Okay, I just hit 99 readers...

[elfs]

So I'm just trying to figure out... who are all those people? Not that I mind, mind you. I have six people I count as good friends, all but one on LiveJournal, and all but one of the LiveJournalers has me listed as a friend of theirs, so... that leaves some 93 people out there who can't really be all that interested in the banal details of my life. Cooking, coding, writing-- gosh, it's such an ordinary existence.

Finally finished Appleseed, by John Clute. I felt that he ran out of ideas; the ending was way too 1970's for my taste. There are some great moments scattered throughout the book, moments that give one a viceral taste for how whole books ought to be written, and the whole told a story, but it was so... deus ex machina in the end. Still, there are a few good ideas in it. I plan on reading Everyone in Silico next, and maybe Jennifer Government after that.

I edited today. I wrote a sonnet yesterday that, sadly, will never see the light of the sun. It is too vicious and mean, too obvious. But today I managed to put in a few good moments, fixed one scene that was going nowhere so that it is now going somewhere. I have a character that I'm sure a few people are going to absolutely hate because she is so completely and utterly politically incorrect. She does something so heinous and horrible that few modern SF writers would ever give a character this particular habit: she smokes.

["Is she on fire?" Linia asked, and then giggled.]

Hopefully, on the way home I'll break file on one of two ideas I've got floating in the back of my head: either the Madships series or the Bridges of Stone story. Madships is a counterpoint to Dreamteam Calamaties. In the latter, a small group of biologicals do something the AIs agree with but which upsets the majority of biologicals; in Madships, the AIs go unexpectedly on a war footing over a first-contact issue that the biologicals don't quite understand and aren't quite ready to fight over.

Or I'll just tinker with another Aimee novel. I've got five of them plotted out.

Comments

Re: civil rights

[(Anonymous)]

Hi again.

You wrote:

> Actually, most of the Objectivists I know . . . want all humans to have the same rights. . . . I think the notion of a "civil rights" law at any level is dubious.

Hm. When I called you an "enthusiastic promoter of gay rights" I wasn't thinking of the legislated kind of "rights". I was thinking more along the lines of the informal kind of social reinforcement through which folks ally themselves with some people and show their contempt for others. I gather that the snottiness toward homosexuals that has been noted among Objectivists derived ultimately from Ayn Rand's own personal distaste for homosexuality, and her classification of it as a "moral error". Anyway, it was a bit of a personal disappointment to me to find out that some transhumanists I had communicated with were a bit squeamish about (and even a bit contemptuous and condescending toward) homosexuality (whether or not because of any putative link between transhumanism and Objectivism). You, at least, are not willing to take any crap about your sexual preferences. Nor are you willing to keep publicly quiet about them simply out of deference to somebody else's squeamishness or out of fear of a contemptuous reaction. You're a transhumanist who's vociferously and unmistakably on "my side" in that department, IOW ;-> .

For the rest, unlike the Objectivists (and some prominent transhumanists, for that matter), I incline to be dubious about attempts to deduce either factual truth or moral truth about the world from first principles. Epistemologically and ethically, I am a coherentist rather than a foundationalist. In the field of ethics, Bertrand Russell summarized this position very succinctly in a recorded interview I have:

RUSSELL: [I]t's very difficult to separate ethics altogether
from politics. Ethics, it seems to me, arises in this way: a man
is inclined to do something which benefits him and harms his neighbor.
Well, if it harms a good many of his neighbors, they will combine
together and say, "Look, we don't like this sort of thing; we
will see to it that it **doesn't** benefit the man." And that leads
to the criminal law. Which is perfectly rational: it's a method
of harmonizing the general and private interest.

WYATT: But now, isn't it, though, rather inconvenient if
everybody goes about with his own kind of private system of
ethics, instead of accepting a general one?

RUSSELL: It would be, if that were so, but in fact they're not
so private as all that because, as I was saying a moment ago,
they get embodied in the criminal law and, apart from the
criminal law, in public approval and disapproval. People don't
like to incur public disapproval, and in that way, the
accepted code of morality becomes a very potent thing.

-- LP "Bertrand Russell Speaking" 1959 52 min. (Woodrow Wyatt Interviews)

Jim