Tocky on 10/5/2014 at 03:14
Quote Posted by Malf
For further adventures in monomania, follow up Moby Dick with Crime & Punishment :p
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I feel Dostoevsky was rejecting Nietzsche's idea of the superman and any supposed special privilage due him. He did it damn well and I wholeheartedly agree with him. The story seemed to slowly and torturously grind home the point. Nietzche had some good points but special privilage wasn't one of them.
Melville ground home his point as well. Obsession doesn't end well. I don't think I believe there was a race warning in it as some critics suggest, not that it doesn't work that way if you want to see it as such. There were minor points he made along the way I liked such as the one right all men hold in reserve.
Anywho, I'm reading Irving Stones biography of Jack London. Now THERE was a man. I feel for where he came from, applaud where he ended up, and rejoice the audacious journey. He didn't believe there was anything he coudln't do and you know what? There wasn't. He had that courage Ray Bradbury spoke of where you "jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down". Reading of his life you see exactly where he got the ideas for his stories and are still amazed at the wealth of understanding he drew from his experiences. He changed the direction of literature for the US when it needed it most and still kept a childlike enthusiasm and zest for life. Hell of a man.
Yakoob on 10/5/2014 at 06:41
I'm reading Brave new World for the second time (this time in English) and so far it's still as good as I remembered! Tho I never realized it was written in 1939, I always thought it was bit more modern then that. Interesting how that influences the knowledge/future predictions in the book!
demagogue on 10/5/2014 at 07:29
I think Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche are closer than the way you (Tocky) described the situation. Both are textbook classic existentialism. Nietzsche had a concept of a superman, but it was something humans could never hope to actually achieve; it was more there to taunt us. Humans are on a continuum between animals and the supermen in his setup, striving for the latter but always being held back by the former. The other thing was that I'm not sure Nietzsche ever advocated for special treatment; quite the opposite. He thought suffering and humiliation were essential to making us strong and not weakass people of sand, which is what happens when you start pampering people & giving them special treatment. It was his biggest fear with the comforts of modern life. Life should be hard, we deserve nothing we didn't do for ourselves, and we're supposed to take ownership over our sicknesses.
But I think they were different in other ways that maybe fit what you're talking about. I don't think Dostoyevsky wanted to even pretend we could overcome our weaknesses or it'd make us better people or life better lived... If you look at the protagonist of something like The Idiot or Notes from the Underground, there are times when we're just completely helpless before madness or sickness or some human frailty. There's not even a saving grace illusion that it makes us stronger or anything. Life is just a dark place sometimes, but we live on.
Tocky on 11/5/2014 at 05:39
Oh no, I didn't mean special treatment by society, I meant special privilage afforded oneself at the sole dispensation of oneself. It has been a long long time since I read Nietzsche and he bored the devil out of me when I was so young so perhaps I missed the finer points but it seemed to me the superman concept (of the sort Ayan Rand so ran with and Hitler so misunderstood) had a disregard for societal rules that Dostoyevsky put a lid on in Crime and Punishment. Then again, it is a fine line. Melville's one right held in reserve Dostoyevsky also dragged into the light. A harsh light. I choose to believe the distinction is for what purpose that final "right" is used. Nations still debate that.
Then again I could be talking out of my ass. It makes sense the way I see it but I could be confusing some concepts. And too I have my own creed which, though I dare not break for my own conscience sake, assumes privilage beyond societal rules so I'm a hypocrite in calling out Nietzsche. Perhaps, as John D. Mcdonald said, there can never be enough contrition when we break the big rules and those rules only one is ultimate arbiter of. I always end up feeling philisophical concepts chase thier own tails. I know what strikes me as right but it's a culmination of life experience. Stupid decisions mostly.
Ah yes, A Brave New World. Never hope for a happy end in dystopian fiction. At least there was some hope in it, unlike the absolute horror of 1984.
nicked on 24/5/2014 at 15:57
Well I finished Matter, which did indeed have an extremely abrupt and unsatisfying ending, but the journey to it was good enough that I don't mind.
Now for something completely different, I'm reading All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, which is really great so far. It's definitely the sort of book to read slowly. Dialogue has no quotation marks, meaning if you're not paying attention, you can lose track of who's speaking. There are also a fair bit of untranslated Spanish conversations smattered throughout, which are usually easy enough to understand but only if you have been paying attention to context (or speak Spanish :p). However, the sheer quality of the descriptive prose and the often-hilarious, naturalistic dialogue make it well worth slowing down and savouring it.
ToolHead on 26/5/2014 at 20:00
Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer.
Holy fucking shit... Insane, wildly original, grotesque and at times quite simply absurdly scary and disturbing. VanderMeer is one of those writers that somehow managed to evade my radar for the longest time. Recently I've read City of Saints and Madmen as well as the two first novels in the Southern Reach trilogy, and he's quickly becoming one of my favorite writers.
Next up: Finch which I'm looking forward to immensely.
DaBeast on 31/5/2014 at 19:16
Finished Surface Detail, just Hydrogen Sonata left. I think I might leave it unread for a while. I have a feeling I'll get a bit down knowing that there are no more left.
I also read Alastair Reynolds Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. I guess it was reasonable, but the first short story seems overly inspired by the film Cube, which is actually referenced at one point in the narrative.
When I'm done with the even less interesting second short story I'll move on to The Reality Dysfunction. Lots of hype about this Nights Dawn stuff. I expect it'll be the more standard fair sci-fi compared to the more imaginative Banks stuff.
demagogue on 31/5/2014 at 22:54
I'm reading a book, Building Better Minds, on what's called Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, and how to solve the combination-explosion problem in normal AI.
The problem is every knowledge node has to search every other one to do something, and it has to scale up to billions of nodes. But if you have good culling algorithms, you can make it search the space more efficiently.
It's a sticky problem, but the book makes a good case it's solveable in the near future, and human-like AI are closer than we think.
SubJeff on 5/6/2014 at 11:46
I was a wedding recently where the best man/grooms brother was a Professor of AI Development (or something). Sadly I never got to talk to him. :(
I'm STILL reading Snow Crash.
Why isn't this a film by now?
demagogue on 5/6/2014 at 12:08
I'm pissed (upset) from the last chapter now because after all that talk of general intelligence, in the end they made their goal system explicitly scripted. I mean the robot follows goals that are pre-scripted in advance, as opposed to just having desires and the robot creates its own running goals in its own terms, which in my understanding is the very heart and soul of general intelligence and generic understanding of any arbitrary thing in the world it takes the time to research.
And then their justification was "robot morality"... They thought if they explicitly scripted the goals they could ensure they never go off the reservation, so to speak, and do bad things. Pfft, we have regulations to keep technology from doing bad things, so I'm not convinced. And if the robot intelligence is really "general", then you give them a moral education like every other agent, or you just disable them if they're sociopathic. It's not like you hand them a gun & let them loose when they're still young. You keep them in a toy world until they demonstrate they can be trusted with more responsibility, like any human.
But the point is explicit goals can't be any route to general intelligence. It's like a poison pill right in the heart of their project that kills it. And now I feel like I have to code the damn things myself if they don't want to swallow logical implication of their own commitment.
Sorry, had to get that off my chest.
