(urth) just in case anyone was wondering

[James Wynn]

Phrases marked ">>" were mine.

Civit said:
> Well, before going further I tend to think that attempts to look for
Wolfe's
> personal beliefs on these particular subjects through the books are doomed
> to failure. The questions Wolfe is raising are difficult - many would say
> impossible - to answer rationally. (There is always faith, but faith can't
> be communicated). Wolfe knows this, and I think he understands that any
> attempt to actually *answer* them in his books would fatally flaw the
text.
> I think that Wolfe's goal is not to answer these questions but to put them
> in front of you in a vivid way and force you to confront the inherent
> paradoxes.

Maybe. But I would be very surprised to learn that the argument that Silk
gives for not disarming Viron does not map to Wolfe's own opinions regarding
gun-control?

By the same token, Wolfe has Rose-in-Marble explain why she is a person and
not a machine-generate anomaly. Note that soul in the original Rose has
"gone to Mainframe" or Heaven or wherever souls "really" go in the Long Sun
universe. It seems likely to me that Wolfe has put into her mouth an
argument that he sees as valid...in this case.

> >1) Rose-as-Marble says that "now I'm one of those gold doo-dads on those
> >cards, but I'm still a person because I always was". This tells me that
> >Wolfe considers a soul to be transcendent over matter. Rose is a person
in
> >Marble because she was a person originally.

>Yes but is Rose's soul absent or present. If for Wolfe, the soul is an
object either
>inside or outside of time.  If it is merely Rose's personality, than a
person is
>cognition of sufficient complexity and self recursion, with or without a
soul.
>Yes, but Wolfe is saying you can copy/reconstruct a persona, a mind, not a
soul.
>It doesn't make sense to say an exact copy of a piece of information is a
fascimile.
>Information is not a material object.  If the soul is an energetic entity
as opposed
>to an informational one, then that is different, but I don't know if he
says that anywhere.

A physicist will tell you different. The piece of paper is far more
intracately detailed information than the words written on it but it is
information as well. It seems to me that Rose is not jus talking about her
feelings. She seems to have been considering the matter and believes she is
a person based logic. Granted: based on logic that is based on premises that
one can accept or reject. Still, its seems to me that those premises are
being leaked by the author. I know Wolfe frequently has very wise characters
say things he believes and even shows to be false. This seems different.

Civit replied
> But, going beyond the surface of the words, you're still left with a
problem
> here - are the words the product of a soul/person perceiving its own
nature,
> or are they the product of a program, a "simulation" of sorts?

That's what I'm trying to say. Wolfe's general story-telling from Fifth
Head, Latro, and the Sun cycle could legitimately lead one to think that
Wolfe sees the soul as pure information. But a few key statements in LS and
SS and now The Wizard Knight lead me to believe that Wolfe probably
*actually* considers the soul to be *somehow* transcendent* of matter. If
the soul were not transcendent to the medium then the soul would not
typically "leave the body" when it was no longer useful as the Narrator of
the SS says it does.

Nor would Gylf's death be significantly different from Mani's in that Mani's
soul would die when the cat does (because Mani is the merger of the
elemental and the cat) but the elemental spirit would lilve on. It seems to
me that Able was saying that "Gylf's soul" would not die with him because it
was ultimately created by the Most High God.

Wolfe seems to me to have rejected Turing's standard for a "self-conscious"
machine and accepted Searle's Chinese Room argument.

But if anyone were to apply the model of "soul = information" he could
hardly be blamed. That model works for most that happens in a Wolfe novel.

Civit says
>You could just as easily argue that Wolfe is implying that
> there are no souls, either for Rose-in-Marble or for ourselves. I won't
make
> that argument, because I don't think he was actually arguing for either
> point of view.

I don't either, of course, and frankly I don't think that would be a very
accurate reading even if we didn't have extra-textual reason to doubt it.

>for Wolfe, a mind is memory and that is the persona or identity. this
>doesn't say what Wolfe thinks of the soul, and the way he treats the
>reinscription of Severian, not that he believes this, but the way he treats
>Severian's multiple copies it is as if he is equating the soul with the
>information of the persona.  In other words, I'm baffled, I do not know
>what Wolfe is trying to tell us about the relationship between the soul
>and how that relates to the mind-body problem if anything.

I think Wolfe has a personal theory regarding the soul - that it is
transcendent of matter and time. He is deliberately constructing stories
that assault that theory to see if it continues to stand up.

Civit asks
>But [regarding the SS Narator] whose opinion? Silk and Horn
>have opinions that are distinct from Wolfe,
>and we often learn that Wolfe's narrators aren't always right - nor are
they
>mouthpieces for Wolfe's own opinion.

I agree. Obviously, I consider this one to be distinct from other opinions
for reasons that might not be impervious to critique. This, and
Rose-in-Marble's statement feel different to me.

Chris says
>I agree with you that part of the original design of the chems *must* have
>been to accept the imprint of personalities. Possibly to give Pas & co. a
>set of convenient (and strong) receptacles at need. I am not sure about
your
>conclusion, though - what about chem reproduction? This could be a serious
>theological problem from Wolfe's perspective. (Bonus question: is natural
> reproduction really any less of a theological problem, and if so or if
not,
> what does this say about the nature of the soul?)

You see, you've anticipated my response. I don't think chem reproduction is
a problem. An interesting question? Very. But not directly relevant. New
chem personalities are an amalgum of their parents'.

Turin asks
When you say [made to be ensouled] does that mean a downloaded personality
prompts God to endow the organism supporting the persona a soul or that it
shares a soul with the organism with the original personality, Kypris or
Pas.  In other words, is Hammerstone Pas?  Does the soul constitute the
identity even if the personae are identical?

Yes. I believe that Hamerstone is Typhon (Pas is a similar but different
matter) without his memories. You see? Memories don't equal the soul, or
else what of the soul of the sleepers in the Whorl? Are they different
persons after that? Frankly, I don't think it is coincidental that the
female chems looked like Mamelta. And IMO this is the explanation of Silk
realizing that he and Sand are "brothers".

But a soul is related to memory. Hammerstone becomes (it seems) a very
different person from the fellow Severian met in the mountain.

Turin originally said:
>>>The elves in the Wizard Knight don't have souls, but he implies that they
>>>will could recieve souls, but this is a convention of
>>>faerie stories, the soulless elves.

>>No comment.

and Turin responded
>This does relate to the A.I. debate only in that they have personalities
and not souls, but as I have said before I don't trust the Wizard >Knight to
inform the questions raised by the Sun books.

I neglected to answer your original question because I felt to go far into
it was a spoiler (and we've decided to to discuss The Wizard Knight until
after the New Year. However, a dog (normal ones, not like Gylf) have
personalities but (according to the book of Ecclesaiastes?) has no soul. So,
yes, a soul I presume *could* be seen as separate from the personality which
we can agree changes over time anyway (i.e. a personality is mutable, a soul
is not).


Civit asks
>An interesting side thread to that entire issue is the theme which recurs
>repeatedly about imitation. Someone asks Silk what would happen if a demon
>tried to impersonate a god. A parallel question would then be, what if an
AI
>tries to impersonate a soul? Does Silk's answer to that question hold up
for
>either case?

Hmmm...since I believe they have human souls, perhaps I'm not the one to
take that on. But remember that the Outsider says demon who pretends to be a
god will become a god ***in a way.**** Quetzal is a fiend who wants to bring
the people of Viron to Green to provide food for his species. He is
pretending to be a kindly old augur who is seeking the best for his people.
He ends up dying trying to lead them safely through the tunnels. So I don't
know about chems, but it sort of worked for Quetzal. And Horn mimicked Silk
and eventually in a way became him.

Turin speculates:
>As for language, Seawrack says that Horn has made Baby and her people
>and if they go back to their previous environments they will no longer be
>people.  In this case, is personhood a kind of socialization or
domestication?
>Baby is learning how to communicate, and Seawrack is using whatever
>language Horn is speaking.  If Horn makes Seawrack a person, but she
>knew the Mother's language beforehand, it doesn't seem as if language
>makes Seawrack a person.   However, Baby did not know how to
>communicate before he met Horn, so is communication or rather conscious
>representation, the basis of personhood, and if Baby was not a person, did
>he have a soul?

Okay. First of all, I don't get Seawrack. It bugs me that Seawrack and
Hyacinth are so key and so obscure. In the case of Babbie, remember when
they all go Urth and Babbie looks like a guy with big arms and glasses? You
probably were here when I came to the positive conclusion about who was in
Babbie....it was Silk (the only character in the books with glasses and
according to Remora "by far the huskiest student the schola produced that
year"). I think Babbie has mental communication with the people he is around
and...I don't know the words but he sort of becomes them over time. So it
isn't language that "ensouls" Babbie. It is a processes similar to how Rose
got into Marble and how Lemur became entrapped in a chem.

>In case of Seawrack, her fear of not being a person is
>similar to Dorcas believing she is a ghost, just as Silk is a reinscribed
>Severian, so is Seawrack and Mamelta reinscriptions of Dorcas.  I think
>Wolfe believed that Seawrack was always a person, and I say that because
>I think Wolfe agrees with Severian that Dorcas is not a ghost, but that is
>more intuition than anything and a kind of guessing on Wolfe's sentiment
>towards Dorcas/Mamelta/Seawrack.  I don't think he thinks language is
>neccesary for personhood, but I am not sure about representation.
>This is a concept that cognitive science debates endlessly over, but one
>I think Wolfe is not unaware of or hasn't studied.

The question once again is "what does Wolfe consider a ghost?" According to
the Narrator of the Short Sun they are all ghosts when they dream travel.
Was Rose-in-Marble a ghost?

Turin asks:
>Also, why is Oreb four feet tall in Horn's dreams?

Nathan answered this a bit, but Oreb at the time was the amalguma of Scylla
and the bird, just as Mani is the amalgum of a cat and an elemental spirit.