(Minor Spoilers Below. If you're already going to read it no matter what, you should just go do that. If you want a little bit of pre discussion, read below)
The story has two endings, each of which is kinda terrible in its own way, each of which makes you think about different things that rarely are discussed in alien-encounter stories (that I've read anyway). I'm not sure there's meant to be a particular moral. My opinion is that, given the circumstances, there was so little time/information necessary for decision making that any decision the characters made would be flawed and biased.
[ September 20, 2010, 02:46 AM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
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Curiously enough I actually just read this yesterday, so its fresh on my mind. That said, I suspect that additional time wouldn't have added anything. Assuming that humans are striving to be perfectly rational, what would the addition of more bureaucracy add? Added time simply allows for more options to crop up, but after thinking about it for a while I couldn't come up with any other options, so the end result would be what happened in either ending. Though this is the only story I know of that the ending "he lived happily ever after" was so chilling.
Its interesting, though, to examine the idea that what makes us human is pain. We constantly strive to remove pain in our society, so when we're faced with an option to remove it entirely why is there so much revulsion attached to it? It reminds me of Huxley's "Brave New World", in a sense, because the end result is a society that can only feel pleasure. As an outsider looking in something feels wrong about it, but I can't formulate an argument as to why. That makes me wonder if that same gut reaction of badness is just a flaw in my cognition?
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posted
Incidentally: This novella has probably the best and most panicked/tense "first contact" event that I've seen in awhile. I mean even before they learn anything about the aliens. I mean the very first few paragraphs.
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quote:Originally posted by 0Megabyte: Possibly because pain, physical or even emotional, is there to tell us when something is wrong.
Without the ability to feel it, there's no way to tell when something is wrong.
At least, that's the guess that comes to mind when you mention it.
But wouldn't a world free from pain be by definition without wrong? If wrongness causes pain, and pain doesn't exist, can something still be wrong? Its sort of implied in the story when they talk about rape, and how it was archaic when rape was illegal. Presumably the society has removed all pain(emotional, physical) from rape so the action isn't considered immoral anymore(not a stance I agree with but thats just a digression).
The problem I have is if I imagine myself in a situation where I felt no pain, would I want to introduce pain to myself? Does pain have any positive utility that isn't overshadowed by the massive positive utility of living without pain?
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Emotional pain? Possibly. Physical pain? Well, there ARE people who live without the ability to feel physical pain, and their lives are definitively not improved. It helps to know when you bite your tongue, for example.
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If you replace the "pain" with "mental data that has no particular immediate psychological effect," then nothing particularly bad would happen, IF you're rational and respond to the pain correctly.
If you instantly removed all pain from humans, replacing it with "non-pain data," a lot of things would go wrong pretty fast because people would be too lazy to respond correctly. Hell, even when people ARE in pain they still avoid going to the doctor because it's annoying and takes time that you could be spending doing other things.
But if you are in a position to enforce, not only a removal of pain, but an improvement in human rationality (and it seemed that human rationality had already been improved significantly), then that particular argument becomes less relevant.
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Btw, not directly related, but there's a pretty major reference that it won't hurt to explain:
The term Kiritsugu, when it was applied to the Confessor, was a reference that kind of hits you over the head with an anvil, if you know what he's referencing.
The word Kiritsugu comes from Fate/stay night, which is referenced alot in this story. It's the name of a character, Emiya Kiritsugu. In the story, he is a person who acts to save as many people as possible, by whatever means necessary. If stopping a madman who will kill more people requires blowing up an airplane full of civilians and even personal friends, he does it. Another character mentions specifically how Kiritsugu kills off his emotions and acts in a cold and calculating manner in his quest to save others, when comparing Kiritsugu to himself.
The next part is a spoiler:
The fact that the Confessor gets the title Kiritsugu and then promptly leads the crew into blowing up a sun and killing fifteen billion people to save the rest of the human race, is a huge allusion. The Kiritsugu from the novel would have done exactly the same thing. Since that character's adopted son is the main character and emulates Kiritsugu, in fact, the ethical dilemma inherent in those kind of actions is actually the major theme of the work at large.
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I'm declaring the rest of the thread spoiler territory, you have been warned.
The 15 billion people thing threw me a bit because I had no context for how many people were actually getting saved. I'm assuming the total number of humans was over 100 billion at least, if not far more. But I'm curious, would any of you consider a binary difference between saving humanity (the collection of all of us) vs saving X humans? If you had to sacrifice 15 billion people to save, say a few million, and the thing you were saving them from was not annihilation but from aliens that wanted to eliminate pain... is that worth it? Would preserving humanity "as we know it" trump saving 15 billion people from dying?
Bearing in mind that you are not merely saving them from the immediate transformation in store, but from future transformations and more alien races encounter each other and blend together.
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The sacrfice also included the continued existence of the Babyeaters and their practice of eating their babies. That's why the humans didn't simply supernova the star where the three species originally met, and instead traveled all the way to the Huygens system, because then the Babyeater species would have been preserved as well. So, the price was 15 billion humans vs. preserving humanity and saving the Babyeater babies.
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quote:But wouldn't a world free from pain be by definition without wrong? If wrongness causes pain, and pain doesn't exist, can something still be wrong?
I think what is wrong in life depends on what our objective in life should be. At least when people are thinking rationally about it, there seems to be two general approaches people can take to the objective of life:
The first sort of approach is that we are born and we will die and thus should spend the time in between in such a way that it will maximize our happiness. What matters under such a view is increasing the proportion (and intensity) of the time we are happy and decreasing the proportion of the time we are unhappy, accepting that eventually our time in life will be spent and only what happens prior to that point matters.
The second sort of approach is that there is something larger than our personal state of happiness at any given time that is more important. We are to invest our time in something important, rather than just to spend it. Under that sort of view, suffering can be worthwhile if it means we are achieving something more important than just our own happiness.
I think the assumptions modern society tends to teach us are often more in line with the first view, but I think books like Brave New World demonstrate how taking those assumptions to their inevitable conclusions leads to a lesser existence. Rationality is not to blame for that - if you give rationality mistaken assumptions, then it will lead to mistaken conclusions. You have to start with an assumption that there are some things more important than living contently - which in turn means that you could completely avoid pain yet nevertheless be doing something wrong.
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quote:I think the assumptions modern society tends to teach us are often more in line with the first view, but I think books like Brave New World demonstrate how taking those assumptions to their inevitable conclusions leads to a lesser existence.
I think you misunderstand the point of Brave New World. It is not that focusing only on happiness leads to a pointless existence; it is that just removing danger, disease, and romantic tension is not the way to happiness.
Consider, if you like, the traditional presentation of Heaven: It is a city of wide boulevards, golden buildings, rubies and diamonds and pearls... and nothing much to do. (I understand that this is not the belief of modern Christians, but you needn't look back very far to find this as the standard depiction.) Well, to your average peasant whose main troubles in life are cowshit, a notable lack of gold and other valuables, and too damn much to do, this no doubt sounds great. But if you were actually offered that life, you would probably only take it in preference to that other place as traditionally portrayed; and you would certainly try to fill up eternity with hobbies.
The point then is that happiness does not really consist in removing whatever is making you unhappy at the moment; but this was a very difficult thing to grasp for much of our history, because those unhappinesses-of-the-moment were so damn big.
What does real happiness for eternal or very long life consist of? We don't know; we just know that focusing only on removing bad stuff is not the right approach. You have to add good stuff as well. But it doesn't follow that a focus on happiness is the way to a pointless life; you just have to realise that an enlightened self-interest calls for something meaingful to do, to produce happiness.
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quote:I think you misunderstand the point of Brave New World. It is not that focusing only on happiness leads to a pointless existence; it is that just removing danger, disease, and romantic tension is not the way to happiness.
I thought the characters, or at least the vast majority of the people in that society, were very happy with their lives. As I read it, the idea was that even the happiest citizens of Brave New World, no matter how happy they were, weren't really living full lives. They just didn't realize it.
The notion of Soma seemed to represent that. The idea that you could have a drug that makes you perfectly happy, and can keep you happy, seems plausible - but it also seem to miss the point of life.
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