Daggers In Darkness, CHAPTER THREE.
An exchange between Luz and Ciara: Luz suggests that the San Francisco Tower of Jewels, currently under construction, will rival the towers of Helium when ambassadors arrive from Barsoom. Ciara reminds her that, of course, there will be no cities on Mars until human beings go there and build them. So far, this is an antithesis between fiction and reality. However, Luz replies that Martian cities will be built:
"'...because people like Burroughs and Wells made us dream of it...'" (p. 56)
Synthesis: fiction becomes reality. And one fictional colonized Mars has:
"'...the Dreamers' Craters - Wells, Weinbaum, Heinlein, all the dreamers -...'"
-Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars (New York, 1998), 21, p. 270.
This has become a topical issue. Will Mars be colonized soon? I will believe it when I see it.
6 comments:
Settling Mars looks a lot more likely than it did a decade ago... 8-).
Also, of course, anything human beings -do- has to start as an -idea-, a thought, to be imagined before it's made real.
I think I mentioned that the chronicler of the conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz, wrote that when they came over the summit of the pass into the Valley of Mexico and saw the shining cities and pyramids and palaces and temples and gardens, one thing the Conquistadors said to each other was that "this is like something out of "Amadis of Gaul"".
Which was a highly colorful adventure story, full of princesses and noble nights and wicked sorcerers -- heroic fantasy, very much like R. E. Howard's Conan stories.
Those conquistadores were hard, practical men, warriors in armor with swords in their hands -- but they'd also been teenage romantics dreaming of adventure and glory, and now saw the chance to get it.
Likewise, Elon Musk is fond of naming parts of his very real space-launch systems after bits and pieces from his favorite Science Fiction works.
Reality and fiction have a complex relationship.
Complex, yes.
Reality precedes consciousness, of course. People had to eat before they could think. Complex societies developed, then ideas justifying/rationalizing/sanctifying those societies were formulated. First there was production of enough wealth to support an administrative/ruling caste, then there was the idea that that caste had been divinely appointed and empowered from the beginning of time.
Alan Moore said that artistic creativity is (like) magic. First, there is nothing.(Well, not quite nothing. English or some other language has to exist before authors can write stories.) Then there is an idea in the author's head. Then there is a finished product, a physical artefact, a published novel etc. Something from nothing, almost.
Human beings can't eat unless they think first; we use our brain, our knowledge and our capacity to plan and anticipate to ensure our physical survival. So securing food also requires planning and forethought and imagination.
It's consciousness that humans use to manipulate the physical world around them; we make models of the world in our heads, which is why we're better at using it than other mammals.
And every single human society has its legitimizing myths, whether it's an empire or a clan of hunter-gatherers -- legends, stories, heroes, villains.
I accept that, by the time an organism is describable as "human," then, yes, it is thinking in order to survive. More fundamentally, though, survival of organisms by natural selection preceded and produced the ability, in some of them, to sense, then think about, their environments. My best account of the emergence of consciousness is that naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation. At some stage of complexity and sensitivity, an organism with a developing central nervous system made the transition from being hot or cold etc to feeling hot or cold etc. That was the big turning point: from mere being to being conscious of itself. Many myths and philosophical systems project consciousness right back to the earliest stage: "God created the heaven and the earth..." etc.
Paul: many animals are conscious; the more complex ones more than the simpler.
Some pass the "mirror test" for self-awareness -- which implies a mental -concept- of "self" and "other".
(The mirror test involves putting a mark on the animal, exposing it to a mirror, and having it look for the mark on itself, on its own body -- necessarily implying a 'hey, that's ME' realization.)
Higher primates generally do pass the test; so it's safe to say that humans, and pre-human hominins back to at least h. erectus and probably to the australopithecines, were self-conscious.
Furthermore, evolutionary biologists are fairly confident that the human mind -- and particularly its personality-modeling function -- evolved not so much to deal with the -physical- environment as the -social- environment.
That is, it evolved its full modern complexity to deal with the evolutionary challenge of social interaction with other humans, building models of their personalities and using them to anticipate their behavior or reactions.
This initiated an 'intelligence arms race', where those best at this were more likely to successfully reproduce.
We're far more intelligent than we need to be just for the physical survival aspects of being hunter-gatherers.
And the gigantic human brain consumes over 20% of the total caloric intake needed to keep us running, so it's safe to assume that there was strong evolutionary pressure to build our brains to our current, enormous size.
Which also makes childbirth much more difficult for humans than for other mammals, and in addition requires a very long dependency period for infants.
We wouldn't have all those disadvantages without concurrent survival/reproduction benefits which more than outweigh them.
So yes, the myths are 'true' in the sense that we were self-conscious long before we were fully human.
From the psychological-modeling aspect of the human mind comes most of our cultural baggage; religion, for example, which is a projection of personality and intentionality onto the physical world around us.
Primitive humans still at the hunter-gatherer stage are without exception animists, seeing personality and intent as ubiquitous in the physical world, and projecting them onto non-human animals too.
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