>
<p>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"... <br>
</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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... <br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p> <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. </><br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/25/24 9:11 AM, glen wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:1a0b99f4-b108-4e24-8b9f-607477a99101@gmail.com">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?
<br>
<br>
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?
<br>
<br>
Back to Dennett, OS Card, Lovecraft, and all the wonderfully
productive people with an Evil facet: Skeptoid had a recent
episode on EMDR <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4928"><https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4928></a>, 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.
<br>
<br>
On 4/24/24 20:26, Steve Smith wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">I am lead by Glen's response to think of
Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead"
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_for_the_Dead"><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_for_the_Dead></a>
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
"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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
On 4/24/24 8:26 PM, glen wrote:
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">I could only wish I'd be criticized this
well when I die:
<br>
"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."
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="https://jacobin.com/2024/04/daniel-dennett-social-darwinism-philosophy"><https://jacobin.com/2024/04/daniel-dennett-social-darwinism-philosophy></a>
<br>
<br>
There's this fantastic podcast by Amanda Knox called
Labyrinths
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="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</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="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></a>)
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.
<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br>
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