Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Book Conservation, Daily Kos, Failure, Feedback, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, Guns, Health, Hospice, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Well, we didn’t make the “10,000 downloads before I turn 50” goal. Still about 225 shy of 10k. Which is OK. It’ll give me another reason to celebrate when it happens!
I did get a nice comment over on dKos in the cross-posted diary there yesterday:
Happy birthday Jim, read your book again the other day, liked it as much as the first time. When’s the prequel describing the fireflu and the sequal where we actually have contact?
As I’ve discussed here often, the recovery period from caring for Martha Sr is taking longer than I had initially expected, and as a result I haven’t been as quick to return to writing St. Cybi’s Well as I hoped. But that’s OK, too. I find that I am feeling somewhat energized by crossing the threshold* of turning 50. It has helped that we’ve got a lot of the household stuff packed up and sent off – now my wife and I can start rearranging things here to suit our preferences. It’s funny how little things can clear the slate, allow you that wonderful feeling of starting something fresh. It also gives me more focus and enthusiasm for finishing other projects – the ballistics testing website, working on the book about being a care provider for someone in the last year with Alzheimer’s, even just my conservation work.
So it’s an exciting time, a good time, even with the mild disappointment that I didn’t get all I wanted for my birthday.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Threshold, by the way, was the original working title for Communion of Dreams, playing off not just the impending revelations of the reality of the universe and our place in it, but also on the idea of crossing the threshold of the dimensional boundary layer which has isolated us and therefore explains Fermi’s Paradox. Unfortunately, as I discovered, there were already several uses of that title in SF alone. Ah, well. I like Communion of Dreams even more – it’s more evocative, if less succinct. – JD
Filed under: Book Conservation, Fireworks, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Fairly quick post.
Delivered the first substantial chunk of books to the seminary yesterday – they were very pleased, sent back with me another 85 books. With a little luck, now that I am recovering further I’ll be able to get these done and back to them in 4-6 weeks.
Things are in chaos here, and having my home disrupted this way is extremely stressful. Why the chaos? Because we’re now to the point where my wife and her siblings have sorted out who gets what of Martha Sr’s household possessions and things are getting ready to be moved out. Some has already been taken, but the bulk of stuff is leaving today for California – lots of boxes everywhere, furniture stacked up and ready to load. I’ll be helping with that this morning, then trying to get some order imposed on the mess following. I’ve been looking forward to having all of this resolved, so that my wife and I can really get settled in here, but going through it is just painful.
And tomorrow is my birthday (additional downloads this week have amounted to about 60, so we have a ways to go to cross that 10,000 threshold.) So I may not get much of substance posted for another day or two – though I do have a number of items bookmarked I want to write about.
Well then, have a good weekend, enjoy some fireworks. You’ll hear from me when you hear from me.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
OK, I know that it’s a bit tactless to ask someone to give you a gift. So I’m tactless.
Last time I updated the count on downloads, we were at 9,500 (give or take a few). That was June second. Since then, we’ve had 160 downloads of Communion of Dreams. I don’t know if it is the summer doldrums, or what, but that is a big drop-off from the previous months averages of 500+ downloads a month.
My birthday is July 4th. I will turn 50. And I’m asking for a gift: help get the download count over 10,000. All we need is 340 downloads. I’ve had twice that number downloaded in one day, previously, when someone somewhere posted a link on a bulletin board or some such. So that’s what I’m asking – just help spread the word. If you belong to a SF discussion forum, or blog about books, or whatever, help me cross that 10,000 threshold. It won’t cost you anything, and it won’t cost the people who want to download the book anything. Just a couple of minutes of your time. And I’d appreciate it.
I never really thought that Communion of Dreams would get so much attention – but now that we’re so close to 10,000, it’d be a cool thing to reach that number before I cross a threshold of my own.
Thanks!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, General Musings, Health, Predictions, SCA, Society, Survival, Violence, Writing stuff
The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.
William Faulkner.
I’ve read my share of Faulkner, as appropriate for someone getting through a high school English class in the 1970s. And then I read a lot more in graduate school. Always loved his use of language, but I never really ‘got’ that quote, though it nicely sums up one of the major themes of his writing. Partly, this was just being young. Partly it was because of a conscious effort on my part to forget some of the worst aspects of my own personal history.
Oh, sure, I understood how the past shapes the future. In fact, that was a big part of my interest in both economics (one of my college degrees) and the SCA – knowing history allows you to understand how things develop in the ways they have, and can provide analogs which can be useful to understanding new situations when they arise. (That is discussed explicitly in Communion of Dreams, in relation to the the industrial archaeologist brought onto the research team.) But for me, the past has always been the past: dead, immutable.
Until now.
* * * * * * *
As mentioned previously, we’re in the process of dividing up Martha Sr’s estate. This includes the household items. When someone has lived in one house, and raised a family there, for over 50 years, lots and lots of stuff accumulates. In an effort to be completely fair and above board, we’ve had assessors in to evaluate the furniture and household items, so that each family member involved can be sure that they get their share. This coming weekend my wife and her siblings are going to go through and divvy everything up. Then over the coming weeks stuff will get moved out and we’ll deal with whatever no one wanted. Eventually, only those things which are ours will remain, and my wife and I can proceed to actually getting settled here.
Because when we sold our house and moved in here to care for Martha Sr, we wanted to disrupt her home environment as little as possible. We wedged ourselves into rooms which she didn’t use much, put a lot of stuff into storage. It was a pain, but one we were willing to put up with while we cared for her.
Now, of course, I am looking forward to actually getting settled. As I told a friend recently:
It was frustrating to be shoe-horned in here the last six years, but I was willing to put up with it for Martha Sr’s sake. As I have been recovering from the care-giving, I have been wanting more and more to feel less and less cramped up here – I can only put up with this level of chaos and annoyance for so long.
But of course it is a little different for my wife, who now sees her childhood home being split up, her memories associated with this or that piece of furniture bereft of a physical connection.
* * * * * * *
I never met my father in law. He died before my wife and I got together. But he was something of a local character, and over the years here I have had many people tell me anecdotes about him. Seems most people either loved him or hated him. He evidently carried on a number of long-term feuds.
One such was with a local builder, who is now the executor of a family trust which owns the property next to us (part of a large tract in our neighborhood which has caused some grief for people here). For various legal reasons (limitations on the trust), this property has always been undeveloped. But now those reasons are being resolved. And it turns out that what we thought for some 50 years is part of our property is actually part of the trust. This includes a substantial strip of our lawn and even a chunk of my garden, about half of the fenced in area I created for my dog, and a substantial number of huge trees. My wife’s family has maintained and used the strip of property for that entire time.
So for the better part of the last year we’ve been involved in some legal wrangling to settle this issue. Because, you know, the matter couldn’t be settled simply, due to the aforementioned feud. And yesterday things came to a bit of a head, as the son of the executor came onto our property to ‘do some maintenance’.
I had words with him.
OK, let’s recap: I, who never met my father-in-law, had a potentially dangerous confrontation with the son of a man who had a feud with my FIL.
Given my current attempts to recover from prolonged and excess stress, this could have gotten stupid very quickly. And I spent a lot of time afterwards carefully considering the situation. And somewhere in there last night I realized that I finally understood just exactly what Faulkner meant. Now I know why border disputes and blood feuds are carried on for generations, pulling people in who otherwise would react in more sane and rational ways. Because, without desire or intent on my part, I am in the middle of exactly one such episode of history intruding on the present.
This is insane.
* * * * * * *
My wife and I discussed the matter at some length last night, once I had stepped back from the adrenaline stew that had me jumped up. Our attorney will seek a restraining order on the other parties to prevent them from doing anything to the disputed strip of property until the matter is resolved in court – to just keep things ‘status quo’. I have asked for specific instructions from our attorney about what I should do in the event that we have a recurrence – ignore it, call the cops, confront them, what?
But beyond that, I have decided that I am going to try and disentangle myself from this historical mess. I just want a resolution to the matter, and of the feud, so I can get on with my life. But I cannot make that resolution – this is a problem for others to sort out; their problem, not mine. Because I finally ‘got’ what Faulkner meant, and understand that unless I disentangle myself I am likely to contribute to a perpetuation of this feud, damaging my own sanity and soul in the process.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Climate Change, Comics, Failure, Humor, Publishing, Writing stuff
I’m just being environmentally conscientious.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Expert systems, General Musings, Music, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Writing stuff
Just now, my good lady wife was through to tell me that she’s off to take a bit of a nap. Both of us are getting over a touch of something (which I had mentioned last weekend), and on a deeper level still recovering from the profound exhaustion of having been care-givers for her mom.
Anyway, as she was preparing to head off, one of our cats insisted on going through the door which leads from my office into my bindery. This is where the cat food is.
“She wants through.”
“She wants owwwwt.”
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers.”
* * * * * * *
Via TDG, a fascinating interview with Douglas Richard Hofstadter last year, now translated into English. I’d read his GEB some 25 years ago, and have more or less kept tabs on his work since. The interview was about his most recent book, and touched on a number of subjects of interest to me, including the nature of consciousness, writing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Singularity. It’s long, but well worth the effort.
In discussing consciousness (which Hofstadter calls ‘the soul’ for reasons he explains), and the survival of shards of a given ‘soul’, the topic of writing and music comes up. Discussing how Chopin’s music has enabled shards of the composer’s soul to persist, Hofstadter makes this comment about his own desire to write:
I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don’t think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer’s soul than do a writer’s ideas capture the writer’s soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin’s music probably does a lot better job (and the same holds, of course, for many composers).
I personally don’t have any thoughts about “shooting for immortality” when I write. I try to write simply in order to get ideas out there that I believe in and find fascinating, because I’d like to let other people be able share those ideas. But intellectual ideas alone, no matter how fascinating they are, are not enough to transmit a soul across brains. Perhaps, as I say, my autobiographical passages — at least some of them — get tiny shards of my soul across to some people.
Exactly.
* * * * * * *
In April, I wrote this:
I’ve written only briefly about my thoughts on the so-called Singularity – that moment when our technological abilities converge to create a new transcendent artificial intelligence which encompasses humanity in a collective awareness. As envisioned by the Singularity Institute and a number of Science Fiction authors, I think that it is too simple – too utopian. Life is more complex than that. Society develops and copes with change in odd and unpredictable ways, with good and bad and a whole lot in the middle.
Here’s Hofstadter’s take from the interview, in responding to a question about Ray Kurzweil‘s notion of achieving effective immortality by ‘uploading’ a personality into a machine hardware:
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either — we’ll have virtual worlds galore, “up there” in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don’t want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass. But I doubt that it will come to pass for a very long time. How long? I just don’t know. Centuries, at least. But I don’t know. I’m not a futurologist in the least. But Kurzweil is far more “optimistic” (i.e., depressingly pessimistic, from my perspective) about the pace at which all these world-shaking changes will take place.
Interesting.
* * * * * * *
Lastly, the interview is about the central theme of I am a Strange Loop: that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which stems from vast and subtle physical mechanisms in the brain. This is also the core ‘meaning’ of GEB, though that was often missed by readers and reviewers who got hung up on the ostensible themes, topics, and playfulness of that book. Hofstadter calls this emergent consciousness a self-referential hallucination, and it reflects much of his interest in cognitive science over the years.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams I played with this idea and a number of related ones, particularly pertaining to the character of Seth. It is also why I decided that I needed to introduce a whole new technology – based on the superfluid tholin-gel found on Titan, as the basis for the AI systems at the heart of the story. Because the gel is not human-manufactured, but rather something a bit mysterious. Likewise, the use of this material requires another sophisticated computer to ‘boot it up’, and then it itself is responsible for sustaining the energy matrix necessary for continued operation. At the culmination of the story, this ‘self-referential hallucination’ frees itself from its initial containment.
Why did I do this?
Partly in homage to Hofstedter (though you will find no mention of him in the book, as far as I recall). Partly because it plays with other ideas I have about the nature of reality. If we (conscious beings) are an emergent phenomenon, arising from physical activity, then it seems to me that physical things can be impressed with our consciousness. This is why I find his comments about shards of a soul existing beyond the life of the body of the person to be so intriguing.
So I spent some 130,000 words exploring that idea in Communion. Not overtly – not often anyway – but that is part of the subtext of what is going on in that book.
* * * * * * *
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers,” I said, “impressed on the door itself. Maybe the cat understands that at a level we don’t.”
Jim Downey
(Related post at UTI.)
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Astronomy, Ben Bova, Feedback, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Space, Titan, Writing stuff
I discovered a couple of years ago that someone had created a Wikipedia entry for me. It was weird to stumble across that when I was looking for something else (I no longer remember what). Particularly since it seemed that the initial entry was made by someone for whom English was not a native tongue, and who only had some of their facts right. In other words, it wasn’t a friend who did it, laying the foundation for some kind of joke on me. My wife and I cleaned up the language a bit, got the facts corrected, expanded the entry to include stuff which had been missed.
But it is still a weird feeling.
And something similar happened again today.
This morning, I was doing my routine check on the stats for the download of Communion of Dreams, and saw that there had been another of the periodic spikes. As I have mentioned previously, when this happens I will sometimes check to see if there is a referring site where a link to the novel has been posted. I’m just curious as to how word of the book spreads, and whether someone has some commentary or criticism that I should know about. And this morning in the ‘referring’ stats was a link to a Wiki page titled “Titan in fiction“, explained by this simple single sentence:
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn. It has a substantial atmosphere and is the most Earth-like satellite in the Solar System, making it a popular science fiction setting.
And there, next-to-last in the ‘Literature’ section, just two entries after Ben Bova’s novel Titan, was this:
Communion of Dreams (2007), a novel by Jim Downey. An alien artifact is discovered on Titan that has strange effects on anyone who observes it.
I could quibble with the description, but I won’t. I’m too weirded-out by seeing it. With almost 10,000 downloads of the book, it is unsurprising that someone who has read it would think to add links in Wikipedia about it. Unsurprising, that is, unless you’re the one it happens to.
I do not have ‘false modesty’. I’ve got an ego, as any of my friends will attest, and I’m not afraid of a bit of self promotion. But in the face of repeated rejections from publishers and agents, it is more than a little odd to see that Communion is slowly creeping into the culture this way. It’s just plain weird – a touch of dissonance.
Well, anyway. As always, if anyone knows of places where Communion has been recommended, and now I suppose where it has been linked in another context, please let me know.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Astronomy, Cosmic Variance, General Musings, John Lennon, Philip K. Dick, Quantum mechanics, Science, Science Fiction, Scientific American, Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Writing stuff
*Apologies to both John Lennon and Philip K. Dick.
Last Saturday, my sister and her husband came to town, and we celebrated Thanksgiving. Yes, about six months late.
* * * * * * *
About two weeks ago Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance had a teaser post up about a new article of his in Scientific American. Carroll has long been one of my favorite reads in cosmology, and his discussion of the cosmological basis for time’s arrow was delightful. From the opening of the article:
Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe—hot, dense, homogeneous—is completely different from today’s—cool, dilute, lumpy. The universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.
The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.
Carroll goes on to explore what those hints (and the implications of same) are in some detail, though all of it is suitable for a non-scientist. The basic idea of how to reconcile the evident asymmetry is to consider our universe, as vast and ancient as it is, as only one small part of a greater whole. We are living, as it were, in a quantum flux of the froth of spacetime of a larger multiverse:
Emit fo Worra
This scenario, proposed in 2004 by Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago and me, provides a provocative solution to the origin of time asymmetry in our observable universe: we see only a tiny patch of the big picture, and this larger arena is fully time-symmetric. Entropy can increase without limit through the creation of new baby universes.Best of all, this story can be told backward and forward in time. Imagine that we start with empty space at some particular moment and watch it evolve into the future and into the past. (It goes both ways because we are not presuming a unidirectional arrow of time.) Baby universes fluctuate into existence in both directions of time, eventually emptying out and giving birth to babies of their own. On ultralarge scales, such a multiverse would look statistically symmetric with respect to time—both the past and the future would feature new universes fluctuating into life and proliferating without bound. Each of them would experience an arrow of time, but half would have an arrow that was reversed with respect to that in the others.
A tantalizing hint of a larger picture, indeed.
* * * * * * *
Philip K. Dick, tormented mad genius that he was, said something that has become something of a touchstone for me: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
It is, in fact, a large part of the basis for my skeptical attitude towards life. But it also leaves open the idea of examining and incorporating new information which might be contrary to my beliefs. It is this idea which I explored over the 132,000 words of Communion of Dreams, though not everyone realizes this at first reading.
But what if reality only exists if you believe in it?
That’s a question discussed in another longish piece of science writing in the current issue of Seed Magazine, titled The Reality Tests:
Most of us would agree that there exists a world outside our minds. At the classical level of our perceptions, this belief is almost certainly correct. If your couch is blue, you will observe it as such whether drunk, in high spirits, or depressed; the color is surely independent of the majority of your mental states. If you discovered your couch were suddenly red, you could be sure there was a cause. The classical world is real, and not only in your head. Solipsism hasn’t really been a viable philosophical doctrine for decades, if not centuries.
But that reality goes right up against one of the basic notions of quantum mechanics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Or does it? For decades, the understanding of quantum effects was that it was applicable at the atomic-and-smaller level. Only in such rare phenomenon as a Bose-Einstein Condensate (which in Communion is the basis for some of the long-range sensors being used to search for habitable planets outside our solar system) were quantum effects seen at a macroscopic scale. But in theory, maybe our whole reality operates at a quantum level, regardless of scale:
Brukner and Kofler had a simple idea. They wanted to find out what would happen if they assumed that a reality similar to the one we experience is true—every large object has only one value for each measurable property that does not change. In other words, you know your couch is blue, and you don’t expect to be able to alter it just by looking. This form of realism, “macrorealism,” was first posited by Leggett in the 1980s.
Late last year Brukner and Kofler showed that it does not matter how many particles are around, or how large an object is, quantum mechanics always holds true. The reason we see our world as we do is because of what we use to observe it. The human body is a just barely adequate measuring device. Quantum mechanics does not always wash itself out, but to observe its effects for larger and larger objects we would need more and more accurate measurement devices. We just do not have the sensitivity to observe the quantum effects around us. In essence we do create the classical world we perceive, and as Brukner said, “There could be other classical worlds completely different from ours.”
Indeed.
* * * * * * *
Last Saturday, my sister and her husband came to town, and we celebrated Thanksgiving. Yes, about six months late. Because last year, going in to the usual Thanksgiving holiday, we had our hands full caring for Martha Sr and didn’t want to subject her to the disconcerting effect of having ‘strangers’ in the house. Following Martha Sr’s death in February, other aspects of life had kept either my sister or us busy and unable to schedule a time to get together.
Until last weekend. And that’s OK. Because life is what we make of it. Whether that applies to cosmology or not I’ll leave up to the scientists and philosophers for now (though I have weighed in on the matter as mentioned above and reserve the right to do so again in other books). This I can tell you – it was good to see my sister and her husband, and the turkey dinner we ate was delicious.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 