In this email I summarize some previous work on the species Homo sapiens
and suggest future directions of study.
The first work we note is the Ph.D. thesis of Dr. Raber. (Dr. Raber: would
you mind posting a copy of your thesis and/or an Amazon link to your book
if it's already out?) We posit that this is a tolerably complete
description of the maturational process and mating habits of the human
mind. (Also, Dr. Raber, if you feel moved to share any extracts from your
second book, would love to see those! It would be super relevant to some
threads we're having about economics, if I understand the thrust of it
correctly. (My gloss: what are the proper uses of luxury in motivating
human beings to excellence and public service?))
We posit that it is possible, via affiliation economics and choice
architecture and computational linguistics and digital humanities, to
assemble a tolerably complete picture of the pressures that any given human
being is under at any given point in time. Presumably this fact is known to
various governments of the world, and has been since the height of the Cold
War.
Furthermore, we posit that human beings do in fact have free will. It feels
pretty obvious if you're driving one of the damn things, anyway. But, of
course, biological materialism and physical determinism hold sway over the
physical and biological universes. How do we reconcile these two facts?
Basically, you never know for sure which way someone is going to jump,
because you never have a complete copy of the inside of their mind. You can
put people in arbitrarily scary and fucked-up and tempting situations, but
they'll still surprise you. As Natalie Portman says in V for Vendetta, that
last inch of one's will remains free. A person who is willing to die under
torture can generally do whatever the fuck they want. (Ofc, dying under
torture is a fairly likely outcome if you make the mistake of telling
anyone this fact when they threaten you.)
Finally, as glue to make all of this cohere in a way that will make sense
to the academic humanities, we offer the novels of David Foster Wallace. I
put it to you that they are about free will and mind control. The
cryptogram for mind control in Broom of the System is, I believe, the
Devil's wooden leg. The cryptogram for mind control in Infinite Jest is
annular fusion. (Think about it for a second - imagine watching a
television that then floats through the air and smashes you in the back of
the head - it traces out an annulus.) The cryptogram for mind control in
The Pale King is the Pale King, who is a DFW self-insertion character, as
are most of the characters in that book.
As further glue, we offer the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. I put it
to you that it is a play about how to kill William Shakespeare with your
words in a world where mind reading and mind control are widely distributed
among the populace; Hamlet is Willie's self-insertion character, and all
the other characters are various figments of Bill's imagination as he
worked through the problem of trying to keep himself from dying or going
nuts.
Would love to hear any thoughts that this email triggered from anyone who I
sent it to!
--
-Eric
