DEATH and IMMORTALITY, meeting 2 (out of 2)

• Passage (Connie Willis)
  • time (running out for the Titanic); cf. PKD's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  • space (tunnels, etc)
• NDE articles (c),(d) from the Lancet
• Seeing (Greg Egan, in Axiomatic)

Dr. Smile

slide 2

Johnny cab

"I've got doubts," Barney said. "Grave ones. I tell you; don't call me, I'll call you. If I don't go into the service." He handed the mike back to the cab. "Here. Thanks."

"It's patriotic to go into the service," the cab said.

"Mind your own business," Barney said.

"I think you're doing the right thing," the cab said, anyhow.

slide 3

Great Books

"The Great Book I'm going to turn into a full-length funny cartoon version in the style of De Chirico will be —" He pondered. "Um, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. [...] Imagine: the surrealistic perspective, deserted, ruined buildings with Doric columns lying on their sides, hollow heads—"

slide 4

conquering the wilderness

Chicken Pox Prospects

slide 5

The Days of Perky Pat

slide 6

the gluck had him by the ankle...

... and was trying to drink him; it had penetrated his flesh with tiny tubes like cilia.

"God," Eldritch said, "promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it."

"Deliver it how?" Trembling and weak with relief, Leo dropped to the grassy soil, seated himself, and gasped for breath.

"Through the lichen which we're marketing under the name Chew-Z," Eldritch said.

slide 7

at this moment

"Okay," Leo said roughly. "Well, tell me how to get out of this place. How do I get back to Luna, to —" He gestured. "You know what I mean. Actuality." [the illustration is based on Hegel's ideas]

"At this moment," Dr. Smile explained, "Palmer Eldritch, although considerably upset and angered, is intravenously providing you with a substance which counters the injectable Chew-Z previously administered; you will return shortly." It added, "That is, shortly, even instantly, in terms of the time-flow in that world. As to this—" It chuckled. "It could seem longer."

"How longer?"

"Oh, years," Dr. Smile said. "But quite possibly less. Days? Months? Time sense is subjective, so let's see how it feels to you; do you not agree?"

slide 8

philosophy and perception of time —
arguments for the doctrine of the specious present:

1. We see things as moving, such as the second-hand of a clock, and `to see a second-hand moving is quite a different thing from "seeing" that a hour-hand has moved.' (Broad (1923)) More formally:
   1. What we see, we see as present.
   2. We see motion.
   3. Motion occurs over an interval.
   Therefore: What we see as present occurs over an interval.



2. If the experienced present were only an durationless instant, then we could not understand a spoken sentence, because what would be presented to the senses at any one point would only be a meaningless phoneme-indeed not even that, since any sound necessarily takes up time (Gombrich (1964)).
3. If the experienced present were only a durationless instant, then we would not see pictures on the television screen or VDU of a computer, since these are built up from a moving electron beam. More generally, we would not see anything at all, since light itself is a motion (Ibid.).

"Paul who?"

"Maybe I'll pray," Anne said. "Praying is hard to do; you have to know how. You don't pray for yourself; you pray what we call an intercessive prayer; for others. And what you pray to isn't the God Who's in the heavens out there somewhere... it's to the Holy Spirit within; that's different, that's the Paraclete. Did you ever read Paul?"

"Paul who?"

"In the New Testament. ... Paul says our enemy is death; it's the final enemy we overcome, so I guess it's the greatest. We're all blighted, according to Paul, not just our bodies but our souls too; both have to die and then we can be born again, with new bodies not of flesh but incorruptible. See? You know, when I was Perky Pat, just now... I had the oddest feeling that I was — it's wrong to say this or to believe it, but —"

slide 10

eternal recurrence

"It's absolutely not like a dream." It was worse, he realized. More like being in hell, he thought. Yes, that's the way hell must be: recurrent and unyielding. But Eldritch thought in time, with sufficient patience and effort, it could be changed. [...]

He became silent; he stared at Anne Hawthorne. There's something wrong, he thought, because—

Anne had one artificial arm and hand; the plastic and metal fingers were only inches from him and he could discern them clearly. And when he looked up into her face he saw the hollowness, the emptiness as vast as the intersystem space out of which Eldritch had emerged. The dead eyes, filled with space beyond the known, visited worlds.

---

Giambattista Vico;
Friedrich Nietzsche

slide 11

Friedrich Nietzsche — Eternal Recurrence

From The Gay Science — 341. The greatest stress

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"^*

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

---

^* More on this later.

slide 12

cat, steak, ontology

The elevator arrived. The doors slid aside. Inside the elevator waited four men and two women, silently.

All of them were Palmer Eldritch. Men and women alike: artificial arm, stainless steel teeth... the gaunt, hollowed-out gray face with Jensen eyes.

slide 13

space: the pearly gate?

"...the images are seen in both eyes and move with them. We interpret this to mean that they are generated in the brain. Here, we summarize a theory of their origin in visual cortex (area V1)."

[right] Hallucinatory form constants. (I) and (II) — following ingestion of LSD; (III) — induced by marijuana; (IV) — cobweb petroglyph.

retino-cortical transform

1. logarithmic spirals in the visual field map to straight lines in V1
2. the action of the map on the "funnel" form constant
3. the action of the map on the "spiral" form constant

slide 15

V1 architecture

local connections between iso-orientation patches are assumed to be isotropic

lateral connections between iso-orientation patches in different hypercolumns are assumed to be anisotropic

slide 16

V1 planforms

patterns generated by group action

slide 17

visual field planforms

patterns generated by group action [in cortical coordinates]	the same planforms, drawn in visual field coordinates

slide 18

what if perception is guided hallucination?

1. lattice tunnel hallucination seen following the taking of marijuana
2. simulation of the lattice tunnel generated by an even hexagonal roll pattern on a square lattice

---

"These results suggest that the circuits in V1 that are normally involved in the detection of oriented edges and the formation of contours are also responsible for the generation of the form constants."

slide 19

OBE

"People who reported NDEs also reported significantly more dissociative symptoms than did the comparison group." B. Greyson, The Lancet 355(9202):460-463, 2000.

---

I gaze down at the dusty top surface of the bank of lights suspended from the ceiling of the operating theatre. There's a neatly hand-lettered sticker on the grey-painted metal — slightly yellowing, the writing a little faded, peeling at one corner. It reads: IN CASE OF OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE
PHONE 137 4597 Seeing (Greg Egan)

slide 20

structures in inner ear, showing utricle	orientation of utricle (horizontal) and saccule (vertical)

slide 21

Wallenberg syndrome — causes

human brainstem

Inversion illusions have been reported due to strokes related to disease of the vertebral arteries, the posterior inferior cerebellar arteries (PICA), and from the basilar artery (large vessel going down middle of brainstem).

[details]

slide 22

animula

Animula vagula blandula
hospes comesque corporis
quae nunc abibis in loca
pallidula rigida nudula
nec ut soles dabis iocos

Publius Aelius Adrianus, Imperator Romanus

Poor little, lost little, sweet little soul,
My body's companion and friend,
Where are you going to now, little soul,
Pale little, stiff little, bare little soul,
Now that the jokes have to end?

slide 23

dust

"I mean, after all: you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?" From an interoffice audio-memo circulated to Pre-Fash level consultants at Perky Pat Layouts, Inc., dictated by Leo Bulero immediately on his return from Mars.

slide 24