Fantasy is the sharp edge of creative thought. Fantasy is proto-science. No pejorative intended.
My question is NOT argumentative … or not meant to be. In a way, I have bet my whole career on such questions.
Let me give you an example, which is sort of creepy, but, I think, “interesting”. In the 70’s, everybody got sick of writing being taught in English departments. After all, every faculty member in a university writes for a living, more or less. So, shouldn’t every faculty member be teaching writing. So, I taught this freshman seminar in which the students could write on any subject they wanted, although, because they knew I was a psychologist, they always took something psychological. I stubbornly played the role of a resource person and an editor. I questioned them in ways I took to deepen and broaden their enquiries in a way that would attract a reader’s interest. But I scrupulously avoided the role of “expert.”
Every year, one or more of the students would want to do a paper on child abuse. It seemed to me a really dark topic, and probably arose as an interest for the student because they were toying with the idea that they themselves had been abused as children. They were kind of hoping, perhaps, that I would play the role of clinician, but I had no training or interest in that. To the extent that their interest was self directed, I took it as lacking universal interest, and therefore not a proper subject for a piece of writing. But I did see that an interesting paper COULD be written about child abuse because hidden in the concept is a very fundamental confusion. We all would agree that having sex with a child or flogging a child at random would be an AB-use of a child; but what, exactly, do we agree is the proper USE of a child. What are children FOR? I never got a student to open that door, let alone, walk through it.
Now I have read some science fiction, over the years. Shirley Jackson’s the lottery, ETOIN SHURLU, a story about a very hot summer in new York and a termite invasion, whose last line was “pried from the jaws of the termite a bright fleck of steel.” I was even addicted to late night startrek for a year or so, although, I have to admit, I dosed through many of the episodes. Every one of those stories was riveting but not because it was the result of some idle curiosity, but because it explored some fundamental question about who we are and why we are that way. Such questions are what make psychology “interesting”, and are the beginning of scientific inquiry. But to turn such an interest into science, we have to explore WHY it is interesting.
AS to Doug;s question, I guess I owe him an explanation of why I found the discussion of induction so interesting. You will recall it began with question of faith. I was interested in the paradox that those who are hard on faith, often offer induction as an alternative. But induction requires faith. And it also require us to join in a community of faith that shares our belief in induction. Such communities resemble formal religions in some uncomfortable ways. However, is that pragmatic faith in induction, which helped us build bridges and fly at faster than the speed of sound, and go to the moon, and provide cheap food for millions of people and, brought us so many important American institutions, such as the marketplace of ideas and the notion of settled legal opinion. All of this now under attack, by, apparently, people to whom its benefits are not self evident. I think we either have to be prepared to say why our faith is better than theirs, or be prepared to be beaten all the way back into the Dark Ages. Hence my interest in the problem of induction.
Nick
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Robert J. Cordingley
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 3:46 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] So, *Are* We Alone?
There's a long lost Star Trek episode ' Run In With The Kardashians' on YouTube but I wouldn't go there - it should remain lost. The 'real' Cardassians are mentioned here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardassian. Their noses are gray.
Now setting aside possible derogatory use of 'fantasies', I think discovering possibly intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is interesting because of the subsequent cultural ramifications here on Earth. All sorts of noses of all kinds of colors will be bent out of shape. Will they have their own Hero's Journey myths, etc. etc. What will their philosophies look like? Will contact of the x-kind change who I consider to be my friends and the way I stir my coffee- absolutely! Purely pragmatic and of self-interest. Perhaps they will tell us what the meaning of INTERESTING is too.
Robert C
On 4/4/12 2:55 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:I go back to the original question I asked Owen. Why are these fantasies INTERESTING?. Now, quickly, I have to admit, they don’t capture my imagination that well. But I also have to admit that I firmly believe that NOBODY is interested in anything for nothing. IE, wherever there is an interest in something, there is a cognitive quandary, a seam in our thinking that needs to be respected. So I assume that there IS a reason these fantasies are interesting [to others] and that that REASON is interesting. The reason is always more pragmantic and immediate than our fighting off being absorbed into a black hole. Speaking of which: Weren’t the Kardashians some race on some planet on StarTrek. What color where THEIR noses? And how did the writers of StarTrek know they were coming
Nick
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Arlo Barnes
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 11:05 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] So, *Are* We Alone?
Ah, one of my favorite authors, Arthur C. Clarke. Well, in 2012 the von Neumann machines were used to increase the density of Jupiter to fusion point, creating Lucifer, the solar system's second star, in order that the life on Europa might have a more stable source of heat to evolve in than the mercurial hotspots on the ocean bottom created by Jupiter's tidal forces. This is why human beings must ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE, so they do not interfere with the process of advancement to civilisation as arranged by the mysterious monolith-controlling aliens (who have energy bodies like Dave Bowman has at the end of 2001 [who by the way becomes incorporated with the energy body of HAL to become Halman after 2010] but who used to have spaceship bodies like Rama in Clarke's Rama series). For those who enjoyed the films, I highly recommend the book series, it is excellent.
But perhaps a better literary comparison is Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question, the eponymous question being "Will we [humans] ever reverse entropy?". In the story, we have a series of vignettes of a human asking a computer the question, from engineers asking it of a huge supercomputer on Earth (contemporary to the time of writing) to a family asking it of a starship they are living on to a pair of transgalactic (energy-body, again) conversers asking it of a mystical supercomputer keeping it's vast mass in hyperspace. None of the computers can answer, and prefer to wait for more data. Eventually the computers and humans merge (that theme again) into a single being (I guess that is the Singularity?) and slip into hyperspace just before the universe heat-dies (correct usage?) and the HumPuter (my term, I forget what Asimov calls it) ponders the Question, eventually deciding it has figured it out. Thus entropy is reversed and the universe was created, with the implication that this is what God is (the religion conversation sneaking back into this thread).
-Arlo James Barnes
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