Star Trek

I'll tie this into course material, I swear. A trailer for Star Trek '09:



Yeah, it's old news, but I personally hadn't seen this one before. I'm not entirely sold on the "Star Trek Muppet Babies" concept... Sorry, that's beside the point. If I go off on a nerd rant we'll be here all night. I don't know how many of you watch Star Trek. (I come from a background of Trekkie nerds. Some of my earliest memories are Friday pizza/TNG nights, hosted by my parents.)

Even if you've never seen the show, I'll try to make this blog post worth your time!

The idea of "revitalizing" the Star Trek franchise - screwing once again with all canon and established continuity, like the travesty that was Enterprise* - can be connected to our recent discussions about augmenting subjective reality. Fiction, in this case the Star Trek franchise, serves as an analogy for the perceptions of reality that we all make for ourselves in our day to day lives: what we see from our perspective isn't exactly what someone else sees, who knows if we all see the exact same shades of particular colors, etc. Likewise, the Original Series character I think of when someone says "Kirk" will not be the same mental construct that a person will develop if Star Trek 09 is their first taste of the franchise and the character.

Where, then, does the "truth" lie? Well, apparently not in my head, and apparently not externally, either, as we are discussing a fictitious entity. The constant shifting and reinterpreting of a fictional history is perfectly acceptable (and can be exciting), but we must remember that the same shifting and reinterpretation is applied to history and self all the time.

With the idea of cyborgs, we are at a moment where we have the ability to reinterpret our reality at an unprecedented pace. With man-machine interfaces, we can even shift and reinterpret our own sensory experiences, which until relatively recent times have been the final, unassailable frontier. No longer is reinterpretation something that must be done with an eye backwards: becoming a cyborg means being able to reinterpret in real-time, obliterating any claim to "truth" that we might make in the process.



*Okay, seasons one and two of Enterprise were kind of awful, especially waiting for Archer to leap out or say "Oh, boy" but when they ditched the Temporal War stuff it got a whole lot better. Season four was good, but it was too late.

Degradation

I thought that the section of chapter seven devoted to "Degredation" was interesting, because it's something I've put some thought into myself. (Not because I'm on Slashdot most every day for quite some time, of course not...)

The idea of meta-moderation seems brilliantly novel at first. The idea of a constantly-shifting mod base is very democratic. I've had bad experiences on forums where the moderators are petty tyrants, ruling over their small virtual hills. I didn't know Slashdot in the early days, it was already huge when I was establishing an online identity, but I've been in on the ground floor of a few forums and I've seen how some trend toward totalitarianism. Slashdot's system makes so much sense looking backward - but then, why do most similar forums never implement it? (Probably the time/money cost of writing the scripts to handle karma, mod point assignment, etc.) But once you've seen the Slashdot method for moderation, you wonder why anyone would ever leave the control of a forum in the hands of one or two people.

After long periods on Slashdot, I sometimes find myself looking for the +5 Insightful toggle when I read something interesting - like the reading assignment for this evening. Alas, I looked at the space above the insightful bits and was disappointed. I think I have some mod points on /. right now, maybe I can fill out some form to attach one to Natural-Born Cyborgs.

Anecdote Hour!

Related to our discussion in class today, and in Natural-Born Cyborgs, re: external information storage and retrieval.

A few days ago I was hanging out and one of my acquaintances mentioned that they were finally going to buy an internet-enabled smartphone, so others started giving advice and experience. One of the group mentioned that he has found that having the internet in his pocket enables him to check Wikipedia or IMDB quickly during conversations. My gut response was "That's totally cheating!"

Then I sat down to read Natural-Born Cyborgs, and it turns out I'm a huge hypocrite because I use similar (if less conscious) strategies all the time. Judge not, I guess!

The Doors of Perception

I was reading a few of Aldous Huxley's essays and found this one on Monday, after we discussed Rorty's theory of language, and I thought that there were some portions of Huxley's writing that might assist in getting one's mind more properly around Rorty's ideas.

(As an aside, I have no idea what mescaline.org is. They're just hosting the content I wanted to point to. I hope it's not some kind of cyber crack house.)

Some of the passages that I thought were enlightening:

"By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable."

This struck me as a bit Rortyian, or at least another way of explaining that the truth is not "out there" but is instead "inside" and that language is a system of symbols that do not exactly correspond to any external "truth."

"To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness [our conscious experience of the world we live in], man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."

This, if I'm not tragically misunderstanding Rorty, is similar to his stance, minus all the "Mind at Large" drug-induced visions that Huxley then begins to describe. I don't know what it means that I find it easier to comprehend what Rorty is getting at via descriptions of consciousness-altering drugs.

The Contingency of Language

It feels like I need a hell of a lot more background to adequately interface with this material. As when I was first studying Nietzsche in a class on modernism, it feels like I've wandered into a big lecture room where a debate has been raging for hundreds of years. The lecture stage is brimming with some of the greatest thinkers humankind has produced, living and dead, and as I'm stumbling around trying to find my seat a spotlight suddenly illuminates me and a voice demands "What do you think?" I don't know what I think, I just got here.

I have metaphorically described my experience reading the article. Rorty has something to say about that. From what I gather, I have not actually conveyed a message, or at least not one that can be considered a "truth candidate"? I have done the textual equivalent of italicizing some words or using odd puncutation. Metaphors are impotent, just like the language they inhabit, as conduits of "truth" - which might not exist, since this idea of "truth" might just be a fetishized ideal of something, some nebulous "realm" beyond the human.

To stop seeing language as a medium, Rorty via Davidson proposes, a step in the right direction is to stop viewing metaphors as having distinct meaning apart from the literal meaning of their component words. I've just imagined what that would be like and realized I owe all of you an apology.

I am sorry for any confusion I have caused with my opening paragraph. I did not actually enter a lecture hall with a zombie Schopenhaur, Nietzsche, etc, debating on the stage. If I had, I would certainly have taken pictures.

The World is Just Awesome

Warning: may cause infectious grinning, with nerds at particularly high risk.