Lucy Schmeidler

Have you ever had a "memory" that was realistic to the tiniest detail, except for some content that was obviously impossible? I have, but I don't remember the specifics, so I'll make up an example:

Having a talk with a close friend with whom I chat regularly, all reasonable, except we were discussing the results of a test that wasn't scheduled till next week. So I assumed it was simply a realistic dream. But how many other memories may I have, genuine memories not of actual experiences but of dreams?

My first reaction to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the obvious: How awful to be trapped like that, and how fortunate I am that I have an intact nervous system! (Especially since the 1991 brain hemorrhage my daughter keeps referring to as my "stroke.") And then there's the worry about how many people diagnosed as in a vegetative state are actually able to think but not communicate? And then my thoughts about people, like my father during the late stages of Parkinson's, who talk and listen but seem to "see" and react to people who aren't there more clearly than those who are, so their communication with their surroundings is obviously faulty.

I have a review of a book by one of my favorite SF writers and personal writer heroes currently posted online at www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=6360.It doesn't relate to the course, but you're all welcome to take a look. (P.S. They don't pay.)

Hominids
by Robert J. Sawyer
Tor, New York, 2002

Hominids is a science-fictional romance, in both meanings of the word: a tale of adventure and a love story. The main premise of the book is that there exists an alternate universe in which our kind of human became extinct, and Neanderthal man developed a technological civilization, though with different values and a very different culture. An accident involving a quantum computer sends a physicist from their world into ours, where it looks as if he will have to build a new life for himself among people not even of his own species. And here the love story develops, between Ponter, the Neanderthal physicist, and Mary, a homo sapiens geneticist who had been called in to verify his alien DNA. But his partner in his old life repeats the experiment, in order to re-establish contact with our world, and Ponter is able to return home. As this is the first book of a trilogy, the details of the inter-species romance--sex, living arrangements, and the reproductive possibilities--are left to be worked out in the later books. In addition to the awakening of love between Ponter and Mary, there is an unsolved rape, and a Neanderthal murder trial without a body, for a murder that never actually occurred.

For my final project, I plan to turn "To Be an Emulator" into a complete SF story, incorporating some of the suggestions from the class workshop. In it I hope to explore further the question of the extent to which a person can seem to emulate another's thoughts and feelings based on that other's visible behavior. I expect to have a complete draft by Wednesday, November 21, which I will then be able to print out, get copied, and bring to a genre workshop in New Jersey on Sunday, November 25, after which I will probably do at least one more revision before submitting it for publication. As I have generally advised others who ask me, I will submit it to the SF magazine where I would most like to see it (probably Fantasy & Science Fiction), followed by the next, etc., until I hope to see it accepted somewhere before the end of 2008.

Many years ago (more than twelve, less than 26), I had an experience that led to an altered state of consciousness, as reported in a previous blog entry ("A Different State of Consciousness"). Ever since then I have been hoping to repeat the experience. Some aspects would be very difficult to recreate, such as the panhandler's request for a very specific amount of money (I think $13 and some change) for railroad fare to someplace in Connecticut where he had an acting job waiting, which I think opened me up to a state of intentional suspension of disbelief. However, the following activity, wandering through mostly unfamiliar streets while keeping as open as possible to whatever came seemed reproducible, and I hoped to achieve that. I had been warned, however, by friends who were more familiar with questions of different mental states, that such an attempt, if successful, could result in serious disorientation, such that I shouldn't attempt it alone, so I decided to ask a friend to accompany me as a "monitor."

For several months I've been playing around with the idea of a fantasy story based on an actual dream, but the story hasn't jelled. First, the dream in its context:

The day before I had gone to see the musical Wicked, and afterwards I had been thinking about musicals in general and how the plot requirements were different than for a book. In my dream I was watching a musical based on the general idea of "Thomas the Rhymer": a mortal man is captured by the fairy queen and forced to serve her until either (1) rescued by his own true love, or (2) all the people he had known have died of old age, while he is essentially unchanged. In the musical in my dream, the man is singing to his captor that he has given her his heart, as:
"Not a gift but a loan,
To hold in your keeping,
For as long as I'm sleeping,
Till I find my way home."
As a member of the audience, I was carried away with sympathy for the man and also admiration for his spirit and determination not to give in entirely, but to remember who he is and know that he's held in a sleeping state, from which he will try, if at all possible, to escape.

Then on waking I was struck by the fact that I had composed a verse of a musical in my sleep, and I wanted to resume the dream and see if I could come up wi

One of my husband's puns:
Q: Why don't they charge for each individual item taken at a smorgasbord?
A: Because there's no accounting for tastes.

I've learned the hard way that things too small to be significant in themselves can add up. I suppose most dieters learn this, but I learned it when I was online, commenting on blogs, and my daughter-in-law asked me to come upstairs for something. I asked if I could have five minutes, hoping to finish the comment I was then in the middle of. She said fine. I could have saved it and logged off, or copied it out or simply tried to remember it and logged off, but because I wasn't rushed I finished it. And another. And another. And by then half an hour had gone by, but I hadn't felt it, because each individual item was too short to notice. So now when I don't want to stop in the middle of a very short task, I'll try to take a few seconds to determine where I will stop and try to keep it in mind when I get there.

I am currently about halfway through I am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter, enjoying it immensely, and hoping to post an entry on it when I'm finished. However, after reading some pages in the middle of the night, I found myself with an insight into reading interesting nonfiction that I'd like to share. As I went back to bed I thought about that reading session and realized that I had been reading the book rather the way I read a novel, assuming that I can track the main points of the plot without any special mental note-taking, and this was not the way I had read Damasio or Zunshine, whose books I read almost like math texts, trying to master the concepts before going on. And I think the way I am reading now is actually better, certainly more fun, but possibly more successful as well. I remembered way back to my undergrad course in literary criticism, when I was trying to completely understand and almost internalize the first essay in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and failing. But philosophy isn't math, and even--or especially--the most profound ideas may leave room for disagreement, or mental dialog, even by a 20-year-old undergraduate. So getting the gist of an argument may be quite enough.

In "A Cognitive Account of Aesthetics," Francis Steen presents an intriguing and plausible theory of the development of aesthetic appreciation as part of the process that allows human beings to have a well functioning perceptual system. He starts by denying the idea that aesthetics has its evolutionary justification as a means of identifying attractive habitats and potential mates. The absurdity of the first is easily seen in the aesthetic attractiveness of some terribly inhospitable landscapes, such as colorful rock formations in the desert.

However, he goes on not only to insist on the aesthetic appetite serving as a goal in itself, which I find hard to dispute, but to give it a specific function in "calibrating the embedded brain's perceptual systems. Here I think he makes a good case, but from a philosophical rather than a physiological standpoint. In the early days of psychology, this would have been quite sufficient, but plausible as his arguments are I can't see them as unquestionably convincing; I would like to see more in the way of functioning brain scans to demonstrate just where there is activity during aesthetic experience and how it relates to later perceptual experiences.