Staying Alive (Or: On Becoming the Emperor of China)

Dana Parker sends us to Julian Baggini’s Staying Alive: The Personal Identity Game that presents three scenarios having to do with what constitutes self-identity. For example, in the first one, you have to decide whether you’d rather get to Mars by taking a risky space ship or via a teleporter that maps your atoms and rebuilds you on Mars. The entire game takes about five minutes to play, and it’s fascinating. Then you can read a brief and clear analysis of your results. (The site is presented by The Philosopher’s Magazine, which looks like an interesting compendium of ideas.)

It reminds of a thought experiment I used to present to students. (I don’t remember where I read it.) Suppose a genie tells you that you can become the emperor of China, with all the luxury and riches you could ever want, just by drinking a potion. You think this would be great and you’re all set to do it when the genie says, “Oh, there’s just one small catch. When you drink this potion, you’ll fall asleep and a few hours later you’ll wake up as the emperor … but you’ll have no memory of ever having been you.” Most students say they would drink the potion anyway. But then, demonstrating how much smarter you are than your poor little students, you ask: “Ok, then tell me the difference between (1) waking up as the emperor of China with no recollection of who you are today and (2) you dying and someone else very much like you becoming emperor.”

This, by the way, is also a pretty good argument against reincarnation. Reincarnation without memory is indistinguishable from death. Having a soul that gets recycled without memory is as satisfying as having a body that gets recycled.

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MiscLinks

Interesting new site: trustworthycomputing.com.

No, the link’s not broken. Think about it, chuckle once, move on.

Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, has a new site, Just One Thing. Every day, he has one short, pithy, useful and/or amusing entry. What a concept! Since Daniel is one of the most interesting people around, it works real well.

I’d say more, but I have another 150 entries to blog this morning.

Dave Rogers continues the bloghopping discussion of voice, preaching and marketing with a provocative entry.

I blogged my PC woes when my hard drive melted, eliciting the Macintosh user’s standard expression of sympathy, i.e., “Get a Mac, a-hole.” Dan Gillmor responds by pointing us to his blog entry on why running a Mac is no walk in the park, especially since the park is run by Windows PC’s armed with uzis.

And remember, kids, it was DanLight Savings Time a few days ago so now we all have to switch our links to Dan’s blog to the new URL his newspaper has forced him onto, for the newspaper apparently doesn’t understand that an URL isn’t merely an address, it’s a thread in a fabric. Pull on enough of the threads and the fabric starts to unravel…

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The Five Stages of Blogging

AKMA has written an amusingly accurate entry on “The Five Stages of Blogging.”

Blogging, phase one: writing as though no one would ever read what you put there…

His list reminds me of the day after a layoff when I was talking with one of my fellow survivors and noticed that on her white board she had written Kubler-Ross‘ five stages of grieving:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining with God
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

But one more had been added during an after-hours bull session about the layoffs:

6. Gloating

Oops, another secret out of the bag!

Note: AKMA says something nice about me in his piece. Thanks. But, fwiw, I actually didn’t see the “squib” until he linked to it in this very piece.

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Open Source Meaning of Life

Eric Olsen tells us about his project to discover the meaning of life in a post-9/11 world. This is being done in conjunction with a book called “America.com: On September 11” by Eric and Marty Thau. They’re going to use “computer communications as an organizing principle.” Eric says to participate in the meaning-of-life project:

1) jot down the meaning of life.
2) answer the following for demographic purposes:

a) gender
b) age
c) zip code or country
d) name (if you choose)

COPY 1 AND 2 ABOVE AND RETURN VIA EMAIL TO [email protected]

Eric assures us that all information will be kept completely private. The results will be compiled at a weblog that goes live on Feb. 12. The results may themselves be compiled into a book. Of course, if the book is successful and we learn from it, then they’ll have to write another book about meaning in a post Feb. 12th world.

Note: If “Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf” gets voted as the meaning of life, the entire species will have to have a time-out.

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Harry Potter: The Anti-Anti-Christ

From Gary “Father of Googlewhack but Still No Weblog” Stock comes this news flash:

OXFORD, Tuesday: A number of concerned British Harry Potter fans have spoken out against the Bible, claiming that the holy text of the Christian Church can cause serious damage to children. “Reading the Bible teaches children to believe in the supernatural,” said one English Literature academic from Oxford University, Lewis Williams. “The tales of Jesus turning water into wine are fairly harmless, but there is a serious risk of children drowning if they try to walk on water,” he said. “And the chance of serious bodily harm isn’t exactly minimised by that whole ‘resurrection-from-the-dead’ story either.”

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The Anals of Marketing

The Intel download search page reminds us

Search for a specific (full or partial) product name such as: ‘pro/100’, ‘mobile’, ‘pentium processor’. Do not include trademark symbols.

Ah, yes, to live in the Marketing Dreamworld where customers play “Simon Sez”: “Sorry about spraying you with mucus, but I was unable to accept your proffered Kleenex because you didn’t say ‘trademarked’ when you handed it to me.”

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Prehistoric Blogging

Gilbert Cattoire sends us to the Grapenotes site. There you can read the archive of stories written by Dr. Gräper, the nom de PLATO of David J. Graper, an undergrad at the University of Delaware in the late 1970s. PLATO was a mainframe-based network for delivering “interactive multimedia programs to students at a number of universities, government institutions, and corporate centers around the world,” according to the site. Because humans will form groups where we can, one of the first online communities created itself on PLATO. Dr. Gräper wrote a series of stories, essays and observations that achieved underground notoriety.

I’ve frankly had trouble getting engaged by what Dr. Gräper wrote, but, then, it’s not the 1970s, his writings aren’t being published in a semi-subversive way on a mainstream platform, I’m not a college student, and Richard Brautigan no longer seems like such a way cool author. But so what? Graper invented a type of weblogging appropriate to his medium. And that is cool.

[Gilbert heard about this site from David Wolley on whose site you can learn about conferencing tools and about PLATO.]

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Weblogging up the Email Escalator

Halley has a cool blog today about why blogging is important, reminding us that we (all of us) are inventing it as we go, and pointing out that the train we’re on is accelerating faster than it may seem from inside.

She points to Doc’s must-read musings about why we blog. He ties it to the urge and the need to talk with one another. Great stuff.

I want to point to one, far more trivial, point about weblogging. For me and apparently for lots of us, it’s turned into a way we escalate email. When an email exchange gets interesting, we go public (and permanent) with it by blogging it. Email no longer is a dead end. We have a new way of turning the private into the public.

Just one more example of how the Web evolves by discovering and then repairing every hole in connectivity. We’re stitching ourselves together. It’s how a social species becomes more than it is.

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MiscLink and Reply

In a roundelay of hypering hyperlinks, Dave Rogers, AKMA and I find ourselves talking about voice, marketing, preaching, teaching, designing web pages and “fearless speech.” I can’t even figure out who started what. But there’s some really cool stuff going back, forth and across Dave and AKMA’s blogs.

Tom blogs a thoughtful, incisive, and beautifully-written-as-usual review of Chris Locke’s Gonzo Marketing. I was particularly struck by the following:

The book’s prime argument is not easily pigeonholed, since it yokes two propositions that don’t have an immediate causal or other obvious relationship, creating an unusual conceptual tension. On the one hand, the corporate entity (any corporation) is informed that it must stop acting as though it were human – stop behaving as if it had a heart (and, by this logic, a mind, an imagination, a personhood); in virtually the same breath, the corporation is told it must assume a new responsibility to the larger world in which it conducts business. Business, then, must live up to an ethical standard even as an inventory of its anatomy finds none of the human attributes normally considered the wellsprings of ethical consciousness.

Why should a large corporation that has just been notified it has no conscience agree to act ethically towards society and the earth itself?

The obvious reason, says Locke, is that it’s in its own interest to do so.

There’s the heart of it. Well, two chambers of the heart, anyway. There’s been a heated discussion over at the Gonzo Engaged blog about how – and whether – to quantify the corporate interests. It’s an important question that shouldn’t be written off as “bean counting”; as Clay Shirky says, we all get paid in beans. But bean counting isn’t sufficient. This is a question that needs lots of thought and talk.

Tom doesn’t slight the other two chambers of RageBoy’s abundant heart: The book is a rhetorical triumph and that is not incidental to one of the book’s key themes: there is no life recognizable as human without voice. As Tom puts it:

Embedded in this book directed at business are substantial swaths of drama, song, anthemic exhortation, pulp fiction, satire (a visit to a psychiatric unit for marketers) etc. To treat these patches as momentary diversions from the ”serious” conceptual argument is to render them innocuous. It might be more interesting to see what happens if one doesn’t allow pre-existing models of typical business books to marginalize these florid blooms.

This is the type of review Gonzo Marketing deserves.

[My own attempt to review the book is here.]

My whining about my computer meltdown draws the Standard Mac Rejoinder, this time from Kevin Marks, discoverer of the Googlewhack Marks mark and all around smart guy:

You really need to look into getting a Mac. Ask Doc.

CD-ROM drives and no-configuration networking? They were expected in Macs 10 years ago. Now we’ve moved on to archiving the Photos and MP3 files for you too. The CD (and DVD) burning is built-in, and you just drag files to the disk to do it.

You want a command line? On OS X it’s a full Unix shell.

Yeah, I work for Apple. David Coursey doesn’t: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-828481.html

The PC’s ancient lack of native CD support was an early consequence of having an open hardware system; there’s something to be said for that. It was also an early consequence of really poor design.

FWIW, CD burning is built into XP. You just drag files to the disk.

But, I accept Kevin’s comment. There are real advantages to the Mac. There are also advantages to Linux. And even Windows. Hell, I could find some good things to say about DOS.

But not about Bush.

Speaking of Bush, this is from Hank Blakely’s Dystopical, on the Bush adminstration’s Quest for Secrecy:

…we might as well clear up this secrecy bugaboo that has so many alarmed. What they don’t seem to realize is that it’s an intellectual property issue: if our leaders told us too much about the government, we might learn enough to go out and start our own.

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The Kindness of Strange Thoughts

I’ve struck up quite a bloggery friendship with

AKMA. I love his blog. He’s a teacher and
minister
with philosophical and theological training and
interests.

I came across his site because he amplified – improved – something I’d written about the nature of universal truth. Here’s what AKMA says:

My way of putting this in an argument
with a colleague who believed fervently in universal
truths was, “I’ll agree that we believe in universal
truths when the truths in question are so universal
that you’ll let me tell you what they are.” Of
course, Max wouldn’t let me define what the
universal truths were; he wanted both universality
and the whip hand in defining the universal truths.
Does that smell fishy to anyone else? “You have to
believe in universal truths, and let me tell you
what they are.”

Widely read and insightful, he’s a
sympathetic reader. In fact, his sympathetic nature
has got him exercised about my offhand, snarky
comment in Monday’s blog in which I said that
that a particular book by Foucault was not “his
usual proof of his own cleverness.”

AKMA replies, in part:

I thought it would be churlish to
blog this, but there are plenty of people smarter
than me with whom I disagree, and feel justified in
disagreeing, without deriding their work.

One of the hazards of my vocation entails
teaching conservative
evangelical students whose version of Christian
faith troubles me
deeply. But both here at Seabury (where they’re
rarer) and in
previous teaching positions, I worked productively
among conservative
students because I showed them at least minimal
respect: I didn’t
ignore their arguments, I didn’t refuse to let them
cite their
favorite books, I went to chapel the days they were
preaching, I
asked them to improve the arguments for positions
they weren’t going
to change, not to abandon positions that were
fundamental (so to
speak) to their identity. And then I could ask them
to extend the
same courtesy to me, which they sometimes, pretty
often, did.

I’ve taken this out of context; you should
understand that AKMA is quite humble. But my offhand
remark has caused him to testify, no doubt at least
in part because he has learned a lot from Foucault.

My kneejerk response is to say: Hey, buddy, it’s
the Web. If I can’t recklessly slap a dead French
philosopher on the Web, then where can
I?

But I know that AKMA is right. It’s easy to think
hard. It’s usually easy to think clearly. It’s damn
near impossible for most of us to think kindly. My
passing swipe at Foucault was intended to get me out
of having actually to read him with the care and
sympathy he deserves. Plus, it’s a cheap way to puff
myself up.

Thanks, AKMA.

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