I enjoyed it, but even if I didn't, you haven't given a clue about where such vitriol is coming from. I'm assuming you don't like it in relation to the work it's referencing? To the point that you find it offensive (VERY offensive, apparently)?
> To be silent in the face of a tyranny of evil is to be complicit.
Isn't that what this criticism is all about? In the original story, you either accept the suffering—be complicit—or you walk away. But that's still being silent in the face of a tyranny of evil. It's just saying "well okay, I won't benefit, but I'm not going to make those people who are benefitting feel bad".
I've never heard the term either. The phrase, "do you live in a cave" is virtually always pointlessly antagonistic/elitist. The combined body of things that a sample of most people would consider "common knowledge" is many times larger than than what is reasonable for the average person to absorb - i.e. they can't all be correct, by definition.
I'm really confused. Did we read the same thing? This is just a "sequel" to the original Omelas that, if anything, suffers from the fact that it doesn't really add anything new.
It's harsher on the city's arrangement. It seeks out and destroys whatever moral ambiguity might have been present in the original. To me it read like, "I read the Omelas short story and I just want to be clear that the correct interpretation is that Omelas is bad, see, look how bad."
I don't see how it misses the point of the original. It just kind of shouts in agreement with the original in an unnecessary way.
> In what way does Ursula roll in her grave?
Who said she was rolling in her grave? I searched the linked page for any mention of "roll" or "grave" or "Ursula" and found nothing.
The child isn't tortured in the original story. You misremember. The child is neglected, ignored and maltreated but the abuse is acts of ommision not commision.
The story doesn't say where the child is from, but it does say the child remembers its mother and how to speak.
The story ends saying that the ones who leave are going somewhere, we know not where nor why (it lightly implies the ones leave because the child is abused, but it could just as easily be they left because they learnt something).
Solitary confinement is commonly accepted to be a form of torture, and that usually involves rudimentary sanitation and nourishment. A confined, solitary, starving child living in its own excrement is being tortured, and I defy anybody to argue otherwise.
Also, confinement is not an "act of omission" any more than punching somebody in the face and then leaving them alone forever after is an act of omission.
I think torture means the intent to harm, usually implying pain by force.
The story shows no proactive intent to try and hurt the child for the sake of hurting it.
Yes, obviously neglect and abuse will harm a child, and that is clearly mentioned in the story.
> Solitary confinement is commonly accepted to be a form of torture
Rubbish. Solitary confinement is used in quarantine, mental health and penal settings without being "commonly" accepted as being torture. The purpose isn't to cause harm, although that may be the outcome. Unfortunately many people seem to think that solitary in prison is acceptable, and too many people wouldn't call it abuse. Do people commonly call it torture? I'm sure most of us would call it torture if we had experienced it (I've only been locked up once - not solitary but threatened with it).
Of course if you intend harm, then solitary confinement can be a form of torture.
As Humpty so wisely said, you can make words mean whatever you wish. But using a definition at odds with your audience does hinder communication.
This is just abuse of the phrase "solitary confinement". Yes, people in quarantine may be confined in solitude, but "solitary confinement" as a phrase has a particular connotation that is not applicable to quarantine.
> ...and penal settings without being "commonly" accepted as being torture.
It is recognized as a form of torture, commonly. The fact that you keep saying otherwise doesn't make it not so[0].
> The purpose isn't to cause harm...
That's an interesting interpretation! Valid, I suppose, but certainly not something you can just assert in passing. The purpose of torturing enemy spies is to get information that might stop a war, which on net reduces harm. Really, is the purpose of anything to cause harm?
In my view, the treatment of the child is purposefully portrayed as unthinkably cruel. It stops short of being graphic; they don't flay the child or stick bamboo shoots under its fingernails. But they do actively confine it; it's strongly implied that they will not permit it to simply leave, or even die. They don't make any effort to clean its living space! They kick it for no reason!
Go re-read the passage that describes the child's living conditions again. I don't know how the author could make it more clear that the arrangement is cruel. It's not like the people were given some absurd set of requirements for prosperity involving a confined child, and then did everything in their power to at least make it easy on the kid. Or, perhaps they have done everything in their power to that effect, but the requirements include cruelty itself. Either way, I'm not seeing how you think it is so incorrect to describe it as torture that you felt the need to directly contradict my use of that word.
If I described the conditions on the transatlantic slave ships as "torture", would you go out of your way to reject my use of that word because of the lack of intent to cause harm? Or would you accept the combination of the abject human misery, the sores, the starvation, the wallowing-in-excrement, the confinement, along with the fact that these conditions were inflicted by fellow humans, as sufficient basis for that descriptor? Because all of those things are true of both the Omelas child and the slave ships, and in neither case is it clear that the sole intent was to harm.
I think if someone was to read the original story and have a smug takeaway, like that of the trolley problem being solved by killing the single person, they might get upset at confronting the alternative of "why were those people placed on the tracks?".
I think this new story is important, because as a society we do often rest on the idea that a certain level of suffering cannot be avoided. This idea allows one to rest, no longer worrying about what could be done for those suffering, because after all, it can't be avoided anyway.
This new story confronts the comfortable idea that nothing can be done, it says out loud, "what if leaving isn't the only alternative to forgetting?".
This harshly confronts comfort, and makes people upset. Similar to how highly "politeness" is held in modern politics, such that you could have a rude man like Trump and a polite man with his same views, and those who despise Trump would then approve of the man with identical opinions but a quieter mouth.
I’ll power up VSCodium from time to time to quickly flip through reams of pages of code, though I’m always annoyed at the faux vi features and end up doing real work in the terminal.
I’m not sure I would be as comfortable without screen.
Complicated means more
Extraneous and more than necessary. Complexity means an order of magnitude beyond an immediate account.
Resilience requires that failure at one level minimizes the likelihood of catastrophic chains of failure. This may mean redundancy or heuristic response (both threaten the rule of extraneous.)
The design of any system should consider how each piece of a larger assemblage may perform its functions clearly, without unnecessary dependencies. Further, such components should self identity their status and provide tools or process by which each feature may be tested without disrupting their role in the greater system dynamic.
I would disagree on one hand as mechanisms can and shall inevitably outperform human thought capacity at some scale.
And agree on another, the human mind is an efficient quantum computer (I know …) which uses constructive and destructive interference for some holographic rendering rather than a composition of linear conditional logic.
Do not let the confines of human ignorance set the horizon for Truth!
Allow that science is only a tool for undeceiving ourselves.
Universal rejection sounds like dogma, not science.
Sorry, it's just what people remember about him for some reason. That hes a Nobel prize winner who must be right about consciousness, sued a toilet paper company and won. Hard for the laymen to speak of his scientific work.
Modernity sees state as the building block of reality. Quantum dynamics says it is POTENTIAL through constructive and destructive interference resolving into state in the moment of now (a continuously transitive and ephemeral moment.)
Is it so hard to see consciousness as the domain of existential POTENTIAL, and living systems as a feedback loop into this echo chamber of potential?
Does potential not sound more like consciousness than the arrangement of state?
If I'm reading you right, I'd say post-chaos maths and post-computing revolution it's much easier for us to see process, not state, as the crucial element (see Ted Chiang's Exhalation). Whether that process requires QM... that's so far above my pay grade I don't even have an opinion.
Potential is composed of the super-amplitude. Process would be the physical system influencing the resolve (which may vary allowing different technological approaches, i.e. organic or silicon or otherwise.)
QM exclusively allows this super-amplitude. No physical process can compare, yet without some physical medium the amplitudes would be unbound.
In the context of a person being trapped in a cave, is some aspect of light shining distantly intelligent? It's reducing uncertainty about where a viable exit is, after all.
But what if the cave walls glowing misleads the observer and they get lost further? Then it wouldn't seem to be intelligent. In any case, the light source being intelligent occurs in the context that there is an intelligent observer who may be able to escape easier given a light source. The observer sees the light, evaluates it, and makes a decision. Even if it's just instincts, there is a decision made. What might be intelligence is if the cave (or elements of it) acts according to "this person is lost at this location, so light up this specific pathway". If the cave somehow facilitated more functionality, such as leading a person to clean groundwater, it would be more intelligent. In the context of helping the person escape or aiding them in the meantime, the cave tends towards accidental sophisticated technology ("...[which] is indistinguishable from magic"). Functional intelligence, I'll call it. Then perhaps there could be a theory of intelligent agents, who have goals and plans.
Throwing out the definition of consciousness as “the inflection upon the potential of existential being.”
All matter in the universe is dormant consciousness and life technology animates this through electrochemical biotechnology.
By this definition quantum computers are more consciousness than an infinitely complex algorithm, yet consciousness is analogue (not qubits.)
We still understand so little and I accept your skepticism yet this is the definition that is not being discussed.
All those other messy details are yours to sort out (bacteria has bacterial consciousness.)
Our brains are vast by comparison, and like any holographic system (constructive and destructive interfering wave fronts) higher resolution.
Also subjective doesn’t mean some detached arbitrary thing, it literally means (and may be a direct synonym of) “a point of perspective.” In a non anthropomorphic way it means from the perspective of a specific instance of a thing (forensic referential interpretation.) In this way the angular corners of a triangle are subjectively relative to one and other, yet all exist on an objective plane.
A perspective on the definition of consciousness. Sorry I didn’t respond in line to the comments I am actually addressing. I thought it overall relevant.
By all this I am saying consciousness is our echo chamber, something grounded in the quantum cloister of objective reality, not directly related to intelligence.
Save yourself the eyesores, don’t click.
The Omelas narrative challenges the psychological maxim that someone must suffer for the common gain.
It is a short story, and like all short stories accentuates a tiny detail into a worldview.
In what way does Ursula roll in her grave?
Gaza, or #metoo, or thriving race hate, or the pedopolitics (here come scathing karma killers.)
To be silent in the face of a tyranny of evil is to be complicit.
Rest easy Ursula, you have been heard.