On 5/2/05, Warren Ockrassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > _Calculating God_, yeah. As it happens I just finished it this weekend. > It's an interesting read but Sawyer leaves a gaping hole in his story > (two, actually), which he also did with _Hominids_. > > In CG Sawyer's aliens suggest that the current universe's physics are > too precisely honed toward life's development for it to be an accident; > the idea is that some kind of superbeing prearranged the current "big > bang" expansion to have the state it does. What we don't go into is how > that entity managed to survive the previous universe's "big crunch". > That's a pretty significant omission, to me. > > And of course the main basis for the argument that the Fohrlinors and > Wreeds propose is the way extinction events occurred simultaneously on > their homeworlds *and* ours (give or take a couple million years) -- > now if something that incredibly improbable actually had happened, > sure, there'd be something worth looking at. But in order to knock > aside any doubts at all the book has to suggest an additional not one, > but two literal deus ex machina events. > > Framed in that carefully constructed context it's hardly surprising the > idea of "god" finds a lot of support, but the fact is that without that > elaborately constructed set of premises, the argument falls flat. > > In _Hominids_, BTW, the problem I had was his suggestion that > consciousness developed in human brains initially as a quantum state > change, something random rather than emergent that altered the way a > given brain operated once and forever in the distant past. Well, how > exactly did that trait get passed along to offspring? It *must* have > been an emergent property of brain complexity, something that existed > in DNA, or else it would never have occurred again. > > > -- > Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books
A goof point Warren, but you forget that genes aren't the *only* unit of inheritance- culture is also inherited. Sawyer could have just as well postulated a race of hominids, humanoid pre-cursors, which are poised just on the critical cusp of breaking into counsciousness, and only need an inspiration or model to make the leap themselves. One of them would be bound to 'get' counsciousness eventually, and by imitation it would spread vertically and horizontally (and would exterminate any groups that didn't 'get' it.) This substitute model has the nice side effect that the character expouding it could easily segue into a learned disquisition on historical 'wolflings' as an example- humans brought up with no counscious human model from which to 'get' it. ~Maru The wordless teaching, neh? _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
