A tiny group of gallant men (and “their women”) go underground to fight the evil gynocratic overlords. Is this the plot of a terrible dystopian potboiler from 1971, or a description of how most MRAs see themselves, and the world, today?
Turns out it’s both. I found this pic in the Blue Pill subreddit, and now I really, really want to read this book.
Here’s a book review from someone who did.
Regarding dystopias, I know I’ve said before that I’m a big fan of Alistair Reynolds. I’m just reading a book by him called “Blue Remembered Earth” which takes place about a 15o years into the future, where everyone on Earth is under constant surveillance by this huge advanced computer system.
There are several things I like about this scenario, that sets it apart from many other similar imaginings of a total-surveillance-and-control-future:
Firstly, it’s not the case that everyone spends all their time struggling with the surveillance issue, and life is an endless suffering due to having no privacy. People still have their lives to lead. Our main character Geoffrey does have a sister who’s opposed to all-encompassing surveillance, and therefore lives in a politically independent colony on the moon where people have a right to privacy. Geoffrey, on the other hand, is a scientist studying elephants. His two big problems in life, as the book starts, are a) getting enough funds for his research projects, and b) the fact that his family of successful capitalists keep nagging on him that he ought to go into business rather than studying elephants (they nag at his sister too, for being a politically-weird artist). This just seems so much more realistic than a world where everyone is concerned with the politics of the world they live in 24/7.
Secondly, when Geoffrey comes to the moon for the first time he’s not immediately “wow, this is such a liberating place!”. On the contrary, he finds it a bit scary when he sees two policemen arresting a visitor who tried to smuggle spy cameras (biologically crafted into his eyes) that are illegal on the moon – Earth is more or less completely crime free, so you don’t have policemen going around making arrests or even holding people with physical force there, and seeing that for the first time is a bit scary. Geoffrey thinks like “they don’t know everything about everyone here, so that makes it possible that the man they arrested had just made an innocent mistake – maybe he had these cameras implanted years ago for some reason and it never struck him, when going to the moon, that they were illegal here… and then these policemen just grabbed him and forced him down”…
Thirdly, overall, life on Earth is just not painted as being completely terrible. It’s a safe place, and apparently there are also decent welfare systems in place so that there’s no real poverty anywhere any longer.
I’m still at the very beginning of the book, and I already understand that Geoffrey is headed for some trouble he absolutely did not want, and that he’s gonna get in trouble with the big surveillance machine after all. Still, this world is so much more sensibly constructed than many other sci-fi constant-surveillance worlds I’ve read about.
Also, btw, in this future, the three big economical and political players are India, China and the African Union. Geoffrey and his family of big business people are African and their main competitors are Chinese. Although this is not really an issue in the book, it’s just the way things are in the future. Makes sense, I guess, since the world is a dynamic place, and there’s really no reason why the US and Western Europe would have the same clout 150 years from now as they have today. Only it’s a bit refreshing that this is not made an issue of.
@dvargshundpossen…and I’m just reading the sequel!
😀
Dvärghundspossen:
That’s large part of it, but I think there’s also an aspect of “My mum could have legally killed me while I already existed”. Anti-choicers tend to conveniently mix up these aspects because, while most people have little or no support for fetal personhood, anyone can be struck with existential anxiety.
But, how will humanity ever reach Greatest Heights?
Good point. You have to stop and think about the whole thing to realize that if you don’t believe that a fetus is already a person in its own rights (if you do believe this, you’re probably gonna be anti-abortion without any “what if my mum had had an abortion, then I wouldn’t have existed” arguments), then “what if my mum had had an abortion” is equivalent to “what if mum and dad hadn’t had sex that night because they were too tired” from the point of view of conditions for your existence.
This magnum opus reminds me of the incredibly sexist 2 Ronnies story – The Worm that Turned. I will not post a link to the You Tube series because MRAs might regard it as a modern documentary.
Instead of asking “What if my parents had an abortion?” they should ask “What if my parents wished I wasn’t born?”. Because that’s what puts you in the shoes of an unwanted child.
There’s something incoherent about the “what if my mom had an abortion!” complaint.
If you believe in souls, there’s zero reason to think that your soul necessarily requires your exact body. What if your mom had an abortion? Then your soul could have gone back into the Big Soul Hopper and been dispensed into a different body. You would still have lived, just a different life.
Why could this not be true? It would not be true if the soul is =created= by the body. That gets into the territory of, “there is no soul, the mind is a function of the brain.” If the mind (what some call soul) is just a function of the brain and nothing more or less than that, then in a real sense “you” didn’t exist until a few seconds ago, and “you” will cease to exist in a few seconds, as soon as the configuration of your brain changes a bit. If that doesn’t seem terrifying to you, then your mom aborting the being who used to exist X years ago, the one who had your DNA but was just a lump of tissue in the process of organization, who wasn’t even a “person” because the brain was not yet self-aware, should not terrify you either.
I’d apologize for thinking too much, but I was a different person when I started typing this comment.
I think Artic Ape has it right. I had an antichoicer ask me that question as some big gotcha to change my mind. I don’t recall my exact words, but my response was kind of like “what if a different sperm met a different egg?”
@Policy: I don’t follow how you jump from “mind as a function of the brain” to “”you will cease to exist in a few seconds, as soon as the configuration of your brain changes a bit”.
Compare computers and programs. I write this on a computer that has hardware and software. All these little zeros and ones in the software keep changing all the time. We don’t think that’s a good reason to say that the computer gets new software every second, and deny that there are programs that were installed in it weeks or months ago that are still running today.
Likewise, you can think of the physical brain as analogous to hardware and the mind as software or something along these lines, and still think that the mind is a fairly stable thing.
You might think, for instance, that “you” is a bundle of personality traits, memories etc, and as long as there’s enough continuity between the personality traits and memories and etc that were in your body, say, ten years ago and those that are there today, then it’s also been the same person all along.
I’m not saying that this isn’t problematic – what’s “enough continuity”, for instance? Just that it doesn’t follow that there’s no stable “you” from the denying of an immaterial soul.
Good point though, that if you do believe in souls, your soul might just as well, as far as we know, have ended up in a different body in the abortion scenario.
This is beautiful.
Also, I agree w/Vaiyt
Back online after (still more) technical difficulties! W00t!
On the topic of furry awakenings, my little Miss Molly has decided that kissing is the best way to wake the ape. I’ve been kissing her on her little snout ever since she was a kitten, and she either recognizes it as affection, or recognizes it as really bloody annoying. Either way, if she wants something while I’m sleeping, I will be awakened by a fuzzy and occasionally damp little snout being pressed in the general vicinity of my mouth. It’s adorable and mildly gross at the same time, as she has no troubles with licking her own butt, or the floor, or anything else, for that matter. If that doesn’t work, then she starts singing Chinese opera in my ear.
@Dvärghundspossen
The comparison between the brain and a computer is imperfect. Too imperfect, IMHO, to be useful. To the best of my understanding, the brain processes, and stores in the short-term, information in the form of electrical impulses, and in that way is similar to a computer. However, information is stored long-term by structural changes to the brain (growing new dendrites, new neurons, the clearing-away of old ones) and in this way is very different from a computer. This information includes “what am I?” and so that concept of “what am I?” changes, physically, over time.
Can you say that you are the same person today as you were when you were 2 months old? 10 years old? At which point do you draw a line and say, “before this line I was different, and after this line I am the same as I am today”? That line is arbitrary. My arbitrary line may be different from yours, but both are arbitrary.
@Policy: Well, I happily admit that I’m not an expert in either brains or computers. Still, undoubtedly there’s a lot of psychological continuity between Dvärghundspossen today and Dvärghundspossen ten years ago.
Ultimately, I agree with Derek Parfit that any line drawn, what’s gonna be considered “enough” continuity for us to be justified to label one instance of Dvärghundspossen and another instance of Dvärghundspossen “the same person” are gonna be arbitrary (although this is controversial). I think it’s fairly unproblematic to talk in everyday contexts about what “I” did ten years ago, as opposed to what other people did at the time – in the real world we live in there’s usually gonna be pretty big differences between, say, my memories of the actions of Dvärghundspossen’s actions ten years ago and the actions of, say, Dvärghundspossen’s sister ten years ago. Also, in everyday contexts, there’s a clear difference between me directly planning for Dvärghundspossen’s actions tomorrow and attempting to advise/persuade Dvärghundspossen’s sister to do something tomorrow. So the idea of persons persisting over time is useful and also unproblematic in everyday contexts, but you can always come up with special cases and thought experiments where there’s no definitive answer to the question of whether A and B are the same or different persons. So, yeah, I agree that it’s all ultimately a bit arbitrary, although pragmatically useful to think of persons as persisting through time.
HOWEVER; defining “person” as “precise configuration of brain states that only lasts for a second” is completely arbitrary. It’s not at all how we use the word “person” in ordinary language, that’s for sure. I just can’t see no reason for that definition at all. It seems way more plausible to say that “person” is a vague concept, possibly ambiguous in addition to being vague (ambiguous between referring to entire bodies, brains or continuous streams of psychological states, perhaps), and that’s why there are no non-arbitrary lines to be drawn and no answers to some questions of the type “is A and B the same person?”. But the claim you made above
Damn, I should have read that through more carefully before hitting “enter”. Sorry for the blockquote monster and sorry for the typos.
I’m thinking emolate is a coffee drink for emo kids.
I love the trolls who can’t grasp the intent of this blog. It is a mockery site, There have been plenty of intelligent conversations here. More so than most sites. However, it is not necessary.
@Dvärghundspossen
It’s true that we operate in our lives as though there is continuity of self. I don’t think that means that that fact makes it true. We also operate as though we perceive the world accurately, when neuroscience tells us that our brains receive and =ignore= vast quantities of data, filtering it out as “irrelevant.” Since there is limited processing power, and more input than that processing power can handle, most of it (=most= of it) is perfunctorily discarded, and these “blanks” filled in with pre-formed constructs.
I’m sitting in a room with a computer, and my hands are on the keyboard, but this perception comes from only a small fraction of the data available to me. Most of that perception is a construct built by my mind, which my brain compares against the small amount of perceptive data that can be usefully processed. I =assume= that the construct my mind has formed accurately matches reality, but does it? I operate as though my perceptions correctly match reality, but that is just an operational assumption that I make, because I have to make it in order to function.
(I find it =very= interesting that Kant so accurately predicted the findings of neuroscience in this respect, long before neuroscience was a thing. Was it luck? Probably. Still interesting.)
tl;dr: Just because I operate in the world as though X-thing is true, doesn’t make it =necessarily= true.
Personally I view continuity of self as being similar to a photon self-propagating through space. The photon does not “exist” in the sense of an object, although it does behave (operate) in reality as though it were a particle, and we call it “a photon” as though it were a singular thing. A photon, though, is motion, nothing more and nothing less. It cannot stop, or else it ceases to exist. It’s the fact that it is moving that creates its existence, and we are the same way. We are not singular objects, and the set of memories and experiences that we have are not “us,” but rather “we” are the fact of change. We only stop changing when we die.
This is why I said what I did. YMMV.
Haha, more Kant fans on this blog! 😀
And I don’t think Kant hit on something by pure luck. Sure, he didn’t know half of what we know about the brain (back at his day, they thought that thinking happened when some kind of liquid flowed back and forth in microscopically thin tubes running through the brain…). But he did know this much: Human beings have limits. We have brains that function in certain ways (although he didn’t have an accurate picture of what these ways were), we have a perceptory apparatus and a psychology that is, in certain ways, hardwired. There’s just no way we can step outside of all this and view the world as God would see it, in a perfectly objective way. So, we can get a lot of information about “phenomena”, but not about “the thing in itself”. That’s a valid conclusion from the facts that he did know, even though he didn’t now about all these details that we have found out about nowadays.
I also think that Kant, if he could travel in a time-machine to our present day and learn about modern science, most likely wouldn’t think that we are on our way now to finding out what “the thing in itself” really is. He’d probably be really impressed, but think that as impressive as science is now, ultimately and at the end of the day we still use our brains to do science (that remains true however much help we can get from various computers and instruments). And our brains are still our limited brains, not the omniscient minds of God… so a completely, perfectly objective view of the universe will forever be beyond our reach.
I don’t think we disagree on the facts, really. Maybe disagree on how to use words like “person” and “you” and “me” properly. I can totally agree that the brain is constantly changing and that my psyche is constantly changing. I just can’t see any reason to draw the conclusion that me writing this didn’t exist a second ago etc. That conclusion doesn’t follow from the facts alone; you also have to add in a definition of “me” that I can’t see any reason for adhering to.
Further thoughts on what Kant would think about today’s science:
He’d be really happy about the progress that biology has made since his day, since he was really annoyed about the lack of causal explanations in that discipline.
He’d be really disappointed about the fact that there’s no more life in the solar system, since he thought that the appearance of life was probably a normal part in any planet’s life cycle, and that there was probably life on the other planets as well (apart from gaseous ones). Including super-intelligent aliens further out in the solar system.
@Dvärghundspossen
Oh, I don’t think it was =pure= luck. But there was luck involved. He was very intelligent and was extrapolating intelligently from the information available at the time. There’s no reason to presume, though, that his extrapolation (which is not perfected but nevertheless eerily close to what we know now) was the only extrapolation possible. Other intelligent people believed differently.
I wouldn’t say I’m a “fan” of Kant, although I recognize his contributions. Mainly Kant makes me think of how many other very intelligent people were unable to make contributions because they lacked his privilege to sit around and ponder stuff all day.
Because the mind is change. The mind is not =changing,= it is =change itself.= If the mind were to stop changing, it would cease to be a mind. The brain is changing, and the change constitutes the mind.
Not saying this is a widely-accepted definition. LOL It’s influenced by certain schools of Buddhism.
@Policy: Okay, you’ve completely lost me regarding the “mind” thing.
You say that the changes in the brain constitutes the mind. Well… in that case, it seems like my mind is here, as long as my brain changes, and that only when my brain ceases to change (i. e. at the point of brain death) my mind is gone. Fair enough! But that definition does seem to imply that I have a mind, during my entire life.
The idea that first there’s one mind, the next second there’s another mind, and in another second a third, on the other hand, seems to require a completely different definition of mind, like “a certain unchanging state of the brain”. With that definition in place, it makes sense to say that the mind responsible for writing this particular sentence didn’t exist a second ago, because a second ago there was a different brain state, and every change in the brain destroys the mind and create a new one.
Regarding Kant… As famous philosophers go, though, he was fairly unprivileged. He came from a poor family and only got to go to university because he was recognized as really talented and various people (like, the local church/priesthood if I remember correctly?) stepped in to pay for a university education.
Then he basically worked and worked and worked as a fairly badly payed university teacher until he finally, middle-aged, acquired a position that allowed him to actually sit down and write philosophy books.
Most famous philosophers had it easier than that in life.
a few days ago, my dear flamepoint here, boris, decided it was time for me to get up. he had no real reason; food and water bowls were full. i suspect he just wanted to play with mamma. i usually feel it when he jumps on me in the night, but at the time in question (4 AM) he had stealthily made it to my chest without waking me. when this did not do the job, he succeeded in his new trick — engulfing my nose in his mouth and providing a full feline lingual probe. i love boris, but yuck. yuck, yuck, yuck. this has got to be one of the worst ways to wake up that i have encountered.
in regards to the OT, i shall have to ensure that ‘the feminists’ is not on the lists i’ve prepared for my teen daughters of books to be read by early adulthood. i shall, however, keep ‘faster pussycat, kill! kill!’ on the recommended viewing list.
@Dvärghundspossen
In a way, yes. Like a wave propagating across an ocean. The ocean = the brain, the wave = the mind. The water must move (change) over time in order for a wave to exist. The wave is not the water; it is the motion of the water. If the water ceases the move, the wave no longer exists. The wave is the change in the water, not a fixed thing.
We can say that “this wave was here a moment ago, and now it is over there” as though it is the same wave, but the =water= that was here a moment ago is still here. Water just moves up and down as the wave passes, the water itself does not move horizontally in any meaningful way. So is it the same wave? Really?