Tag Archives: philosophy

Two appetites together

I suspect that many young women might not be all that pleased to have a lover quote the Monster of Malmsbury at them, even in the pleasantest of afterglows.   But Jill (and therefore Jill-Prime) is a scholar as well as an athlete (sexual and otherwise), and so it goes pretty well.

Frontispiece to _Leviathan_ (1651). Click through to see an amazing collection of politico-religious visual references in the larger image

Now you, dear reader, might well at this point be scratching your head and wondering what a 17th century English political philosopher is doing in the middle of all this erotic mad science.  Well, for one thing, Hobbes is a natural go-to for the thaumatophile, because in his striking image of a political commonwealth as a sort of man-made man, he got close to the whole Frankenstein theme a century and a half early.  From the introduction to Leviathan:

Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

And the erotic is not an element lacking in Hobbes.  The passage quoted by Rob is real.  It’s cited seriously by the contempoarary Cambridge philospher Simon Blackburn.  Blackburn’s a delight as a writer.  Not only did he administer a well-deserved intellectual spanking to theism-apologist John Polkinghorne in the pages of The New Republic a few years back, but he also gave the lecture on “Lust” as part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins put on at the New York Public Library.  It’s there that Blackburn actually quotes Hobbes.  Have a look, if it’s your thing.

(Well, it’s at least my thing.)

Invisible Jesus sex

Maureen Creel sure stumbles on something unorthodox when she tries to figure out who (or what) is shtupping Lola in the chapel.

As the distinguished proprietor of Bondage Blog has observed and as I have myself argued on occasion, there’s kind of a submission and suffering kink going on in Christianity.  Here are the first two verses of real hymn that neither of us is making up:

1.	Make me a captive, Lord,
	and then I shall be free.
	Force me to render up my sword,
	and I shall conqueror be.
	I sink in life's alarms
	when by myself I stand;
	imprison me within thine arms,
	and strong shall be my hand. 

2.	My heart is weak and poor
	until it master find;
	it has no spring of action sure,
	it varies with the wind.
	It cannot freely move
	till thou hast wrought its chain;
	enslave it with thy matchless love,
	and deathless it shall reign.

Full words along with a score and midi music available here, if you’re interested.

Unsurprisingly, someone is willing to push the metaphor, and not just weirdos like me.  There’ a real sex toy — honest! — called the Jackhammer Jesus, a crucifix in the form of the dildo, so I’m not making up some weird fetish just to advance the plot.

“Invisible man having sex with girls” is of course also a well-established trope — I had to throw in the anal Jesus thing just to give it a touch of originality.  You might well be familiar with it’s appearance in comics especially.  It shows up, for example, in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill‘s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a story of a group of late-Victorian characters (many with mad-scientist origins) who group together to fight the enemies of the British Empire.  The Invisible Man is one of them.  He is first “seen” in the series in a girls school, busily having his way with the students (some of whom, impregnated, interpret their experiences as divine visitations).

And of course there is also always that classic of European comic-book erotica, Milo Manara‘s Butterscotch, which has a merry time with the whole Invisible Man theme.

As with so many kinks, the roots of this one turn out to be ancient.  Remember that we have asked before the question about why people put so much energy into thinking about possible morality-free zones?  Well, as it turns out, people in fifth and fourth century B.C.E. Athens were thinking about this as well.    In Book II of Plato‘s Republic, Glaucon, a young companion of Socrates, challenges Socrates on the value of justice using — you guessed it! — a story about an invisible man.

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.

So now Glaucon, who’s clearly been giving the matter a lot of thought, quickly jumps into the “invisible man having sex” theme, before swiftly moving into the more philosophical challenge.

Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other;,no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.

Whole text available here, in case any of you want to see how it ends.

Personal identity porn

As an ardent thaumatophile, I cannot but love the idea of a person scanner, and so does Iris, apparently.

The idea of a scanner that can take your information for re-creation of you later on somewhere else out of new matter is one that has played an important role in thinking about the metaphysics of personal identity.  The beginning of Chapter 10 (“What We Believe Ourselves to Be”) of Derek Parfit‘s Reasons and Persons contains a famous example.

I enter the Teletransporter.  I have been to Mars before, but only by the old method, a space-ship journey taking several weeks.  The machine will send me at the speed of light.  I merely have to press the green button.  Like others, I am nervous.  Will it work?  I remind myself what I have been told to expect.  When I press the button, I shall lose consciousness, and then wake up at what seems like a moment later.  In fact I shall have been unconscious for about an hour.  The Scanner here on earth will destroy my brain and body, while recording the exact states of all my cells.  It will the transmit this information by radio.  Traveling at the speed of light, the message will take three minutes to reach the Replicator on Mars.  This will create, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like mine.  It will be in this new body that I shall wake up.

Happily this process works, and Parfit’s narrator goes through it many times, until one day…

 

Several years pass, and I am often Teletransported.  I am now back in the cubicle, ready for another trip to Mars.  But this time, when I press the green button, I do not lose consciousness.  There is a whirring sound, then silence.  I leave the cubicle, and say to the attendant, “It’ not working, what did I do wrong?”

“It’s working,” he replies, handing me a printed card.  This reads, “The New Scanner records your blueprint without destroying your brain and body.  We hope that you will welcome the opportunities this new technical advance offers.”

The attendant tells me that I am one of the first people to use the New Scanner.  He adds that, if I stay for an hour, I can use the Intercom to talk to and see myself on Mars.

“Wait a minute,” I reply.  “If’ I’m here I can’t also be on Mars.”

Someone politely coughs, a white-coated man who asks to speak to me in private.  We go to his office, where he tells me to sit down, and pauses.  Then he says “I’m afraid we’re having problems with the New Scanner.  It records your blueprint just as accurately, as you will see when you talk to yourself on Mars.  But it seems to be damaging the cardiac systems when it scans.  Judging from the results so far, though you will be quite healthy on Mars, here on earth you must expect cardiac failure within the next few days.”

The attendant later calls me to the Intercom.  On the screen I see myself just as I do in the mirror every morning.  But there are two differences.  On the screen I am not left-right reversed.  And, while I stand here speechless, I can see and hear myself, in the studio on Mars, starting to speak.

Get all that? Ponder it in your head for a moment while you savor another EroticMadScience picture of a scanner at work (though this one is real, not fictional, as you’ll see if you click through on the link).

The point of Parfit’s example is to sharpen (and challenge) our intuitions about what it means to be ourselves and survive as ourselves.  There are many different possibilities, the most salient of which are physical continuity and psychological continuity.  Since normally your consciousness and your body don’t separate, we don’t experience challenges of this kind in reality.

But Iris is smart.  She knows that the two might be separated.  Being forced to decide between the two possible theories is at the core of her disagreement with Professor Gregg in the prologue to Study Abroad.  Gregg subscribes to a physical continuity theory of personhood, which is why he thinks that the permanently-vegetative “Tabitha Sibling” (fictitious, but arguably based on a real case) has the same moral status as “you or me.”   Iris advances contrary to this the psychological continuity theory of personhood.

There is a problem, of course, which is that if we take a hard line on psychological continuity we might end up with a rather big bullet to swallow, to wit, that if we are in the position of Parfit’s narrator, we shouldn’t at all regret the fact that we are about to die of heart failure in a few days, because the guy on Mars is us, psychologically continuous with us, will have conscious experiences like ours, will carry on our projects, love our spouse, rear our children and so on just like we would have done.

Head spinning yet?  Oh, but I’m not letting you off quite that easily.  The same issues are entertainingly discussed further in a brilliant short film by John Weldon, called “To Be.”  Watch at any time:  unusually for something here at Erotic Mad Science, it’s completely SFW.  As to whether it’s safe for your peace of mind, I make no warranties.

The awesome thing about Iris is that, unlike most philosophers, she is willing to put everything on the line, her very existence as a test of the theory she espouses.   She (with a little boost with tolmemazine, perhaps? — that in itself poses an interesting philosophical problem) shows herself to be an absolutely fearless bullet-biter.  This is experimental philosophy à l’outrance.

Just speculating here, but I’d bet that if in the real-world philosophers were half that courageous, philosophy would command much more respect.

ADDED 11 p.m. The woman in the scanner shot is apparently a hoax that appeared on both Gizmodo and Drudge Report so my “real” claim turns out to be wrong.  But I at lesat hope the entertainment value remains, and, I think, the larger philosophical point raised by the post is unimpaired.

Professor Corwin’s lectures

I should like to note that the references in Professor Corwin’s lectures are not just things made up for fictional purposes.  He is teaching a bona fide course on consciousness and hedonics.   In his first lecture, he discusses the work of Daniel Dennett, in particular Consciousness Explained and also Susan Blackmore, in particular Consciousness:  An Introduction.  Corwin also alludes to some rather more speculative work, citing the Nick Bostrom of Oxford University‘s Future of Humanity Institute, and in particular Bostrom’s famous Simulation Argument (an argument that we are either going extinct soon, or that a posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run large-scale history simulations, or that it is highly likely that we are in fact living in a simulation).

In his second lecture, Corwin goes even further into the speculative by citing perhaps the most challenging thinker in his course, the negative utilitarian David Pearce, who believes in the moral imperative to use technology to transcend the human condition and end all suffering.

Deep and controversial stuff.  Small wonder Professor Corwin is so popular with undergraduates, and so unpopular with conservative moralists.