The weirdness of slight fame

People want to be famous.  In fact, nowadays they seem to want to be famous just for the sake of it and probably expect to get money and power with it, or something, maybe sex.  Yes, probably that too.  Not something which occurs to me.  Anyway, here's this:

We are very slightly famous on occasion (despite my apparent complete lack of telegenicity ^^^^).  Namely, the children have been on the TV and newspapers, i've been in TV documentaries and news and current affairs programmes and Liz has of course been in magazines and newspapers and on the TV because, to quote "Black Books", she quaffs pints of her own whizz (or is it "wizz"?).  However, fame is a weird thing because it just goes off on its own and has a life of its own, apparently.  You don't have any control on what you're famous for, and the things for which you are known float away and have a life of their own, which is hard to handle because you sort of put stuff out there and then people draw their own conclusions about who you are.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote about this in his story Borges y Yo.  He describes the situation of writing stories for publication and having knowledge of the stranger out there whom everyone calls Borges.  It's a short-short and he notes at the end that he doesn't know who has written the story.  He also notes that he finds himself pompous and annoying and i share this dissatisfaction with him about the other person depicted up there who did this video.  I'm also irritated by the person who wrote this blog, and i wonder if they're the same person in fact.  Maybe this blog is actually written by someone who is stalking the person uploading the YouTube vids, though goodness knows why they think it's worth the effort.  They are both me of course, and neither of them are me.  For more on this aspect, you might want to read the story itself here:

http://anagrammatically.com/2008/01/31/borges-and-i-borges-y-yo/

There's also a PDF on certain philosophical aspects of the story here:

http://www.amherstlecture.org/perry2007/perry2007_ALP.pdf

However, i also afflict Liz with this problem.  For years after we married, i used to have the occasional experience of seeing a real woman in the distance (these were not hallucinations - the people i saw really existed so far as i know but in a sense that doesn't matter) and mistake it for Liz.  The following thought would then occur:  "Hmm, that looks like Liz Gray.  I wonder what she's doing nowadays."  This impression finally faded when i observed her as part of a training course in adult education.  I sat in on one of her excellent Yoga classes and took notes, and i finally discovered what that figure in the distance with whom i was vaguely acquainted was doing:  she had become an excellent Yoga teacher.

Once i had had that experience, my previous weird impression that Liz was both my wife and a virtual stranger i hardly knew was gone.  I knew what had become of that stranger and that she was both a Yoga teacher and my wife.

I have this image of our rather weedy, pathetic fame which is constantly on the blink and needs the occasional thump to keep the picture from constantly flickering as being a long stick with us at one end and "us" at the other.  It seems absurdly easy to generate tiny bits of fame but it doesn't matter at all, they seem to mean very little and have no apparent connection with any kind of success.  Also, they seem to move along railway lines and we can't control the brakes or the points.  Fame is a train, not an off-the-road vehicle.

Is Donna Noble's soul a magic Mars bar?

First of all, credit to charlieissocoollike for the idea of the magic Mars bar (other chocolate bars are available too):

The basic idea is that filesharing is less immoral than stealing Mars bars because the latter involve a lot of work to produce each time, but files such as music or videos, or ebooks for that matter, will still be available after they are "stolen".  Douglas Adams might say they're freemantled.  As it happens, Adams himself had one of his ideas freemantled - Cannock Chase - and was not amused, so maybe he wouldn't, but then again H2G2's plot is reminiscent of "Kilgore Trout"'s 'Venus On the Half-Shell', so i'm not sure he's in a position to complain.

Another thing Douglas Adams did, of course, was write three excellent Doctor Who adventures and edit Doctor Who scripts for several years.  Then Jon Nathan-Turner showed up and, according to some, decided to ruin the whole thing, resulting in it being taken off air.  A few years after it came back, Donna Noble appeared as the Doctor's companion. In an episode referred to as 'Silence In The Library'...

SPOILER ALERT!


 ...she suffered what Adams would call a "total existence failure" and woke up in a virtual world as herself.  The Doctor later found a way to restore her to existence, but of course by that point she had in a sense been replaced by an identical copy, a fact about which he seemed rather relaxed.  Some might say she had died and been replaced by an identical copy with all her memories intact, but now of course in a sense false.

SPOILERS OVER!

Back to the magic Mars bars, and of course the question of selling your soul (forgot to mention that).  Souls are apparently like magic Mars bars, because when you sell it on Ebay its still there to sell and unless you have either a contract or maybe uniquely numbered bits of soul like Voldemort or someone might do.  Therefore, clearly souls are intellectual property and when you sell them to the Devil, you sign a contract.  You might do something similar when you join a religion.

Now my suggestion is that the Doctor was so relaxed about Donna's recreation from a completely different set of materials with no overlap because he does something similar when he regenerates.  I see a regeneration as like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly:  the Doctor's matter rearranges, so far into a similar form in the sense of being a white male humanoid, but with potential new characteristics such as ginger hair or no legs.  Clearly the tenth Doctor didn't "want to go", so it's not a case of simply changing your face.  Major physical characteristics can change too - Romanadvoratrelundar, for example, was at one point a blue dwarf for a few seconds (a life form, by the way, not a star).

So there are a number of issues here.  Firstly, this version of a soul is a culturally constructed thing and seems to have nothing to do with consciousness, an afterlife or reincarnation.  Secondly, it constitutes one's identity in the same way as the Doctor is the "same" person throughout all his regenerations, and even apparently Donna through her experiences, of which there are many.

This is the sense in which i mean soul, and it's even possible that i use the word in this sense when i think about the afterlife and the resurrection.

I realise that there's a poor fit between the two parts of this video.  I have had a tendency for things not to link up well when i've done them, and that's happened here too, so in future, as well as getting better at making videos from a technical perspective, i will also endeavour to do some joined up planning.

Empty nest 1.0

Right, so he's gone.  Liz and Holly are also out.  Liz and i have both felt rather aimless today because it's bloody weird not having either of them around or needing to think of anything to do with them, although to be honest that happened quite a while ago - self-sufficient and overcome by ennui for quite some time have our children been.  So it's empty nest time, almost.  Presumably there will be a proper empty nest moment when they both really and truly do leave home, although people say that never quite happens.  Holly announced a couple of years ago that she had in fact "left home", but since she did it while loading the washing machine it wasn't entirely convincing unless we lived in a laundrette.

The thing now is to "start" as i mean to go on.  Unfortunately the whole weirdness of the situation is making it difficult to start anything.  My progress on the ebook has ground to a halt right now - i did displacement, fake work activities like making sure the text was all loaded into Evernote so i could edit it on the tablet if i needed to, but since as i said i am alone in the house, that was all a bit immaculate (=pointless).  So maybe Tuesday is the real day when i "start as I mean to go on" rather than today, but once you've had several days where you haven't started, it gets hard to convince yourself that that's what you're honestly doing.  For that reason in itself, it'd clearly be a good idea.

I have had one thought about all this which might be fruitful, and it's based on the idea of what some childless gays and lesbians seem to do.  There is more than one nurturing role available to us and as a result, such a person might choose to nurture the whole world, the youth of today or what have you.  Hence they might become a probation officer or teacher as a way of satisfying that role.  Now that is software in a sense.  Fertilisation provides the hardware - human bodies capable of learning.  Culture and nurture provide the software.  Liz and i are now in a sense a gay couple, apart from the minor detail that we're heterosexual.  Our role towards the children continues in a subdued way, but our role towards the world now comes to the fore.  Now we are supposed to provide the software more than the hardware.  There are a couple of organisms out there which are now considerably independent - the living bodies of Holly and Daniel.  However, they both existed as a piece of software from way before that in our minds because we were aware of various aspects of possible future children of ours before we even met.  For instance, some time in about 1977, i decided i liked the name Daniel and hence there was a possible future child of mine called Daniel Ure, date of birth unknown, possibly even non-existent.  That child would probably speak English as a first language, be male and so forth.  As time went by, that software was edited together with Liz's prototypes for children and eventually got compiled into the object codes we call Holly and Daniel.  The software is their souls, the hardware their bodies.  I hope that makes sense.

There is of course one other child in this family who has only ever existed as software:  Sophie Gray, date of birth 13th November 1999.  She has a soul but no body and she is still with us.  Here are some pictures of her:

This is a ghostly image of our phantom daughter on holiday in Sussex i think.  Her age here is something like nine.  Here's another one of her at home:

Unfortunately, due to the annoying fact that it's difficult to point a camera into a parallel universe, the shape of her face is a bit distorted, but she's there.  Incidentally, her eyes are the wrong colour in both of these.  Thus we still have a child at home, but she's disabled in an interesting way:  she is less existent than the other two children.

On a sort of combined software and hardware note, there are another set of phantom alter egos too:  the counterpart children who were never born but are everything, genetically, which one is not.  Everyone has one of these.  When the cells which eventually become the eggs and sperm which unite to create the hardware on which our souls run as programmes (or maybe operating systems if we are particularly dissociated or have lots of roles), each of them divides to produce two cells.  The other pair of cells, one an ovum, the other a sperm, has the other alleles, so for example any female will have a phantom male counterpart and vice versa, any homozygously blue-eyed child of heterozygous brown-eyed parents will have a brown-eyed phantom counterpart and so forth.  Hence, somewhere out there in the phase space of your genome, there is another person who is anyone but you:  Ivan and Daria, our non-children, our doubly non-existent phantom non-son Brutus, and the husband of the non-existent Ruth (who is anyone but me) who seems to be called George or Albert.  We all have these phantom counterparts who never existed, and of course many billions of other counterparts who never existed either, but in other ways.  Also, those counterparts Ruth and George have other children which we couldn't have because their very genomes are dormant or have been destroyed, depending on the sex.  These ghostly children can't even manage not to exist as well as the ones which don't.

However, we are not these bodies, whether or not they exist.  We are the software running on those bodies, perhaps with some differences.  We will never know what most of those differences were, and there would even be similarities where a homozygous recessive trait is inherited from both parents. Perhaps all of a nervous couple's phantom children are also nervous, for example.  Think of it this way.  You have a child.  They turn out to have an inherited genetic trait, such as, allegedly, being able to roll their tongue, but you don't find out until they're thirteen.  Now, suppose you had had the other, phantom child instead.  That child would not have been able to roll their tongue.  Similarly, you might find out your son is red-green colourblind.  Their alter ego would have been a daughter who was not colourblind, almost certainly (99.9% in fact).  However, simply because you discover your child can or cannot roll their tongue or is or is not colourblind does not alter the fact that they are the same person.  It means something to say they might not have been able to roll their tongue, or that they might not have been colourblind. It might even mean something to say they might have been of a different gender.  The point is that all that depends on the child's social identity.  They exist as a person in the world almost regardless of minor details in their genomes, although some differences have big consequences.  Therefore, I would say that our children are, metaphorically speaking, software, and that is the sense in which they have souls.  As such, they are also eternal because at the latest, taking my son as an example, he had a name by 1977 and he will exist in people's memories for as long as there are people to remember him after he has died.

To end frivolously, this makes Sophie as real as the other children in the sense that she exists as an imaginary character, but she is still our daughter.

Does that make sense?