I am a little surprised to hear that Scott reads science fiction, I wouldn’t have expected it, nor did I expect that he would still be reading Shakespeare. Science Fiction itself is a genre that I think can be compared to video games; SF readers and Video Game players are stuck in some type of a mental loop that they do not seem to recognize; there are a finite number of alien civilizations and a finite number of obstacles and enemies. SF in particular always reconstructs the same theme, which could be summarized as: rational is a practical tool that should not be taken to extremes, technology will save the universe and in the future emotions will serve feelings in a jar. By an large most science fiction entails a pseudo compromise of three things, feelings, biology and technology and they are not much more brilliant than that; science fiction landscapes sustain the same political realities that we perceive today, the same rivalries, the same economic difficulties and similar apocalyptic endeavors.
And then Scott makes the mental leap which few with any frame of reference would make by noting that Shakespeare is science fiction, and that trounces the mind. Is it possible? I take another sip of my cup of coffee. The thought comes like a two ton piece of iron 30 feet long, four feet wide and four inches thick. It doesn’t fit. I take another sip of coffee.
I always have said that I am bored by Shakespeare, I wish we would get over him and move on. But then I am also bored by Freud and Tchaikovsky and Darwin. I just want to move on, I mean 80 decades of psychoanalysis ought to be enough to include two orbits of repetition! Two centuries of evolution and we have not evolved beyond it! Why then evolution itself must be the best argument against evolution.
I think ideas some times are like lollypops, only after a while a lollipop melts away and ideas unfortunately don’t come with self destruct tags, and there is the folly of it. As a result some ideas permeate civilizations well beyond their times and prevent other more brilliant ideas, (read brilliant ideas like mine,) and thus ideas suffer from very long tails that squash everything.
Someone less brilliant might say, “But Ricardo doesn’t the fact that the idea of evolution has lasted almost two centuries, doesn’t that mean that it is fertile and rich with insight and thus humanity’s intellect continues to mine it?”
No! Absolutely no! An idea is only fertile the first quarter of its life expectancy. Psychoanalysis like Relativity were both exhausted of prime material by the 1970s; there has been no significant revelation made by either camp since the 1980s killed all lines of thought and turned the world into pure action adventure. According to ideal idea life expectancies, having successfully survived adolescence both psychoanalysis and relativity should die out within the next fifty years. Psychoanalysis gets a little longer life expectancy because it is not so much a science as it is an expression of sedentary angst.
“Bur Sir Ricardo how do you know the quarter fertile life of an idea without knowing when it died?”
It is a good question but not a wise or principled one. There is no need to suspect that ideas have reached the level of half life principles that Radioactivity has championed. Radioactivity has proven beyond all doubt that it is the most substantive singular idea that has ever existed. All things appear to have to come to terms with radiation, and the idea that cockroaches will survive an atomic bomb has obviously not been tested. If I am correct, and there is no reason nor contemporary evidence that disproves this, then radioactivity can also help us date ideas, in much the same way that carbon dating allows us to date mummies.
The reason for using radioactivity its because it is pervasive, all encompassing and thus it is an absolute. And as any department of weights and measures will tell you, rulers have to be absolute! Now having defined the ruler where do we start measuring? This is not as foolish a question as it sounds, it is subject to two possible interpretations but fortunately no more than that and so there is 50/50 chance that we will get it right and if not we can change our minds and still get it right anyways.
Our starting points have to be when the human species came to be or when ideas came to be within the human species? We have to decide if ideas were born with the inception of homo sapiens or if ideas were born after homo sapiens? That is, is having an idea synonymous with homo sapient existence or is an idea a parasite mandating a precursor homo sapient?
Like I’ve said, we may go either way but there is another problem, that is no one knows when humans really came into existence so we don’t know when idea & homo sapiens could have arisen. Rumor has it that it was about 300 thousand years ago. That is not a long time and it assumes that we have all the evidence and well of course we don’t for much of what we know about our origins is pure science fiction with a doctoral endeavor as its only supporting structure.
Yet I think we may ascertain one thing, humans have not been around for more than a million years and I am very comfortable with that large margin for error. A million years ago there weren’t a lot things here, and so a million years ago some chemical biology could have risen to create homo sapiens, or god could have said, “Let there be Adam and Eve.” (That must have been his wisest move, naming things, baptism and cataloguing go hand in hand.) Or some aliens might have germinated the planet a mere million years ago. So there you have it, starting with a none to precise number we have been kind and added longevity and resistance and a long time of ignorance to the human species.
A starting point is everything, we humans work a lot on beginnings and endings and so we are fortunate that it is only a million years ago; 100 thousand to the tenth power, 333 thousand multiplied by 3 plus a little more, or half a million twice, a million is nothing really!
I think you are getting the picture mi Rosa, Rosa mia, Rosa Rosa, if ideas & homo sapiens were born at the same time then the extreme extremists mostess fertile period for ideas can only be 25% of that existence! Then it stands to reason that all ideas must absolutely start to die after a theoretical maximum of 250 thousand years! That is an incredible discovery for it will allow us to measure if an idea has gotten away with humanity. That permits us to know if an idea is becoming too autonomous from us humans and thus dangerous to the human species.
Suppose for instance that the idea of there being an omnipotent being was an idea that considered the god-idea more important than the human species, to the point that the idea God would ask humanity to sacrifice itself for the god-idea. Well with our new criteria for the life expectancy of ideas we could readily conclude that such an idea was getting out of hand and, barring there being a Galileo with another idea to challenge it for the hearts and minds of our peoples, then such an idea might have to be put to death! And if peoples wouldn’t want to let go of it, even as they knew it to be bad for them, we could instead give them a lollipop until it melts.
Or suppose for instance that there was a nullifying point for evolutionary theory, a point at which humanity ceases to perfect itself through evolution because the environment is no longer a challenge; if there is no conflict with your surroundings then evolution might nullify itself. Where there is no need to adapt why therefore Darwin? One can easily imagine humanity creating such an artificial environment, an environment so subservient to humanity that any evolution could only be a consequence of manipulation. I don’t know if manipulation has been considered as a factor in evolutionary theory but I damn well doubted. The point here being that ideas can and may indeed die of natural causes, i.e. the environment is no longer favorable, or in catastrophes, i.e. unexpectedly turning into vulgar British comedy.
But let us continue with the difficulty or not of our measure. The fact of the matter is that the assumption that ideas are born with homo sapiens is wrong. What if ideas were born before homo sapiens? Why we happen to know that Homo Habilis used tools, and to me you have to have the idea to use tools, maybe that is not the same as making tools but if you use a stick to get at some delicious red ants you are in the idea, dark chocolate ideas cannot be far away. Only Habilis wasn’t apparently very successful, indeed in the evolutionary racetrack it dropped out of the race. But that doesn’t mean that we can avoid the heavy to lift idea: Is it possible that ideas originated before homo sapiens?
Minds cannot hold such things, it is easy to think that we are the uppermost intelligent of life forms, that doesn’t require any heavy lifting, but the idea that the human species was preconceived by an idea, a superlative at that, that is not so easily graspable and so I grapple with it. Shit, it is easy to say physical evidence easily implies that we are less than a million years old as a species but how do you date the origins of idea if such by reason of causation were to predate the advent of Milesian aquatics and even homo sapiens?
I now realize that we are a little dizzy from where we started, for now there is a third question so it is no longer a 50/50 proposition of error. Idea before humanity, Idea after humanity or Idea and humanity at the same time? That is the question.
Which in a round about way gets us back to Shakespeare, and that might actually help us to answer the question as Shakespearean thought has been one of the most repetitive ideas of all time to the point where it can even build theaters, actors, writers, wealth, and dramas in real life as a matter of pure consequence. This is a clear and unspoiled sign of a mature idea, The Shakespearian idea is a mature idea because it builds things, immature ideas, that is to say ideas that are still fertile cannot build anything because they haven’t even constructed themselves.
And I think here we have finally gotten a hold of something solid, at least when it comes to ideas, which as you have witness is not an easy thing to do. And that solid thing is that ideas that are mature build genuine and solid things! Shakespeare today is an industry, it edifies London and Londoners and indeed civilization; acting or directing a Shakespearian play is often the crux of a fine career; and quoting Shakespeare a sign of self inflicted cultural kudos. More important you don’t have to think Shakespeare any more, everyone knows Shakespearian thought, even the commonest of the commonest, the lowliest of the lowliest knows something or other about the much ado about Shakespeare.
And because it is an all pervasive idea it makes it very easy to lavish and subsidize it, and to recreate more of the idea anew until this idea enters every aspect of our existence. And thus I now bleakly realize what a logical transition it was for Scott to conclude that Shakespeare is science fiction. Far from being a brilliant insight it is rather a logical foretelling of what is inevitable, there will be a Quantumitized Hamlet; a Hamlet that at once is and isn’t, a hamlet in 11 stringing dimensions that uses a tractor-bean to bring about the murderers of his father, a Hamlet that will use 3D glasses to see his adulterous mother, a Hamlet that rages through the universe in a hyper-navi-usv squeaking atoms from his rage; and finally a Hamlet that realizes how insignificant he is after overreaching the frailty of his vanities. And in this final episode we can see Hamlet put a finite point in the universe, where he inks with his own blood the stained idea that ideas are before man and will be so after man.
A ruler cannot measure an object larger than itself.
RC
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