bloggable bits

[rax]

Random things:

• This morning Krinn convinced me not to write a mail client with the most effective threat I have ever had made to me. (Recently our office mail server upgraded, and while in theory getting new webmail and access to Apple Mail and Outlook 2012 should make things better, each of those three clients has some critical flaw I can't chase down that makes me have to run a minimum of two of them at all times. I now understand why people write mail clients.) She said: "If you try to write a mail client, all of your Shaymins will stop smiling." I think I actually gasped. The image is SO SAD. Good work, Krinn. <3
• I dreamt last night about being part of a band that did abstract process-as-performance shows where we dragged beanbag chairs on stage and had shitty rehearsals at various venues. It was awesome. I think the other members of the band were punk kids from our Pokemon league and from Albuquerque's. If no one has done this schtick yet, someone should. *finger on nose*
• rushthatspeaks 's blog (and in particular this book review) got me thinking about generation ships --- which, if I understand correctly, are giant spaeships meant to serve as a habitat for many generations of human as they go off to colonize some new planet. I mean, I have never actually read a book or really consumed any media that used generation ships, because I'm a very sporadic consumer of science fiction, but the idea in and of itself makes sense and has some plausibility benefits over AND THEN THEY WOKE UP FROM CRYOSTASIS ON "EARTH, BUT WITH CAT PEOPLE" or what have you. What it did get me thinking about was Lyotard's essay "Can Thought Go On Without A Body?," which I am pretty sure is in The Inhuman. He talks about the difficulty of producing machines capable of thought, with the idea of sending them outside of the sphere of influence of the sun so that  thought will persist after the sun explodes/implodes/whatever. The reason he thinks it wouldn't work is that machines don't have gender --- that is, some difference between some fo them that has an almost religious inscrutability and implies the imbrication of the other with the self. Or something, I'm butchering his argument. The point is, if I take that argument at face value, I actually think generation ships could be the cure for gender, if that inscrutable difference as expressed in the people on the generation ship was the difference between the people who did and didn't stay on Earth. Maybe? I dunno. Been chewing on it, figured I'd share. (Also: Does gender need a cure? "Curing gender" is not unproblematic, but boy are there some interesting thought experiments and maybe stories in here. Haha. "Boy." GENDER WHY)
• It turns out I can make fairly spicy lentil curry by just milling good black pepper into it until my arms are tired and then asking someone else to do the same. :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D I have been trying and failing to make reasonable curry since losing nightshades from my diet, and apparently the trick was to start from an Ethiopian recipe and modify, rather than starting from an Indian one? Once I've got it at "I know what I'm doing" I will post a recipe or something.
• I hate to do anything that even comes off as complaining about weather when I know a number of my friends are still stuck under snowdrifts, but on Sunday Rik and I walked for five miles or so and it was cold enough with the wind that my legs were covered in hives. Stupid cold allergy, and arguably, stupid me for walking five miles in shorts in February. It seems mostly better although my calves are still itchy as all get out, and while this is mostly not a huge deal I scratch in my sleep. :( I think as fashion disastery as this is, the best solution I have without spending money might be shorts, leg warmers, and sandals. ... ... ... how does one go about selecting good hiking pants? I don't know how to garment.
• There's still a long-form life update email... coming... soon... ish? Hope y'all are doing well!

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

That reasoning seems to me to be based on a highly anthropocentric view of sentience and sapience

That was pretty much my reaction too; I find the notion of gender as a distinction that comes with inherent inscrutability both implausible given my experience of humans and dangerous in the directions of essentialism it could be claimed to support.

The setting I am currently primarily writing in has medical tech such that a full somatic sex-change is a matter of spending thirty-six hours unconscious in a regen tank; one of the incidentals arising from that is a subculture of people whose gender identity is "we change every few weeks". This has not come into focus yet as it needs a lot more mulling on my behalf; my protagonist's sweetie belongs to that culture, but my protagonist is also rather firm that her love life is not generally the business of the people for whom she's writing. (I have a strong and abiding antipathy for first-person narratives that do not make sense as anything the person in question would plausibly actually write down.)

[rax.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree with you, but to devil's advocate, I think that it's reasonable to say that human thought as we experience it now is pretty tightly linked to gender and sexual difference. I guess "reasonable to say" is different from "unquestionably true" and that difference is important, but exploring things through that lens feels useful.

Are these folks changing gender identity at the same time as they're changing their bodies? That's actually very surprising to me; maybe I misunderstand.

[kelkyag]

If I'm reading correctly, the characters in question are claiming the mutability as their gender identity.

Losing a weekend a month to a voluntary medical procedure sounds like an awful lot of lost time, to me. And probably very expensive.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

You are reading correctly. I am intrigued by the notion of new forms of identity as enabled by new technology - by analogy to wondering how, say, people for whom being drawn to rubber is an important part of their sexuality could have coped in a time before rubber existed.

The setting is post-scarcity*, expense is not an issue; the time investment of a weekend a month is worth it to some people, and it's not as if anyone in the setting has to work, unless they effectively have a vocation. One of the underlying influences here is putting the boot into the appallingly poor Star Trek depiction of supposedly post-scarcity society and its influence; to an extent the books are spiritual cousins of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels in that regard.

*The core of it is, anyway. As ever, the places one gets interesting story-shaped conflicts are around the edges where it's bumping into people who do things differently.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

Lyotard's title mentions thought, but doesn't clarify it as human thought, which seems a little off. I mean, if you're assuming you have machines that think, why assume they think like humans? Humans are notoriously bad at thinking.

I guess part of the point of making machines like that is to have more "us" to fill the galaxy with, rather than making something totally different, and so it would be useful to have something to say to them, and to expect them to say to us. A commonality of thought that would at least support the mutual delusion of shared experience. But of course, if we're creating them to be like us, why not make them gendered? "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." and all that?

How much do people who theorize about thinking machines (e.g. Lyotard, I assume others (I R not theorist)) converse with the people actually attempting to build thinking machines (e.g. AI researchers, cognition and neurobio researchers, psychologists)?

Wouldn't the difference between introspective and extrospective capability be enough cause that perception of an other with whom one can have some form of intellectual overlap and exchange? That is, I can "see" into myself, and to some extent see and imagine my own exterior. I can't really see "into" you, but I can observe similarities in our exteriors that lead me to conclude that we have some shared interior aspects as well.

The Culture novels by Ian Banks also have members who can change sex, at will. If they do it by triggering a biological shift, it is a pretty gradual process, taking a year or so (although it could be done faster by copying the person's mind into a different-gendered artifical body). Some parts of the Culture regard only ever having been one sex as a little immature or narrow, sort of like never leaving the town you grew up in. I'm not sure how or if they change gender identity as well, but considering that some members of the culture chose to be robots (gendered or not), utility fogs, bird people, etc., I think it is a matter of personal preference, and the Culture likely makes less of a big deal of it than our culture. It is kind of a world where most people don't even have 0-th world problems (e.g. death, boredom, inconvenience, etc.) unless they go looking for them. Banks has pointed out that a novel set entirely in the Culture would be more a comedy of manners than a space opera, and the Culture novels are generally space opera, so the matter isn't handled in any super-heavy depth.

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

How much do people who theorize about thinking machines (e.g. Lyotard, I assume others (I R not theorist)) converse with the people actually attempting to build thinking machines (e.g. AI researchers, cognition and neurobio researchers, psychologists)?

In my experience in a couple of subsets of the latter category...not very much. Though I suspect they're more likely to talk to professors and the like than grad students like myself. And it might happen more with the cognition people. I know Tufts has some cross-talk between the philosophy and cog sci folks, but I don't know any details.

To the extent that it happens, it seems like it's mostly philosopher types talking to a handful of really theoretical AI people who are quasi-philosophers in their own right (e.g. Minsky), with most of the people who do AI and neurobio research not paying that much attention. I mean, I've read some stuff on embodied cog sci written by theory-focused AI researchers, and it was very interesting, but when I read about Lyotard or other famous philosophers, I have trouble concentrating on the words because they are full of jargon that I do not understand or am guessing the meaning of.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree with you, but to devil's advocate, I think that it's reasonable to say that human thought as we experience it now is pretty tightly linked to gender and sexual difference.

I think that would be very arguable, and while my experience suggests that any inherent systemic effect on modes of thinking based on gender/sexual difference is negligible compared to, and swamped by, other differences between individuals, it seems entirely likely that my preferences in terms of the people I tend to get on with are introducing severe sample bias.

I guess "reasonable to say" is different from "unquestionably true" and that difference is important, but exploring things through that lens feels useful.

No argument there.

Are these folks changing gender identity at the same time as they're changing their bodies?

I am inclined to think some of them think of themselves as doing so and some do not, and there may well be people with strong attachments to theoretical models inclining either way.

[anasai.livejournal.com]

I still can't understand this line of thought as anything but insane. In a world with only one gender, humans would cease to be capable of true thought? If a person does not experience thought tightly linked to gender and sexual difference, they do not think? Philosophy of thought at this level is basically thought experiments, and I personally can't construct any thought experiment where that makes any sense whatsoever. Surely there is a strong link between the way humans tend to think and their physical embodiment, which has some variation by sex, but that is an entirely different statement.