that's coming back from the States in the second half of October?
Justin? Mingus? Anyone?
Saturday, September 27, 2008
I travel for the experience, the memories and the change of scenery. Although I spend a considerable amount of money on travel, I rarely enjoy it at the time – it’s more about the satisfaction of having been somewhere. So when I found myself genuinely impressed by Montserrat and Barcelona, I knew it couldn’t last.
Andorra was scheduled as a day trip, because it is actually quite a long way from Barcelona – about four hours by coach each way. It is far more impressive in the journey than in the arrival, as the climb up through the Pyrenees takes you through the sort of scenic, rustic villages that you would think of, but hardly actually expect to find. The state itself uses the Euro and is jointly governed by the French head of state and the bishop of the nearest big congregation (on the Spanish side), but is resolutely outside the EU. This means borders, but also an independent tax policy, and that is very significant for goods normally subject to heavy, centrally mandated excise fees. People come to Andorra for booze and tobacco, but also other kinds of shopping.
The coach drops us off at a mall next to a highway, and we are told we have two hours for our retail needs. The mall may be impressive for a community of 70,000, but it is completely devoid of individuality or charm; think Võru Maksimarket. I buy a bottle of Crema de Catalunya and ponder the electronics selection, apparently a year or two behind the rest of Europe. Most of the others in the group take advantage of the lack of excise, returning with cartloads of cheap(er) booze. While it’s true that storing a crate of vodka in the cargo hold of a coach is probably the least troublesome way of shopping for ethanol on a holiday, I suspect that this is mostly due to a single specific factor: it makes Tallinners feel like all those reviled Finnish vodka-tourists.
Mercifully the trip does not conclude there, and the coach rumbles into downtown Andorra la Vella (as if it has any other sort of town). In a fit of glaring, stupefying incompetence of the tour guide that has been dragging along since Estonia, regaling us with occasional stunted passages of Wikipedia wisdom read out over the stereo, we are given less than an hour to wander through the streets of the tiny capital, during the specific period that half the shopping district shuts down for an extended lunch. I spend the time running around frantically, trying to find an open electronics store that has a Canon 450D in stock – since getting a 50D from the States is proving tricky, I was willing to settle for a good deal on a lesser body. I find a shop that is willing to sell it to me for 550 Euro, in kit form, which is some three thousand kroons cheaper than it retails for in Estonia; but the camera is physically in a branch that doesn’t open until half an hour after the coach leaves. As we depart, I am angry, and don’t bother to hide it. Still, Andorra is to be appreciated for its architecture, which is endearingly local. On return to the hotel, I go down to the seaside and fulfill my Catalan quota by consuming a paella and a sangria (or two).
Friday is a free day, and I’m feeling a bit too lazy to go back to Barcelona on my own, so instead I take in the area’s last great attraction, Marineland. Filled not with American soldiers (yes, I realize how awful a pun that is) but with dolphins, sea lions, and an assortment of the less trivial birds. The free shuttles from Calella and back leave some five hours at the destination, which is way too much since I’m not particularly interested in the attached water park. Still, dolphins are intrinsically awesome, as I’ve known since San Diego, and my patience is rewarded as I catch the later tropical bird show, and am called as one of the volunteers; an improbably large and polychromatic parrot-type creature is placed on my outstretched arm and I am told to give it a kiss on the beak. I go along with the act, and for my troubles the bird is made to perch on my head; before you ask, no, there are no photos, and if there were, I would not share them. Still, as something to have done at some point in your life, it’s fun.
Tomorrow afternoon we pile into the coach and begin the long five-day trek back home, via southern France and then Venice, the latter of which I am certainly looking forward to. Expect wifi to be sketchy.
Andorra was scheduled as a day trip, because it is actually quite a long way from Barcelona – about four hours by coach each way. It is far more impressive in the journey than in the arrival, as the climb up through the Pyrenees takes you through the sort of scenic, rustic villages that you would think of, but hardly actually expect to find. The state itself uses the Euro and is jointly governed by the French head of state and the bishop of the nearest big congregation (on the Spanish side), but is resolutely outside the EU. This means borders, but also an independent tax policy, and that is very significant for goods normally subject to heavy, centrally mandated excise fees. People come to Andorra for booze and tobacco, but also other kinds of shopping.
The coach drops us off at a mall next to a highway, and we are told we have two hours for our retail needs. The mall may be impressive for a community of 70,000, but it is completely devoid of individuality or charm; think Võru Maksimarket. I buy a bottle of Crema de Catalunya and ponder the electronics selection, apparently a year or two behind the rest of Europe. Most of the others in the group take advantage of the lack of excise, returning with cartloads of cheap(er) booze. While it’s true that storing a crate of vodka in the cargo hold of a coach is probably the least troublesome way of shopping for ethanol on a holiday, I suspect that this is mostly due to a single specific factor: it makes Tallinners feel like all those reviled Finnish vodka-tourists.
Mercifully the trip does not conclude there, and the coach rumbles into downtown Andorra la Vella (as if it has any other sort of town). In a fit of glaring, stupefying incompetence of the tour guide that has been dragging along since Estonia, regaling us with occasional stunted passages of Wikipedia wisdom read out over the stereo, we are given less than an hour to wander through the streets of the tiny capital, during the specific period that half the shopping district shuts down for an extended lunch. I spend the time running around frantically, trying to find an open electronics store that has a Canon 450D in stock – since getting a 50D from the States is proving tricky, I was willing to settle for a good deal on a lesser body. I find a shop that is willing to sell it to me for 550 Euro, in kit form, which is some three thousand kroons cheaper than it retails for in Estonia; but the camera is physically in a branch that doesn’t open until half an hour after the coach leaves. As we depart, I am angry, and don’t bother to hide it. Still, Andorra is to be appreciated for its architecture, which is endearingly local. On return to the hotel, I go down to the seaside and fulfill my Catalan quota by consuming a paella and a sangria (or two).
Friday is a free day, and I’m feeling a bit too lazy to go back to Barcelona on my own, so instead I take in the area’s last great attraction, Marineland. Filled not with American soldiers (yes, I realize how awful a pun that is) but with dolphins, sea lions, and an assortment of the less trivial birds. The free shuttles from Calella and back leave some five hours at the destination, which is way too much since I’m not particularly interested in the attached water park. Still, dolphins are intrinsically awesome, as I’ve known since San Diego, and my patience is rewarded as I catch the later tropical bird show, and am called as one of the volunteers; an improbably large and polychromatic parrot-type creature is placed on my outstretched arm and I am told to give it a kiss on the beak. I go along with the act, and for my troubles the bird is made to perch on my head; before you ask, no, there are no photos, and if there were, I would not share them. Still, as something to have done at some point in your life, it’s fun.
Tomorrow afternoon we pile into the coach and begin the long five-day trek back home, via southern France and then Venice, the latter of which I am certainly looking forward to. Expect wifi to be sketchy.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
.CAT
On the morning of the next day, we pile back into the coach and set off for Montserrat. I know of it simply as the first name of a famous opera singer, but am told by the guide that it is a monastery high up in the mountains. The destination fails to disappoint: in a region of the world famous for its outstanding architecture, the Montserrat sanctuary is exceptional. The long, windy track up to the 1200m elevation is one of those roads I would like to drive in a small, rear-engined roadster, with a steward at each end making sure there is no oncoming traffic. But it is still pretty exciting from the top of a double-decker.
Montserrat itself is a proper small town, albeit centered on a church. It has a couple of hotels, a supermarket, and lay accommodation for the various personnel that keep the tourist trap running. The church itself houses something called the black Madonna – literally, an icon of the Madonna as a Maur. Apparently it is faintly scandalous, but Montserrat is far enough out of everybody’s way that the practice was allowed to continue until it became tradition. I go into the church, but there is a mass in progress so I do not disturb the faithful by shuffling around.
I go into the handful of buildings making up the rest of the compound, and take an easy trek up to a vantage point, then come down to the railcar station. Montserrat proper is accessible from civilization-level by both road and rack-rail, and there is a little rail/cable arrangement leading from it up to the summit of this particular Pyrenean peak. I buy a return ticket.
At the top there is a small museum and three separate hiking paths. I go about half way up the simplest of them, on the other side of the mountain from the Barcelona freeway, and return, feeling vaguely disappointed that I do not have enough time for the 50-minute walk back down the mountain to the main compound. I will definitely need to come back here.
With half an hour before departure, I look through the gift shop for an appropriately hip black T-shirt, but instead settle on a tin of black tea and a bottle of monk-sourced booze, plus a sampler of various kinds of honey. I don’t even mind the price-gouging: whoever lives here and keeps this amazing place in good condition despite the throngs of tourists deserves my money.
We return to the hotel, and I make another attempt at Calella’s supposed major bookshop. It’s not Sunday, and it’s not siesta, yet the stubborn reality of steel shutters contradicts the promise of the opening hours listed on the door. Fuck ‘em. I go to a newspaper stand, search for a British car magazine without success, and pick up a Grisham paperback. That night there is a fireworks show on the beach, the culmination of a week-long festival, most of which we have missed. The show is quite cool, actually. After 11pm, the town is appreciably younger, as the retiree set is replaced by school trips.
Wednesday is our big day-trip into Barcelona. The Sagrada Familia is very cool, but located in what looks like a mildly disreputable residential area, not to mention covered in construction works; the church is being built completed on donations alone, although apparently the Spanish government promised it would make up the shortfall necessary to finally have it done by 2026.
Barcelona is big and feels healthy; the city buses carry red-and-yellow striped flags, in the same sort of way that Tallinn’s trams are adorned by two little flags whenever a particularly important foreign dignitary is visiting. With all the local pride, Barcelona definitely feels like the capital of Catalunya rather than a metropolis in Spain. I wonder about the region’s self-identification. They already have their own Internet domain; I suspect that the only thing stopping them from seceding is the sheer uselessness of aggravating the rest of Iberia. Between EU policies that would be binding anyway, and the heavy autonomy that Catalunya seems to enjoy, it seems to have as much independence in practice as it cares to claim.
For a closer look at Gaudi’s legacy, we go up to the Guell park, something very akin in concept to the Villa Borghese in Rome – a vast green space on what was the edge of the city when the industrialist for whom it’s named envisaged it as a community for Barcelona’s affluent. Only about five of a planned fifty stately homes has so far been completed, so the park remains a pleasant public recreation spot, with bits of impressive Gaudi sprinkled about. I find that I have taken quite a liking to pleasant hikes through moderately angled bits of nature.
The coach takes us down to Barcelona’s sprawling port complex and the statue of Columbus, on what is thought to be the spot where he first set foot on Spanish soil. We are given some time to stroll down the city’s main tourist street, the retroactively inevitable La Rambla. I make it up to Plaza Catalunya and back down again via sidestreets, eventually emerging with a copy of CAR Magazine; between that and a couple of the less suspect paperbacks from the hotel’s used book exchange, I feel confident I have enough reading material to see me through to the end of the trip. We have a quick look at the Olympic stadium, a place of some significance for Estonia because this is where Erika Salumäe received her gold medal in cycling, a significant affirmation for what was in 1992 a country with little outside recognition and even less faith. They hoisted the Estonian tricolor upside down, too.
Returning to Calella, I spend a couple of hours online, working on my stockpile of podcasts for the return trip. As the evening rolls in, I briefly consider attempting the gastronomic rape of the hotel’s dinner service, but decide against it. Food prices here can vary greatly: I paid over 15 Euro at a tourist trap in downtown Barcelona for a tapas-sized portion of fried shrimp in batter and a coke. (Tapas, the new thing that latte-sipping Guardian readers in Islington have been obsessing over, is indistinguishable from what Tartu pubs call an õlletaldrik – an assortment of unassuming, but functional snacks. The shrimp were fine.) Back in the hotel town I walk down to the nearest steak house. This being Catalunya, bull country, I feel obliged to go for the beef, but my ongoing quest for protein without lard steers me toward the mushroom sauce that comes with a very decent (and impressively huge) piece of pork. With chips and salad, plus a beer, the entire meal costs me less than 13 Euro. If the restaurant can make a profit on that, I feel even more appalled at the pile of inedible dung that my hotel has the gall to charge 9.50 for, without providing so much as tap water to wash down the crud. Still, the town of Calella feels a lot more agreeable after a pint of the local lager.
Montserrat itself is a proper small town, albeit centered on a church. It has a couple of hotels, a supermarket, and lay accommodation for the various personnel that keep the tourist trap running. The church itself houses something called the black Madonna – literally, an icon of the Madonna as a Maur. Apparently it is faintly scandalous, but Montserrat is far enough out of everybody’s way that the practice was allowed to continue until it became tradition. I go into the church, but there is a mass in progress so I do not disturb the faithful by shuffling around.
I go into the handful of buildings making up the rest of the compound, and take an easy trek up to a vantage point, then come down to the railcar station. Montserrat proper is accessible from civilization-level by both road and rack-rail, and there is a little rail/cable arrangement leading from it up to the summit of this particular Pyrenean peak. I buy a return ticket.
At the top there is a small museum and three separate hiking paths. I go about half way up the simplest of them, on the other side of the mountain from the Barcelona freeway, and return, feeling vaguely disappointed that I do not have enough time for the 50-minute walk back down the mountain to the main compound. I will definitely need to come back here.
With half an hour before departure, I look through the gift shop for an appropriately hip black T-shirt, but instead settle on a tin of black tea and a bottle of monk-sourced booze, plus a sampler of various kinds of honey. I don’t even mind the price-gouging: whoever lives here and keeps this amazing place in good condition despite the throngs of tourists deserves my money.
We return to the hotel, and I make another attempt at Calella’s supposed major bookshop. It’s not Sunday, and it’s not siesta, yet the stubborn reality of steel shutters contradicts the promise of the opening hours listed on the door. Fuck ‘em. I go to a newspaper stand, search for a British car magazine without success, and pick up a Grisham paperback. That night there is a fireworks show on the beach, the culmination of a week-long festival, most of which we have missed. The show is quite cool, actually. After 11pm, the town is appreciably younger, as the retiree set is replaced by school trips.
Wednesday is our big day-trip into Barcelona. The Sagrada Familia is very cool, but located in what looks like a mildly disreputable residential area, not to mention covered in construction works; the church is being built completed on donations alone, although apparently the Spanish government promised it would make up the shortfall necessary to finally have it done by 2026.
Barcelona is big and feels healthy; the city buses carry red-and-yellow striped flags, in the same sort of way that Tallinn’s trams are adorned by two little flags whenever a particularly important foreign dignitary is visiting. With all the local pride, Barcelona definitely feels like the capital of Catalunya rather than a metropolis in Spain. I wonder about the region’s self-identification. They already have their own Internet domain; I suspect that the only thing stopping them from seceding is the sheer uselessness of aggravating the rest of Iberia. Between EU policies that would be binding anyway, and the heavy autonomy that Catalunya seems to enjoy, it seems to have as much independence in practice as it cares to claim.
For a closer look at Gaudi’s legacy, we go up to the Guell park, something very akin in concept to the Villa Borghese in Rome – a vast green space on what was the edge of the city when the industrialist for whom it’s named envisaged it as a community for Barcelona’s affluent. Only about five of a planned fifty stately homes has so far been completed, so the park remains a pleasant public recreation spot, with bits of impressive Gaudi sprinkled about. I find that I have taken quite a liking to pleasant hikes through moderately angled bits of nature.
The coach takes us down to Barcelona’s sprawling port complex and the statue of Columbus, on what is thought to be the spot where he first set foot on Spanish soil. We are given some time to stroll down the city’s main tourist street, the retroactively inevitable La Rambla. I make it up to Plaza Catalunya and back down again via sidestreets, eventually emerging with a copy of CAR Magazine; between that and a couple of the less suspect paperbacks from the hotel’s used book exchange, I feel confident I have enough reading material to see me through to the end of the trip. We have a quick look at the Olympic stadium, a place of some significance for Estonia because this is where Erika Salumäe received her gold medal in cycling, a significant affirmation for what was in 1992 a country with little outside recognition and even less faith. They hoisted the Estonian tricolor upside down, too.
Returning to Calella, I spend a couple of hours online, working on my stockpile of podcasts for the return trip. As the evening rolls in, I briefly consider attempting the gastronomic rape of the hotel’s dinner service, but decide against it. Food prices here can vary greatly: I paid over 15 Euro at a tourist trap in downtown Barcelona for a tapas-sized portion of fried shrimp in batter and a coke. (Tapas, the new thing that latte-sipping Guardian readers in Islington have been obsessing over, is indistinguishable from what Tartu pubs call an õlletaldrik – an assortment of unassuming, but functional snacks. The shrimp were fine.) Back in the hotel town I walk down to the nearest steak house. This being Catalunya, bull country, I feel obliged to go for the beef, but my ongoing quest for protein without lard steers me toward the mushroom sauce that comes with a very decent (and impressively huge) piece of pork. With chips and salad, plus a beer, the entire meal costs me less than 13 Euro. If the restaurant can make a profit on that, I feel even more appalled at the pile of inedible dung that my hotel has the gall to charge 9.50 for, without providing so much as tap water to wash down the crud. Still, the town of Calella feels a lot more agreeable after a pint of the local lager.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Gumbo
A philosophical interlude, if you will indulge me. There is an old science fiction trope about immortality, that it can be achieved by recording a mindstate, either at the moment of death or before, and unpacking it into a new body if the original dies. The implication is that the new body would of course be in excellent physical condition, and the process could be repeated indefinitely (or the body is a robot of some sort that does not age).
The earliest example of this idea that I have encountered was in a Roger Zhelazny novel, which I read long ago, in translation, and do not remember the name of. It has also served as a significant world-building element for Tad Williams’ Otherland, John Scalzi’s Ghost Brigades, and I’m sure many others; the most recent one I have read is Iain M. Banks’ Look to Windward.
All SF novels that use this idea inevitably concern themselves with a case of two instances of the same identity existing, and interacting. But that was never as interesting to me as the question of whether it is, in fact, immortality.
The problem is a lack of continuity. Ghost Brigades is the second book in a trilogy, and in the establishing work, Scalzi comprehensively evaded the issue by declaring that in his world, a consciousness could only be transferred directly into a clone (albeit a heavily modified one). The mind was never copied, it was transferred, and the original body died, even if physically it was still perfectly viable.
In Otherland, the advocate of the technology, developed specifically for immortality, expounds that it does actually involve copying a mindstate and storing the copy inside a computer. The advents are encouraged to kill their physical bodies and minds at the moment of the transfer; not because the technology necessitates or results in it, but because the two consciousnesses would continue to exist, in parallel, and would diverge due to unsynchronized experiences.
In Look to Windward, mindstate backups are commonplace and accepted as a form of immortality; a restored creature is considered still the same one, just missing a few days or months. The society of the world takes great care to ensure that no two identical constructs are walking about the universe at the same time, but there is no natural barrier to that, and it does occasionally happen.
To me, this does not constitute immortality, because I am not convinced that the reconstituted entity can be equated to the original (except in circumstances carefully contrived to show that it is, such as Scalzi’s original interpretation – a masterful cauterization of a nagging question that was irrelevant to his story and only served to explain how a 75-year-old wreck of a human could be quickly turned into a supersoldier). If a copy is taken of me, my personality, thought patterns and memories, and stipulating that the copy is perfect in the context of the argument, then that copy could be used to create another iteration of me that would be indistinguishable to other people. For anyone grieving upon my demise, it would certainly be an acceptable resolution. But I continue to exist beyond the backup point, and when I die, what happens to the self-aware me? To suggest, as Banks and Zhelazny do, that the dead me simply wakes up somewhere else with a case of amnesia, is entirely unsatisfactory. Me-2 is the same person in the regard of everyone else, except me.
This bothers me, because it is the absolute biblical definition of soul. The line of reasoning presumes that there is some absolutely unique focus for my personality, inextricably linked to this body, and that if a copy of me is created with the exact same memories and thought patterns, a sentient, self-aware creature that is indistinguishable from me either biologically or behaviourally, passing any Turing-style test, then it will still not possess my soul. Atheism precludes me from accepting the idea of a soul, but then I am not entirely limited to perception – I can conceive that there are forces at work in our physical universe that cannot be perceived by current technology. An atheist should be willing to consider any falsifiable idea, and perhaps there is some mechanism whereby two copies of a consciousness cannot exist; where a restored backup is no more than a vessel that then draws in the departed soul. This would actually be a decent premise for an SF novel, though I believe it has been done at least partially.
But until such a mechanism is discovered and made to work, let’s get back to a world without souls. The question remains: is the death of a personality that was then restored to an earlier backup an actual death? For practical purposes it isn’t, the question is purely subjective, since it is a given in this scenario that the backup is indistinguishable from the original, minus the memories between the points of backup and death.
If it is indeed death, if an expiration of a sentient consciousness is a permanent loss despite the creation of identical one, then where is the line drawn? I know, in this scenario, that when I die, someone will wake up later who will be convinced he is me. In this case, is short-term amnesia effectively death? Remember, soul does not enter into it. Do I die if my streak of continuous self-awareness and experience of the surrounding world is broken, even temporarily? If the answer is yes, then do I die every time I fall asleep?
If it is not death, then what is the value of human life, and how much effort should we really put into sustaining it? The history of our society proves that in the short term at least, no suffering is unendurable; for every tragedy, there is an example of someone who got through it, and if everyone was sure that they will wake up in a week/month/year in a new, healthy body, without any memory of the pain, why wouldn’t you take the ultimate decision whenever faced with anything greater than an inconvenience? And not just physical pain, either. Had your heart broken? Kill yourself and leave a note asking to be restored to a version from before you met her/him. Sidestepping tragedy becomes simply a question of leaving enough assets behind to cover the cost of restoring yourself. And it might just be covered by your health insurance: with economies of scale, restoration could just prove cheaper than treatment.
But if you have no soul, then why restore? In our existing society, a single human life is worth more than anything except another human life. Yet a lot of lives, lived to their natural extent, turn out to have been inconsequential. The value of human life is therefore not only a recognition of infinite, invaluable potential in every human being, but also a safeguard against human lives in general being treated lightly; our history has taught us that this is one slippery slope that cannot be tread upon.
But if mortality ceases to be a certainty and becomes a choice, then how easy will the choice be? Certainly it should be in each person’s power to decide if they will be restored or simply left alone. If a merciful society gives everyone the ability for immortality, then a thinking person will inevitably have to make the crucial self-assessment: is my life worthwhile? Do I deserve the effort and energy it would take to put me back on this Earth? Do I actually matter?
This is the hardest philosophical question of all, but it occurs to me that irrespective of technology or faith, everyone needs to ask it.
The earliest example of this idea that I have encountered was in a Roger Zhelazny novel, which I read long ago, in translation, and do not remember the name of. It has also served as a significant world-building element for Tad Williams’ Otherland, John Scalzi’s Ghost Brigades, and I’m sure many others; the most recent one I have read is Iain M. Banks’ Look to Windward.
All SF novels that use this idea inevitably concern themselves with a case of two instances of the same identity existing, and interacting. But that was never as interesting to me as the question of whether it is, in fact, immortality.
The problem is a lack of continuity. Ghost Brigades is the second book in a trilogy, and in the establishing work, Scalzi comprehensively evaded the issue by declaring that in his world, a consciousness could only be transferred directly into a clone (albeit a heavily modified one). The mind was never copied, it was transferred, and the original body died, even if physically it was still perfectly viable.
In Otherland, the advocate of the technology, developed specifically for immortality, expounds that it does actually involve copying a mindstate and storing the copy inside a computer. The advents are encouraged to kill their physical bodies and minds at the moment of the transfer; not because the technology necessitates or results in it, but because the two consciousnesses would continue to exist, in parallel, and would diverge due to unsynchronized experiences.
In Look to Windward, mindstate backups are commonplace and accepted as a form of immortality; a restored creature is considered still the same one, just missing a few days or months. The society of the world takes great care to ensure that no two identical constructs are walking about the universe at the same time, but there is no natural barrier to that, and it does occasionally happen.
To me, this does not constitute immortality, because I am not convinced that the reconstituted entity can be equated to the original (except in circumstances carefully contrived to show that it is, such as Scalzi’s original interpretation – a masterful cauterization of a nagging question that was irrelevant to his story and only served to explain how a 75-year-old wreck of a human could be quickly turned into a supersoldier). If a copy is taken of me, my personality, thought patterns and memories, and stipulating that the copy is perfect in the context of the argument, then that copy could be used to create another iteration of me that would be indistinguishable to other people. For anyone grieving upon my demise, it would certainly be an acceptable resolution. But I continue to exist beyond the backup point, and when I die, what happens to the self-aware me? To suggest, as Banks and Zhelazny do, that the dead me simply wakes up somewhere else with a case of amnesia, is entirely unsatisfactory. Me-2 is the same person in the regard of everyone else, except me.
This bothers me, because it is the absolute biblical definition of soul. The line of reasoning presumes that there is some absolutely unique focus for my personality, inextricably linked to this body, and that if a copy of me is created with the exact same memories and thought patterns, a sentient, self-aware creature that is indistinguishable from me either biologically or behaviourally, passing any Turing-style test, then it will still not possess my soul. Atheism precludes me from accepting the idea of a soul, but then I am not entirely limited to perception – I can conceive that there are forces at work in our physical universe that cannot be perceived by current technology. An atheist should be willing to consider any falsifiable idea, and perhaps there is some mechanism whereby two copies of a consciousness cannot exist; where a restored backup is no more than a vessel that then draws in the departed soul. This would actually be a decent premise for an SF novel, though I believe it has been done at least partially.
But until such a mechanism is discovered and made to work, let’s get back to a world without souls. The question remains: is the death of a personality that was then restored to an earlier backup an actual death? For practical purposes it isn’t, the question is purely subjective, since it is a given in this scenario that the backup is indistinguishable from the original, minus the memories between the points of backup and death.
If it is indeed death, if an expiration of a sentient consciousness is a permanent loss despite the creation of identical one, then where is the line drawn? I know, in this scenario, that when I die, someone will wake up later who will be convinced he is me. In this case, is short-term amnesia effectively death? Remember, soul does not enter into it. Do I die if my streak of continuous self-awareness and experience of the surrounding world is broken, even temporarily? If the answer is yes, then do I die every time I fall asleep?
If it is not death, then what is the value of human life, and how much effort should we really put into sustaining it? The history of our society proves that in the short term at least, no suffering is unendurable; for every tragedy, there is an example of someone who got through it, and if everyone was sure that they will wake up in a week/month/year in a new, healthy body, without any memory of the pain, why wouldn’t you take the ultimate decision whenever faced with anything greater than an inconvenience? And not just physical pain, either. Had your heart broken? Kill yourself and leave a note asking to be restored to a version from before you met her/him. Sidestepping tragedy becomes simply a question of leaving enough assets behind to cover the cost of restoring yourself. And it might just be covered by your health insurance: with economies of scale, restoration could just prove cheaper than treatment.
But if you have no soul, then why restore? In our existing society, a single human life is worth more than anything except another human life. Yet a lot of lives, lived to their natural extent, turn out to have been inconsequential. The value of human life is therefore not only a recognition of infinite, invaluable potential in every human being, but also a safeguard against human lives in general being treated lightly; our history has taught us that this is one slippery slope that cannot be tread upon.
But if mortality ceases to be a certainty and becomes a choice, then how easy will the choice be? Certainly it should be in each person’s power to decide if they will be restored or simply left alone. If a merciful society gives everyone the ability for immortality, then a thinking person will inevitably have to make the crucial self-assessment: is my life worthwhile? Do I deserve the effort and energy it would take to put me back on this Earth? Do I actually matter?
This is the hardest philosophical question of all, but it occurs to me that irrespective of technology or faith, everyone needs to ask it.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Viva la Wifi
If all goes right, you will be reading these three articles tonight; the F1 joint outside Valence purports to have WiFi, and while it’s the overpriced Orange variety and does not actually reach to my room, my information withdrawal is bad enough that I am willing to pay. They’re still twats for not having any English-speaking channels on the TV.
Germany was a merciful blur, and France is a massive improvement – at least in the evening, when we get off the autoroute and make our way through Lyon and beyond. The mountains are beautiful. Even the gas station food is miles better. (Incidentally, best thing I’ve bought at a gas station on this trip was a bottle of vanilla milk at a Polish Statoil.) It’s sunny and warm and the trip is beginning to justify itself.
Coach travel can be wearing, but after three days on the road I am surprisingly unphased. The key seems to be content: music, podcasts, books, and movies on the laptop, which now seems to have mercifully regained its proper 4,5-hour runtime on a single charge. Air travel is perhaps too quick, as you skip the sensation of actually going somewhere, unless you are crossing an ocean. Chalk it up to youthful optimism (if there is such a thing), but watching Europe roll by outside my coach’s panoramic window, I feel like I’m seeing my country. In much the same way that I need to grasp a city to be comfortable in it – to have a mental plan of it – overland travel allows one to grasp the EU, make it more than a heady concept. Everyone should do this at least once, but if you have any choice at all, avoid Poland. While Germany has ridiculously good roads and Lithuania and beyond just doesn’t have that much traffic volume – unless you’re enough of a fool to try getting through downtown Riga – Poland is the bottleneck. It would be far less frustrating to take the party boat to Stockholm, then blast down to Malmö and take the Öresund tunnel to Copenhagen.
Continued...
Since you are reading this only now, obviously the Orange wifi did not work. Was not present in any discernible form. Still, the gas station food really is quite good: two Agip runs have yielded a passable ham & cheese sandwich, a box of really quite fair salad, and a slice of genuinely spectacular strawberry & coconut cake. That is well beyond the best that I could scrounge up in an enormous German supermarket. I’m sorry if I don’t have any better insights on France, but I only ever saw it from the tarmac.
On the fourth day, we cross the Pyrenees and finally enter Spain, where gas prices instantly drop 40 Eurocents per liter. For my American readers, that translates to about three hundred bucks per gallon, and I cannot describe the joy I feel in being able to make that gag, after suffering a decade of poor currency-exchange humor.
Our first stop is the Dali museum in Figueres. You would need to have either read a lot of the Antyx archive or spent time with me in person to properly appreciate my loathing for what grew out of modernist and particularly surrealist art, and the rest of you will simply have to believe when I say that Salvador Dali was the dude. His museum, an old theater building that he bought and converted, is layed out to subtly block suspicions of postmodernist twattery by starting with Dali’s more conservative pieces. He could, and did, paint both photorealistic images and ones that stun the viewer with their sheer technical prowess; stand there and smell the accomplishment. With an unassailable background like that, he was perfectly justified in dismantling the conventional wisdom. Besides which, he was the compleat rockstar, and still deeply and passionately loved his wife for the entirety of his life. As a sign of respect, I buy a T-shirt.
Our coach winds its way down the Costa Brava until it reaches our staging point: Calella, one of a series of tiny tourist towns on the Catalan coast. The hotel has wifi, mercifully, although only in the lobby – which is unfortunate, as I would have loved to make good use of my room’s balcony, blogging in the breeze. The hotel, like much of the town itself, leaves an odd impression of vague inauthenticity. While there are some ancient bits here and there, Calella mostly seems to be an amalgamation of hotels constructed some time in the last two decades. The age of a hotel can be roughly judged by the availability of power sockets, increasing as people started to carry more electronic gadgets; the Regency Hyatt in Jerusalem, an impressive pyramidal pile from the Seventies, scandalously offers pretty much none, despite claiming a five-star rating. This one is three stars, and doesn’t blow my mind. It is as if its crew had a guidebook to comfort that they studiously implemented, without ever truly understanding its essence. Some aspects, such as the painted concrete walls and naked flagstone floors, may just be a southern peculiarity, a way to keep the inside cool; but I do wonder how come this place, a resort hotel in a resort town, expecting its patrons to stay for a week or more, manages to feel less cozy than the Best Western Grand Hotel in the village of Bollnäs, where I can’t really imagine people staying for more than a day (there is nothing to do in Bollnäs for more than a day, even if a few thousand Swedes somehow manage to spend most of their lives there). My expectation of what a three-star hotel should be like is based on the Baron Hotel in Reykjavik; no three-star hotel in a Western European country should be worse. Hell, my B&B in Rome had in-room wifi.
That evening, we get back on the coach for a brief run down to Barcelona, to watch the fountain. The spectacle involves music (something classical that I recognize and really ought to know the name of) and color-filtered spotlights placed under the surface of an exceedingly elaborate system of pipes; the water dance is something truly to behold, and I say that as a skeptic who is rarely impressed with anything. If you want a more impressive experience of staring at some water, you will need to go to Iceland and look at waterfalls. There should be a picture or two on my Flickr.
The next day, it is overcast and (relatively) cold with a strong suggestion of rain. I grab a coat and go explore the town, walking down to the beach and then taking a progression of stairs and trails to hike the full 118 meter elevation of something called Los Torretes – the remainder of a couple of signaling towers used by some military or other in the mid 19th century. The towers are not intrinsically impressive, but the views are quite nice, although spoiled by the overcast weather. I may not be as extreme as Kristopher when it comes to walking, but I descend with a mild sense of achievement and amble around the town’s shopping district, desperately looking for reading material in English. (I have underestimated my reading speed and am almost done with the books I brought from home – and there is still the way back to Estonia to deal with.) I return to the hotel and kill time until dinner sitting in the lobby with my Mininote.
The hotel package comes with breakfast and dinner. Breakfast is acceptable, although that is too simple to get wrong, but dinner is an ugly smorgasbord of greasy fried meat, unimaginative salad components, and suspect desserts. Since my surgery, I do not eat very much, and therefore prefer to make each meal an experience; the hotel’s policy of emphasizing quantity over quality is directly at odds with that, so in the future I think I’ll skip the hotel dinner altogether and wonder out into town for something more interesting. Maybe a nice seafood paella.
(Incidentally: there is an email in one of my various inboxen dating from July 1st, from undoubtedly one of my most treasured readers, asking for a status report on the surgery and weightloss. The short answer is, it’s fine. An elaboration is in the works.)
Germany was a merciful blur, and France is a massive improvement – at least in the evening, when we get off the autoroute and make our way through Lyon and beyond. The mountains are beautiful. Even the gas station food is miles better. (Incidentally, best thing I’ve bought at a gas station on this trip was a bottle of vanilla milk at a Polish Statoil.) It’s sunny and warm and the trip is beginning to justify itself.
Coach travel can be wearing, but after three days on the road I am surprisingly unphased. The key seems to be content: music, podcasts, books, and movies on the laptop, which now seems to have mercifully regained its proper 4,5-hour runtime on a single charge. Air travel is perhaps too quick, as you skip the sensation of actually going somewhere, unless you are crossing an ocean. Chalk it up to youthful optimism (if there is such a thing), but watching Europe roll by outside my coach’s panoramic window, I feel like I’m seeing my country. In much the same way that I need to grasp a city to be comfortable in it – to have a mental plan of it – overland travel allows one to grasp the EU, make it more than a heady concept. Everyone should do this at least once, but if you have any choice at all, avoid Poland. While Germany has ridiculously good roads and Lithuania and beyond just doesn’t have that much traffic volume – unless you’re enough of a fool to try getting through downtown Riga – Poland is the bottleneck. It would be far less frustrating to take the party boat to Stockholm, then blast down to Malmö and take the Öresund tunnel to Copenhagen.
Continued...
Since you are reading this only now, obviously the Orange wifi did not work. Was not present in any discernible form. Still, the gas station food really is quite good: two Agip runs have yielded a passable ham & cheese sandwich, a box of really quite fair salad, and a slice of genuinely spectacular strawberry & coconut cake. That is well beyond the best that I could scrounge up in an enormous German supermarket. I’m sorry if I don’t have any better insights on France, but I only ever saw it from the tarmac.
On the fourth day, we cross the Pyrenees and finally enter Spain, where gas prices instantly drop 40 Eurocents per liter. For my American readers, that translates to about three hundred bucks per gallon, and I cannot describe the joy I feel in being able to make that gag, after suffering a decade of poor currency-exchange humor.
Our first stop is the Dali museum in Figueres. You would need to have either read a lot of the Antyx archive or spent time with me in person to properly appreciate my loathing for what grew out of modernist and particularly surrealist art, and the rest of you will simply have to believe when I say that Salvador Dali was the dude. His museum, an old theater building that he bought and converted, is layed out to subtly block suspicions of postmodernist twattery by starting with Dali’s more conservative pieces. He could, and did, paint both photorealistic images and ones that stun the viewer with their sheer technical prowess; stand there and smell the accomplishment. With an unassailable background like that, he was perfectly justified in dismantling the conventional wisdom. Besides which, he was the compleat rockstar, and still deeply and passionately loved his wife for the entirety of his life. As a sign of respect, I buy a T-shirt.
Our coach winds its way down the Costa Brava until it reaches our staging point: Calella, one of a series of tiny tourist towns on the Catalan coast. The hotel has wifi, mercifully, although only in the lobby – which is unfortunate, as I would have loved to make good use of my room’s balcony, blogging in the breeze. The hotel, like much of the town itself, leaves an odd impression of vague inauthenticity. While there are some ancient bits here and there, Calella mostly seems to be an amalgamation of hotels constructed some time in the last two decades. The age of a hotel can be roughly judged by the availability of power sockets, increasing as people started to carry more electronic gadgets; the Regency Hyatt in Jerusalem, an impressive pyramidal pile from the Seventies, scandalously offers pretty much none, despite claiming a five-star rating. This one is three stars, and doesn’t blow my mind. It is as if its crew had a guidebook to comfort that they studiously implemented, without ever truly understanding its essence. Some aspects, such as the painted concrete walls and naked flagstone floors, may just be a southern peculiarity, a way to keep the inside cool; but I do wonder how come this place, a resort hotel in a resort town, expecting its patrons to stay for a week or more, manages to feel less cozy than the Best Western Grand Hotel in the village of Bollnäs, where I can’t really imagine people staying for more than a day (there is nothing to do in Bollnäs for more than a day, even if a few thousand Swedes somehow manage to spend most of their lives there). My expectation of what a three-star hotel should be like is based on the Baron Hotel in Reykjavik; no three-star hotel in a Western European country should be worse. Hell, my B&B in Rome had in-room wifi.
That evening, we get back on the coach for a brief run down to Barcelona, to watch the fountain. The spectacle involves music (something classical that I recognize and really ought to know the name of) and color-filtered spotlights placed under the surface of an exceedingly elaborate system of pipes; the water dance is something truly to behold, and I say that as a skeptic who is rarely impressed with anything. If you want a more impressive experience of staring at some water, you will need to go to Iceland and look at waterfalls. There should be a picture or two on my Flickr.
The next day, it is overcast and (relatively) cold with a strong suggestion of rain. I grab a coat and go explore the town, walking down to the beach and then taking a progression of stairs and trails to hike the full 118 meter elevation of something called Los Torretes – the remainder of a couple of signaling towers used by some military or other in the mid 19th century. The towers are not intrinsically impressive, but the views are quite nice, although spoiled by the overcast weather. I may not be as extreme as Kristopher when it comes to walking, but I descend with a mild sense of achievement and amble around the town’s shopping district, desperately looking for reading material in English. (I have underestimated my reading speed and am almost done with the books I brought from home – and there is still the way back to Estonia to deal with.) I return to the hotel and kill time until dinner sitting in the lobby with my Mininote.
The hotel package comes with breakfast and dinner. Breakfast is acceptable, although that is too simple to get wrong, but dinner is an ugly smorgasbord of greasy fried meat, unimaginative salad components, and suspect desserts. Since my surgery, I do not eat very much, and therefore prefer to make each meal an experience; the hotel’s policy of emphasizing quantity over quality is directly at odds with that, so in the future I think I’ll skip the hotel dinner altogether and wonder out into town for something more interesting. Maybe a nice seafood paella.
(Incidentally: there is an email in one of my various inboxen dating from July 1st, from undoubtedly one of my most treasured readers, asking for a status report on the surgery and weightloss. The short answer is, it’s fine. An elaboration is in the works.)
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