Utari's Puppies (Formerly Off-Topic Thread)

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
1128

I’m … a little puzzled by what you apparently think you’ve established, Arrendis.

I’m a teeny tiny itty bitty fragment of the Totality, as are you. The Totality isn’t … uniform? Like, at all? Parts of it play literally every role there is.

(Right now, being a tree seems like it would be kind of relaxing.)

You have a way of assuming you’ve shown something when what you’ve done is misunderstood. Maybe that’s because I didn’t explain well; maybe it’s because your cup, as Ms. Tsukiyo might put it, is already full. Then you act like I’m doing something sneaky and dishonest when I try to explain. It’s a lot of why I stopped talking with you before.

I don’t lie or try to trick people very often, about this least of all. If I did, I’d be betraying the thing I want most in this world. My understanding isn’t perfect; I’m not a wise person even if I want to be. But I won’t try to trick you or argue disingenuously, so please don’t accuse me of such a thing.

Ask me questions, and I’ll try to answer. But understand that some of this stuff isn’t easy for even a master to explain in a way that won’t seem totally bizarre.

I’m not trying to convert you, or even persuade you. Just to sketch something for you.

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1129

You have a way of saying you don’t do a thing, and then when it’s illustrated that yes, you do exactly that thing, claiming the other person is misunderstanding… despite never actually having anything to offer to refute their statements. And you never actually offer anything to illustrate the misunderstanding. You just insist the other person does misunderstand, but have absolutely no clarifications to offer.

So, as much as you claim you don’t lie… honestly, Aria, I have a very hard time believing there’s no deception involved. It makes me wonder if maybe you’re not being entirely honest with yourself.

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1130

Okay, now I am going to do 100 push ups for finding something I can agree with in Arrendiot’s speech.

No, it’s really not like I’d want to support Arrendis in anything, but really… Ms. Jenneth, Ms. Tsukiyo, it would be way wiser to, maybe, try to understand each other for real instead of trading punches?

I understand when I trade punches - it’s most likely against a hostile entity whom I’d just explode in the space anyway without any mercy or regret, or just punch their nose face to face on station (or maybe just shoot them down with a handgun - my words pretty much lie in accordance with my actions), but I don’t see what exactly makes you two so hostile to each other?

I see a lot of assumption about oppponents from both your sides. It’s not healthy, really…

1131

And before I do these push ups, I’d like to offer my point of view about reality (not really going to target this reply to anyone).

We, Caldari, accept things as they are. We believe in what we see and we don’t look to explain what we don’t. We build hypotheses as minimal as possible just to match all the facts we have learned and discard those, that require more assumptions that we cannot verify. It is in our nature to see things as they are, without subjective interpretations.

I know many people love to criticize Caldari science, but, you see, our science is the best one in the cluster. Our scientists in the fundamental sciences instead on working on heavy hypotheses just trying to figure out, how exactly things work. If you are a Caldari scientiest, you don’t ask questions like “Why electron stays in atom?” you ask questions like “How electron stays in atom, how it behaves, how it will react on external interactions?” They are figuring out how the Universe works. And our applied scientists use this knowledge to enhance our way of life.

There is no merit in looking for what our imagination creates, as, most likely, there will be nothing to find. It’s like trying to find a black furrier in a dark room that doesn’t have a furrier. And you will go in loops, going around the walls, locked inside your own imagination.

That is a deadend, we need to open our eyes.

The world is vast, it is larger than we think, it is larger than our small imagination. It is the sea of possibilities and new finds, so strange and vivid that no imagination could cover. We are just a tiny grain of sand, and everything the world can offer simply can’t be maintained in that tiny data storage called human brain. (Or even infomorph, largerst of infomorphs will still be grains of sand in the ocean of the existence).

We build our imagination as iterations of what we have already learned…

But there are so many things we haven’t learned yet, and so many things we will never learn!

// okay, now to push ups.

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1132

(Ah, sleep is good!)

So … about the misunderstanding. When we’re talking about stuff like solipsism, would you expect me to be able to refute such a suggestion in a way that would actually disprove it?

How would you go about disproving such an idea?

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1133

Let’s leave aside the solipsism.[1]

You say you don’t see yourself as something separable from the universe. That’d have to include other people, because they’re a part of the universe, too. To say you don’t see yourself as separable but the universe ‘except for other people’ is inherently contradictory. It’s like saying 1+2 != 2+1.

If you hold yourself as separable from others, as able to draw a clear distinction between yourself and them to the degree that you tolerate treatment of one that you would violently oppose if applied to the other… then you are holding yourself as separable from the universe.

Let’s start with that.

  1. Returning to focus on solipsism (which, let’s face it, nobody’s ever been able to disprove, so demanding a refutation of it would be pretty damned unfair of me now) is part of what I’m talking about with the self-deception. We’d pretty clearly moved past the foundational ‘something observes, therefore something must exist in order to observe’. So returning to that, rather than address the specific matter you’d said I was misunderstanding, feels dishonest. I’m not saying you intended to be dishonest, mind you, but that’s how it feels to me. You may well have not even realized you’d done that. I don’t know. And I’m trying to give you the benefit of that doubt.
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1134

But it doesn’t feel like the world is short on contradictions of this type.

Performing one’s role within the Totality doesn’t require universal awareness or identification-- actually the ideal is that it doesn’t even involve thought. (This isn’t easy for humans-- we think a lot.) A tree has its role down perfectly, and it’s probably not even sentient, much less sapient. (Animists might beg to differ.)

Not having consciousness makes it easy (inevitable, even) to act appropriately according to one’s context. I’m not a tree, though, and playing my part in a similar way might require me to be vicious, cruel, even outright deadly. We have different expectations for baker and soldier, right?

If I’m reading your subtext here correctly, though, what you’re really getting at is that I don’t seem to care a lot about certain classes of people. But, that’s natural. Caring about all of humanity is kind of a hard trick; the Amarr and Gallente kind of give it a swing, and I wish them luck. I don’t feel an obligation to do likewise.

This is where I might start to sound a little like Ms. Tsukiyo. You see, she’s not wrong about the Totality’s nature: the universe doesn’t seem to notice or care what becomes of us figments.

Human beings are tribal creatures. It’s not necessarily a very admirable quality (I have no reason to think my predecessor’s life as a half-Civire living among Achura was all that much fun), but it’s true. And if that’s our nature, it’s not reasonable to expect us to stop being like that. (We might be able to find ways around it, though-- really, that’s what nation-states are for.)

There’s an idea in Achur society, not universally held, but it’s an interesting idea, that for any given person there are only certain people who should be treated as really existing. You have to have some kind of connection, like friends, family, business partners, people whose lives you’ve touched and affected in some meaningful way. These people are “real,” to you, part of your personal reality; you have some responsibility for what happens to them. The rest is just scenery.

A lot of callous behavior flows out of that-- you get beggars trying desperately to establish a connection, create a sense of obligation; other people walking by, pretending they don’t exist. On the flip-side, it results in a lot of minding-one’s-own-business and getting on with life, which actually is pretty good for keeping the society ticking along. Meddlesome people rarely agree about what actually ought to change, so you avoid a lot of conflict by keeping them feeling like they’re doing the wrong thing by meddling in the first place.

That’s kind of how I tend to function. It’s not something I’ll defend as an especially good quality-- I’m sure the Directrix, also, wishes I showed more concern for people generally. Although … maybe my habits have shifted a little about that. Either way, I won’t even claim to be totally consistent about it.

My culture tells me to keep my head down and mind my business-- that sticking my nose in is more or less literally looking for trouble, and not just for myself. At the same time I also try to stay aware of the harm I do and the suffering I cause, because I don’t think it’s safe for a creature like me to be blind to such things. And actually, the suffering I cause is very much my business-- those are lives I touch with mine. So I guess that’s not even inconsistent to begin with.

The virtues of my creed are humility, moderation, curiosity, and compassion. They exist in tension with each other; an exemplar of humility can wind up being extremely incurious and cruel in the process of being an exemplar.

For me, humility and moderation consists, in part, in focusing on those within my sphere: those who are most real, to me.

About solipsism and the rest, Arrendis … maybe this isn’t apparent to you, but to me this isn’t a contest. We’re talking about reality, and I’m a student, not a master. Ancient ideas, even the ones that can be said not to depend on religious belief, aren’t usually going to be shut down with a glib bit of logic. If you think you’ve “disproven” my sect’s teachings, you’re probably going to find that, at most, you’ve raised a question that I’ll then maybe adjust my position to respond to, or, in extreme cases, go ask someone who’s better prepared to deal with the topic than I am.

(That’s a little problematic. I don’t presently have a master when it comes to my beliefs, and even if I could find one without visiting Achura I’d hesitate to burden any with a student with such an unhappy history.)

I’m not arguing so much as exploring. I learn stuff, talking to intelligent people. It’s fun. It seems to be a little frustrating for you, though.

Let me be clear: as long as my head’s clear and I haven’t gotten all fogged with aggravation or something, I’m not fighting to win. Insight’s more important. So if I hear something that strikes me as true, I’ll move to incorporate and adjust around it, and I won’t tell you about it because it’s likely that I don’t notice I’m doing so myself.

I’m still learning, and I won’t pretend to stop even for you. That means I’ll be inconsistent some of the time (even leaving out the possibility that I’m just wrong or thinking of something in a weird way).

(Also it’s totally possible I could be lying to myself about one or more things-- it wouldn’t be the first time, you know?)

There’s a stranger aspect to this, as well. The Totality can be described most simply as the world that exists underneath all the words, the symbols, the semiotic illusions, we use to navigate it. But I can’t really talk about that world directly, because by using words I’m inevitably weaving, at best, those same semiotic untruths. It’s like having to use oral discourse to describe silence, and while the obvious way to do that is to just … stop …

… it’s not so easy to stop the discourse in our heads. That’s what stuff like meditation is for. Basically, there are some things I’ll have a lot of trouble illustrating, especially if you’re not very interested.

(Wow, I ended up saying a lot. Should I try to break it up?)

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1135

I don’t see any contradictions in the universe other than the ones we introduce (like the one I see you as presenting). I see different things, each working within their own natures, that together weave a consistent whole. Different threads in a tapestry are not contradictory. You and the tree are separate. You do not contradict one another.

Do we? Or do we have the same expectations, expressing themselves in different ways? I expect both to be decent people, to care about the well-being of others—even, albeit in a more removed and academic manner, those they’ve never met, and never will—and to do their jobs to the best of their ability. That they have different jobs doesn’t change my expectations of those people, it only changes the specific permutations of what ‘doing their job’ looks like.

What I’m really getting at is this:

You claim you make no separation between you and everything else.
You then acknowlege that you don’t treat everything the same way you treat you.

That’s a separation.

And then you insist you really don’t make any separation.

It’s like insisting that you don’t eat meat while devouring some of Aldrith’s wretched blackfowl (sorry, Aldrith, I’m sure Mitara makes lovely blackfowl, but I really can’t stand the stuff).

And all the rest feels like obfuscation and deflection.

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1136

Would treating everything else the same way I treat myself be properly playing my part?

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1137

If you can distinguish your part from any other part, you’re again creating separation.

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1138

Dropping this in a separate post because you’re already responding and I don’t want to make it look like you ignored a bunch of this in your response to what would have been the ‘prior state’ of the above post:

I don’t object to you not treating everything like you treat yourself. I’d have to be insane, for example, to think that you should treat yourself the way you’d treat a round of EMP S ammunition. The fact that you don’t treat every scrap of matter just like you treat yourself isn’t what I’m saying is fallacious. It’s the illustration of the fallacy.

You say you don’t see yourself as separable from the universe. I say you clearly do, and I’m using the fact that you don’t treat every other piece of matter the same as you treat yourself to illustrate that separation. You don’t even treat other bits of matter that happen to be the same kind of matter as you, arranged into roughly the same shape and fashion as your matter, including those you might even have very similar features, the way you treat you. This is separation.

I’m saying your claim that you don’t make these distinctions is a fallacy. You may feel that you’re a part of the whole, and that’s totally fine, but taking that the step further to say that you can’t draw the line to separate what is you from what isn’t, that you aren’t ‘real’ and don’t have an existence unto yourself… that’s self-deception and denial.

You make that distinction all the time. You hold yourself as a discrete and self-contained whole every time you breathe. Saying that that whole is also part of a larger framework doesn’t remove the discrete and self-contained nature of the part. Rather, to insist that that discrete and self-contained nature isn’t real is to deny the complexity of the larger framework.

A single cog is a thing. It has existence and reality. It never stops being a cog, never stops being its own thing, even when incorporated into a mechanism that utilizes millions of cogs. The difference here, though… is the cog never tries to tell itself it’s not real.

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1139

So … I’m kind of fishing around for the exact nature of the problem here. It’s not quite that I can’t distinguish between myself and, say, a shrub I’m trying to get planted. It’s that the borders of “my self” aren’t something set and grounded in absolute reality; they’re an idea, something I use to navigate the world. An illusion.

That doesn’t mean that I should be screaming in pain while I’m pruning a bush because I’m identifying so hard with the bush. It does mean that in that moment there’s maybe no very meaningful distinction between me pruning the bush and the clippers pruning the bush-- the clippers are functioning as an extension of my self.

(Gods know I don’t really want to have my digits pruned. Ow!)

The set borders we draw, like between me and the clippers, are fictitious, artifacts of mind. That doesn’t mean the Totality is a homogeneous, undifferentiated mass of sameness. It’s literally reality itself, so it should be a little obvious that it contains disparity.

How to function from a certain position within all that disparity: that’s the question. What that place entails is going to vary a little.

You can ask me to feel equally for all humans, for all life, even for all that is. Maybe that seems proper to you, given your situation.

I can look at you like you’ve grown a second head for demanding something so strange. That presently seems proper to me.

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1140

Well, first, I’m not asking you to do that. That would be silly. To even think I would is also silly. To suggest it (and remember, I am presenting you with my impressions, not claiming these impressions are an accurate representation of your intentions) feels like obfuscation and an attempt to twist my words to mean something they don’t—something, perhaps, you expect me to mean.

No. They are not fictitious at all. One cog is not another cog. The borders are not illusory. The clippers are not functioning as an extension of yourself, they are the next cog, which your motion is setting into motion. Your ship is not you. Your clothing is not you. You are you. To attempt to blur those lines is to diminish the very totality you seek to understand.

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1141

Why do you say this with so much certainty, Arrendis?

I feel like I’m running up against a deeply-held belief of some kind, and this isn’t the first time I’ve thought so when you’ve talked about this. It wouldn’t be rare-- it’s the sort of belief that produces ideas like “True Names.” But I want to be sure I understand where you’re coming from.

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1142

Why do you say with such certainty that the borders are fictitious?

A thing is that which, if you remove any part of it, would no longer be that thing. A Thrasher is still a Thrasher, even if completely unfitted. Remove the engines, though, and it’s no longer a Thrasher, it’s part of a Thrasher. ‘Most’ of a Thrasher, even… but it’s not a Thrasher.

If the clippers are destroyed, I am not diminished. If the ship blows up, I am not diminished. Discard my clothes, yet I remain. Only I am I.

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1143

Shoot you in the head and another of you steps out of the cloning bay a bit later. Leaving that alone, though…

Take a pebble off a mountain of pebbles, and you’ve … still got a mountain of pebbles, and it’s mostly the same mountain. Cut my hair and I might get a little lighter, but I’m still mostly myself. I might even be back to looking exactly the same two weeks later. Or how about I file a few molecules of armor off your Thrasher?

Semiotic theory tells us that when we look at “a thing,” we see, mostly, not he object itself, but a pattern in our heads that aligns with a purpose-- a tool. “Coffee cup.” (Chipped, is still a coffee cup, but maybe not suitable for company. Broken, is possibly shrapnel.) “Good stationary.” (Not what it literally is, which is a slice of pulped dead tree. Kind of expensive in space. More traditional-minded Amarr tend to like how it feels on the fingers. Actually so do I.) “Flour.” “Flower.” (Good for aesthetics, needs to be chosen and cultivated carefully to have a good effect.) “Car.”

“Gear.”

Symbols, standing in for underlying reality. It should be totally obvious that a coffee cup is good for all kinds of stuff, actually, without changing it at all. “Small aquatic plant pod.” “Bead storage.” In aquarium: “House for fish.” It can also be a “house for fish” if I drop it in an oceanic abyss, and will probably never get to be a “coffee cup” again-- without me taking a thing away from it. Only its context changes.

And on and on.

Me: my body sheds matter all the time. It’s a little gross actually. Other matter replaces it. A river: a rotating cast of water, sometimes (almost always, even) with other stuff. Sometimes the other stuff stays; sometimes not. But what you see, looking at it, is the moving water: its possibilities, its dangers.

A salt shaker. Generally, if I ask you to pass it, I don’t mean you should remove the salt first. If I shake out some salt, and pass it back, it’ll still be the salt shaker.

Bread really is just “some of that stuff over there.” It doesn’t care whether you call it bread or not, and it’ll still be “most of a loaf” for at least a few slices.

Borders are squishy, Arrendis. It’s your mind that draws, and re-draws, them. And it mostly does that to help you navigate.

Sometimes where it draws that line can be a problem. Who really cares where the beach ends and the sea begins, even if the sand is sharing space with a whole lot of soaked-in sea water? It might as well be just wherever the waterline is right now. Try to hold a bog to that standard, though. . . .

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1144

Exactly. Not me. Another like me. A different Arrendis. I’m 13 days old. Prior to this, there was a different Arrendis. In roughly 17 more days, assuming the average period holds, there will be another Arrendis. She will not be me. She will have my memories, she will be identified the same way, but she won’t be me. She’ll simply be indistinguishable from me by others.

If I have a cup, and have you walk into a room where it is on the counter, you’ll see the cup. Perhaps you’ll identify it as ‘that cup’, if you take specific notice of it. Then you leave, and the cup is destroyed. But immediately prior to its destruction, it is measured and analyzed, and an exact duplicate is created.

When you see that cup, you might identify it as the same cup. It may be utterly indistinguishable from the original in every way. That doesn’t make it the original cup.

Another Arrendis steps out of the cloning bay. She’s not another of me. She’s her. Just because you, or even she, can’t tell the difference doesn’t make her me. It just means you can’t tell.

Mostly. It is not the same. It has changed.

Are you your hair? I’m not my hair. My hair is a product of me, but it is not me. A few molecules of that Thrasher’s armor, or even its structure, is not the Thrasher.

I can’t help it if you place importance in overly-specific labels that introduce error. To me, it’s a cup. It’s only a ‘coffee cup’ when it’s being used for coffee. ‘Coffee’ in that use, is an adjective, describing the cup.

Indeed. This doesn’t change my point in the slightest. You are no more the detritus of your biology than you are your hair—that, after all, being a redundant statement. The river is the waterway. The flow of the water and the course it runs. Neither the water, nor the course, is the river without the other. The water was not the river before it entered that course, and it will not be the river when it reaches its outflow. Nor is the riverbed the river. It is only when the two combine—when you have the thing that would not be the river if you remove anything else—that you have the river. The other stuff is not the river. It may be in the river… but it is not the river.

The salt shaker: No, generally you don’t mean I should remove the salt first. But this is a linguistic convention applied to containers in use. The item itself is a shaker. It could be filled with pepper. Powdered garlic. Cocaine. Again, you’re investing adjectives with the property of being part of a compound noun… and it’s only correct within the specific context. The item itself is the shaker.

These things are not squishy. Perhaps you should consider that your approach to language is lazy, and fraught with inaccuracies you introduce.

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1145

shaker
noun * shak·er \ ˈshā-kər
1 : one that shakes: such as
a : a utensil or machine used in shaking * cocktail shaker
b : one that incites, promotes, or directs action * a mover and shaker

Ooooor, possibly language is lazy and I just work with what I have?

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1146

The fact that nouns are broad and adjectives useful doesn’t change where you’re investing emphasis and meaning, Aria. The cup isn’t defined by the adjectival use of ‘coffee’, the shaker isn’t defined by ‘salt’. They merely provide context for the thing. They are not the thing.

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1147

So you’re saying a cocktail shaker and a salt shaker are interchangeable except for their contents?

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