In The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), a poor colony world is haunted by rumors of a vanished aboriginal race. The status of the natives forms a thematic link between the three novellas in the volume, and is framed by this anthropological theory, mentioned in the first story:
“Veil’s Hypothesis supposes the abos to have possessed the ability to mimic mankind perfectly. Veil thought that when the ships came from Earth the abos killed everyone and took their places and the ships, so they’re not dead at all, we are.”
Veil’s Hypothesis seems not to be strictly correct, but it is an excellent guide to the themes of the three stories, which are filled with doublings and murders, of and by: clones, twins, shapeshifters. There are copies and double-reverse copies. All of this stands next to a colonial drama, where the original peoples were (apparently) displaced by French colonists, and the French themselves marginalized by later colonists. As usual with Wolfe, these are presented at first as almost subliminal puzzles. Subject matter that would not be out of place on the lurid cover of an old pulp instead is subtle, and so: spooky, scary and thought-provoking. Life is, after all, a TALE OF THE WEIRD, and it is only because we are weird that we don’t know it.
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From WolfeWiki:
Nadan Jafferzadeh, a rich Iranian tourist, has disappeared after a week visiting America (which has been reduced to a poor third-world country). The only clue to what has happened to him is his travel journal. But can it be relied on? It seems to describe only six nights in America, not seven.
A novella by Gene Wolfe, and subject of discussion next week on Useful Phrases. It’s apparently a story that does not have a consensus reading. The story is available in The Best of Gene Wolfe, a fine collection that also includes “The Death of Doctor Island,” “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” and numerous short pieces.
First we had brains in a vat, based on Descartes’s experiment that asked us to consider that all our supposed sensory experiences might be lies created by a malicious demon. Then there was the simulation hypothesis, which asked us to consider that all our supposed sensory experience could actually be the output of a complicated computer simulation, and that we ourselves were (only?) objects in the simulation. Nick Bostrom took this further, arguing that we have strong reason to believe we are in a simulation: if future civilizations are able to simulate many consciousnesses, the odds of our being one of those consciousnesses could be high. Physicists went a step further, with the concept of Boltzmann brains, roughly the idea that random fluctuations in space could very briefly take on forms exactly like a brain, full of memories and the (false) sensation of being part of an ongoing life on Earth. A clever argument seems to show that we are much more likely to be a Boltzmann brain evanescing in space than the brain of an actual person living on Earth.
All of these arguments seem to assume that our subjective experience corresponds to some physical thing, and that the relative preponderances of various physical things gives the probability that we are embodied in one or the other of them. But what if, as some mind-body dualists believe, there can be subjective experience that does not correspond to any particular physical facts? How do we know all our experiences are not of this kind, and our existence purely abstract rather than embodied?
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My friend Alan posted a long blog post based on a discussion we’d been having. I had posed the following question:
If someone tortures you to find out the location of the ticking time bomb, is it “reasonable” under your personal code thereof to be angry at that person? To hate that person?
[. . .]
Suppose it is a small bomb, and the relative utilities of the torture and the bomb are similar. [. . .] Does it matter whether the torture is slightly worse than the bomb, or vice versa?
The question is meant to capture scenarios where a person is harming you, but with some justification or excuse. The discussion is here.
Alan claims to believe that judgments of liking and disliking necessarily are or should be judgments of underlying character, rather than products of contingent circumstance. I disagree; my own views are reasonably represented by a quotation at the end of his post.
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