I'm at ICFA in Orlando this week. On Saturday I will do a fiction reading and appear on a vampire panel.
Yay -- 80 degrees in Florida instead of 40s and 50s at home (and the below-freezing temps and snow we had there for most of February)!
I'll post a report next week.
Margaret L. Carter
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In Robert Heinlein's I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, the very old, fabulously rich protagonist arranges to have his brain transplanted into a young body, healthy aside from brain death (the result of a mugging). Rather than a "brain transplant," this operation should more accurately be called a "body transplant," since identity resides in the brain. An Italian surgeon makes the far-fetched claim that a "full body transplant" will become possible in about two years:
Full Body TransplantOddly, however, he envisions attaching a severed head to the donor body rather than transferring a brain from one skull into the other. The project evokes images of vintage mad scientist movies. I'd think if the process could be accomplished at all, it would be easier to implant a brain than an entire head with esophagus, windpipe, etc., as well as nerves and spinal connections, plus the challenge of keeping eyes and ears functional.
More cautious scientists point out the unlikelihood of making those neural and spinal connections viable in the near future, given that we still don't know how to restore function to a person paralyzed by accidental damage to the spine. And the inevitable question of "ethics" comes up. In principle, I don't see why a body transplant would be any less ethical than the reuse of a single organ or a group of organs (e.g., a heart-lung transplant). People have been willing their bodies to medical schools for teaching and research for a long time. What's the essential difference between that kind of donation and using a donated cadaver to house a transplanted brain?
In I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, when Johann Smith wakes up in the body of his young secretary, Eunice, he finds Eunice's spirit lingering in her flesh, and they have lively mental conversations throughout the novel. The prospect that some spark of the original inhabitant might remain in a dead-and-revived body lies, so far, outside the realm of science as we know it.
What about transferring a live brain into an artificial body? In the present state of medical science, I suspect the possibility of creating such cyborgs would be further in the distant future than a viable brain-body transplant.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's CryptAlthough I haven't seen the movie STILL ALICE, I was intrigued by an incident from it described in a review. The title character suffers from Alzheimer's. While still lucid, she recorded a video giving herself instructions on how to commit suicide. Later, in a state of dementia, she tries to follow the instructions as if on "autopilot." The review raises the question: Did the past Alice have the right to make this decision for the Alice of the present?
How do we know our past self (or selves) and our present self are the same person? Typically, we assume this to be true, even though our bodies change completely over weeks, months, and years as cells die and get replaced. We rely on continuity of memory to assure ourselves that we remain the same individual. I remember being my teenage self, my twenty-something self, et al. But what about Alice with Alzheimer's, who has forgotten most of her past? What about an amnesia sufferer?
In a case of multiple personality, are there two or more people in the same body or only one person with a mental disorder?
If my entire consciousness gets uploaded into a computer, and then my body dies, is the computer program "me" or only a digital copy of me?
In the universe of the original STAR TREK, Dr. McCoy had misgivings that he'd died the first time he stepped into a transporter and his present self was a many-times-removed copy. When a transporter accident creates a duplicate of Captain Kirk, splitting personality traits between the two of them, which Kirk (if either) is the "real" one?
Some psychologists maintain that our experience of an "I" or a "self" is an illusion created by the brain's activity—a hypothesis that doesn't work for me, because there must be a "self" to experience the alleged illusion.
A boldly different angle on this issue: In the hard SF novel BLINDSIGHT, by Peter Watts, a spaceship's crew has the assignment of making contact with aliens who are intelligent yet not conscious. In fact, they react to evidence of human consciousness with horror and hostility, because self-awareness strikes them as incomprehensibly insane.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's CryptI recently reread most of the novels in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mystery series, set in New Orleans around the 1830s (beginning with A FREE MAN OF COLOR). In a later book of the series, Benjamin and his wife suffer dire financial loss in the bank collapses of that period. That plot element reminded me of how the value of money depends on our mutually agreed belief in its value.
There's an incident in Heinlein's TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, when Lazarus Long works as the banker in a frontier-like town on a colonized planet, where he burns a batch of paper money (after recording the serial numbers) because storing too much in the bank presents a theft hazard. The other character in the scene is horrified, since he doesn't grasp that dollar bills aren't wealth in themselves, only a portable representation of wealth. The value of money is grounded in consensus reality, not anything objectively "real."
In an early scene in S. M. Stirling's DIES THE FIRE, when civilization starts to collapse because all advanced technology has instantaneously stopped working, one of the protagonists gathers a group of her friends to lead them to a place of refuge. Before setting out, they stock up at a local store. She feels a bit guilty for accepting food and other valuable items in exchange for bills and coins, because she understands—as the storekeeper does not—that within a few days money will become worthless.
In the early history of what we know as money, it consisted of coins made from "precious" metals or other substances rare enough to be considered valuable. Users had an objective way of determining whether the "true" value matched the claimed value, because a coin could be tested to reveal contamination with base metals. Eventually paper money and other devices for exchanging wealth without carrying heavy coins all the time were invented. Bankers issued promissory notes; merchants bore letters of credit from one city to another. The first paper money ("banknotes") was issued by individual banks, as illustrated in Barbara Hambly's series. When Benjamin January's bank failed, no other institutions would recognize money issued by it as valid. Paper money printed and backed by the government obviously represented an improvement in financial stability. Then we got credit cards, so that a buyer didn't have to use cash at all in many situations. (As a child, I thought buying something with a card meant you didn't have to pay for it. Alas, some adults actually use their plastic as if that's what it means.) Now we can pay for material goods in a purely digital mode, by transmitting our credit card numbers electronically. Wealth has become rarefied, almost imaginary.
I can enter numbers on Amazon and receive a package a few days later. The money represented by those numbers flowed from the government (Social Security and military pension) into our bank account, from our bank to the credit card issuer (via checks I write for payments, which I could also do with ones and zeroes online if I chose), and from American Express to Amazon, without a cent of cash changing hands at any point. The process feels magical, almost miraculous. It illustrates what a tremendous amount of faith our system depends on. Of course, the down side of this miracle is that we've had our most-used credit card's account number changed at least three times within the past few years because it keeps getting hacked, even though the cards have never left our possession. Thanks to computers, fraud artists don't need the physical plastic to steal from a card holder. They simply run a program to try a series of numbers at random until they hit one that works.
Will the often-predicted cashless society ever come into existence? We have that capability now. Some people, I hear, use debit cards for everything, even coffee at Starbuck's. I don't think cash will become obsolete in the foreseeable future, though. Even now, not everybody has credit cards, some (such as the homeless) don't have bank accounts, and we'll probably always need tangible money for casual exchanges between individuals.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's CryptResearch is under way to design nanoparticles that will be injected into the human bloodstream for treatment of hardening of the arteries. They can potentially detect blockages and even help the arteries to heal themselves. Here's one article on this technique:
NanoparticlesThis kind of therapy foreshadows—even though still a long way from—the super-powerful nanotechnology in Lynsay Sands's Argeneau Family vampire series. Her vampire clan originated in ancient Atlantis, where scientists created "nanos" to bestow longevity and perpetual health on the experimental subjects by continuously healing all damage to the body. Effectively, the treatment has transformed these people into a new subspecies of humanity. The miracle cure works, continuously repairing the effects of disease, injury, and age. As an unforeseen side effect, however, a person infected with the nanos has to consume blood to replace the resources used up by the healing process. Furthermore, the submicroscopic particles interpret the effects of ultraviolet radiation as damage, so that the longer an Argeneau immortal is exposed to sunlight, the more blood he or she needs. Fortunately, Sands's immortals have adjusted well to their condition and, with the availability of bagged blood, lead fulfilling lives without having to harm anyone. If you haven't read her amusing, lively, sensual vampire romances, do try them.
Could a similar experimental program—nanotechnology designed for healing or explicitly to "improve" the human race, raging out of control—be the origin of the Sime-Gen mutation?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's CryptDid you see the "Shakespeare Uncovered" programs shown on PBS last Friday? Each show explores the issues posed by a different Shakespeare play as viewed through the eyes of famous actors. Last week featured OTHELLO and THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. (This coming Friday's episodes will analyze ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and ROMEO AND JULIET.) Much of the discussion centered on the difficulty of redeeming THE TAMING OF THE SHREW for modern audiences. It's true enough, as mentioned in the commentary, that this play foreshadows every romantic comedy starring two strong-willed people who start out unable to stand each other and fight their way to a passionate relationship. And Katherine really is presented as insufferable at the beginning of the story. She treats Bianca, her meek, conventionally lovely and demure sister, with violence that goes beyond sibling rivalry.
But—the modern audience is apt to think Kate has some excuse, considering the attitude her father and all the other men in the vicinity take toward her. If she and Petruchio appear equally fierce and feisty, still, in that culture his authority as her husband creates an inescapable power imbalance. And the only possible justification (in our eyes) for his treatment of her, that she's getting a taste of her own abuse of Bianca, is undercut by the sheer brutality of his "taming" program. He deprives her of food, clothes, and sleep. He "gaslights" her, insisting that she call the sun the moon and an old man a fair maiden. To Shakespeare's credit, at least Petruchio never inflicts physical violence on Kate. Yet in real life, nowadays, we'd label his controlling behavior domestic abuse. To the people of his time, a "scolding" wife (i.e., one who talked too much or too loudly by the standards of the men in her life) was funny and the "punishment" of a scolding wife even funnier. Cultural changes have made it impossible for us to regard the marriage of Petruchio and Kate that way.
So much of our readiness to accept their falling in love depends on the way the stars perform their roles. When we see two different actors deliver a speech by Petruchio claiming absolute ownership of his wife, one man sounds implacable, almost menacing. The other actor makes the same lines sound bawdy and seductive.
C. S. Lewis, situating the play in the context of its era's beliefs about the proper order of the universe, the superiority of male to female, and the authority of husband over wife, maintains that Shakespeare intends Kate's climactic speech of submission to be taken completely straight, not "tactical or ironic." Most modern readers or viewers can accept that speech from her only if we hear it as "tactical," or, as one of the commentators on the PBS show suggested, Petruchio and Katherine are in "collusion" at that point. We would like to see the couple as negotiating their own separate peace within their society's view of marital relationships. (And note that she doesn't say a husband deserves his wife's obedience because their roles demand it; she says it's because he works hard to take care of her.) Or has the "taming" developed into a game between them, in which she's decided to humor him? If played a certain way, however, the comedy could turn into nightmare fuel; we could see Kate as submitting because she's terrified of her crazy husband.
So can this comedy be rehabilitated as a love story from our viewpoint?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Here's an article listing the many sensory systems human beings have beyond the classic "five":
More Than Five Senses"Touch," for example, is far from a simple, unified sense. We have separate nerves for temperature, itching, pressure, and pain. I do think it's a stretch, though, to call perception of hunger, thirst, and time "senses." And what about chemoreceptors? "Chemoreceptors: These trigger an area of the medulla in the brain that is involved in detecting blood born [sic: "blood-borne"?] hormones and drugs. It also is involved in the vomiting reflex." If we're not consciously aware of this perception, only of its results (e.g., vomiting) is it a "sense"?
Still, there are plenty to get on with in constructing aliens with different dominant senses from ours. Most human beings have sight or hearing as the dominant sensory mode. A smaller minority focuses on touch. Suzette Haden Elgin's "Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" system includes a lot of material on sensory modes:
Overview of Verbal Self-Defense
What kind of environment would an alien evolve and live in to have magnetism, electricity, tremor-sense, or echolocation as its dominant sense? And what about telepathy? If a sapient race communicates telepathically, they probably live in an environment where sight and hearing don't operate efficiently. Would a telepathic species have any reason to develop spoken language? Probably not, but as they became technologically advanced, one would think they'd invent a written language for archives and long-distance communication. Unless maybe they "store" memories in crystals or some other matrix and access them by touch. Could they use similar devices to amplify mental signals and send messages without anything we'd recognize as language?
If so, imagine the difficulty of making contact with them, conveying the concept of "language," or even convincing them we're intelligent. (Unless they have the ability to probe the minds of non-telepathic sentients.)
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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