Crop Rotation - 012 - Chiang, Villeneuve - Stories of Your Life, Arrival

A discussion of Ted Chiang’s story Stories of your life, as well as the Denis Villeneuve film based on it, Arrival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears while we all stop sorrow with the song that will linger forever. Hard times come again. Tis the song the side of the week. Hard times, hard times come again. Many days you have lingered around my cabin door. Oh hard times come again.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Welcome to Crop Rotation, an ad hoc seminar discussing works of art and of intellect. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. This leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion. This meeting's leader is Dwight.

SPEAKER_04 1:04

Hey hey hey. This week we read Story of Your Life by Ted Chang, and we watched the film Arrival. And so I'll give a little bit of a rundown of those two. They're similar but different stories where some aliens show up and communication is established, and the main character learns the language of the aliens, and that changes her. And so my opening question is I want to specifically talk about the difference at the end of the film. Spoilers. And the story. She's able to understand this language, but she can't make different decisions. She keeps it to herself. And because of that, change the daughter in the movie, she has in incurable cancer. In the story, she dies in an accident. In the movie, she tells the physicist, her husband, Oh, I know what's gonna happen. And that causes them to split. In the story, she can't obviously if the story was like the movie, it'd just be like, oh, well, why don't you go and keep her from going skiing and then she doesn't die in the avalanche? And so they were like, Oh, we need to fiddle with that. I don't want to talk about it on just the level, but we might talk a little bit about the art of filmmaking. You know, you have to do things in film, but why do you think they did that, made that change, and do you think it's better? I personally think the story is better than the movie.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

I love the movie, but I think first I watched the movie with Dwight and it was actually helpful to me, Dwight, that at the end you said, hey, there's some differences here. I don't usually pay attention to that kind of thing. I sort of keep them as separate, as alternate versions of each other. You know, I don't think of it as whatever.

SPEAKER_03 3:57

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

That said, the idea of just a couple of notes on some of the bits you said. One is I don't think it's that she doesn't have free will. She actually says it at some point, but it I think she says it a different way elsewhere. But the framing of it is probably more truly something like the idea of free will loses meaning. Yeah. In some ways. Uh so I'm just throwing that out there. I don't know if the point of this in the movie when General what was the name? I can't remember because I saw that part of the movie as that it was subtly saying, I think, that the aliens were engendering a kind of cooperation that would enable us to whatever, whatever, help them 3,000 years hence or some kind of thing like that. And I have a question about whether or not that was changing the story, because that's not something the heptopods would consider you know, like naturally in the story.

SPEAKER_03 5:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Though I could also see a reasonable interpretation of it being that the movie took a more causational rather than whatever, I forgot the other word that was used, but the movie took a more causational approach and teleological. Teleological, yeah. And therefore rendered the events as causation with forethought from the human perspective, from the heptopods. Whereas the book could be argued to have rendered the same events, if those had happened or whatever, as non-causational, but instead teleological. It's not clear to me that they're conflicting exactly, except for the fact that obviously the actual point of like China versus US intentions.

SPEAKER_04 5:53

Yeah. Yeah, in the story, the end they give him some stuff that had actually already been discovered shortly before. And now I was wondering after the third time reading it up. Because the whole time he's trying to tell the story with tense and you know, I I will remember when you did that thing, and some really interesting sentences to get us in that mindset. And so, like, maybe the aliens did from one perspective give us that information in the story, but the story kind of makes it seem like no, they just dropped the thought into this one linguist and left.

SPEAKER_02 6:47

There's the time travel like paradox to consider, where in the book he talks about the book of ages.

SPEAKER_03 6:56

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

You know, where everything that must happen is written down, and if you were still causation-minded and you were able to look at the book of ages and see what was going to happen, then you could choose to do something else, which is a paradox. Because then the book of ages isn't the book of ages, which contradicts the thesis.

SPEAKER_04 7:18

So the story loves the book of ages, but she just doesn't change.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

The story resolves it by saying only one type of mind is able to look at the Book of Ages, and that type of mind is necessarily also free of the idea of making free choices. And the movie doesn't address it. But Sir Robert, I think, is proposing that the movie is deliberately violating it and then like daring us to say that it's committed a crime, because actually it was faded from all ages. What's written in the Book of Ages is that the Chinese general would say the dying words of his wife to the woman who can see the future, so that in the past she would be able to say them as a code word to him, so that he would know to share the one-twelfth of the secret that China has with the rest of the world.

SPEAKER_04 8:27

So I was thinking when I read the story again today, I don't think you have any information propagated that way, although I could have missed it. There is the, you know, zero-sum game thing, but in the story that's similar to a memory.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

In the story, this is something that I was noting about the zero-sum game scene. So I think this is relevant. So I had read this story like five or six years ago, and I did not get what was going on in it when I first read it. I was like, oh, a translator translates an alien language, and also her daughter dies. Hmm. I guess this story is sad. Next story. Like it went right over my head.

SPEAKER_04 9:17

Did you catch any of the tenses?

SPEAKER_02 9:18

I think probably because I was listening to it. Well, also, like, you know, people who are writing stories will play with tenses in order to create an emotional effect. You know, the tense that something's written in doesn't have anything to do necessarily with when it actually happens. Although in this story, he is actually very strict with the tenses he uses. There is one present in the story, one moment which is the present. And everything from before that is written in past tense. Everything after that is written in future tense. But because I at least have a very strong presupposition that protagonists do not know their own future, and they certainly do not remember their own future, to say, I remembered this or I remember what you will say, I just translate that into author writing in future tense for reason of style about things that happened in the past. So up until that moment with the zero-sum game anecdote, I thought that the child and her death was in the past. And the aliens were in the present, right? Because that's how you would read it. Yeah. And if that is the case, then the zero-sum game incident is information traveling into the past.

SPEAKER_04 10:45

You're right.

SPEAKER_02 10:46

So if you're reading it that way, you hit that and you go, Oh, something's going on here. Information just traveled into the past. And eventually you realize that, like, oh, the thing that I think is the past is actually the future. Yeah. So when I came back to it, I realized, oh, this is just a regular memory. She's just remembering something that happened in her actual past and telling her child about it. And she didn't remember it before and now she does. And the only place where she does actually get some information about the future that has any effect at all on the world is where she wakes Gary up because she has like a stress dream because she knows that her future daughter, who's not even born yet, is going to die. She's having like a nightmare about it, and the nightmare wakes her up. And Gary is like, You okay? And then she's like, Yeah, I'm fine. And that is, I think, the only thing in the story where information of the future has an actual effect on the present. But in the movie, of course, that's the whole thing. Is like the whole plot of the last third of the movie is information from the future solving a problem in the present.

SPEAKER_03 12:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

So, quick note that makes sense to me, Matt. And I'm not arguing that the movie makers were doing 40 chess. That was me attempting to save what I think is a flaw in the movie. I think whether or not they knew it, they whoever was doing it, producing whatever, apparently liked Ted Chang enough to, you know, do a movie. But at least for popular audiences, I think to have it sell well enough to be financially viable, it needed to have a simpler concept. And it's like when people watch Interstellar and then, or you know, what's that other one? Inception. And it's advanced enough and mild enough that they can feel proud of themselves for getting the hook.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Right. Yeah, I think I agree with you. I think that the strict philosophical avoidance of the time travel paradox is something that the filmmaker let go of. Along with the cool thing about the heptopod written language that I wish they had kept. Which one? So in the story, the heptopod's language is written by joining a bunch of characters together.

SPEAKER_03 13:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

There are a bunch of like what they originally call logograms, or eventually they call semiograms, I guess. They like are partially superimposed over each other, right? Yeah. So that lines from each of them create or are the same line as parts of the other ones. And in the story, the heptopod draw these characters one line at a time. Yeah. Not one ideogram at a time. So a sentence that's made of like four ideograms will be drawn in like twelve strokes, and each stroke will form part of three different ideograms.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Yeah. And they actually simplified it in two different dimensions in the movie there. One by making them circular, which is linear but without beginning or end, is their idea. Right? Instead of nonlinear.

SPEAKER_04 14:10

And then in the story they're circular. She talks about it looks like a bunch of praying mantises circling it. Maybe it didn't say circular, but.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

Oh no, there is stuff about circles in the description of it because they write the same logogram at a different angle each time they write. That's right. They can be tilted in any direction and mean the same thing. Because to the heptopods, direction isn't important.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

I like the writing portion of in the story better. And I get that they had to make a visual presentation that people could understand well and whatever in the movie.

SPEAKER_02 14:48

Well, let me hold on. Because I think it is a better movie the way it is, than if you had just naively written this story as a script and shot it. Because good movies have stakes. And the nature of the philosophy in the story means that there cannot be stakes that have anything to do with the main philosophical payload. If there were stakes that had to do with the philosophical payload, that would prove that the philosophical payload was not right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

And in the movie storytelling.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

They don't care that the philosophical payload is not right. They're like, bye, philosophical payload.

SPEAKER_06 15:34

So what about the biggest differences around the uh the portion where the scientist and the linguist are trying to suss out how to communicate with the aliens? Like the biggest difference between the short story and the movie. The uh the rectifying portion, the learning discovery phase. Yeah, what are you thinking in particular? No, no, no. I'm I'm curious what you guys saw were the biggest glaring differences. Like Matt's talking about the philosophical payload difference. And from a storytelling perspective, that was one of the places where that constraint of how you're converting the short story to the movie, that was an interesting place of conversion. But I I wanted to hear from y'all's perspective.

SPEAKER_04 16:19

It seemed like the movie tried to minimize the principle of least time or most time or whatever that was, and tried to maximize I don't even know if the story mentioned the Sapier Wharf hypothesis about, but they do in the movie, they mention it about how the language changes the way you experience the world. And eventually they're like, the gift is this ability to see the future.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Yeah. I think that the movie had a difficult job to do in that what they did successfully show was that when you are trying to learn a language like this, you will have false starts, and then you will have eventual success. And it did dramatize first, you know, a false start, and then the eventual success. But all that, dramatizing all that with like the long lingering shots and the smoke and the cool monsters and the environment, like took so long that I think they didn't have any time to show like you know what the actual linguists in the Amazon are doing. They're like following a real protocol, which is like, you know, show them this, say the word, show them the other thing, say the word for that thing. Or show them the first thing again, say the word for it. Like, I guess they showed some of that.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Yeah, I think the movie would not have been different on the heptopod side. Right? So there's two sides of the movie, right? There's the alien encounter, and then there's the having a child. So the sort of personal life side, right? Right. I think on the professional side, the movie would not have been different if they hadn't had the scientist guy.

SPEAKER_02 18:14

Yeah. Yeah, I think the movie just sort of dropped the physicist out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 18:20

I mean, because it's it it fits into the kind of there's a bit of a gender narrative there. I mean, it's all very mother female-centric, and so he ends up playing like a B role to her in terms of like problem-solving stuff. When she gets utterly exhausted and she passes out, he finally like cracks that you know, it's time, this one symbol of time and negative space, right? But that's it. That's the only real time he contributes. Other than that, so Robert's right. He's just kind of backup, he's a tissue in her pocket, you know.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Yeah, and it's a shame because the light refraction thing is such a powerful symbol for the thesis of the story. Yeah. And it's completely left out of the movie. And it's visual too. They could have shown it on the screen. Yeah. I don't know why they didn't do that. I think they should have.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

That particular point of the principle of least time is an interesting one in the story because our understanding of that principle has changed since the story was written. Which is interesting to me. Really? Tell us. Yeah, so the story mentions action, right? The the the idea of action, uh, the physical concept of action. It's not that light is choosing or whatever, taking the shortest, the time-shortest path. It's taking the least action, right? And action as a principle, in that case with light traveling, it ends up being a time optimization. But we have since then generalized how action works. And action is the underlying physical principle that seems to be how a whole bunch of different things in a whole bunch of domains of physics work. I'll also point out we have experiments now that show the principle of least action such that we can demonstrate that the light is traveling all the paths. It's traveling all the paths and manifesting in the shortest action path. That's where light qua photon hits. But we can demonstrate very easily that it is traveling all the paths because we can make it change and show the same laser traversing suboptimal paths at the same time. Like some of the photons going there. Anyway, it's a really, really interesting read on that part for me because hearing Ted Chang's articulation of it from the I I like Ted Chang by the way. I've I've been a fan of his stories since the 90s when I was first read them. I was in high school. And so I'm a this is not in any way critical of him for it. But he I love that he goes into really great depth and he really cares about the philosophical principles in the storytelling. The stories are media for that. And it was so it was really neat to watch this one where uh the way he told it is uncharacteristically archaic, you know, for like really cutting-edge physics, right? Where the understanding from I don't know, the year of 2000 or so isn't the main understanding anymore. And let me just throw in there real quickly regarding things happening from the future and coming into the past. This is something I had to pause and think about when I was in the story and and this relates to the action part is that uh General, whatever his name is, or captain or whatever, the military dude, Bragg or something, graph Major. Major, yeah, thank you. Colonel. I thought he was a colonel. Colonel Graft. I'll take it. Colonel Graff. Because the colonels are all the same. Those are synonyms. Oh.

SPEAKER_06 22:06

For all of our military people, he did not mean that, and I do not stand with that statement. Go on.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

For the majors, I did mean it for the colonels, I didn't. Or if one if the other one is higher than I think, the other way.

SPEAKER_04 22:22

He's trying to insult the most people or the least people. One of the two.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

It's a zing.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

Military political action issue. Dwight makes a joke that will only land for people who have definitely read the story.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

So I really liked that whoever the military guy was wanted to know about the gift exchange thing, and that what's her name? Threw in that the heptopods say that information cannot be exchanged. I thought that was a really neat line that I had to think about, and I'm not resolved on it yet. Right. I think Ted Chang thought about that more than I have yet.

SPEAKER_06 23:05

This was one of the places where Ted is exploring some of the stuff that Orson Scott Card explores in his Enders game quadrilogy about the relationship between humans and their potential relationship with an alien, and how much of that has to do with their capacity to recognize one another as capable, not capable of threat, empathy, and exchange. And so, yeah, Sir Robert, I made a note of that same moment between Graf and the linguist, where he says, don't give them anything. Like, show me your vocab words, don't give them anything. And then it was really punctuated by the CIA guy. You know, he's he's there to make sure that our interests are upheld. I don't know. It's an effective story, I think, because it holds up a lens to us and makes us think ahead of time how much of how this will go down is already faded because of our aggression response that will inevitably come. You know?

SPEAKER_04 24:13

Yeah, when I was watching the movie, I was asking Sir Robert and thinking myself a lot about like, how would you react if if this, you know, undeniable, not some lens flares on a you know, navy radar, actual giant floating what were those garlic garlic slices showed up, you know, how would you how would you react? I'm not sure how how I would.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Yeah, I I thought I would probably try and go and get a gun too. Maybe a very American response.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

I'd go visit. I was telling Dwight when he asked that if their intentions are something like aggressive, then with eight ships or twelve ships or whatever, then they apparently s believe that they have sufficient force to be sufficiently aggressive across enough of the surface of the planet, right? And if their intentions are not aggressive, then great, let's go check them out. Either way, great, let's go check it out.

SPEAKER_06 25:19

I was gonna say it's an interesting yeah, collapse of outcomes that it's either 12 ships that's enough to get it done, or it's just 12 ships that are here to say hi. Either way, let's go say hi. That's that's funny. Uh so this story has particular import to me and spooky import because it overlaps in details with a story that I wrote before I found out about this, before I didn't know about Ted Chang as an author, and I went to see the movie Arrival, and as I watched it, I just kind of had a very surreal experience. It was difficult to fully process the movie because so much of the details were in the story I'd written, where there was a girl who is plagued with a terminal illness because of her parents' relationship to science, because they're on a space station and there's a particle that gets passed from the dad to the daughter. And it was just really interesting seeing how many uh common themes, like I the mom and the daughter are the primary relationship in my story as well. Whereas Ted writes, with the mom being the more dominant figure, for me, it's a balance of the two. But it was just really, really spooky and interesting how convergent storytelling tropes led us to that place. Matt, I'm sure you could explain far better how that happened.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

But oh, it's because there's nothing new under the sun. Right. Everything that can be written has already been written. If one of us has an idea, somebody in the 70s already had it, yeah, and somebody's in the 30s had it before them. That's true. It's very true.

SPEAKER_04 27:03

Well, yeah, I wonder if the story was written now with our with the understandings Robert talked about with action. I wonder if it would just be another multiverse, you know. You don't have free will because you're in the you know, the universe where this happened.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

So the interesting thing about action as we've experimented with it is that it is traveling through all of them in this world. Like another way of saying that at a sort of gross macro scale is that if I get up and go to my car right now, I could go through the front door, the back door, I could go to the kitchen first, then go to the front door, whatever. And I actually do take all of those paths, but and then this is me obviously not I'm making this like a gross visual kind of analogy. I actually am doing all those paths, but one of the paths has the least destructive interference with all the other paths, and so it's the one that sort of is apparent. What happens when the light travels in all the different paths is that let's say it travels from A to B and then it along a particular curve, and then it travels from A to B along some other set of curves. All of the curves, when you kind of let them be constructive or destructive, all of them negate each other except for one. What we are able to do with some experiments is interfere with the negation patterns and show the light happening in several places at once by messing with the construction and destruction. But it's not multiverse, it's physically really happening. And when we see, you know, those famous like you can imagine the picture of like a laser going into a thing and bending, right? When we see those, what we're seeing is the only part where the sum of things wasn't the I guess integration of them wasn't destructive all the way.

SPEAKER_04 29:05

So this might be you know overstretching a metaphor, but if you know you're talking about your pants to the car from your house. Is is there a equivalent of, for example, you could jump through a window and leave something different behind. Yeah, change the physical layout of your house, and you're like, oh well that path didn't get taken because the window is not broken. Is there something we could set up like that in light where after it passes it has changed what it's like? That's a great question.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

I don't know. I'd have to think about that. And I should point out, and I I said this before, but uh it turns out this is true for a lot of other physical things than like this action thing. It it it's a at least conceptually unifying way of conceiving of all of these weird things that do the path of least or path of most.

SPEAKER_06 30:08

So how does that affect Newton's claim that everything is fluctions and fluence? It certainly continues to jive to me, but I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Will you remind me what what he meant by fluxions and fluence?

SPEAKER_06 30:27

So Newton's claim was that the reason why we can do math about stuff and it works is because at the deepest level of reality, all motion that you see, all action, all you know, he's I I'm it's escaping me what his fundamental word is, but you know, all observable phenomenological action or change of value or valuation that you could ascribe to something that's real, all of that works because everything that you're seeing is itself a fluction or a fluent of a fluction and a fluent that make a value, and that all value that is observable is some sort of emergent phenomenon of a fluction and a fluent. And then at first people call that recursive crud, and then I think he's saying something real. I think this whole action thing, right, seems to it's hard to put a finger on. That's I'm asking a real question here. I'm not asking you guys to listen to my solution about it. Like I'm trying to see how the fact that in reality there are these potential ways that something can propagate, and that based on some of them being constructive versus destructive, all of that speaks to something potentially going one way or another way spread across space. We're talking about something that is being resolved one way or the other. This capacity of reality to be calculated against each other. This piece of reality against that piece is calculable against that other piece of reality. That's what flexions and fluents are. You know, I get maybe it's that everything is a field, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:28

I was just looking up here. The modern word for fluent is something that changes over time, so a function of time, and the modern word for fluction is derivative of a fluent, the rate of change of the fluent at a moment. That's just for clarifying.

SPEAKER_06 32:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Josh, it sounds like you're talking about Deleuzean machines. What are those? Deleuze has everything in the world built out of machines, and a machine is something that flows, and then something that either cuts off or does not cut off that flow.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

And eventually becomes a woman or an animal or whatever?

SPEAKER_02 33:08

Yeah. Woman, then animal, then then not seeable anymore. But also, Josh Deleuze has the concept, which might be new to Deleuze, of a plane of consistency, which is where all the potential conflicts between all the flows of all the machines are brought into consistency with each other.

SPEAKER_00 33:30

I thought when reading this. Does the woman in the story have a name?

SPEAKER_04 33:36

In the movie The dude's name is Ian, and it's Greg in the story. Ian in the movie.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Okay. They call it Abbott and Castella.

SPEAKER_04 33:46

Yeah, Abbott and Costello instead of raspberry and fart or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

Her, yeah, the linguist. The way she ended up talking about her experience of things really reminded me of Spinoza. And one other person I can't remember, but their talk their whole description about us being in something like the best of all possible worlds, which is a different meaning, but it had like Leibniz, was it? Did you say?

SPEAKER_04 34:23

Is that yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

But I could be wrong. It had a kind of inevitability that she seems to be talking about in that way. Spinoza, I think it was Spinoza who had the monads of each thing, and then they influenced the world in some ways. By the way, I just want to say for the record. Okay. I just want to say for the record, uh, I have made fun of Spinoza, I think it's Spinoza, many times for saying my favorite line in all of his writing, which I will say now, and I think is ridiculous. But my disclaimer is that I also appreciate that he was, you know, really working on hard stuff. My favorite line in Spinoza is there's no such thing as cause and effect. We only think that there is because we've been conditioned to see it that way. The end. I just wanted to throw that out there. No, I but the Spinoza world was a lot like when you write a sentence like that, you have to.

unknown 35:30

Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_06 35:33

Boys, there are gonna be a lot of egg on y'all's face when you find out you're wrong.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

Anyway, I just wanted to say it. His world, what was it called? There's no cause and effect. There is complementary motions of things happening that are orchestrated. He had a specific phrase I can't recall now, but things are orchestrated such that they flow without actually influencing each other, but they have all the appearance of influencing each other. And that's actually surprisingly close to her in the story, or Ted Chang or somebody, rendering of the mind that can behold the book of ages.

SPEAKER_06 36:16

Sir Robert, I remember he talks about a track, like a train track that runs in parallel to describe the very thing that you're articulating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:26

I mean, so what they're talking about is the absolute, the eternal, and the universal. So once you are eternal, you cannot be contingent and you cannot be particular. You have to be universal and absolute if you're eternal.

SPEAKER_05 36:48

Tonight, in the yellow corner, Matthew Talamini at 6-2, and in the blue corner, Sir Robert at 6-3. It's gonna be a cluttering.

SPEAKER_02 36:56

No rules. What I'm saying is what you're seeing here is that when Ted Chang makes the character's name is Luis Banks. I just looked it up. When he makes Luis think in a way that's eternal, it stops making sense to us for her to also be thinking in a way that's contingent.

unknown 37:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 37:17

Well, memory is the buffer there, right? Memory is what makes it a sensible, coherent experience. Sometimes she is or is not in a state of remembering that which is in the future, right?

SPEAKER_04 37:29

Do you mean it makes it work as a story that he's telling, or do you mean yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 37:36

It may it might be a cheese, but it does. I'm saying Matt was over-skewering the story. He was over-condemning it. Like there is something. But doesn't memory account for the this discrepancy that you're talking about?

SPEAKER_02 37:53

I'm not talking about a discrepancy. I don't know what you think I'm saying. Uh Sir Robert was talking about how the story reminds him of Spinoza, because in Spinoza, there's no actual such thing as cause and effect, right? Well, in this story, the reason that that reminds him of that is that in the story, her mind becomes eternal, which is to say, not subject to time in the same way.

SPEAKER_06 38:20

And but it is.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

And Spinoza's philosophy is not contingent, but rather absolute. That the causes that seem to happen only seem to happen. Things that happen are not contingent on other things happening, they just happen absolutely. The same way that her mind is is functioning eternally. So the two things go together.

SPEAKER_06 38:42

Yeah, absolutely. In that some of its function is participating in eternal, but you also made a statement now her mind is eternal, and it's not. I wouldn't say that her mind is eternal, her mind is beginning to participate in some eternal modalities or something or other, but it it isn't fully transformed.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

I think the story might say not that her mind is beginning to participate in that, but that it's she's beginning to frame things that way in her mind, the same mind. Right.

SPEAKER_04 39:26

It's something like She's changed by the arrival of the aliens.

SPEAKER_01 39:31

Right.

SPEAKER_04 39:32

So she's not absolutely life. She lived her life in such a way before the aliens arrived, she learned this language, and that caused a change, and she talks about it as a thing that she remembers will happen. Her daughter will be absolutely inconsolable until she's given her milk, and then she will be absolutely content. Angelic or whatever. She only lives in the present. And like we can as adults can kind of project forward and backwards, but infants can only live in the present, but we also actually only live in the present.

SPEAKER_00 40:17

But she has a parallel description, but it is also maybe has the opposite point, which I think is pretty cool. I agree with your interpretation of the baby thing, by the way. But the part where she's talking to again, military man, whatever, and she's saying, now it's my turn to say this, and she's talking about herself, like I rehearsed this role, and he's being completely ad hoc. He's speaking off the cuff, but he doesn't know the script, but he's playing the role perfectly. And she's in that scene crossing between the guy living only in the moment, but he's still doing the same thing, right? It the reality is still the same. The mind is even arguably, I don't know about this part. I'm gonna say it, but I don't know if it's true. The mind is still the same, it's just not framing itself the same way, or something like that. Maybe not though.

SPEAKER_02 41:17

Dwight, you are making me think that this story is a recapitulation of Kierkegaard's philosophical fragments. Asking the same exact question: can an eternal consciousness be based on historical fact? Like, can the historical fact of her living her life and then learning this language become the basis for her consciousness being atemporal or eternal? Same question.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

That gets Matt at a problem I had. The only real problem I had with it. Had a couple of small ones that he resolved pretty well. We don't see a memory recursion, and that is very strange to me that she remembers her daughter in the future having such and such an experience, whatever. But when she gets to that future point, she doesn't say, and I remembered remembering this. So there's no transtemporal cognitive observer happening, which I super would expect. I would expect her to be remembering the past, remembering the future, in the future, remembering the past, and therefore, because she's having her experience in the present, remembering the past from the future and getting these loops. And I don't know, maybe I missed it, but I didn't see that at all. And I was really surprised by that.

SPEAKER_06 42:46

I think the movie addresses that. Specifically, she says, I choose to live in the moment. Like I choose to embrace this life knowing that my kid will die. And so it's addressing specifically her choosing to have this kid, even though she knows that they're gonna die.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

But I doesn't live in the moment, right? She's constantly remembering other moments.

SPEAKER_06 43:12

So she is not living in this moment of constant memory, of recursive memory, to the degree that she is in the moment.

SPEAKER_04 43:24

So Yeah, the movie sort of presents it as she's living out and she has invasive memories, and then at the end we find out, oh, that's not a daughter that died in the past. It's a daughter that will die in the future. I think it it flattens all of that out a lot. But maybe there's subtlety in there that I missed.

SPEAKER_02 43:48

I have a relevant passage to read from the story. The heptopods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts. They don't Act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptopod's mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history's events. It is also that their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology. Freedom isn't an illusion, it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion. It's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other.

SPEAKER_06 44:40

Well, yeah, because they're free or coerced to the degree that the space-time manifold dictates they be. And so their society, their choices, their psychology, their actions. They do follow probably a very interesting, overlapping set of categories to the ones that we have, but they map to this chronological satisfaction rather than a sociological satisfaction.

SPEAKER_04 45:08

There's a paragraph right after a portion that I wanted to bring up that actually seems to relate directly to this. She says, Even though I'm proficient with heptopod B, I know I don't experience reality the way a heptopod does. My mind was cast in the mold of human sequential languages and no amount of immersion into the alien language. My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptopod. She doesn't fully become heptopod. She's just changed from human vital language.

SPEAKER_00 45:44

There's this other representation of a person or a being living outside of I'll call it living outside of time, but I mean seeing the whole and being present in the whole at once. Okay.

SPEAKER_06 46:03

You can't bring up Ted Kaczynski again. Okay. Sorry. It was a joke. Keep going.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

Which is uh Philip K. Dick, the Golden Man, I think is what it's called. Yes. And I bring that up because I want to contrast it so that I can understand Ted Chang's representation. In the Golden Man, there's this guy born who effectively sees his entire lifetime throughout. I think he his might be a little different, but basically he knows the beginning and the end, if you recall it knowing. And what ends up happening is he doesn't make choices that we would call choices. He does something very similar to the path of least action, where he I'm looking for words and I keep finding words that are wrong because they're describing human stuff, like instinct, it's not instinct. But it's almost like a physical force.

SPEAKER_02 47:00

Unless I'm mistaken, the scientists who are observing him describe it as like instinct because he does not make choices or reason about things. Because he sees all possible outcomes. He doesn't have to think about anything. The end of the story is like this guy is gonna breed with our women and create a new species of humans which is going to definitely outcompete us. And this is the end of reason and science and logic as we know.

SPEAKER_00 47:33

The end of mind.

SPEAKER_02 47:34

Mind will vanish from the universe from this point forward.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

So my my reason for bringing that up, I think it was a neat framing of it. His difference was that he sees all possible universes, and so for that reason, I think he's doing a lot more of this whole action idea, right? My reason for bringing it up is I'm trying to understand the heptopods in Chang's conception. Well, first of all, side question that may be relevant, maybe y'all can say something about it, is it's not a hundred percent obvious to me why the knowledge stops at the time of death, unless death is the time of knowledge stopping. So that's somewhere in there. But the question is, why are the heptopods not a let's call it physical phenomenon? We we aren't regarding that because they have this kind of animal, right? This animus that we think of as will or something. But she's maybe claiming they do have will, but it's aligned towards purposes, and then there's that whole part about active speech, right? Thank you is the act of thanking, saying thank you. I don't understand why we wouldn't think of the heptopods as more like the golden man where he's mindless. Why do the heptopods have a model of reality? Yeah, in that doesn't seem like they would.

SPEAKER_04 48:58

In the story, why do they come to Earth?

SPEAKER_00 49:02

Doesn't say. She actually says at the end, we never found out why, which I found to be a strangely anachronistic thing for her to say. Anachronistic because by the time she's saying it, she has the frame of mind that doesn't have whys.

SPEAKER_04 49:21

To be fair, she is before that. I don't remember exactly when it happens, I'm assuming it's after they leave. Before that, she had been sitting there in meetings, being like, you know, like you mentioned, they're playing their roles. So she's already kind of outside, so I think that could just be.

SPEAKER_02 49:40

I think it says somewhere at near the end that presumably there would be a way to interpret their actions as cause and effect fulfilling some specific purpose, and they just never found out what it was.

SPEAKER_00 49:56

Yeah. Well, uh, she would say, I think everything can be seen as either cause and effect or teleological motion or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 50:06

Yeah, she does say that specifically. Yeah, it reminds me of there's one place where Kierkegaard describes what the Knight of Faith would be like. He says, Imagine meeting the Knight of Faith, and you talk to him, and he says some stuff that you don't understand, and he looks and he gestures at a building and he says, I might buy that building, and then you find out later that he's you know, he has like $50 in the bank account and he can't buy that building. And he talks about like, oh, my my wife is making this amazing like cow's head delicacy dish that she's gonna you know we're gonna have when I get home, and he gets home and the cow's head dish is not there because they can't afford it and they're having you know beans on toast or whatever, some cheap food, and he's just as happy with that. I don't know. There's a philosopher's trying to explain what a person who is unmoored from cause and effect in the world behaves like. Um, so Robert, when you described the more contemporary view of how light moves and the more contemporary explanation of how refraction works, I began trying to calculate in the same way that there are two views of how refraction works in this story, and they correspond to two epistemologies and two similarly competing ways of envisioning choice, where the one way is that the light is moving sequentially from point A, and then it hits the glass, and then it changes direction, and then it moves, and then it passes out of the glass and changes direction again, and it continues moving on. And the other way is that it was always already in the path that it ended up having taken. And the first one corresponds to people not knowing the future, having free will and making choices, and the second one corresponds to the heptopods not making choices and knowing all of the future all at once already. What does knowledge and choice look like in the lightning bolt feelers mode of light? And I decided that I don't like it, because making a choice would be like making every choice and being frustrated on all of them but the one that works.

SPEAKER_00 52:45

I don't think so. I think it might be more like having character or having a character. Explain. I have a choice to make, let's say, let's simplify it and talk about it as one of three choices, or something like that. A B C. And the question is one way of framing it is which one should I choose? That's causal, right? As though I'm optimizing for some end, or I want to, you know, I have some will in there. Another one is which way will I choose? And that's knowing things or whatever. And then there's this other one, I'm just making this up off the cuff. I have not thought about this until you said you want to try to frame this. And there's this other one that's something like, given me and this, what do I do? And Matt here might choose differently than Sir Robert here. I have a real honest choice of A, B, and C, and there's a version of me theoretically that could choose A, and there's a version of me that could choose C, but I'm a B chooser, and reality kind of collapses into who I am.

SPEAKER_02 53:54

But it sounds like it sounds like you were saying that light does actually choose every path.

SPEAKER_00 54:03

Let me make a distinction here. And by the way, there's some great physics videos, y'all should go watch some. I think Veritassium has a good one. It has a demo that I saw once, but there's some other ones, OpenMIT, there's some good ones. Okay, anyway, let me say it this way: it depends, Matt, on what you mean by light. In the way that is not considering action, the light is the actualized beam. In the action model, if you want to call it that, the light is a field of things, and the energy goes on paths that are like suboptimal, and you know, they do all these different things and they cancel out. But it kind of, if you want to frame it in one way, it kind of becomes visible along the path that we call the laser beam, you know, whatever the light ray. But if you don't want to say visible, you could say it actualizes there, right? Action actualizes. Sorry, let me take a step back. You ever have those conversations where you say to somebody, I have had this conversation and it incites violence within me? Where I say to somebody, I didn't dream last night. And then they say, Well, actually, you dream every night. It's just that you don't remember them. And then I say, in response to them, you get I don't usually actually say that part, but I say, No. My definition of a dream includes the experience of it in the memory. So I did not dream, in fact. I did all of the necessary precursors to having fully dreamed, and I didn't, because I woke up and there wasn't a dream there. So I didn't dream. But it's the same kind of thing, right? If I had the rapid eye motion and the firing of the different n-grams and so forth, and it doesn't make it into my consciousness. Did I dream? Did I not dream?

SPEAKER_02 55:58

I did something as a physical reality. Man, I do things like put my keys down, which I do not remember doing all the time, and I definitely did them, and I have to suffer the consequences of them despite having no memory.

SPEAKER_04 56:15

That's because you're talking about your roommates have true.

SPEAKER_00 56:23

I'm just saying the nature of a dream could be considered the light beam could be thought of as the thing that's actual when the field collapses into something, quote unquote collapses, or the whole field itself with all of its potentials, including this one highlighted part, could be considered the light.

SPEAKER_02 56:42

It still sounds existentially frustrating because of choosing every possible choice all at once, and then all of the choices except for one destroy each other.

SPEAKER_04 56:58

What when you're talking about your experience of it, the all the couldn't it just be that all of those destroyed things aren't experienced.

SPEAKER_00 57:10

Yeah, in that case, Dwight, what's choosing is realizing the way your will has expressed. It's the final thing only, or in the realization of it. That's what choosing would become in the way Dwight said it.

SPEAKER_04 57:24

So, like you're not experiencing any frustration.

SPEAKER_00 57:28

The light's not going bouncing all around, and then one of the paths is the one that goes, now that's a nice path. It doesn't experience all the other.

SPEAKER_02 57:39

The thought experiment is the way we currently, with our language and thought patterns, experience life is like this one way of looking at refraction, and the way the aliens' thought patterns and language experience life is like this other interpretation of the refraction. Well, then what I'm asking is what would the experience of life be for this third account?

SPEAKER_04 58:07

In the story, and it's slightly different because she says that she's not fully heptopod or whatever. But in the story, you have this sort of resigned but hopeful, but nostalgic, but you know, it's a sort of strong sad moving through life sort of thing, but also very excited. Yeah. But yeah, so I I think you get that I'm not exactly sure, but I think the cancelling out of the paths that aren't taken that are taken, but they cancel each other out, just at least for the linguist who in the movie is named Louise. I don't think we see any things that didn't happen happening.

SPEAKER_02 59:09

Language would be like a Sudoku puzzle. Hear me out. In what circumstance would it be? If the first interpretation of refraction is causal, the light is traveling, and the language that corresponds to that is saying words in sequence one after the other. Second interpretation of refraction is all at once simultaneous, and the language equivalent of that is a sentence where every ideogram contains all the strokes that are used to make up every ideogram. They all happen at once, there's no order to them. Then the language equivalent to light taking every single path and then resolving into the only one that doesn't cancel out would be a Sudoku puzzle. Because you have some information, but there's all these possibilities, but most of them cancel each other out, leaving you with only one possible solution.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:12

Yeah, something like that. When I was traveling one time, years ago now, for work, I was in a strange city. I was this was in um Moscow, and I had this random encounter. I you know, I don't know anybody there, right? Doing whatever. And long story short, in effect, I had an opportunity to cheat on Johanna. There's a woman who was something like not quite propositioning, but it was like that, it was implicit, it was there, and I whatever. And I didn't realize it at first, like because you know, it's just minding my own business, right? But then I suddenly saw what was happening there, and she spoke English, I didn't speak Russian, or you know, not very well. And in that moment, I saw when when I saw what was happening, I saw like versions of me, sort of, that took her up on the offer. Nobody would have ever found out at all, right? Because I'm I'm in Russia, right, doing whatever. And so, but it was just for a moment and it wasn't even a struggle. I wasn't like, oh, should I, you know, nothing like that. Obviously, I wasn't going to, and I didn't, right? And that was the path that was real. But the other ones were like none of the ones that I went through were like, she says hey, and then we both spontaneously combust, and the earth turns into a second star. It wasn't crazy garbage like that, right? It was real things that are possible things. And they had to kind of in me, in a moment, collapse into me, being me there and then. And I was. And that was the real me. That was what I was gonna do the whole time. But that, you know, I think that in a certain way of saying it, Matt, maybe the experience of it is like a lot of temptation or, you know, mm pulling you from you.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:08

Well, I can let it go now that I have completed the analogy and discovered how the story would extend itself given this new physics.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:19

So I thought a lot about uh Cassandra when I was reading this.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:28

Is that Siddhartha?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:30

No, Cassandra is the prophetess in Troy. Oh, she's cursed with true prophecy, but no one will believe her. And I haven't done a lot of discussing about it. Every time I've thought about it and wanted to discuss it, I've wondered what exactly does the but no one will believe you add to her thing. Because all of the things she says, if people believed her and were able to change it, the prophecy would not be true. So if the you know the goddess just cursed her with true brain. I guess this is just another look at the you know, the book of ages thing. To me, I don't quite understand the curse of no one will believe you for Cassandra. And it seems like the main character in the story has that sort of more explicitly in the film.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:34

Or it can't really affect the world.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:37

Yeah. I guess no, in the film it doesn't. The film breaks it because General Kang does believe her and changes. But in the in the story, she has that. She kind of puts it as she doesn't tell anyone, I guess. That's a difference there. But just looking at Cassandra, if you want, what does the but no one will believe you add to the prophecy? I mean to the curse.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:05

That's a good question. I have this notion w this is a quote from or it's pretty close to a quote from somebody, but I can't remember who. That is something like a citizen who isn't involved in politics, doesn't exist, isn't a citizen? Something like that. Like if you're not involved in the polity, then what are you even what are you? You're I don't know, maybe you're a parasite, I can't remember what the exact concept of it was. Maybe it's a kind of death, right? To to a kind of social death or civil death. What would the opposite be? You everybody believes you, but you're always wrong about stuff?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:47

Well, I think in a non-Greek tragedy, I think the idea is that she would have true prophecies, but that can be changed, maybe. That sort of thing. As opposed to this thing will happen.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:06

Like Jonah.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:07

Yeah. Although Jonah doesn't get that. Yes, yeah. He said, Go tell him that Nineveh's gonna be overthrown. And then it doesn't.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:16

Maybe Jonah's the opposite of Cassandra. Because he's wrong.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:20

Yeah. Although the Nineveh Ninevehans didn't necessarily believe him. I guess they believed him, but with a caveat. We'll we will just, you know, throw ourselves at God's mercy.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:35

Was Jonah's thing contingent? Did he say unless you repent? No. No, that's the thing.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:42

Yeah, he he just says, in 30 days, I think Nineveh will be overthrown.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:47

Hmm.

unknown 1:05:48

Let's see.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:49

This isn't directly related to the story of your life, but on this particular thread, there's this one passage in the Bible that I find the most Curious where it seems like God is advocating for deceit, and that's one resolution of the Jonah story. God tells him to go tell them something because he knows that they'll repent. And that's a kind of Socratic, like the noble lie almost, if you wanted to interpret it that way. I'm not saying that's the case. But the part where he he seems to advocate for deceit is when uh Samuel is gonna go up to anoint David and Saul he says, go up there and do it and go and sacrifice a you know, whatever it is, sacrifice a lamb or something to do the things. And then Samuel says, But God, like then Saul will kill me. And then God says, Okay, well then just go tell him you're gonna go have a feast. And then when you get there, do the sacrifice, and it's like it's that's really interesting because he's not lying, he is going up to have a feast, but he's like saying, be deceptive, which is not the same as lying. It's you know, it's like subterfuge at least. Anyway, I'm just telling y'all, I know that was a total tangent.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

No, I can tell you how I reasoned through it if you want. Yeah, sure, absolutely. Imagine that you're in World War II and you're the British and you're fighting the Nazis, but you're an honorable gentleman. How could you possibly deceive somebody? Well, you've already decided to kill the Nazis. So if you can kill more of them by lying to them as well and tricking them, you should go ahead and do that. God is fighting Saul, God is doing battle with Saul, lying is part of doing battle. You know, if you're fencing, you you do a feint. It's dishonest. Part of trying to overcome other people in combat or sport or you know, battle is tricking them. So if you've already made the moral move that it's okay to fight this person, then it's okay to lie to them too.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:58

It is interesting because there are sports in which it used to not like it used to be when you played football, you just ran the ball up the middle, and it was literally just a contest of strength. And coaches were like disappointed in people who pulled the ball back and threw it and were like, what are you doing? You're breaking the not rules, but you know, you're breaking the That's so dishonest. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:29

How could a gentleman trick the other team?

SPEAKER_04 1:08:32

Yeah, it's you're no longer competing, you know, your linemen are no longer trying to push aside the linemen and you know, honestly moving the ball up the field, fencing. You and you're fencing your wily.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:47

Yeah, I think fencing has involved deceit for a very long time. And tennis.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:54

Speaking of which, the uh the CIA officer in the film references the Hungarian term salami tactica, salami tactics, cutting up your enemy. Salami tactics sometimes refers to just trying to cut them up, but at the larger tactical level, it means taking a large number of enemies, pitting them against each other, trying to drop resources between them to get one to leverage the resource against the other, to get them to deplete each other's resources, all that. So it was that versus a non-zero sum game. So it was interesting to me, once I started looking at it from that perspective, the gospel is getting to see things at this higher order than time, and the linguist really does become a Mary figure, and she gives birth to this kid with a terminal disease, and her husband disagrees with her choice to have the kid. It's it was just an interesting kind of false gospel. You know, you've got instead of sending one Messiah, you've got twelve pods touching down, but it's still the twelveness. So there's still biblical imagery there. The seven, you know, the hepta pods, kind of a biblical angel, kind of numerological reference there. Did you guys not did you guys pick up biblical vibes to all this?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:28

Oh, I mean, maybe not biblical, but there's a lot of like medieval kabbalah uh in here uh where you know like medieval practitioners of magical kabbala would draw out the Hebrew letters for different like magical or supernatural principles, and then just meditate on them as a way of like attuning their mind to angelic beings and like taking part in the eternal in that way, and hoping to, you know. It's definitely very very kabbalistic.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:04

And that's the fundamental occult mechanism of all the Masonic stuff. That's what you're getting when you get to the end of the road. The magic sauce is by thinking magical thoughts, we're gonna make you magical. So think about these magical thoughts. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:22

Or a little bit like uh the movie Pi.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:25

Mm-hmm. If you remember that well, yeah. I remember a little bit about so uh the uh one of the most fascinating parts of the story to me in terms of the linguist's character development, is when she's talking to the colonel and she tells him the deceitful story about the linguistic origin of the term kangaroo as a mistranslation, a conflation of the aboriginal term, I don't understand, which was the response given when asked, what is that animal over there? You know, they said, Well, kangaroo. So the condescension of lying to an African American man about an Australian and uh another white person having a conversation, part of it felt like it was a bit degrading to her and it made her a bit manipulative. But then you remember her contempt and her disdain for the colonel and the way that he put down some insurgents and stuff like that. And so you see she feels that it is expedient and effective to just lie to the guy and communicate the concept that she wants to have conveyed to him because she doesn't really see him as someone who's worthy of receiving her integrity in communication. She he is someone that she needs to effectively say some stuff to. So it's interesting, like she has this strategic level of input over the op, right? It was just kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:02

I think there's a little bit more of a hint of this in the story that it's like that anecdote about the word kangaroo is like a long-standing urban legend in the like linguist community.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:18

So she's pulling out an old tale.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:20

Yeah, she's pulling out what you this is what you tell the freshman to make this particular point. And she's just pulling that out of her back pocket because she's a teacher. But she knows because she's also a deep researcher, that actually it's sort of probably mostly an urban legend. But in that way that urban legends re often represent truth.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:40

And that's you I don't know if it had happened yet, but there's other times where the colonel tells her that he's responsible to the generals and he's gotta communicate to them. So like they're I don't think he would be upset. He just needs something to say to the people that make the decisions.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:03

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:04

And so that kangaroo story probably went down great with the generals when he told them that. And it doesn't matter if it's true or not.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:11

Yeah. But interestingly. The generals probably know it's not true.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:15

Nah, the generals are idiots.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:21

I respect our troops. I don't know about these guys. I'm not a communist.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:25

Yeah. Everybody at my work was all in a tizzy last week because I think a captain visited us.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:34

Yeah, that's not the lowest officer.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:36

They were very excited.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:38

Was it a naval captain or a other branch of the service captain?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:42

Probably Navy. But I really know nothing about these things. I'm a JavaScript guy.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:48

Do you have a bird on his shoulder?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:50

I didn't see him.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:51

Oh Did you guys already address the question of science and language, which is more fundamental to civilization?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:59

We did not talk about that. That's a good question. Depends on what civilization is. And what science is.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:06

And what language is. Which is why the answer is. Are you gonna use language or science?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:21

A diagram. Civilization is when you put things in between other things.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:27

Wait a minute, wait a minute. That's a prophylactic, Matthew. Even I know that.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:32

Civilization is a good thing. Imagine you're eating your food off the floor. What are you, a savage? Eat your food off a table. Oh. What are you, a savage? Eat your food out of a plate. What are you, a savage? Put a placemat between that plate and your table. What are you, a savage? Put a tablecloth underneath of the placemat. Underneath a savage where a table table's resting directly on the floor on the carpet there. What are you? A savage? All you're perpetuating a plate underneath of your soup bowl?

SPEAKER_06 1:16:09

All you're perpetuating is a misdirected diatribe against feminine sensibilities for objects as art. Okay, and they want more objects to be involved in the process, and then men involve themselves in deep rituals around the use of them.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:26

What are you a savage? Put a foreword before your book.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:30

What are you a savage?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:31

Put an introduction before the foreword. Are you kidding? That's embellishment. You're civilized. This is academia. We need a translator's preface as well.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:40

Isn't that just embellishment? The nature of embellishment? I mean, civilization is accreting human refinement of things.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:49

You can't just have a function that modifies the data. You have to have a function that takes another function that chooses which function to use to modify the data. Are you savages? We can't just have that.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:04

We have to have that and a unit test that applies itself to that and tells us whether it's good or bad. We can't just have unit tests. We have to have end-to-end tests as well. We can't just have end-to-end tests.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:16

Matthew, I'll just have unit tests and functions making other functions. Matthew, you didn't mention branch coverage, and for that, please receive a gentleman's white glove slap across your face, sir. Anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:28

Civilization is when you put things in between other things.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:32

I'm trying to remember before Matthew schooled us all on what civilization is, what were we talking about?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:39

You had asked whether science or language was more fundamental to civilization.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:44

All of the layer stuff that you're saying is derivative of a single concept, which is the major, in my opinion, I and I think it's true, the major differentiator between what we would call high and low civilizations or whatever, which is the concept of maintenance. Every single thing you said, every layer, the plate under the soup bowl, the whatever, the whatever, on the physical side is a hundred percent all about making sure that things that can be cleaned more easily are the things that get soiled first. And same thing with all the unit tests, same thing with the writing, arguably, depending on how maintenance is interpreted and projected into a sort of abstract space of writing. Anyway, that's just my two sense. The civilizations that do no maintenance are the ones that we call low civilizations, and they do things very directly.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:39

I would say that that maintenance is certainly a sufficient observable factor to see that high-low status that you're talking about. Another way of seeing it like you would observe it breaking down in the space of a couple of generations through the lack of maintenance. Another way that you would see this high-low status in a civilization would be in the way that they develop and or maintain economic stability. Well, that's interesting. What about a civilization that has the foresight to set up sustainable systems that don't break down? It's not that they're good at maintenance, it's that they design systems that don't need to be maintained. Is that still a high civilization?

SPEAKER_02 1:19:33

I think you're talking about a square circle. You're giving a you're giving a uh system that doesn't need to be maintained. There's a practical that's not a thing.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:45

There is. There are practical examples of this in places where there are local geological features that define agricultural capacity. When people settle into sustainable rhythms with them, then there's no real need for maintenance. You're just kind of living out a cycle of dependence on a local ecological phenomenon. But then if you interrupt it and you try to get more efficient than the local ecology allows, then you're trying to, you know, do a system that will involve breakdown and maintenance.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:22

That's living in nature, which is the opposite.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:27

But what if you're not living in nature? What if there's like a natural amount of water that comes down off the mountain and you have set up a series of stone aqueducts, and now everybody gets enough water to do their own little rice paddy?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:40

The stone aqueducts are going to wear down and need to be maintained.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:45

I mean, even if you're living in nature, things have to be maintained or they change. Everyone has this idea of oh, you know, this happened for four years in a row, so it's normal and everything will always be like this again. Except no, it doesn't. El Nino comes and the weather is different, and you know. I I don't think even your proposed even without aqueducts that have to be maintained, I don't think what you're talking about exists. But the aqueducts add another layer of maintenance.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:24

Anyway, I don't think that you need either science or language to do civilization.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:30

How are you gonna So you think civilization can be Okay, that's fair. So you believe that the technological advancements that define civilization as opposed to living in the wild are the kinds of advancements that can be obtained without quote unquote science. These are just the things that people who are clever can figure out by going about their life.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:57

Before science, many things were discovered.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:00

Well, okay, so hang on. Is there a such thing as before science? Because as soon as you do something that might work out one way or the other, and you don't know, but you do it to find out, isn't that science?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:15

I mean, then you've made science so general that it's just another word for being.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:20

No, science is the way of knowing things and includes any way that you know things like theology, empirical science, forensic sciences. That's why they're called science. That's why the word is called science schio, knowledge to know. And it's why theology was the queen of the sciences. We are just raging bigots towards empiricism, and so we say science is only that one.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:45

Amen. And that's why I forgive him for all of his off the handle things he says about the military.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:52

In that case, science is essential for civilization because you can't say is without invoking science.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:00

Science is just the word for But you propose that we be have civilization without language. So that's the one I'm more interested in.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:12

I would but you can't tell me about it because that would involve using language.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:17

We would certainly need to take off all of our clothes, got into a field, and grunt at each other and see if we could get the point across if we wanted to be sincere.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:26

You can fashion yourself a crude whip and and create a civilization amongst your fellow men without language.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:36

Matthew, that's slavery.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:38

It's not civilization, that's slavery.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:41

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:45

I was interested in the imagery around Dwight.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:50

I'm sorry. Dwight is wiggling his pinky finger at me in a reference to the ancient Greek philosopher Menandros.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:59

Menandros.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:01

To Testocles. That's what we called our dog when he got neutered.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:08

I just Destocles. I just had my dog fixed a few days ago, and I need to refer to him as Testocles in front of my wife. Yes. Detestocles. Yes, pretty good. I was I was interested in the scene where the scientist and the linguist are about to go into the alien ship for the first time, and the army medical officer gives them a booster shot. And obviously, I'm looking at this with all of the reactive hatred and bile of post-COVID. But uh it was interesting to me this idea that you you've just gotta be injected with something. We can't just send you in there. We have to inject you with something.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:57

Prophylaxis.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:58

Yes, a prophylaxis. Uh I was like booster.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:03

When she took off her helmet, I was like, oh, that's the most evil thing I've seen in a movie in a really long time.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:10

How what do you mean when she took off her helmet? What was evil?

SPEAKER_02 1:25:13

She was okay killing them. She was okay killing the aliens and humanity. Like, you know, what was it like 90% of the people on this continent were killed by germs that the Europeans didn't know they were carrying? Right, right. Just from, you know, and we no longer have American chestnuts. They don't exist. I mean, they exist, but they don't grow tall enough to bear fruit anymore because of the customer.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:40

They just just in the last 10 years slowly got a strain that they're gonna be able to propagate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:50

I thought that part was true to the story, though, Matt.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:53

I don't care. I'm gonna do a dramatic, a dramatic empathy move, and just who cares?

SPEAKER_04 1:26:02

This is my only story, there's they're not there, the aliens aren't there. They're just projecting. So, but also maybe there's no helmet removal scene that I don't remember. Go ahead, Strubbert.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:13

I was just gonna say this was my only real complaint's the wrong word, but my only criticism or something of the movie and the story. It's the only part of Ted Chang's writing that I have not enjoyed in most of his stories, which was that my guess was that he had never had a kid when he wrote this. Because it's super unrealistic portrayal of parent child, like ways that you interact and think. Or else or possibly I'm super unrealistic and everybody's just or this woman or whatever is just super insufferable. But the I thought that was the one part that translated correctly to the movie Matt was the sort of horror of her being willing to fly by the seat of her pants. It had what was Chang's reckless indulgence of sort of like psycho-emotive feminism that was sort of permeated the story and made me blanch the entire time. But aside from that, that was that was what was wrong with the whole parenting stuff. It was just gross. But aside from that, I liked the story, liked all the stuff, liked the way Amy Adams, or whoever did she did a great job, the writers did a great job, big fan of everything. That one part was just a blot.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:35

I'm not a parent and I have no idea what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:39

It was just like silly and overly dramatic. It was how somebody that the writing of that part, here's why I'm saying this. The writing of that part was the same as the writing of the taking off the helmet. It's the same thing happening in both, which is this buying into this idea of The power, the life-altering, physics-modifying power of a mother's love and a woman's intuition. Yeah, great. Wonderful. Nothing bad could possibly happen because of how fiercely she believes that she could translate and really reach out to the aliens and the way she's interacting with her daughter. Ugh. It was just like, come on, stop.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:22

So I have a I think tangentially at least related question about related to that. One just so everyone knows, I'm also not a parent. So I don't know. I'm in the same boat with Matt. One thing that struck me one thing that struck me as potentially true-ish or wise-ish that she said was the way she but possibly falls under this absurd thing that you're talking about. Was the way she talked about she was struck not because of something, but because her daughter wasn't her, but she felt the like she felt the pain that she felt, but wasn't able to I can't control your muscles, but I can feel all your feelings. Yeah. Was that was that absurd?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:19

It was it was super like hyper indulgent. It's okay. Here's how here's what that was. That's what you say, that's what you acknowledge when the woman you're interacting with is super self-indulgent and about her emotions, and you're trying not to offend her because it's a lot of hassle. You go, oh okay. That's what that is. Yes, it was absolutely ridiculous. You totally hate to see your kid get hurt. You love him. Right, Josh? Like you you hate to see her get hurt, but it's not actually feeling the pain. It was self-aggrandizing. That that whole framing is self-aggrandizing doubly. On the one hand, because of how amazing a person I am, that I'm so sensitive to you and to what your meaning would over. And on the other side, that I'm not so forceful that I control you. I recognize my boundary. It was just wild, sort of, again, like like I called it psychosocial feminist like craziness. Aside from that, everything was great.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:32

Yeah, I mean, to me, one of the biggest problems with what's happening is the way that Jeremy Renner's character as a man is a nothing burger of a entity in the relationship. He's less than Joseph, you know, in the story of Jesus and Mary. He is only even acknowledged to be the person who is the dad there at the very end. You should have been able to put the pieces together a little bit sooner than that. But it's crazy how her quote-unquote love for him and like, do you wanna it's weird, like, so you want to make a baby, you want to have a baby, like they having a child is this just like bizarrely whimsical esoteric thing that happens.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:26

I think you get to criticize the uh emotional content of the Sacharin dwelling on parenthood aspects of it, but I do think that the love story is very deliberately drawn in very few strokes.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:45

And we just have a few sentences, and we have to fill in all the details because that's him and her is not what the story's about. The story's about her and her daughter.

SPEAKER_06 1:31:57

That's fair. That's fair. It just it really thematically played into it, it left a lot of space for nothing. Listen, I'm not against films that have feminist tones, undertones, overtones, stories that tell a good feminist story. That's great. I love it. But I am okay. Well, you know, he also hates the military. So so for me it feels uh kind of cheap, right? Because you do I don't know. It felt cheapening to see the man be nothing. And that just leaves the kid in this weird attachment zone where you see the mom and the daughter talking to each other, and the daughter's like, well, dad just kind of doesn't look at me the same way anymore. And it's so this kid, her whole existence is divine by the way that her mom looks at her and only her mom's attachment. So maybe you know what that it's true, there are a lot of dads that are gone. So at the very least, it's valid social criticism, and so I've undone my own complaint about the criticism. So anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:09

No, the guy's a dweeb. He's a dweeb in in both.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:13

He's probably better at differential calculus than you.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:15

That's what dweebs are for. That's true.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:22

That's very true. Oh, I just wanted to say this film really is all about us. This film is all about the power of podcasts to radicalize people because it's really the power of podcasts that transform the minds of those soldiers who plant that time charge that accelerates the storyline. So we should be careful, guys. Our words have power. Somebody out there might be listening to us. Remember, kids, don't trust your government.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:49

Don't ever trust your actually you're joking, but it is that brings up another thing that I was I forgot that I had thought about while listening to the story this afternoon is the the idea of a magic word, which the podcast stuff isn't in the story, but the understanding Yeah. Yeah. From the other story, understand, or m that's a little bit more explicit, but in this, that's the language that the heptopods give her changes her. And I think we're often Yeah, I mean it's kinda hard to talk about, but just this idea of, oh, if if I had the if I had the exact right word, I could communicate to you this idea in my head. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:42

And uh that brings up Matthew's previous point about how proper nouns are the most powerful words in a language because they allow you to convey with the greatest degree of precision an idea, because you get an actual whole real thing across. Like Dwight, you were just saying, if I had a word, I could get this whole idea across to you. Well, Poughkeepsie. There we go. You I just got you to think of the entire exact geographically contiguous area that is the municipality of Poughkeepsie, whatever that is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:23

Even in Kyoto, hearing the cry of the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:32

Is that a death poem or just a haiku?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:34

Uh I think it's just a haiku. It's Bosho. One of the great ones. One of my favorites. I like that one. But the you know, the strength of it is in the in the proper noun.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:46

Is that I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:49

Like the famous blues song, Sweet Home Chicago. It's all in the the word Chicago.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:58

Sweet Home.

SPEAKER_06 1:35:59

Robert Johnson? I was gonna say, Sweet Home Alabama and Georgia are the uh most iconic state eponymous.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:07

Yeah, look up Robert Johnson's Sweet Home Chicago.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:11

Okay, so Josh, what's your uh reading for us next week?

SPEAKER_06 1:36:14

Well, folks, uh you are in for a treat. The assignment is to watch the stabilized version of the Patterson Gimlin film and to read some PDFs that I have here pulled aside. One of them is an analysis integrity of the Patterson Gimlin film image by Bill Muns and Jeff Meldrum. So that'll give you some insight about the nature of the film itself. And then the other is the Ichnotaxonomy of Giant Hominoid Tracks in North America by Donald Jeffrey Meldrum from the Department of Biological Sciences of Idaho State University. And I will provide those PDFs to you guys. So if you guys read those and you're like, more, we've already plowed through them, it's day three, and we need more cryptid content. I there's a deep stack. I can throw more stuff at you, but this is a good starting point for you guys. So I don't want to get too deep in the weeds. And if you're good, I'll show you stuff about leprechauns and ley lines, but you have to be good and you have to play nice with the Sasquatch stuff first. So that's the next assignment for uh Bigfoot Cryptive Readings. Thank you for joining us for this discussion. You are dismissed with the following validation from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars, and that wolf behowls the moon, whilst the heavy ploughman snores all with weary task foredone. Now the wasted brands do glow, whilst the screech owl screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night, that the graves all gaping wide, every one lets forth its sprite, in the churchway paths do glide, and we fairies that do run by the triple hectate's team, From the presence of the sun following darkness like a dream, now our frolic, not a mouse shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with broom before to sweep the dust behind the door.