elfs | Entries tagged with philosohpy

WARNING: I cannot emphasize enough that here be spoilers. Maybe you want them. Maybe that’ll make the art and gameplay worthwhile.

There are stories that let us be heroes. Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect, Half Life are all such stories. Prey was such a story until the epilogue, at which point the story changaed so much I swore to never play it again. (I did, but I skipped the epilogue). There are stories where our heroism is very much a choice (the first two Bioshock games, or Cyberpunk 2077), and there are stories where the point is to say that being the hero doesn’t always come with the ending you thought it did (Bioshock Infinite comes to mind).

I write science fiction. I’ve thought a lot about the Simulation Problem, the moral infrastructures of aliens and robots unlike ourselves and how those would interact with human consciousness and human frailty. I’ve cheered for Free Guy, a dumb (but fun!) movie that has as one of its central themes Wittgenstein’s maxim for believing if someone has a soul: if you can’t tell if someone has a soul, your only moral choice is to believe and act as if they do until proven otherwise.

Clair Obscur’s theme is that it doesn’t matter if you’re the hero, or not. It doesn’t matter if you have a soul, or not. Your very existence is worthless in the eyes of God.

You spend the first two-thirds of the game with Lune, Sciel, and Mielle, as well as the others. You learn their backstories, their sadness at being in so broken a world, their tragedies that led them to join the expedition, gamble their lives on potentially hopeless task, and against the slimmest of odds save their world. The game shows you in slow, beautiful steps how their suffering, their love, their loneliness, and the companionship they’ve found in this adventure make them human.

At the end of Act II, you learn your friends are “not real.”

The prologue introduces the Paintress, a monstrous, bony figure on the horizon who is inflicting all the pain and suffering the citizens of Lumiere face. In Act I you meet “the man with the white beard,” who slaughters almost all of the expedition, leaving only a handful alive, the core of your party. Act II brings gives them names: the Paintress is named Ailene, and the man with the white beard is her husband, Renoir.

Ailene and Renoir are gods. In their world (of which you see barely two minutes in the entire game), there is a war between The Painters and The Writers. Nobody says why; I dug up every piece of lore I could and couldn’t figure it out. Both of these groups have the magical power to create new worlds by painting (“Canvases”) or writing them. An incident killed one Ailene and Renoir’s son, and left one of their two daughters, Mielle, hideously scarred and crippled by burns. Ailene took one of her dead son’s paintings, added a ton of detail to it, and gave him a city, Lumiere, in which they could live together.

Renoir had once been trapped in a painting decades ago, and Ailene saved him. Renoir and Ailene know that entering a painting eventually drives you mad, but Ailene would rather have had a lifetime with her son and go mad. Renoir entered the painting to drag Ailene back to the “real world,” but Ailene fought back; Mielle followed him to help her mother. The resulting battle caused The Fracture and caused Mielle to lose her memories, so she thought she was just another citizen of Lumiere, and Gustave adopted her and taught her how to live in the Fractured world.

That’s the overarching Lore. You just spent more time reading about it than the game itself spends showing it to you in dialog and flashbacks.

At the end of the game, Mielle has gathered enough Chroma (a form of magical power mostly used as currency in the game mechanic) and come into her own power enough that you, the player, are to make a choice for her: drive Renoir out of the Canvas, or let him burn it.

If you drive Renoir out of the Canvas, the people you’ve spent hours and hours with, the people the game told you to care about, get to live for as long as Mielle keeps her sanity. Eventually, though, she will die. Mielle wants this. She wants to live as an ordinary person, live out her days in a reconstructed Lumiere with the friends she’s come to trust and love, to see them happy, to see them live out the lives the narrative told us they deserved.

If you let Renoir destroy the Canvas, Mielle has a chance to live out a “real” life, in the real world, in a burned shell of a body, it’s skin barely able to move, blind in one eye, unable to speak. There’s a whole human mind back of that remaining eye, but her family treats her with contempt. Ailene’s attachment to her son will be broken and she’ll have a chance to be healed.

Your choice, then, is to take the risk that your life means something and deserves a chance, or to accept that it doesn’t mean anything at all and your death will give the gods (with whom you have almost no contact and who view your very existence as a problem) a chance at some closure.

Like, no. To hell with that sort of premise. It made me angry with an incandescent rage that all that time was buildup to “Oh, let’s give Renoir a chance at closure.” He murdered a city already. He’s been abusing his power to create and then neglect life for decades. He gets less than ten minutes of screen time and we’re supposed to accept that his feelings, his “life forces on us cruel choices” bullshit, matters more than our friends, our companions, and our lives? Just because he’s some arbitrary definition of “really real?”

Nope, not playing this game again.

Current Location: The Villa Sternberg
Current Music: Clair Obscure OST, The Curator

How are queer theory and the green energy discourse similar?

One of the books I’m happy to own is the somewhat infamous Fear of a Queer Planet, published in 1991, right in the center of the AIDS crisis. FoaQP was a distilliation of decades of queer theory, about how being queer was always an inherently political act, a challenge to a status quo. It didn’t incorporate everything: the influence of Roughgarden, Jane Ward, and Denny Lowell aren’t here, nor are the critical insights Pat Califia brought through the 80s and 90s, but overall it’s a good intro.

One thing queer theory does is explode the myth of “men are reliable and stable, women are fickle and unpredictable.” Gay men’s relationships are infamously less stable than heterosexual couples, and the ancient joke about what a lesbian brings on her second date still has a ring of truth to it. (Answer: A U-Haul.) The last 30 years since the publication of FoaQP has shown both significant progress in addressing this duplicity between the myths straight men tell about themselves and the reality straight women face in dating men, and often violent pushback from straight men that such truths should not be spoken.

I bring this up because we’re seeing it play out again in very strange ways when it comes to “green energy.” I’ve now encountered several conversations where the accusation is that green energy is “feminine,” that is, unreliable, fickle, and likely to fail when critically needed. “The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine,” goes the refrain from these manly men, “which is why the market is stupid to embrace these technologies.” (Nevermind that “those technologies” produce electricity at the lowest cost and highest environmental respect.) Both fossil-fuel boys and nuclear boys are enamored of their own tech: it works, they say, and it’s reliable. You can turn it on and off with a switch, unlike the sun or the wind, and that’s why they like it, and that’s why we should embrace it. And they’re independent: you don’t need a whole network to just drive your gasoline-powered car.

Except they’re not really reliable. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island proved that about nuclear energy, and fossil fuels have contaminated enough of our planet it’ll be centuries before the taint of their passing is removed from our air, water, and soil.

Commodity streams of oil and nuclear fuel depend upon “a whole network” to deliver commodity fuels to gas stations and nuclear power plants. The transport of nuclear fuel and nuclear waste are both security and health nightmares for the people tasked with moving them, as well as the communities through which they might move.

Pro-nuclear-power and pro-fossil-fuel people lie about green energy the way men lie about women: because they like what they have, they like the feeling of power it gives them, they like the howling explosions– inside a V8’s cylinders and within the atoms at the core of any reactor– and they like the idea that it takes a lot of high-performance engineering to keep either from blowing apart the engines they power. Solar is disappointing: it just sits there. The worst thing a wind turbine does is catch fire and fall over, and that’s no fun. The opportunities to be manly, to engage in rescue, are few and far between.

The pushback against green energy resembles the pushback against queer theory: it’s an upset of the status quo, and it takes pieces of the carefully crafted “masculine” identity and says, clearly: you men are either lying or being lied to, and the lies are in service to a destructive (and self-destructive) lifestyle.

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: The Villa Sternberg
Current Music: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/stormSoundGenerator.php

One of the great touchstones of philosophical greatness, in Greek thought at least, is the ability to respect your reactions to crises and opportunities, and to exercise power over those reactions. The secret to understanding how that works can be found in writing romance novels.

If there’s one absolutely consistent theme throughout my stories, it’s that the greatest mystery in human thought is simply this one: why do we make choices and decisions at all?

I’ve come to some satisfactory conclusions, the most important of which is that choice involves nothing supernatural. There’s no “soul” that “I” don’t have any access to, that makes decisions one way or another. That decision making is based not on reason, but on emotion, and that without emotions we would be eternally caught in an optimization loop, unable to break down and make a choice. Even as we weigh choices from the most trivial to the most essential, from what to have for lunch to whom to love and marry, in the end it is emotions that rise up and say, “It’s time to break the tie. You have other things to worry about, young hairless African plains ape, like that cheetah stalking you.”

I’m also a practicing Stoic of the old school, and one of the criticisms often hurled at Stoicism is that Stoics are unfeeling, unemotional creatures who think too much about death, and let that maudlin rumination leech them of feeling.

Obviously, if on the one hand I practice Stoicism, and on the other hand I believe that our emotions are the core and essence of what we are, and that we couldn’t be human without being fully emotional, then I believe that being Stoic and being emotional are fully compatible.

I’m a writer, and writers think about emotions a lot. To borrow a page from my character creation notes, a great character always has an internal tension between two different goals, one long-term and one short-term. Since I write romances, my two protagonists often start with a short-term need to get the hell away from each other for plot reasons, and a long-term desire for affirmation, love, and finding their place in the world. The trick of good writing is to show how those two desires conflict with each other, and then to show how deciding to go for the long-term solution slowly reveals the “real person” under the conflict such that they start to see how suitable the other person is as a partner.

I believe we all have these short- and long-term goals, and that they’re frequently at odds with one another. The desire to lock myself into my mancave and write for hours on end is clearly in conflict with long-term desire to have a happy marriage, and I’ve learned that I have to consistently push away from the desk and attend to my family. My long-term goal is more important to me than my short-term desires.

That’s the primal secret to having power over your reactions. You have to recognize that a reaction is an expression of a short-term desire, and that those expressions aren’t always suitable. By practicing how you’ll react to crises and opportunities, even in the quiet theater of your own skull, you’ll have more control over yourself when the time comes to put that rumination into practice.

I think that’s why romance writers tend to have such stupendous output. They’ve uncovered the secret to dealing with harsh emotions, by rehearsing them over and over on the pages they write. Readers get to experience that second-hand, but for the writer, exploring those details and analyzing them down to their bones gives them that insight. By understanding this conflict, they find the strength to sit down every morning, face the keyboard, and write.

You should practice this too. Every morning, ask yourself one question: “What one terrible thing could go wrong today? How would I deal with it?” Take a deep breath and ask yourself, if your long-term values were fully engaged, if you were seeking to be fully and emotionally satisfied, and not the hormonal, irrational, animal reactive person you are when you’re just “thinking fast,” how would you want to react? Who would need you more than you needed yourself in that moment? Do this regularly, and you’ll be a far stronger person than someone who doesn’t.

Current Mood: accomplished

So, I have a question about Buddhism.

It's a given in the neurological and psychological sciences that we are fundamentally emotional beings. People whose emotional response centers have been damaged lose the ability to make decisions; they prevaricate back and forth between choices, never settling on one. The "modular" structure of our brains, the one that adjusts the knobs of our personalities (sometimes radically) in response to stimuli— hunger, exhaustion, desire, jealousy— is more or less a given. We also know that this varied, modular design is what gives rise to distraction: we aren't "in control" of our thoughts, for if we were, they wouldn't wander whenever we were bored. Buddha took this to a logical extreme: if your "self," whatever it is, can't command your thoughts to behave, then perhaps there is no "self" at all, only a phenomenal collective of thoughts and their organic origins that, having only one body, appears to be a whole human being to other human beings.

In the Buddha's view, all of civilization is a pantomime, and our evolutionary emotions dedicated to keeping us alive (fed, warmed, in a tribe where we can shine individually so long as we all keep the water running and the herd fed collectively) and getting us laid, are at the core of who and what we are. We suffer (the word is overused in Western Buddhism; Buddha meant something closer to a sense of perpetual anxiety and dissatisfaction, with 'suffering' as an extreme of the daily discomfort and alienation we experience) and we desire to alleviate that suffering through food, drink, sex, drugs, fame, power, and any number of tools.

Okay, all good. The technology (technology: "a collection of knowledge, methods, skills, and applications used in the production of goods and services toward human flourishing") Buddha gave us was the Three Meditations: Concentration, Mindfulness, and Insight— and in that order. The purpose of mindful meditation was to give us an insight into our own brains. After some mastery of concentration, we are to observe how it works, to monitor its behaviors, to tally and catalog whether our thoughs are to accomplishment, or anticipation, or rumination, or anxiety, and learn that each of those thoughts isn't the thinker. That we can observe this lack of self-mastery, this tendency for the mind to wander, and be mindful of who "we" are without having to regard every thought we're having as being part of our "selfhood."

Buddhism then asks you to go a bit deeper, and inquire about the observer. If none of those thoughts, about what you did yesterday, about what you might do tomorrow, about who might criticize you, and about who you might desire, are you, but clearly they're thoughts about things you want, or want to learn from, then what is doing the observing of these thoughts?

Dig deep enough, Buddha claimed, and you'll find that confident, concentrative, mindful "you" isn't really "you" at all, either; it's just another thought.

So let's turn this onto its neurological head: what emotion keeps you on the cushion? We are at our base emotional creatures. Buddha encouraged us to get a grip on those emotions, to marshall them. In this, Buddha and Zeno, the founder of Stocisim, found both the symptom of our problems and the solutions.

But what emotion drives a practicing Buddhist or Stoic to their daily meditations? What happens when you are finally satisfied with your Buddhist practice?

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Calibre, Even If

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with Omaha. In a recent blog post I wrote "I ... believe that consciousness is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, a way of maintaining a continuity of self in a world of endless stimuli and the epiphenomenal means by which we turn our actions into grist for the decisions we make in the future..."

Omaha challenged me on that. "You're not a normal person. You know that as well as I do! You have ADHD and that not-Aspy thing I can never remember the name of^†. Normal people don't tell stories about themselves, to themselves, like that. They don't have to."

Really? I'm genuinely surprised. We all have stories, about who we are, where we came from. "Normal" people don't review that story from time to time to ensure that what they hope they'll accomplish in their coming day, their coming week, their coming year, is consistent with the story they've told so far? I find that disappointing.

Lots of things are stories. Software is a story; a well-written program tells you a story about what it does, how it does it, and how the developer thought about it. I write stories. My life is a kind of story.

Seneca once said, "If you don't know to what port you're sailing, no wind is favorable." There's a story in your past about how you got into the boat. There's a story in your head about what you'll do when you'll land. Even a voyage of discovery has a destination in mind, if only in hope.

People re-watch movies. The re-play video games. They re-read books. They go for the story, again and again. That "normal" people get through life without reviewing and retelling their own story, too see where they've been and plan where they're going, just seems impossible.

† Persistent Interictal Syndrome