“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.

In the first story, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” a boy named “Number Five” grows up in a brothel run by his father. When he turns 12 or so, his father begins subjecting him to midnight psychological experiments of obscure purpose. The status of the abos and Veil’s Hypothesis come into this story obliquely, as a mirror to the story’s other themes of identity, memory, and domination. Dr. John Marsch, an anthropologist from Earth, enters the story as a minor character, visiting the brothel, but becomes the focus of the next two stories.

The second story is “‘A Story,’ By John V. Marsch,” which appears to be a first-person account of the life of a young aboriginal man before the arrival of humans. The story is broadly about conflict between hill and lowlands tribes, but it is rich with strange detail. There are apparently two species of abo, one of which apparently came from the stars, the other of which mimicked their form (but we don’t know which is which, and the story is unstable); all men are apparently named “John.” In the context of the first story, this seems to be an anthropological fiction told by the earth-man, Marsch

The third story, “V.R.T.,” is framed by Dr. Marsch’s imprisonment by the Kafka-like security apparatus of the planet St. Croix. A prison official considers Dr. Marsch’s case as he sifts through the Dr.’s notebooks, both from his research and his later prison diary. There are two main sources of tension in this story, 1) will Marsch be released, 2) what did he learn in the course of his research that allowed him to write “A Story”? The main story follows a trip that Marsch takes with a local boy guide (V.R.T.), who claims to be half abo.

Each story is told within a fictional frame, and so the puzzle to be solved is generally: “Why? How? By whom?” The answers are mind-opening and frightening.

The first story (“Fifth Head”) can be read stand-alone (and is available in The Best of Gene Wolfe); I recommend the whole collection highly.

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.

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?

Perhaps you don’t have to be a spooky dualist to hold this position, either. If you entertained the simulation hypothesis, you presumably believe that the manipulation of some numbers according to mathematical rules can give rise to consciousness — that’s what computer simulation means. In a simulation, a mind could ultimately be represented by a very long number, and its experience moving through time would correspond to the evolution of that number according to some rules. There’s nothing magical about a computer, though. I could do the same thing with pencil and paper. And if we believe computer simulation “works” in the sense of producing a consciousness, pencil and paper simulation should work, too. (This is, I think, a version of the Chinese Room problem.)

So when I do the math by hand, there should be a simulated mind having an experience. (When does it have the experience? When I write down each transformation? I am tempted to say “never” or “eternally,” but leave that aside.) What if I write down the “problem” but not the “solution”? (Say I write down the number for the initial state of the mind, and the rules for transformation.) The answer is just as determinate, since it’s a mathematical fact. Same if I write down nothing. It is uncomfortable to say that the subjective experience happens in the absence of the simulation, but what else can we say? It seems just as weird and magical to say that scribbling some numbers gives rise to conscious experience. Instead, we may say that physically manifesting a mind (say by simulating it on computers) does not create the mind, but only gives rise to physical evidence of it, just as writing down a mathematical formula does not create the underlying mathematical truth.

If we do follow this reasoning, we should ultimately conclude that there are subjective “minds” corresponding to all the mathematically possible minds, which is surely a large number. Now suppose I am trying to decide whether I myself am a physically embodied mind, or simply a notional, mathematically possible mind. Surely there are more mathematically possible minds like me than physically embodied, so seemingly I must conclude that I am probably not physically embodied.

I am not a brain in space, then, but no brain in no space at all.

This is something that dualists should seriously consider, I think, and more people are dualists in the relevant sense than maybe realize.

(Possibly related Bostrom paper. I haven’t read it yet, but it has to do with “counting” minds.)

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.