some motivation

Michael Swanwick on magick:
...the book you're probably looking for is Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati. Wilson's best known for the Illuminatus trilogy, but this is a non-fiction work, a kind of Grand Unified Theory of the occult. He started with the premise that every strange phenomenon he'd ever heard of — telepathy, UFOs, the brownies of Findhorn, everything! — was true, and then asked, what single framework could possibly explain them all? Enormous erudition served up with wit, clarity, and a healthy dash of skepticism about his own conclusions. I remember thinking as I read it that this guy was either one of the most important thinkers of the century or completely out of his tree. I don't think he'd disagree with that analysis, either.

slide 1

Lecture 0: introductory remarks

the six themes

dreaming and reality
sanity and madness
self and others
sex and embodiment
death and immortality
humanity and transhumanity

theme I

dreaming and reality Jorge Luis Borges:
Circular Ruins		 Not to be a man but to be the projection of another man's dreams - what an unparalleled humiliation, how bewildering!
sanity and madness
self and others
sex and embodiment
death and immortality
humanity and transhumanity

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theme II

dreaming and reality
sanity and madness Philip K. Dick:
Martian Time-Slip		 "At the side," she said. "It unbuttons, my skirt."

Bending over her he saw her languid, almost rotting beauty fall away. Yellow cracks spread through her teeth, and the teeth split and sank into her gums, which in turn became green and dry like leather, and then she coughed and spat up into his face quantities of dust. The Gubbler had gotten her, he realized, before he had been able to. So he let her go. She settled backward, her breaking bones making little sharp splintering sounds.

self and others
sex and embodiment
death and immortality
humanity and transhumanity

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theme III

dreaming and reality Greg Egan:
Orphanogenesis 		Gradually, the orphan's input-classifying networks began to grasp the difference between the citizens in the forum and all the icons it had seen in the library. As well as the image, each icon here exuded a non-visual gestalt tag -- a quality like a distinctive odour for a flesher, though more localised, and much richer in possibilities. The orphan could make no sense of this new form of data, but now its infotrope -- a late-developing structure which had grown as a second level over the simpler novelty and pattern detectors -- began to respond to the deficit in understanding. It picked up the tenuous hint of a regularity -- every citizen's icon, here, comes with a unique and unvarying tag -- and expressed its dissatisfaction. The orphan hadn't previously bothered echoing the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a group of three citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate.
The citizen exclaimed angrily, "Don't do that, idiot!"
"Hello!"
"No one will believe you if you claim to be me -- least of all me. Understand? Now go away!" This citizen had metallic, pewter-grey skin. Ve flashed vis tag on and off for emphasis; the orphan did the same.
"No!" The citizen was now sending out a second tag, alongside the original. "See? I challenge you -- and you can't respond. So why bother lying?"
"Hello!"
"Go away!"
The orphan was riveted; this was the most attention it had ever received.
"Hello, citizen!"
The pewter face sagged, almost melting with exaggerated weariness. "Don't you know who you are? Don't you know your own signature?"
Another citizen said calmly, "It must be the new orphan -- still in the womb. Your newest co-politan, Inoshiro. You ought to welcome it."
sanity and madness
self and others Greg Egan:
Orphanogenesis
sex and embodiment
death and immortality
humanity and transhumanity

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theme IV

dreaming and reality Ursula LeGuin:
Left Hand of Darkness 		Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

"I don't know. They don't often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers. But it isn't that they are stupid. Physically they're less muscular, but a little more durable than men. Psychologically --"
After he had stared a long time at the glowing stove, he shook his head. "Harth," he said, "I can't tell you what women are like. ... In a sense, women are more alien to me than you are. With you I share one sex, anyhow..."

sanity and madness
self and others
sex and embodiment Ursula LeGuin:
Left Hand of Darkness
death and immortality
humanity and transhumanity

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theme V

dreaming and reality Connie Willis:
Passage		 "Oh, shit."
-- Last words on majority of flight recorders recovered after plane crashes.

"Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six."
-- Words of Tolstoy on his deathbed, on being urged to return to the fold of the Russian Orthodox Church.

sanity and madness
self and others
sex and embodiment
death and immortality Connie Willis:
Passage
humanity and transhumanity

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theme VI

dreaming and reality Stanislaw Lem:
Golem XIV		 While serving as chief of the general staff during the Patagonian crisis, Golem XII refused to cooperate with General T. Oliver after carrying out a routine evaluation of that worthy officer's intelligence quotient. The matter resulted in an inquiry, during which Golem XII gravely insulted three members of a special Senate commission.

"My final allegory is a fable, in which a traveler finds a sign at a crossroads: `Turn left and forfeit your head. Turn right and perish. There is no turning back.' [...] So you will embark on the expansion of Intelligence, abandoning your bodies, or you will become blind men led by one who can see, or -- ultimately -- you will come to a halt in sterile despondency.
The prospects are not encouraging, but that will not hold you back. Nothing holds you back. Today a disembodied Intelligence seems to you just as much a catastrophe as a disminded body, for this act of resignation entails the totality of human values and not merely man's material form. This act must be to you the most terrible downfall possible, the utter end, the annihilation of humanity, inasmuch as it is a casting off, a turning into dust and ashes of twenty thousand years of achievements -- everything that Prometheus attained in his struggle with Caliban."

sanity and madness
self and others
sex and embodiment
death and immortality
humanity and transhumanity Stanislaw Lem:
Golem XIV

slide 9

shine on, you crazy diamond

..and what do you think about all this? Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

shine on, you crazy diamond

..and what do you think about all this? Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!