By Law, the Vach Urdiolch are landless so that they can impartially serve the Race. OK. But we know from "Day of Burning" that Urdiolch were landless before they became the Vach from which the Roidhun is elected, indeed from before the Roidhunate. This Vach has lived for centuries in leasehold homes and their wealth comes from what they win off-planet. Thus, they lead the Race outward and encounter the unknown.
Ydwyr, a xenologist, has studied under Aycharaych who has looked deeper than anyone else:
"'...into that quality of pandemic Mind which the scientists deny can exist...'" (p. 301)
What pandemic Mind? Consciousness originates inside individual organisms with central nervous systems. Such an organism can have unconscious mental processes but these are generated by its consciousness. Once I dreamed that I needed to make a phone call and was surrounded by giant phones too big to handle, then was woken in the middle of the night by a telephone persistently ringing two floors below. I had unconsciously reversed hearing a phone into seeing phones and being rung into needing to ring.
Why describe any pre-conscious processes as mental? Particles interact by the strong and weak nuclear forces. Masses interact by gravitation. Organisms interact with their environments by organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations. Central nervous systems qualitatively transform organismic sensitivity into conscious sensation which generates mental processes, thus "mind."
Consciousness is a relationship between subjects and objects and involves a distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. Thus, an organism's increasing body temperature is an objective datum whereas the organism's experience of feeling hot, then hotter, then too hot, is subjective, unique to the organism. In this case, the object of the experience is internal, not external, to the organism. When an inanimate object or an unconscious organism is heated, there is objectivity but no subjectivity - no mind.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
The closest human analogy I've thought of for the landless Urdiolch might be the tribe of Levi among the Jews, before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. The Levites were not supposed to own lands but to subsist on the gifts of the Jews, to carry out sacrifices to God and act as interpreters of the Laws of Moses. I can see them becoming more like the Urdiolch if the Jewish War had not scattered the Jews.
Ad astra! Sean
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