Theseus in Nova Scotia

You'll know it if you've ever looked at a Canadian dime: the Bluenose, the schooner that became a symbol of Nova Scotia and Canada eighty years ago. It's been sixty-five years since she sank in the Caribbean, but her legacy lives on with the Bluenose II, a replica of the original based in Lunenberg, originally built as a marketing stunt for a beer company - in other words, deeply Canadian.

As a replica, Bluenose II was built out of wood - and the thing about wood is that it tends to degrade over time. So, since last summer Bluenose II has been in drydock undergoing a heavy rebuild to extend its life - but at the cost of putting much of the ship's original materials through a wood chipper, with practically the entire hull being rebuilt and only the masts, sails, and another one-fifth of the original materials remaining.

The Globe and Mail ran a story about this yesterday. Its thrust is simple, and boots criticisms and complaints that seem to have been circulating in Nova Scotia for a while now; given the profundity of this refit, when all is said and done will that ship in Lunenberg still be the Blunose II, or just some new ship that happens to incorporate pieces of the Bluenose II?

Of all the things I expected to encounter in the mainstream media, a real life example of the Ship of Theseus problem is not it.

I can't find any photos of an actual sailing ship to illustrate this article, so this one of the side of a West Vancouver Transit bus will have to do. It's full of... ship-ly goodness.

The Ship of Theseus problem, if you've never heard of it, is a long-standing philosophical issue that boils down to this: if you take an object and replace everything material about that object, is it still the same object or is it something new? This is one of those things that will never be satisfactorily answered until there's only one being left who cares about it, and only then because there would be no one around to disagree - that kind of identity is extrinsic, assigned by the observers around what's being identified, and not an intrinsic part of the wood itself. The planks don't care whether or not they're part of the Bluenose II.

The problem also has bearing in terms of human uploading, and whether or not a person's consciousness uploaded into a computer is a continuity of the consciousness as it was in the body, or just a sophisticated computer that has been given all the memories of a person and carefully taught to think exactly as they had. In fact, I think that questions such as this may well become significantly more important in coming years; even if mind-to-machine uploading isn't possible for a while if ever, I can certainly see some people electing to become total cyborgs - that is, installing their brains in robot bodies. I'm sure there are no shortage of folks who would love to use that as an opportunity to officially define total cyborgs as being "less than human." That's just one of the wonderful things we may look forward to in years yet to come!

As for the Bluenose II - well, it comes down to physical continuity versus spiritual continuity. When I've thought about consciousness uploading, no matter how much I believe that the uploaded consciousness would be another being with another viewpoint that just happens to have memory of everything that happened before the upload, the fact of the matter is that nobody else can tell the difference. Ideally, that is. The same can be true for ships. The materials may be new, but they were placed into the pre-existing template that we call Bluenose II, and even if everything that once made up the ship is gone, the idea of the ship remains. It's not really that hard to imagine - we look at cities the same way. Today, for example, there are only a few scattered bits and pieces of the New Westminster of 1871 standing, but you don't have people claiming that New Westminster of 1871 and New Westminster of 2011 are entirely different cities.

In the end, it's all about the ideas. Everything else is just hydrogen.

Not A Moment Unsung

Yesterday my digital camera died - I killed it, to be more precise, by accidentally dropping it on a hard concrete floor - and today I feel incomplete. I picked it up on April 25, 2008, and in the time since I've taken more than eleven thousand photos and videos with it. The vast majority of the Public Domain Photography photos I've posted here over the last year came from it. I've been able to document my world with it, to preserve old and fresh perspectives alike while the capability still exists to record them. Now, everything that passes by just passes by, unable to be appreciated and soon forgotten.

Personally, I can't abide that. There are too many fleeting things in this world to go uncaptured, too many pieces of life that deserve to be remembered. Look at the present gulf between the film photography past and the digital present. While almost every house have albums upon albums of vacation, holiday, and family photos, most of these are left sandwiched between the pages and rarely ever see the light.

Other times it's difficult to find a photograph of something that's since been destroyed. For example, a while ago the city of Barrie demolished the historic Barrie Arena, home of hockey since the 1930s, so that a new fire station could be built on the site. It was demolished in 2008, well into the era of digital photography, but nevertheless only a handful of decent photos of the place exist online. UrbEx Barrie has the best ones I've found. Two photos out of a seventy-four year history. I have just as many photos of a soft drink called Leninade, the last photos I took off my camera before its untimely death.

The camera that photographed this tall, sparkling glass of Leninade is now as dead as Communism.

The present proliferation of cameras, in the form of cell phones and digital point-and-shoots alike, may help to end this. Whereas in the past cameras were bulky, had limited capacity and film development required a significant investment - a friend of mine still has fifteen or so undeveloped rolls of film from a trip we took to the United Kingdom in 2004, because he couldn't justify the cost of developing it since I'd taken a digital camera - modern cameras can hold hundreds of pictures that can be disseminated around the world cheaply and easily.

Nevertheless, just because capacities are there, it doesn't mean that the documentary inclination is. People generally photograph things that interest them personally, and I don't think the documentary inclination doesn't interest the average person. I certainly don't know anyone else offhand who would think to collect photographs of city buses or station nameplates in the Red Line. How many people, upon landing in Los Angeles, would practically salivate at the prospect of riding the Gold Line Extension?

Not everyone's doing it. That's as good a reason for me to keep on with it, no matter how many cameras fall along the way.

The Avarice of Automatons

Human nature is one of those things that resists easy definition. Some people tend to believe in the "inherent goodness" of humanity, while others tend to look at crowds with jaundiced eyes. Personally, it doesn't matter what side of the fence I'm on - human nature may be our most stalwart ally, or our greatest enemy, in the years to come. Knowing us, it will probably be both at the same time.

One of the most significant discoveries regarding human nature came out of the Milgram experiment, an investigation into social psychology and obedience. In the experiement, the person being experimented on was led to believe that he or she was "teaching" a learner through the application of progressively higher electric shocks, but the real purpose of the experiment was to see how many times the teacher would shock the learner with the experimenter, a stern man with authority and a lab coat. I first learned about it in university - it chilled me then, and it still does. I suggest you read it - if nothing else, maybe to inoculate you against something similar.

What I get out of this, and other news I've found, is the impression that a great many people would, subconsciously, like nothing more than to be automatons - to not have to be responsible for any of their actions. In the case of the Milgram experiment, people followed orders to do something with which they were uncomfortable because of the pressure of authority and the lack of perceived responsibility - the abdication of personal responsibility.

But what happens when, at the same time as a person considers themselves not responsible for their actions, they're presented an opportunity to do something they want to do?

Generally, that's almost all of what you need to get a riot started. Which is exactly what happened at a coat store in Columbus, Ohio earlier this week, as reported by MSNBC.com, when a woman touched off a riot by claiming that she had won the lottery and the merchandise was on her. This is a recipe for opportunism and chaos regardless of whether you're in the grip of a recession. A Columbus police officer said that at least 500 people were in the store with another thousand outside trying to get in - if cell phones enable one thing, it's flash mobs looking for bargains or freebies - with no evidence other than the woman's own word that she had won $1.5 million and would pay for everything.

When she had her rented stretch Hummer take her to a bank but returned with nothing - in the interim, two dozen police officers had had to be brought in for crowd control, and hopefully no other crimes were made possible or easier because of this redeployment - the bargain hunters rioted.

"Everybody was like, 'I still want my free stuff,' and that started the riot," Detective Steven Nace was quoted as saying, which really gets down to the core of it. People adapt quickly, and people are able and willing to see salvation in the dimmest flickers of light. By then they'd probably already mentally identified whatever they were carrying as "theirs," and when they realized the erstwhile millionaire had only been winding them up, it was as if the store was stealing from them, and not reclaiming property that had never left its ownership.

Points like that don't really matter to a wound-up crowd that's got dollar signs in its eyes and has marked its territory, though. The store was practically torn apart in the riot. I would not be surprised for the footage to eventually make its way to YouTube. They knew what they wanted, they knew what they had, and when it became clear that they couldn't have it, they reacted with the fury of basest human instincts.

This is the well that charismatic dictators draw from, and it's the platform from which psychics and snake-oil salesmen wheedle you for your money. This may well be one of the sources of popular skepticism toward climate change - to their eyes, it's as if they're being asked to change their ways for something they can't see, and if they can't see it it might not even be happening. When someone wants something, and they're led to believe they can attain it or maintain it with no personal consequences - it's dangerous to be in their way.

Enemies of Civilization

I'm not going to make any bones about this, today. Evil is common in the world, and it's frequently done by people who honestly believe they're doing good. I see it again and again. The most brazen and galling example of it that's crossed my awareness recently took place in Oak Brook, Illinois, a quiet and wealthy suburb of Chicago. The Daily Herald - "Suburban Chicago's Information Source" - recently covered a conflict between the supporters and opponents of the Oak Brook Public Library.

The face of the anti-library faction appears to be Constantine "Connie" Xinos, who from all appearances could not be any more of an asshole if he tried. "I wanted that kid to lose sleep that night," he was quoted as saying with a grin as he responded to his vitriolic rebuttal to an 11-year-old girl who spoke about how she missed having on-staff librarians to help her.

Oak Brook, according to Xinos, should "stop indulging people in their hobbies ... their little, personal, private wants," and that if people opposed the layoffs of the Oak Brook Public Library staff, they should raise the money themselves. Considering that the median household income in Oak Brook is $146,537, that might not necessarily be a difficult prospect, but that's not the goddamn point. The point is how this is a blatant undermining of the foundation of modern society.

Xinos, according to the article, launched an unsuccessful lawsuit to prevent the construction of the library - and why? Because it costs public money to run. While he's quoted as saying his philosophy is "conservative," his reference to the necessary role of government being "to catch bad guys, put out fires, fix the streets and make sure buildings are sturdy" is more than enough to pin him as a libertarian.

Libertarianism is a philosophy that's particularly strong in the United States, a philosophy which seeks to maximize personal liberty and states that government should have as little responsibility as possible, and that most services other than national defense should be the balliwick of the free market. There's a long libertarian strain in sf; Vernor Vinge has written a few, including "The Ungoverned," a short story in the same universe as Marooned in Realtime, where law enforcement is privatized and individuals can own arsenals usually reserved for militaries. The only issue is that there's very little middle ground in libertarianism, from what I can see - most of its supporters seem to be rabid supporters.

That's fine, in its way, but I draw the line at the health of society. Actively seeking to shut down a library system is not reflective of an interest in the health of society. Libertarianism exists today because our ancestors created a system through which the average person could, at no cost to themselves, learn and educate and enrich themselves. The 19th century industrialist Andrew Carnegie's most enduring legacy may well be the system of Carnegie libraries, 2,509 libraries built around the world and financed by him, built specifically so that people living in poverty could improve themselves, the way Carnegie himself had gone from poverty to plutocracy.

It may be that attitudes have shifted in the intervening years. A hundred years ago, there was a general appreciation of education in culture, because people knew that it was the road out of poverty - an education made the difference between unskilled ditchdigging labor, say, and far more lucrative professional employment. It's taken far more for granted today, I think, enabling people like Xinos to call for the piecemeal destruction of that enlightening infrastructure while standing atop the pedestal it built.

I don't care what your justification is. If you're actively seeking to shut down a library, not because of budget shortfalls or other sad exigencies but because you just can't sleep at night knowing that people are enlightening themselves on your dime, as far as I concerned you are a villain and an enemy of modern civilization.