Unrelated, but one of my favorite quotes from PKD is this one from Now Wait for Last Year:
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“All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean-"
"I can see what it would mean, sir," the cab broke in. "It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her."
"That's right," Eric said.
"I'd stay with her," the cab decided.
"Why?"
"Because," the cab said, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."
"I think I agree," Eric said after a time. "I think I will stay with her." "God bless you, sir," the cab said. "I can see that you're a good man.”
Note that the meaning in the book was almost wholly changed for the film. A big part of the book was that by learning to think 4-dimensionally (via the alien language), the scientists found that free will did not exist. The narrator had no choice in how to act with her child - she was simply acting out a predefined narrative...
"I suddenly remembered that a morphological relative of 'performative' was 'performance,' which could describe the sensation of conversing when you knew what would be said: it was like performing in a play."
...
"Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn't arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death."
The movie left this key message out almost entirely.
I include Arrival alongside Children of Men as an example of a case where the movie is better than the book (and I'm a big Ted Chiang fan) - changing the daughter's death from a climbing accident to a disease was much better imo.
In the book, it's impossible to act on information from the future, whereas in the film that clearly happens in the phone call near the end.
This means that if the daughter had died in a climbing accident in the film, the mother would have to have chosen to let that happen/not warn her, whereas to avoid the disease, the only option would have been not to have the child. In the book, that wasn't an option; learning the language changed her subjective experience of time, but did not give a superpower.
In the case of a disease, there's really nothing she can do, and iirc the film implies the hard choice here was to decide to have a child even knowing that will die.
In the car of an accident, there is the feeling that she could literally have prevented her daughter's death by preventing the accident, but "chooses" not to. The free will implications of that are much more interesting imo.
(To be clear, it's one of my favorite stories and also one of my favorite movies.)
I logged in just to tell you thank you for sharing, sometimes the right comment at the right time means a lot, and this is my case now it appears, so thank you.
I still think it's the right decision not to have kids.
I myself would prefer not to been born (while my life is relatively easy)
In dune there is a story part were the ruler knows what he needs to do but also realizes that he is not strong enough and knows that his son has to fullfil it (I forgot what it is about) but I feel as soon as we achieve the ability to self determine things like if we want to make kids, we should stop doing it as we might not have the right to create new life.
Don't get me wrong, this is not black and white thinking: have kids if you want.
Evolutionary everything and everyone is programed to stay alive and procreate. Fighting against it is hard.
It's easier to make this life easier, better etc than staying your ground and not making kids.
We tried actually and it didn't work out after 3 month. That made it much easier to not try again. But as you see, thinking about it and what you do is not black and white.
The vast majority of people are happy to exist, even people that experience a lot of suffering. Even if you ignore everything else, just that metric suggests on net it's better to have kids.
> "We should stop doing it as we might not have the right to create new life."
You can't get consent before hand so the best we can do is look at results after. By that it seems choosing to not have kids would be the less ethical position (though I don't personally hold that view - people should do what they want).
In addition to just being a fundamental part of humanity, a spark of intellectual curiosity in an otherwise indifferent universe, and a way to have companionship when you're old.
That's the problem: evolution drives life otherwise Evolution wouldn't exist.
Now we circumvent already things evolution purports like the strongest survivies. We also compensate for errors or flaws like eye sight, mental illness etc. We question eating meat. We cook meat. We self control and we evolved evolution by inventing the internet (highspeed human interconnect) and computers. Potentially the internet itself with all it's inputs (blogs, comments, news), processing power in-between and outputs will become a new thing.
We also do not support not lifing. If I would tell my parents that I want to stop/end my life I would not be allowed.
Why? Because of course the only true answer can be that lifing is good.
Now let's question this: we have no impact (universe will disintegrate), we have a lot of pain in the world, we can't guarantee to anyone that they will ha e a good life and there is no purpose in life either besides the purpose you create for yourself.
We can't ask someone if they want to be a life before they get born either.
In my logic the most social thing would be to be aware of everything around you and stop creating new brains to entertain yours.
How many brains in agony are okay? What is the perfect ratio? 1:10000? 1:100?
Making kids is not a logical answer it's an evolutionary one.
Lucky enough for our society my type of thinking will not propagate much anyway.
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People are doing what they want anyway. It's just a discussion :)
Moral and ethics is a construct of a self-sufficient, sustainable and fair society. Nothing else.
> In dune there is a story part were the ruler knows what he needs to do but also realizes that he is not strong enough and knows that his son has to fullfil it (I forgot what it is about)
I thought in the movie it was cast as her choosing to accept it and cherishing the time they'd have left together? Maybe I missed the predestination theme (or maybe it was just implied... although you could say it's implied for any story involving travel or communication between different times.)
We’ll I certainly walked away with an understanding that it was all predestined, which annoyed me to no end because it felt like a ridiculous and meaningless cop out. But maybe I misread something that was actually more ambiguous?
Thank you for sharing this. I've often wondered how some folks deal with misfortune, take it in stride and work through them than abandon all hope for an easier route.
Perseverance and Endurance are a rarity in today's society.
This comment needs to be internalized by everyone who has ever worked in a collaborative environment, or God forbid manage a team of people.
For all the hard charging, 10x programer, I am a builder let me work folks out there...Empathy is hard to learn, but you'll be a better person for it. I promise.
How are you measuring perseverance and endurance? I find that such claims tend to be completely made up, based on some "sense" you get from hearing a couple of viral stories.
The cabbies take is bizarre to me. Surely choosing to leave is part of reality, not a rejection of it? Why should living in reality require acceding to circumstances at every opportunity?
Unless I misunderstand the context and this quote is meant to be ironic, which seems possible.
I lived that in he Real World, for nearly 30 years. The saga of my late wife is now part of the documentary Pain Warriors. It can be watched for free on Amazon Prime and TubiTV.
What has become known as Karen's Journal is required reading at Duke school of Medicine to educate doctors about the reality of Chronic Pain. In the end the Medical Establishment failed her and she killed herself to stop the pain.
Something that pings a neuron in another brain may be the second step in a chain to me which leads me to interesting and unexpected lines of thought.
If it bothers you, depending on your client, theres a "collapse" button at the bottom of posts so you can personally skip on entire threads as soon as you know it's not for you.
Other people have different values so I, without rancour, say "carry on" to grandparent.
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“All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean-"
"I can see what it would mean, sir," the cab broke in. "It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her."
"That's right," Eric said. "I'd stay with her," the cab decided. "Why?" "Because," the cab said, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."
"I think I agree," Eric said after a time. "I think I will stay with her." "God bless you, sir," the cab said. "I can see that you're a good man.”