What Does It Mean To Be Human? or The Question of Sentience

What does it mean to be human?
Most humans would say that being human is something that sets us apart from the rest of... everything. Being human is something that elevates us above the animals.
Even though we are animals.
"Christians" would say it's because humans have a soul, but what even is a soul? Some bit of "secret sauce" that makes us more than just a biological machine? I don't think I can buy that anymore.

I mean, there's nothing to say that animals aren't just as soul-full as man. Just because the Bible doesn't say it, doesn't mean it's not true. The Bible doesn't mention America, either, so maybe that's just a fantasy, too.

And there's nothing to say that a "soul" is what elevates humans. "Christians" have taken a lot of liberties and made a lot of assumptions about the phrase "breathed life into" Since man was last, there is nothing to say that God didn't go around breathing life into the "nostrils" of all the animals.

Personally, I'm tired of the liberties "christians" take. It's the definition of entitled.

However, it's not just "christians" who have long said that humans are elevated above the animals. Science has long held this to be true, too. And I get it. Man has done so much stuff that other animals have not: created art, built cities, murdered for fun. Man looks so much different than every other creature, not in physicality but in... accomplishment.

But what if it all comes down to opposable thumbs and a prefrontal cortex?

When I was growing up, what was said was that man is the only sentient animal. But what is sentience? Looking up the definition, now, it's pretty loose: the ability to think or feel subjectively. Basically, the ability to have a personal perspective.

So let's talk about my dog:

My dog doesn't like tall men wearing hats. There are few things that can make her flip out like a tall man in a hat walking by, well, other than the vacuum cleaner, but the vacuum cleaner is her nemesis. Now, it is objectively not true that tall men in hats wish her harm. My father-in-law is a very tall man who sometimes wears a hat, and she loves him, though she is giving him special dispensation. Clearly, something in her past (she was a rescue) has caused her to hate tall men in hats. It is her personal perspective. It is also her personal perspective that she doesn't hold my father-in-law to the same standard as other tall men in hats.

And, yet, dogs are not generally considered to be sentient.

So let's throw in one other factor that is often applied: the concept of "I am."

Humans like to think of themselves as the only creatures with a concept of individual identity, which is something I find highly amusing considering that most people spend their time trying to do nothing more than fitting in. And, while we're not sure if dogs have a concept of individual identity, we're pretty sure some other creatures do.

Take dolphins, for instance, who have names. They have fucking names just like we do as people, making it blatantly obvious that they not only have an awareness of their own selfhood but of other's selfhood as well, and I would be willing to bet that that extends to humans. They sound a little more evolved than we do, though.

I could go on with other examples, but I'm going to skip ahead to the part where I talk about elephants.

Elephants have a complex social structure, distinct roles and personalities, value the individual, and, even, some kind of funeral observance for the dead. Their brains are of a comparable size to human brains, and they are capable of complex tasks and, yes, building. Why don't they do it in the wild? Lack of interest? I don't know. What is clear, though, is that if there is any other land animal that qualifies as sentient, the elephant would be it. And, yet...

And, yet, Trump #fakepresident recently made it legal to once again bring elephant trophies into the United States. He might as well make it legal for ICE agents collect ears and scalps. Oh, wait... I better not give him any ideas.

Look, I'm not saying I have the answers about sentience and where or what that line is, but, then, I don't think anyone has that answer yet, What I am saying, though, is that if there is the possibility -- and there is EVERY possibility where elephants are concerned -- you should not be supporting the murder of said sentient species, especially when that species is already endangered.

But, then, Trump #fakepresident has a difficult time of recognizing the humanity of fellow humans (see Puerto Rico), so I suppose it's too much to expect that he would see anything beyond his own bloated sense of self-worth. And his gut and bucket of chicken.

Angels Unbound: Gadreel (an a-to-z post)

Gadreel
Gadreel is a bit of a paradox. He's the "wall of God," but he's also the Angel who brought the teachings of war to man. I suppose he's a believer in "the best defense is a strong offense."

And that's about all I'm going to tell you about him because to go on would get all spoilery, not just in his story but in the overall story arc that he's in. However, I can tell you some things that aren't about him:

After doing all of my research and deciding on my cast and some loose story arcs, "Gadreel" was the story I wrote first. The story of the seduction of an Angel seemed... well, it just seemed interesting. I mean, why would an Angel be interested in humans at all? As a human, how would you get one to pay the slightest bit of attention to you? I mean, if an ant was trying to flag you down on the sidewalk, what would it need to do to get you to notice it?

Probably a lot more than Na'amah had to do but, then, ants are much smaller, and you're not walking around with the ants pretending to be one. [That's Na'amah on the cover, by the way. Or, at least, someone who evokes Na'amah in my mind.]

There's actually a bit more about this stuff -- stuff about the Fallen and Demons -- in the Author's Note after the story so, if you pick it up, and it's FREE! today, you'll have that, too, but, since I already wrote it there, I'm not going to write it here, too.

Anyway...

Go get "Gadreel"! It's FREE!


Already released (just click the images):

Foxcatcher (a movie review post)

I think this might be a year where the performances are better than the movies they're in. Foxcatcher is a great example of this. I really can't say that watching Foxcatcher is an enjoyable experience. Disturbing is more like it. And kind of fascinating, but that's all about the actors.

I went into this one with no idea of what it was about. I mean, I had no clue at all other than my wife saying she thought it had something to do with boxing, which turned out to be wrong and only matters in that it explains that I had no expectations whatsoever. Even having no expectations, what I got was completely unexpected.

The movie was kind of like watching a scorpion or a large spider crawling over your kids, and you can't do anything about it. It gives you the shivers and makes your skin crawl watching that... thing... creeping over your kids, and you just keep hoping it keeps going and doesn't stop to bite or sting. Watching spiders and scorpions and how they move can be pretty fascinating. It's just not enjoyable when they're on you or someone you care for.

That said, the performances are amazing. I mean, seriously, they are fantastic.

You can barely recognize Carell, and it's not because of the nose and makeup. His whole bearing is changed. The way he holds his head, the way he talks, his mannerisms. There's nothing Carell-ish about him, none of that frenetic energy he so often has. And he's creepy. He's a creepy, rich, old white dude, and he acts like it. I might not have known it was him if I hadn't known it was him. That Steve Carell was in it was about the only thing I knew about the movie going into it.

Speaking of bearing, Tatum and Ruffalo were incredible. I don't know if I can even describe what they did. So they were playing Mark and David Shultz, wrestlers who both won gold at the 84 Olympics, and they had this way of moving their bodies around that more closely resembled chimpanzees than humans. It wouldn't have even surprised me if they had put their knuckles to the floor and moved with their arms instead of their legs. And it's not just about the way they walked; it's everything. Tatum even had this jutting lower jaw, and it wasn't some fancy prosthetic thing. If he was doing that himself, it must have taken incredible concentration to keep that up through filming. The overall effect, especially with Tatum, was that of cavemen. Or, at least, how we imagine cavemen.

And Ruffalo? Well, I wasn't even sure it was him some of the time during the movie. I mean, I thought it was Ruffalo, but, every once in a while, I was doubtful. I thought it was just someone that bore a striking resemblance to him. With the beard and the odd way he moved around, I was never quite sure, not until the credits rolled. That's just impressive.

To top it all off, at least as far as I can tell by doing a cursory investigation of what actually happened, the movie got it pretty spot on. The only issue I could even raise is that there is a lack of clarity about the time frame on some of the events, but that doesn't have any actual bearing on the movie or the plot; I was just surprised to find out how far apart some of the events actually were. That's a very small thing for a movie like this.

I think this is definitely a movie worth seeing as long as you're not looking for something that's going to give you that feelgood buzz when it's over. If you want to see some stellar performances, though, this is really a must see movie.

The Ghost Brigades ( a book review post)

The Ghost Brigades is the sequel to Scalzi's book Old Man's War, which didn't get the highest recommendation from me. You can check that review here.

I was hoping that I was going to be able to say that this one is better than the first and, for a while, a long while, I thought I was going to be able to say that. For one thing, Ghost Brigades is in third person, so that was a great improvement for me. For another thing, there is much less exposition about Scalzi's scientific ideas. And Jared Dirac is a much more interesting character with much deeper internal conflict than John Perry from the first book. Everything was there for this to be a better book.

Then it wasn't.

Actually, there was a pretty significant hiccup at the beginning of the book, and I was willing to overlook it when it was the only wrinkle but it becomes more noticeable when combined with how the book ends. I mean, when the opening is weak and the ending is weak, well... it makes it difficult to look kindly on the book.

The book opens from the point of view of an alien [and this is a bit of a spoiler, but it's only the first 15 pages or so, so it's not much of one], only we're not supposed to know that. The way we don't know that is that we're experiencing everything through the character's internal perspective without any external descriptions. That way, see, we're "surprised" to find out that this character was really an alien with animosity toward humanity. The problem I have with this is not the trick of it (okay, actually, I get annoyed with these kinds of tricks by authors where we're only fooled (if we are) because the author purposefully left out information which, honestly, we ought to know) but that the alien acts entirely human. His emotions and thoughts and everything are equivalent to what humans would have so, really, he's not an alien when he ought to be completely strange. Just on Earth, humans can have such cultural differences, while still being human, that we are, at least, disconcerted to be around the other person. That a species of an entirely different planet would think and act like a human so much so that we are "fooled" by it is mildly ridiculous at best.

But I got past that issue, completely forgot about it, once I moved into the story proper. That character at the beginning of the book is mostly inconsequintial and easily dismissed once we've gotten caught up in the mystery of Charles Boutin and Jared Dirac. And that was a good, engrossing story right up until somewhere around 75-80% of the way through the book.

Then the bottom falls out of it.

At least it did for me. And there will be a major plot point spoiler here, so feel free to skip past.

There's this bit of tech in the book (both of them) called the BrainPal. It's pretty much what it sounds like, a computer in the brain to assist the soldier and allow things such as internal communication with other soldiers with a BrainPal. Scalzi felt the need to disable the BrainPal en masse, so he went back to an 80s trick and had Boutin do it with a secret backdoor in the code. Now, I get that this a thing that we've been seeingin movies and books for about three decades, but, at this point, the idea of a secret backdoor in a program is ridiculous. Everything about it is ridiculous.

So, in the book, the reason the backdoor is there is to allow Boutin easier access to the program he's working on, but I think we all know that to access, well, anything all you need to do is input your password (or whatever the equivalent is). To get in through a backdoor, you have to input your password (or whatever the equivalent is). It doesn't allow any kind of ease of access or speed up the process, so, from that standpoint, it's pointless.

Beyond that, Boutin is not the sole architect of the computer program he's working on. In fact, he's not even the primary architect. He's just part of the design for one small part of the BrainPal, the consciousness transfer aspect of it. Asking us to believe that Boutin was able to put in an exploitable backdoor when working within a group and not even the lead in the group is asking us to believe something that is totally implausible, and it's easier to accept things that are plausibly impossible than implausibly possible. Basically, Scalzi is asking us to believe that everyone Boutin was working with was incompetent, in which case, the BrainPal wouldn't work, anyway. [This is on par with expecting us to believe that John Perry is the only one to understand the truth about the Consu in Old Man's War. It's just not plausible.] Scalzi does, at the end of the book, acknowledge (through the characters) that a backdoor like that shouldn't have existed, but it doesn't make it less of a contrived scenario to create tension at the end of the book. Basically, he had created a "Superman scenario" and used the backdoor as his Kryptonite.

So the book fell off of a cliff for me and plummeted to the rocks below. There's nothing that will ruin a book more than bad ending.

Sure, it might just be me, but anyone who knows anything about computers and how people work together and will probably find the contrived backdoor fairly laughable.

And I'm not even going to talk about how ridiculous the motivations of Boutin were. I thought as I was reading through the book and the obvious motivations were given that it must be a trick because it was so cliche. I figured Scalzi had something more interesting, more clever, up his sleeve but, no, it was all straightforward cliche and based on things that went against how given characters and races should have acted. It even had the super villain monologue at the end. To say that I was disappointed doesn't come close to how I felt at the end of the book.

Still, I will probably read the next one, though I'm not sure if I know why. I do want to find out what Scalzi has going on with the Consu, which is barely touched on in this book, so, yeah, I will probably read at least one more to get more of the meta-story. I just hope it's better than this one, though.