Fine, Let's Talk About Star (Insert Trek/Wars)

They say that you can like both Elvis and the Beetles, but you can never like both equally. The same could be said for many people and their attitudes towards the two most popular franchises with "star" in the title. In honor of the release of the new Star Wars movie, Bill Nye weighed in on his opinions about the series. It seemed to come down to his annoyance that Star Wars was not as scientifically accurate as Star Trek. Niel Degrasse Tyson had some similar comments around the same time, although he seemed to be more focused on discussing the representation of science in the new movie and less on whether this made it preferable to Star Trek. Bill Nye, on the other hand, seemed downright offended by Star Wars, which honestly doesn't care about science. It never did and it never will. I think it was pretty clear about that at the start of the relationship, so don't start acting like this is new information.

Didn't George Lucas call his movie a "space opera"?  That should've been a give away. Much of science fiction deals with changes to science, technology and society and their philosophical implications. Even though Star Trek can be just as magical as Star Wars, it makes some attempt to be grounded in the world of known science because doing otherwise would defeat the point. Gene Roddenberry intended it to be a realistic vision of the future. I'd should point out that I think this vision is oriented more towards a civilization that is more humane and sanguine than our own - rather than being fundamentally about fancy gadgets and exotic space phenomenon - but this requires speculation about science and technology too. On the other hand, Star Wars is more like a fantasy in science fiction setting than it is speculative fiction.  Of course it has magic, Mr. Nye. It takes place a long time ago in a galazy far, far away. We're talking about Lord Of the Rings in space here.

Why Philosophy Is Important To Programming

Baruch would like to discuss stretching the concepts of proof beyond mere math.

If your friends and family rolled their eyes at you when you announced that you were majoring in philosophy, I empathize with you. Perhaps it is better to say that there is a part of me that empathizes and there is a part of me that asks whether you are out of your damn Vulcan mind. That more skeptical voice wonders about the practical applications of said major and waxes on about how such questions matter in a world where a degree at a second tier university costs more than a house. Even if you get a free ride or happen to be the progeny of millionaires, is a philosophy major really the best way to honor the blood and sweat of your benefactors?

Don't expect me to answer that last question. Honestly, if you needed that from me then maybe you shouldn't be a philosopher after all. Also, I don't need a lecture on how the importance of philosophy does not rest on its practical applications alone. What I want to do now is answer the skeptical voice's first question of practicality, at least in part. I am sure that many, if not most, people associate philosophy with nothing but mountaintop navel gazing about the meaning of life. (Which somehow they don't regard as a practical devotion?) If the twentieth century has shown us anything, it is that philosophy has a closer relationship to math, science - and dare I say engineering - than we have previously been willing to admit. We have folks like Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to thank for this. Despite their contributions to the foundations of technical disciplines, I think they are still considered esoteric for many who labor within those disciplines to make their daily dime. We can hope that the twenty first century will bring the philosophical mindset to the masses.

The importance of what these folks accomplished lays in discovering or inventing tools with which we can reason about concepts. The unification of mathematics with set theory and formal logic preceded an acceleration of discovery. One of the most important contributions to twentieth century math after that, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, would not have been possible without it. We cannot find the limits of reason before we have developed some formal way of defining what reason is.

One may ask, what do we need of philosophy if math already has the necessary tools? Set theory began with the question of how to formally define what mathematical concepts are. The set of all "things", however, extends beyond mathematical things. It extends beyond computer science and engineering, but for my part I will turn to computer science. Once a program exceeds a certain level of complexity, we start to talk about design and architecture. We start to collate lower level sequences of instructions and bits of memory into abstract concepts such as routines, objects, subsystems and the like.

Every step along the way, we have to make decisions about the divisions between these entities. While those division may be driven by software's relationship to the real world, they are just as much driven by demands of maintainability, extensibility, and stability, among other things. No one can tell you what the right division of labor is within your program. Often, there are several right ways. More often, there are several ways which are each right for a different purpose and we have to decide which purposes are important and which can suffer compromise and exactly what are the tolerable compromises.

I am not aware of anything quite as well established as set theory and formal logic for reasoning about these things. Each program is a bit like developing a new set theory. We have to start at the beginning, asking the big questions of what it is we hope to accomplish and what is the best way of accomplishing that. While there may not be any tools for answering these questions as one might develop a theorem and its proofs, there are tools that can help us divide and conquer. These tools are found in philosophy. I was go so far as to say that we can adapt more than just metaphysics and all its descendants. Even fields such as ethics and aesthetics may be important in our endeavor.

Unfortunately, I feel that most software developers are left to their own devices. The good ones probably rediscover concepts that may have gleaned from Spinoza or for that matter the pre-Socratics. Is it so revolutionary to suggest that curriculum in computer science should include some survey of philosophy, so at least we can know where to look when we want to find someone who may have traveled down the same corridors of thought?

Two Examples From Inductive Composition

Here are two pieces that I wrote using what I called "inductive composition" in my previous post. I of course need a minimum of two to demonstrate it. These use the same characters and could be a part of a larger story, but I wrote them as independent stories, each centered around a particular idea. I also wrote them in reverse of the order I present them here, which is chronologically. I wrote the second one first and that spawned and idea for the first.

Both stories were inspired by some of the concepts I related in my post on genetic engineering, I also tried to relate these ideas in Divide The Sea, a much longer story. I wondered if I could refine the concepts to their purest narrative form. I don't know If I've succeeded, but in any case I offer these for your consideration.

Flowers And Sand

Compared to anything else that came across her tablet screen, the questions were stark. Their semantic and visual simplicity is what terrified her. Each was a sequence of no more than ten words without a conjunction or dependent clause among them. The eggshell white background and black, monospaced typeface served only to heap more anxiety upon Lizette as she stared at the exam and nearly saw it peering back into her.

The first question out of one thousand read: “Do flowers ever make you feel sad?”

Lizette had answered this with a yes and failed to move on because the next question read:

“Do old friends sometimes feel distant?”

She sensed movement and looked up to see a hazy figure against the ocean and sky. The beach was made of rough sand and it ended in grassy dunes. The person, the only other human Lizette could see, stepped onto a boardwalk that wove among the dunes and ended at the slender brick road on which the house stood. An autumn breeze had descended and was messing around with sand and the grass and the figure’s floral dress.

A moment later, the woman had climbed the porch and entered the large room that faced the ocean. It was cool in there and full of plants, some nearly two stories high. A table stood in the middle and Lizette sat at it, across from the other woman. The tablet lay near the edge of the table, face down. The woman looked at it and raised an eyebrow.

“It’s no use.” said Lizette. “I know what it will say. Lian, do you think I’ve changed so much?”

Lian said, “Are you asking because your husband didn’t come home last night?”

When Lizette didn’t answer, Lian removed a deck of cards from her purse. She lay them face up in a grid. Each bore an image, a title, and a couplet. Lian instructed Lizette to stare at the arrangement for a moment and try to remember what she saw. Then she flipped them over changed their positions, making sure that she moved with enough care to allow Lizette the opportunity to follow where each card went. She assembled them into a grid again.

“Turn over three.” said Lian. “This isn’t a magic trick or a seance. You saw the cards and your brain followed them, even if you weren’t paying attention. Whatever you pick, something inside of you has chosen it.”

The first card pictured a man standing on a balcony and holding a burning sheet of paper,

The top read, “The Perpetual Actor” and the couplet at the bottom said,

He needs no crowd, no audience for his voice

The script is loud and divines every choice

Lizette turned over a second card, entitled “Lover’s Shade” and picturing a man followed by an inverted shadow, a silhouette with a head that touched its owner’s feet. The man covered his eyes from blinding sunlight, but was unable to stop a crack that was splitting open is face. An eye peered through the crack.

Daylight uncovers hollow faces and eyes awake in kind,

hoping strangers lie in places of lovers left twice behind

As Lizette touched the third card, Lian put her hand on top and held Lizette’s hand down.

“You know what this is?” said Lizette.

Lian nodded and let her eyes flood, saying, “I was hoping for something different, but you see things too well. I’m the dishonest one.” She drew a long breath. “None of this is your fault; I’m to blame. Go to my house and you’ll find him there. Hate me if you want, but you should forgive him.”

Lizette left and Lian went back to the beach, where she dialed someone on her phone.

“I went over thinking I was going to tell her the truth, but when I saw her face I couldn’t. She was taking the exam again because she senses that she’s changing and you won’t love her anymore. That poor woman, she doesn’t know how else to live. You were right, if she finds out that you cheated on the test, it will crush her. The only thing she’ll ever think is that you were never meant to be together. Better to let her believe I led you astray.”

Lian held up the third card, the one Lizette had chosen but never seen. It was “The Lock and Key.”

If you think that this key guards a secret then you are wrong

Captive truth wants to flee, but you’ve been the keeper all along

Prophecies Once Spoken

From the distance afforded by the hills, the descent of mortar shells sounded almost calm, like the soft shoed rumbling of a thunderstorm gathering a few miles out to sea. Aaron stood in the archway of his chapel, where morning dew clung to the moss on the stones. He surveyed the steppes cut into the hills on which his abbey stood. Each plateau blossomed in a different brilliant color. They bore wheat and vegetables as well as weedy grass on which pigs grazed. The most important crop was Aaron’s unique breed of peonies that looked like candy because of their glossy swirls in purple and white and blue and gold. Aaron was dismayed the see a depression in the middle of his flower bed. The shadow assumed the shape of a human body.

He crossed the courtyard, throwing corn which chickens pecked from the seams between paving stones. When he reached his peonies, he realized that one of his guests had died. Aaron fetched a cart and took the corpse into the basement of his chapel, where he kept a morgue in which he prepared bodies for their final passage. On the wall hung a dried and pressed flower behind a square of cracked glass. Handwritten words on the backing paper read, “In honor of your first artificial breed, love Elish.”

The next morning, two women and three men climbed the hill. The three men were nearly, though not entirely, identical. The same was true of the women, the most striking difference between them being the blue eyes of one and the golden eyes of the other. They passed a dead pig in the tall grass. Its mouth was turned to the sky and a dark mass of insects flew in and out of it. Aaron had been crouched over the pig and when he saw the group he stood.

He said, “Elish”, as though unsure it was her.

The blue eyed woman said, “The natches burned out our neighborhood.”

“Won’t your own kind take you in?”

“Things with us aren’t good. Perhaps you can pretend to be our kind again?”

One of the men said, “Were you lying when you said he was refined?”

Aaron said, “Yes, I’m not a victim of genetic design. I’m a natch.”

Elish said, “When we met he was pretending to be refined. How could I have known? He was lucky; he was born just as smart and strong as any man designed to be that way.”

The five of them argued and the three men left.

Aaron said to the yellow eyed woman, “I’m surprised you came Lian, let alone stayed.”

Years before, Lian had claimed that she and Aaron were having an affair. Even though the match making program had placed Aaron and Elish together, it wasn’t perfect. Lian was herself a constant reminder of technology’s imperfection. Her eyes weren’t meant to be gold. When Elish pressed Aaron about the fictional fling, she found a truth far more unsettling. Aaron had forged the results that placed them together. He had said it was because he’d wanted so much to be with Elish. His wife concluded it was because he was a natural born who wanted so much to find acceptance among the genetically engineered elite.

Lian said, “When war comes, sometimes you find friends among former enemies.”

Elish smiled and said, “Our argument with the others was a ruse. My kind, as you call us, sent me here to spy on you, but as for me I’d like to make amends. Will you come back down the hill?”

She held out a wedding ring, to which Aaron replied, “You might want to look at something first.” He brought them to the morgue and said, “I get a lot of pilgrims.. They want to be more than they are and blame the regulations of refined society for their impoverished creativity. Unfortunately, the peonies killed this one.”

Elish shook her head, saying, “No, you’re lying, just to drive me away. You never forgave me.”

She left, leaving Aaron and Lian alone. Lian asked what Elish had meant and how she could possibly think that Aaron has somehow arranged the body as a stunt when he didn’t even know they were coming. Aaron explained that Elish understood the truth immediately, but that people believe what the need to.

“You know that.” he said.

“What do you think she wants to believe?”

“I designed my peonies, but now they’re sick. It’s the germs that give them those colors. The effect on nearby animals is a change in pheromones that draw poisonous blue flies to breed in their mouths when they sleep. But it only affects those with a particular gene that is, unfortunately, essential to the engineering process. It is like inbreeding; it weakens us. The result is a complex disease that science cannot cure fast enough. All of you being the same, you lack the happy accident that would reveal the truth. And all of you may die of the same thing.”

Lian nodded, saying, “Elish is an agricultural engineer. It seems her work is meaningless now.”

“In work, as in love, she is insecure. I had hoped she changed, but she hasn’t. She’s like this man.”

The woman considered the man. His mouth was ajar. Behind the teeth blacked by insect waste, she could see a tongue pot marked by thousands of tiny craters. Blue flies inject their victims with anesthetic before borrow inside and laying their eggs. The larvae gestate in a matter of hours. Given that the cadaver’s eyes were opened, it wasn’t unreasonable to think this man had awoken to find himself paralyzed with a mouth full of worms competing to escape.

Lian said, “Aren’t you the happy accident?”

“I don’t know. I’m not so sure it’s happy for you and your kind.”

Inductive Composition And Theme Stories

My Favorite Poet.. Wait, I still have the meaning of that word wrong, don't I?

In his book On Writing, Steven King says he’s a natural “putter-inner”, meaning that as revises his first draft, he tends to add more material. That’s a problem because his goal is usually to make the second draft shorter than the first. I have this same problem, compounded by the tendency to start writing the second draft before I’ve finished the first. The longer my piece, the more likely I will go back to the beginning and started fleshing out material with new ideas. Often, I’m fleshing out stuff that’s already a bit overfed. That usually happens because the characters, settings, themes and other story elements have had too much time to sit in my brain and generate new ideas.

There is more peril in this behavior than merely bulking up a story that may first requiring some tightening. Another consequence is that I spool out new threads of thought that meander away from the central throughline. Sometimes these diversions are okay. I’m comfortable with pinning random ideas to the board and seeing what becomes of them later. Sometimes, however, they take on a life of their own. I become fascinated with a new turn on a story element and want to follow it further, adding more and more and circling back until the sideroad becomes a part of the main product. It can through the balance off or paint me into a corner. I can wind up turning a story that started out with a clear concept into something that is a little confused about what it is. At that point I may be tempted to put the work down and ponder it for a bit before having the courage to sort out the mess. It happens to the best of us, I suppose.

However, lately I’ve been trying to work on shorter stories and poems that are a little more immune to this trend. In particular, I’ve developed a fascination with flash fiction and haiku. My flash fiction is 1000 words or less and my haiku use the tradition 17 syllable pattern. There are many advantages to these literary formats. For example, they are more likely to actually get finished. Also, I am less likely to start messing with the content before I’ve finished a first draft. What’s more is that I have to be parsimonious with my words. I’ve found that this limitation is more freeing than constraining. There is the obvious result that short pieces can be more focused. However, I’ve also found that it appeals to my habit of “breeding” : when things I write generate litters of more ideas that I am then compelled to write also. Short works do not force me to throw out ideas. Quite the contrary.  They encourage me to break those ideas off into separate pieces. Each thought can be developed on its own.

One could ask whether this results in more disjointed results, where one speaks in sound bites rather than complete meals. After all, when I try to write a novel and add more and more ideas, it’s because I think they’re all related in some way. By spinning off new stories (or for that matter poems), have I risked shredding something that had the potential of being a whole fabric? I’ve come to the conclusion that ideas can be multitude, all with inter-relations, without forfeiting individual coherence. I’m not the first to have experimented with the way of writing I’m about to describe, but for lack of better terms I’ve coined it inductive composition and theme stories. Let me explain.

Inductive composition is a little like regular old brainstorming, except that each idea gets self-contained development, and the end products may stand on their own or together. Suppose you have an idea for a basic story involving two characters and a single conflict, something that can be related in a flash fiction format. This may spawn ideas about a continuation of that conflict, or new conflicts, or new characters that may relate to one or more of the original characters. Can each of these become the basis of a new flash fiction piece? Write them, making sure that they can still function independent of the others. The idea is to create a chorus of pieces. Each has an individual voice and together they add volume and new shades to various aspects of the story. At this point, one might rearrange the pieces and put them together in a single cohesive long story. You could do that, breaking their isolated existences and weaving them together. Thus, this becomes one way of coming up with the rough draft of a traditional novel. Or, you could select a subset of these pieces that seem to have a narrative relationship and arrange them together.

The parts may not be as cohesive as that traditional novel. They may even be somewhat contradictory. Nonetheless, it is possible for a general narrative to emerge and become visible to the astute reader.

I call this inductive composition, by analogy to the inductive method of reasoning (not to be confused with inductive mathematical proofs, which are altogether different). The foundations of an inductive argument are facts or propositions that come from independent sources. They weren’t created for any particular purpose. However, noticing a pattern, one may pull them together to argue that in concert they imply a certain conclusion. While better and better inductive arguments can support greater and greater probability of their conclusions being true, they can almost never provide absolute certainty in the way a deductive argument can. Of course, deductive argumentation requires axioms and strict adherence to formal logic, which is not true of reality.

Fiction is sometimes meant to represent reality, which is experienced in a sequence of moments that don’t have an ultimate purpose and which often have lots of blind alleys or observations that are interesting but not lent to absolute conclusions in the absence of omniscience and the ability to integrate such total knowledge. Reality is contradictory and subject. Yet, we press on with hedge bets based on an inductive assemblies of a thousand individual experiences. This is the model of inductive composition.

Them stories take this a step further. A theme story is composed of shorter stories that may not even contain the same characters or settings. Each component represents an individual emotional beat that might be typical in a larger story. For example, consider a plot summary based on the monomyth structure. One could write a sequence of shorter stories in which each piece details the emotional core of a particular stage in the hero’s journey. Don’t worry about continuity with anything else, just write something that evokes that stage the deepest sentiment and clearest representation possible. Then arrange them in their normal narrative sequence. Thematically, it tells a story, even if this isn’t true on the surface.

The major drawback of the theme story is that it makes no sense as a whole with the decoder ring. This may be okay, depending on your purpose. I could use a theme story as a platform for honing particular skills or exploring ways of looking at the larger story problem without being encumbered by commitments and connections that I have established earlier. Perhaps I could use that to write something more traditional. Or perhaps I could let it stand as-is. After all, each of the component story is supposed to stand on their own and should draw their strength from within, so to speak. The thematic progression might actually be clearer than you think to some readers.

I like to think this approach has a loose connection to the concept of nen actions in Zen philosophy. Nen actions describe the chain of thoughts that progress from an initial sensory input. The first nen is the immediate impression that happens when we first receive a stimulus. It is the sensation of colors and sounds without identity as a part of a larger pattern. We simply see blue and hear a string of notes. The second nen, which often happens so quickly we don’t even notice the first nen, is pattern recognition. We now see an entire image in a painting and may even identify it if it’s familiar to us. We now hear a melody and know the words. The third nen turns from passive recognition to active response. This could be a simple internal response, such as a pleasant feeling that comes from the things around us - or even a decision to ignore the input and move on. Or it could be something more dramatic, as when a stimulus triggers our flight or fight reflexes. Though in some sense the first kind if response might be considered passive, down at the level of nen actions we would call it active because it is a response that distinguishes you from a device that merely records its inputs.  

This is of course just an analogy. Writing any sort of fiction requires going beyond the third Nen (come to think of it Beyond The Third Nen sounds like a great name for a story or a prog rock album). However, I like the idea of sometimes just following a stream of ideas without first trying to connect them in some over-arching infrastructure. Sometimes one can be created after the fact, and sometimes themes and narratives emerge organically all their own. You make take a step back and find it there, something you couldn’t have discovered if you went in with a plan.