Into the Void

I’m a Mandarin!

You’re an intellectual, and you’ve worked hard to get where you are now. You’re a strong believer in education, and you think many of the world’s problems could be solved if people were more informed and more rational. You have no tolerance for sloppy or lazy thinking. It frustrates you when people who are ignorant or dishonest rise to positions of power. You believe that people can make a difference in the world, and you’re determined to try.

Talent: 54%
Lifer: 28%
Mandarin: 56%

Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz.

Amazon.com: Cat’s Cradle: Books: Kurt Vonnegut

I wound up writing this review because recently, in a flight of fancy, someone conjectured that perhaps in other parts of the universe silicon forms four bonds, making ring structures - similar to the carbon-based benzene ring that is the basis of all organic materials - possible. My question was whether silicon-based amino-acid analogues would “teach” the silicon in this part of the universe to form the same kind of rings. Carbon-based DNA teaches raw [tag]amino acids[/tag] how to make more DNA, so that begs the question of whether such structures would propagate.

Ice-9 does just that.

[tag]Kurt Vonnegut[/tag]’s Cat’s Cradle isn’t quite as absurd as it seems.

Ice-9 is a form of ice with a different structure than regular ice. It is frozen solid at room temperature. Further, when it comes into contact with liquid water, it causes the water to freeze into more Ice-9. Given that 4/5ths of the earth’s surface is covered by ocean, and that our bodies are mostly made of water, you can probably deduce that keeping the Ice-9 in a thermos where it can’t come in contact with other water is an important plot element.

A [tag]seed crystal[/tag] is often necessary to initiate a phase change or precipitation, so it is conceivable that Ice-9 could initiate a catastrophe. The science fiction part is that we haven’t discovered a form of water that is solid at room temperature.

Incidentally, there’s not much danger from oxygen-breathing [tag]silicon-based life forms[/tag] because instead of exhaling carbon dioxide they’d exhale glass. They won’t be bothering us here on earth when they show up.

However, electricity-breathing silicon creatures like the semiconductor nodes that make up the Internet could be a threat. [tag]Google[/tag]’s server network has almost - not quite, but almost - reached a level of complexity where [tag]consciousness[/tag] and intention are possible.

Some reviewers on amazon.com thought that Ice-9 was a metaphor for the atom bomb. Since the possibility of [tag]thermonuclear armageddon[/tag] was so over-arching in real life at the time I first read the book, I didn’t place any emotional emphasis on that subtext. After all, it wasn’t necessary to know that [tag]Godzilla[/tag] was a metaphor for the atom bomb and the damaging effects of residual radiation in order to enjoy his antics.

Cat’s Cradle was a fun social commentary that didn’t benefit at all from atomic metaphor. Ice-9 was merely a plot device, a Deus-Ex-Machina that brought about the natural consequences of great social granfalloons.

[tag]Bokonon[/tag] isn’t the first religion founded by a science-fiction author, either, but that’s another topic for another day.

Like all of Vonnegut’s books, Cat’s Cradle looks at society and personalities and relationships with a new, slightly mad perspective. It is hard to walk away from Cat’s Cradle without re-evaluating the [tag]Granfalloon[/tag] that is [tag]organized religion[/tag], or any other carefully-crafted social institutions.

Follow up to http://www.bipolarplanet.com/~void/2005/07/09/talking-to-dog/

There is this thing called the religious experience. This is where you feel the presence of something larger than yourself, and know your place in the grand scheme. Sometimes you only get a glimpse of it, but it’s enough to change your opinions completely. Uh, epiphany, that’s what it’s called. Epiphanies are associated with the amygdala and certain brain chemicals which I don’t care to look up right this instant.

Organized religions cannot allow their laypeople to have religious epiphanies. Why? Because they are exploiting that divine revelations to exert power over us. What if Dog told one of us to stop following the kosher laws or to take down the graven images in the church, or whatever your particular religion requires?

I can hear the Elders now: “What’s that? Dog told you that the church must allow rape victims to obtain abortions if they want so that they aren’t troubled by the life-long trigger of a child with the face of their rapist? Hmmm, he didn’t tell us about it! Heresy! BURN THE WITCH!!!”

I seem to burn a lot of witches in this blog. Apologies to my Wiccan friends. I am not condoning witch hunts, I am raling against them.

There’s another problem. In certain mental disorders the patient finds change very distressing. In the case where the patient is incapable of seeing others’ points of view, and is in a position of power, it can get very ugly. Since the patient doesn’t acknowledge other points of view, he perceives that his own dysfunctional ideas fill the entire universe - are intrinsic to it, are the Word of Dog. This has a lot of useful side-effects. One of them is that the patient, in externalizing his own faults, can deny them and even project them onto others! If another opinion ever impinged up the patient, he would believe that it threatens his very existance, that it threatens the order of his universe, that it is Blasphemy. He will label other opinions as Evil and then try to destroy them.

I believe that this is precisely why so many people in power use organized religion to control the populace.

Anyone who foists their particular flavor of religion on another person is, by definition, trying to control them. It has absolutely nothing to do with “saving” them or helping them “attain enlightenment” whatever the Big Idea in their particular religion might be. It is all about pathology and projection and POWER.

So don’t even think about proselytizing. Why should I follow instructions that were meant only for you? If I want to talk to Dog I’ll do it myself, thankyouverymuch.

There is a theory of relationships that states that any person on earth is separated from any other person on earth by at most six degrees of separation.

Say that I wanted to get a letter to a friend in Germany but I couldn’t remember her address, only the town she lived in. Obviously I couldn’t mail it to her. I could give it to someone who would pass it on to someone else until someone knew someone else in Germany, who knew someone in my friends town, and within six degrees the letter would have found its way to her. In practice, of course, I probably wouldn’t hand it to the right person immediately, so it might take more than six steps. I’d have to know *everything* about everybody and make a really intelligent - or lucky - guess as to who has the closest ties.

It sounds rather airy-fairy New Age, but a few years ago someone did a social experiment, handing out decks of postcards with a name and town on it and instructions to try to get it to that person through people they knew. To the best of my recollection everyone was able to accomplish the task within 12 postcards. Eh, I don’t remember where I read it. Omni magazine maybe? Well, there are a number of books about it if you’re interested in learning more.

This is where Social Networking is taking us, to a small blue planet where everyone is connected.

There’s even a parody of the concept, a game called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” in which people trace their connections to the actor Kevin Bacon. *Everybody* is connected to Kevin Bacon.

I guess the caveat would be that the person has to have social contacts of some sort, people nearby who know their real name, etc. Cave-dwelling hermits are pretty much out of the game.

Oh, right, well, here’s the thing. There are people that you’d rather not be within six degrees of. Drug dealers, terrorists, radical fundamentalists, Tom Cruise. Oh, but you are, and that’s the problem.

At least one of the domestic surveillance programs being conducted by “No Such Agency” is intended to find not just terrorists, but their associates, sympathizers, and anyone who might know who the previous three are. As I hinted at above, you have to gather as much intelligence as you can about *everybody* until you have enough to see patterns and relationships.

Every American is within six degrees of Al Qaeda.

To persuade a man that his experience is not real or is worthless is to be a propagandist for some vested interest.

In appearing normal to others, one becomes a habit-ridden plaything of social pressures and expectations.

The criterion of “success” has shifted from exclusive attention to behavior to concern for the quality of experience.

<RANT>
I am not swayed by vague, impassioned arguments. If I was, I’d be a Republican. The reason the Republicans are stomping us is this:
They put huge amounts of money into the infrastructure of the party. Think tanks, framing the arguments. The Democrats don’t invest, they throw money away. The tone of the latest JohnKerry.com email was just plain dumb. It is far below Kerry’s intellectual capabilities and I’m getting rather tired of his ineffectual stumping.
PLEASE, get a backbone. Be proactive: as long as you are reactive you don’t have a good enough foothold to argue your point. We have to be proactive participants in the Democratic process, not reactive little paramecia.
Listening to Kerry trying to be politically correct during the debates was painful. Stop trying so hard not to offend anyone. Progressives’ morality on the abortion issue is about the QUALITY of life vs. the inhumane exercise of bringing unwanted children into the world. “Pro-life” indeed! My morality is far more valid than theirs, yet Kerry fumbled for words during the debate sounded as if he is ashamed of his beliefs. As if any woman *wants* to abort her children. Nobody *wants* an abortion.
Life is an evolutionary continuum, not a series of separate creations. An early first-trimester fetus looks like a prawn and though the potential for human life is there, it is not sentient life. Not yet.
I saw Kerry on one of the Sunday morning political shows recently. The guy is still campaigning, still stumping. He is capable of so much more. How about some well-thought-out, *deep* insights from him for once.
And don’t let them call you “elite” just because you are educated. Bush has the same education as Kerry, but apparently he has chosen not to use it.
Republicans can give quick, definitive answers because they have already reduced the issues to black-and-white, with immutable, inhumane answers. They don’t have to stop and think. We think things through so it looks as if we are weak and indecisive.
And stop giving away money to people who don’t deserve it. Invest your money in the future instead. Put money into job training and childcare. Don’t put money into encouraging impoverished women to have more illegitimate babies. Many of these women are teens who don’t have access to the information that would have prevented the pregnancy. Teach birth control in the schools. Make the boy’s parents pay for the baby’s support - don’t encourage teens to have babies by offering them cash incentives to do so. If they get older they keep having them, offer them cash incentives to get free sterilizations instead.
Let’s make it really clear that white women have illegitimate kids,too, it’s not just a minority problem.
Tell everyone with an SUV that they aren’t safe from terrorists in their big metal womb. Each week your SUV uses enough gas to run my Prius for a two weeks or more. Get over 9-11, even if it requires psychiatric intervention. Especially if it requires psychiatric intervention. Don’t trade your freedom for a false sense of security. And PLEASE, the attacks on 9-11 were by Saudis, not by Iraqis and not by the Taliban. Our unprovoked attack on Iraq was and still is an obscenity. The war in Iraq is about the oil interests of all the people in the White House. Karl Rove acts like an evil wraith, Cheney acts like a sociopath, and Bush acts as if he is cognitively impaired from years of alcohol abuse.
And I act as if there is still a place in America for Democrats and other Progressives.
</RANT>

Our possibilities of experiencing are infinite and infinitely beyond that splinter of awareness we acknowledge, call “normal,” and disclose to others.