From: 00vmszopa@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: What it is to be alive?
Date: 20 Nov 92 20:52:33 GMT
Organization: Ball State University, Muncie, In - Univ. Computing Svc's

In article <1992Nov19.233408.20565@yang.earlham.edu>, jessec@yang.earlham.edu writes:
> In article <1992Nov19.171801.8269@pbhyc.PacBell.COM>, 
> djdaneh@pbhyc.PacBell.COM (Dan'l DanehyOakes) writes: 
>> In article <1992Nov18.165819.20554@yang.earlham.edu> 
>>jessec@yang.earlham.edu writes: 
>> 
>>>   Curtis Yarvin (curtis@cs.berkeley.edu) writes:
>> 
>>>>I don't know about you, Jesse, but I already have a pretty good feeling
>>>>of what it is to be alive.
>> 
>> 	way.  Each of us can understand _people_, and that is
>> 	probably about as close as you can some.
>> 			--Douglas R. Hofstadter
>> 			  GODEL, ESCHER, BACH
>> 
>> Nuff said.

Don't know about THAT..
> 
>    Wow... Nice quote, there! :-) I haven't gotten around to reading 
> Hofstadter yet, though I just read most of *Consciousness Explained* by 
> Daniel Dennett, who coauthored *The Mind's I*, I believe.  Very 
> interesting stuff about the phenomenology of consciousness, which is what 
> we're talking about here...
> 
>    Anyway, I don't think that Hofstadter (from what he says here, anyway) 
> is slamming the lid on the question for the writers of literature.  
> Dennett, who also tears apart our concepts of consciousness, finding only 
> "multiple drafts" beneath the illusory Jamesian "stream of consciousness", 
> nevertheless is an admirer of writers like Joyce and Faulkner who 
> attempted to plumb human phenomenology with more veracity.  As Hofstadter 
> says, "it all depends on what you mean by 'understand.'" If you mean, can 
> an author describe, without omission or simplification or just plain 
> making mistakes, what it is to be conscious for even one minute? The 
> answer (at least with the limitations of text) is no.  But authors can 
> come asymptotically closer and closer to describing that experience 
> *convincingly*, so that the reader stares, shakes her head, looks again, 
> and says "yeah... it *is* like that!"

I really like what you're saying here.

In some cases it's: "My god it really is that WEIRD!"  William Gibson and
some of the other authors mentioned around these parts shift us into
overdrive on fumes of chaos, style, and irony. I think that there's a huge
group of people (all ages) struggling with our culture and what it means
to be alive in the midst of latter-day technological sprawl, and it's being
read about and discussed in a very mainstream genre. Usually beneath the
surface. There's much more to be said than 'nuff said. (Though it's tempting,
cool and easy to sum things up like this -- some of my favorite sci-fi
characters talk that way :) )

Philip K. Dick is my big read right now, and I'm sure that you have
read some of his stuff. (?)  The new biography of him, _Divine
Invasions,_ is engrossing to say the least. His wacked-out life reflects
the intensity of his work -- he apparently COMPOSED at eighty to 100 
words a minute.  

I've been dwelling on his questions of consciousness lately, even though
I should probably choose a major instead.

> 
>    --Jesse.
> 
-- 

-------------------------------------------------------------------
00vmszopa@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu                            Vinney Szopa
Ball State University		Muncie, IN			USA
Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty
"We must go on. We have to go on!" --Kane in  A L I E N
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,alt.cyberpunk