Reflections on the act of writing. Round 1.
By: Ruth, Plainwater
Tags: Alien

Given the COVID situation last year, I quarantined by writing a novel. I mainly wanted to try my hands on generating output through this medium. Now having had a sense of the task, I devoted a bit of my mind to the theoretical aspect of writing, that is, if the medium determines the limits of the content, what’s the difference between fiction writing versus non-fiction? Also, I’d like to try my hands on inventing experimental mediums, for my own sake, for convenience sake. If you were to lead a team to mission on a tech startup, ask them to read a fictional story get’s people aligned on the values and expectations readily, but on a denser cause, normative guidance may not sufficient to the establishment of a common ground.

Still, I’m only toying around with the idea. Let’s start small, try something easy, get the hang of it first.

Currently, when I write things, I tend to tabulate “the math” on a separate file. Obvious when you set a character, it’s set in a universe or a point in universe governed by some logic. To speak narrative is to speak on the superficial level, on the first layer, it’s the descriptives. On the second layer, the motives. The third, a compare and contrast with the actual reality. The fourth, reasoning.

Unlike the non-fictional work, where the reasoning itself could be dealt with head on and the inner working of things could be laid out straight, fictional work is like applied theoretical work, but not quite.

The difference is that viewed from reason’s perspective, fictional work looks positioned on the derived end of things. Yet, there are two types of interpretations to rebuttal this point, one, people are intrinsically different in their understanding of the world, emotion may speak the totality of things to someone while rationality rarely enters their lifestyle. Second, the counterpoint rebuttal, to bring what was impossible into the light of the world, to find that shrouded outlier.

I don’t think in the world of art, this level of stringency is actually practiced. Because deviation from the commons can be achieved without having to completely leave the realm of possibles. Note that I’m only speaking of a rough impression rather than delineating the rules.

Art for one, is going through events on a particular level, to reverse the process of generalizing, to go from theories to particulars. While most theoretical studies is conducted in the level of abstracts. In that sense, art is the opposite of philosophy.

Speaking strictly within this framework of art being the opposite of philosophizing, how is art differ from counterexamples? Given that counterexamples are most logically powerful deviant from a rule or theory, could art ever exceed this type of measure? Or does art in itself, a type that denounces this way of measuring?

Let’s go back to four layers of art.

It could be of a thing, or about a thing, that the thing is mystical.

This could be a consequent of two types of scenarios, for one, the thing is indeed unknown to the writer, such process of writing functions as exploration. Or two, that the thing is known but remain hidden.

I suspect few works of writing is actually written for this kind of purpose, for if they were cognitively adequate, they’d unlikely choose this type of tool as the tool of investigation. The flaws are imminent. It’s too unstructured, inefficient and “impure”, to put things roughly.

There’s also the question of audience. The only reason I can see people resorting to this method is because it needs to be accessed by others, and that’s their inherent purpose. So instead of writing the thing itself, they had to consider the audience, therefore a hindrance and adding a shade to their writing. The more shades and perspectives laden the writing is, the more water down it was for the sake of appeal. Therefore writing for the public, from the writers’ point of view, functions more as a duty, a service provided to the public in exchange for money or goodwill, or plainly, for the sake of charity.

In a daily functional way, a proper analogy would be commissioning the work and being both the tradeswoman and the matron, that it’s part of what functions the woman. If one were to go about the daily business, one needs to be informed at all fronts of the mores and rationales for conducting proper behaviour. For most people, the availability of public information is sufficient or even providing surplus to their daily needs. And that’s where the problem occur for people with some cognitive malfunction, that their sense and intuitions are stacked up differently, therefore permanently befuddled by the open acknowledged facts. They consistently miss out on the cues of others and never seem to get to the right interpretation of an event. It’s alienating and confusing. And this is the true need that propels me to keep tab on multifarious type of business, almost like keep a cheat-sheet so when my gut reaction tells me one thing, I had to re-compute the situation and try to get a best grasp at what others are thinking and say something that’s not offensive.

When I speak my thoughts, I get laughed at, people secretly exchange smirks and roll their eyes, pretending that I don’t see it. The worst part is I couldn’t figure why. What did I do wrong? Anyway, that’s the reason why people like us had to have two a foreign policy and an internal policy, in order to separate the two lines of thought. Internally, we can afford the pleasure of transparency and non-judgement. But externally, we had to treat each person like an independent country, where his/her past history, religion, and current understandings must be respected and considered.

It’s clear then, in practice, the internal development would reside on re-developing a personally tailored set of beliefs, stemming from two lines of concerns. For one, there’s zero filter between one and nature. If a thought, and invention could burgeon off the ground, it means it has passed the test of nature. Laws of physics, as such, are a crucial focus that I am meaning to venture into. But equally so is the laws of man, of which a biological product, a physical brain, a set of nerves, and those aspects, removed from the aspect of its internal workings, is in fact an item of nature. To govern oneself based on laws of biology, is equivalent to that of passing the laws of nature.

People mingle the two aspects, of the content of thoughts and the biology of the hardware, therefore confusing as to which law it is contested against. Therefore creating further confusion, when they thought the manifested thoughts themselves must be of intrinsic moral, that even this belief itself is tentative.

It is from this line of thought, I reject many claims of value, frankly, god, love, freedom, democracy are all part of what follows. It is not the existence nor the reality of those values that I am doubting, but rather it’s possibility in manifestation, which inevitably involves human beings. In my humble opinion, the capacity to see god is no less rare than that of a born pianist. If to say there’s a biological ground in perceiving god, it is therefore possible for civilizations to largely breed out this characteristic. To add an even more confining standard, consider the many scientist who transitioned between theism and atheism, or philosophers who had changed views throughout their career, people would commonly associate the latter claim with the revised view, therefore the good view. But if intuitions are by product of our hardware, this change or even enlightenment could also mean a hardware fluctuation. Trusting it would mean no more than trusting the intuition of the smartest person in the room.

At the upper echelon, there’s indeterminancy of the outcome. This problem I cannot solve. But to point to the obvious, the viability of those values depends on the subject of its’ application. Seeking a pianist in me is not much different than seeking a pianist in a swine. I see my own limitations transparently and evidently, there’s no shame for me in admitting them. I had to have an accurate representation of myself for meaningful decision making. A distorted image far from reality will impact the efficacy of the actions. It is not to say that there’s no benefit in carrying a distorted vision, for that’s the different matter.

Given the vast deviation in the capacity of understanding those values, it’s simply inadequate to claim the universality of those values, especially in practice. While people lands on different ends of the spectrum on certain views, the spectrum itself is not limited to strongly agree or strongly indifferent, but rather, the customization of a personal theory versus the adoption or the non-adoption of a given theory. To some, agreeing with available options is in itself a non-option, that is the theory either does not apply or does not get the question at hand correct.

It sounds like an easy practice, however, I am afraid the necessity to remain silent on those subjects were not ill founded. It is analogous to the leakage of testing stage drugs to drug dealers, therefore selling to the public and wreck a havoc. Needless to say, a drug developed for one person may not work for the genes of those dissimilar to the first patient.

Henceforth the act of writing personal theories is equivalent to that of giving oneself personal prescription. The process, to me, is no different than solving a math problem. It is simply to find the equations, let in the variables and compute the result. At this stage, I am at weak hands with regarding to the more weighty subjects, but to give an example using love as an subject:

(this is gonna offend people, but already find this least offensive example I could give, so I’m gonna use an alien example.)

Say an alien was teleported to live among us in a human form. And assume the alien still differs from human in many mental physical ways. Some of those differences happens to be crucial to human’s conception of love, i.e. chemistry, spark, reproduction, etc. If the alien were to overlook these mental physical differences, he’d had to resort to living an extremely unsatisfying life under the human ideologies. Aliens ought to be governed by different things, what things?

To solve this problem, the first thing is to identify the actual traits possessed by the alien, without having to infer back to the physiology of the alien, simply run a list of commonly acknowledged definitions on love and short list the alien-able ones.