(urth) Fwd: Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy

[David Stockhoff]

On 11/19/2011 10:51 PM, James Wynn wrote:
> On 11/19/2011 9:22 PM, António Pedro Marques wrote:
>> I don't understand what's the harm for your explanatory framework of 
>> having Horn's and Silk's spirits still there.
>
> It depends on what you mean by "spirit". For many people a person's 
> "spirit" or "soul" are mere systemic arrangements and typically that 
> is the way Wolfe presents them as well. Thus Typhon is truly ON the 
> Whorl in the form of Pas; Severian can be copied, the original 
> destroyed, and *he* continues. The Short Sun is different. On the 
> Whorl, the Rajan speaks to Hound about the soul in purely classical 
> terms...as a man living in a house.

I'm skeptical that LS and SS can work together with two different 
theories of the soul. Are you sure this is not simply an attempt to warn 
the reader than multiple possessions are the bread and butter of SS?
>
> One could imagine the Neighbor /possessing/  Horn...both of them in 
> Horn's body at once. But then, when Horn's body is destroyed, the 
> whole thing becomes very cumbersome when the Neighbors send him to 
> Silk. Why would they send both of them to Silk? It is far simpler to 
> imagine one simple mechanism. Horn dies. The Neighbor enters. Silk 
> dies. The Neighbor enters.


To me that seems more complicated than a new Horn being created that is 
all Horn and all Neighbor. Once the new Horn is created, it's a single 
entity. Where's the complexity?