Followup to:  Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Joy in the Merely Real

Most witches don't believe in gods.  They know that the gods exist, of course.  They even deal with them occasionally.  But they don't believe in them.  They know them too well.  It would be like believing in the postman.
        —Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

Once upon a time, I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories—

And before anyone chides me for my "failure to understand what fantasy is about", let me say this:  I was raised in an SF&F household.  I have been reading fantasy stories since I was five years old.  I occasionally try to write fantasy stories.  And I am not the sort of person who tries to write for a genre without pondering its philosophy.  Where do you think story ideas come from?

Anyway:

I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories, and it occurred to me that if there were actually dragons in our world—if you could go down to the zoo, or even to a distant mountain, and meet a fire-breathing dragon—while nobody had ever actually seen a zebra, then our fantasy stories would contain zebras aplenty, while dragons would be unexciting.

Now that's what I call painting yourself into a corner, wot?  The grass is always greener on the other side of unreality.

Followup to:  Explaining vs. Explaining Away

    "Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms.  Nothing is "mere".  I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them.  But do I see less or more?
    "The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light.  A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there.  Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.  What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why?  It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.
    "For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!  Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?
    "What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
            —Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol I, p. 3-6 (line breaks added)

That's a real question, there on the last line—what kind of poet can write about Jupiter the god, but not Jupiter the immense sphere?  Whether or not Feynman meant the question rhetorically, it has a real answer:

If Jupiter is like us, he can fall in love, and lose love, and regain love.
If Jupiter is like us, he can strive, and rise, and be cast down.
If Jupiter is like us, he can laugh or weep or dance.

If Jupiter is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, it is more difficult for the poet to make us feel.

Yesterday I heard that Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, had died at 69.  And I don't understand, I truly don't, why that of all deaths should affect me the way it does.

Every day, people die; 150,000 of them, in fact.  Every now and then I read the obituary of a scientist whose work I admired, and I don't feel like this.  I should, of course, but I don't.  I remember hearing about the death of Isaac Asimov, and more distantly, the death of Robert Heinlein (though I was 8 at the time) and that didn't affect me like this.

I never knew one single thing about Gary Gygax.  I don't know if he had a wife or children.  I couldn't guess his political opinions, or what he thought about the future of humanity.  He was just a name on the cover of books I read until they disintegrated.

I searched on the Net and just found comments from other people feeling the same way.  Stopped in their tracks by this one death, and not understanding why, and trying to come up with an explanation for their own feelings.  Why him?

I never even really played D&D all that much.  I played a little with David Levitt, my best friend in elementary school - I think it was how we initially met, in fact, though the memory fades into oblivion.  I remember my father teaching me to play very simple D&D games, around the same time I was entering kindergarten; I remember being upset that I couldn't cast a Shield spell more than once.  But mostly, I just read the rulebooks.

There are people who played D&D with their friends, every week or every day, until late at night, in modules that Gary Gygax designed.  I understand why they feel sad.  But all I did, mostly, was read the rulebooks to myself.  Why do I feel the same way?

Followup to:  Politics and Awful Art

There's this thing called "derisive laughter" or "mean-spirited laughter", which follows from seeing the Hated Enemy get a kick in the pants.  It doesn't have to be an unexpected kick in the pants, or a kick followed up with a custard pie.  It suffices that the Hated Enemy gets hurt.  It's like humor, only without the humor.

If you know what your audience hates, it doesn't take much effort to get a laugh like that—which marks this as a subspecies of awful political art.

There are deliciously biting satires, yes; not all political art is bad art.  But satire is a much more demanding art than just punching the Enemy in the nose.  In fact, never mind satire—just an atom of ordinary genuine humor takes effort.

Imagine this political cartoon:  A building labeled "science", and a standard Godzilla-ish monster labeled "Bush" stomping on the "science" building.  Now there are people who will laugh at this—hur hur, scored a point off Bush, hur hur—but this political cartoon didn't take much effort to imagine.  In fact, it was the very first example that popped into my mind when I thought "political cartoon about Bush and science".  This degree of obviousness is a bad sign.

If I want to make a funny political cartoon, I have to put in some effort.  Go beyond the cached thought.  Use my creativity.  Depict Bush as a tentacle monster and Science as a Japanese schoolgirl.

Followup to:  Rationality and the English Language

One of my less treasured memories is of a State of the Union address, or possibly a presidential inauguration, at which a Nobel Laureate got up and read, in a terribly solemn voice, some politically correct screed about what a wonderfully inclusive nation we all were—"The African-Americans, the Ethiopians, the Etruscans", or something like that.  The "poem", if you can call it that, was absolutely awful.  As far as my ears could tell, it had no redeeming artistic merit whatsoever.

Every now and then, yet another atheist is struck by the amazing idea that atheists should have hymns, just like religious people have hymns, and they take some existing religious song and turn out an atheistic version.  And then this "atheistic hymn" is, almost without exception, absolutely awful.  But the author can't see how dreadful the verse is as verse.  They're too busy congratulating themselves on having said "Religion sure sucks, amen."  Landing a punch on the Hated Enemy feels so good that they overlook the hymn's lack of any other merit.  Verse of the same quality about something unpolitical, like mountain streams, would be seen as something a kindergartener's mother would post on her refrigerator. 

When I try to introduce the subject of advanced AI, what's the first thing I hear, more than half the time?

"Oh, you mean like the Terminator movies / the Matrix / Asimov's robots!"

And I reply, "Well, no, not exactly.  I try to avoid the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence."

Followup to:  Cached Thoughts, The Virtue of Narrowness

Since Robert Pirsig put this very well, I'll just copy down what he said.  I don't know if this story is based on reality or not, but either way, it's true.

        He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't.  They just couldn't think of anything to say.
        One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred word essay about the United States.  He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.
       When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset.  She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say.
        It just stumped him.  Now he couldn't think of anything to say.  A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer:  "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman."  It was a stroke of insight.
        She nodded dutifully and went out.  But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time.  She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.