Lockhart is the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We are first introduced to him at Flourish and Blotts, the bookshop in Diagon Alley where Harry, Hermione and the Weasleys are shopping for textbooks for their second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.^[1]

A prolific author, repeated winner of Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile Award, and widely considered a heartthrob (looking at you, Molly Weasley), Lockhart is obviously vain but also appears – at first – to be reasonably competent. His books detail his many great achievements: his defeat of the Wagga Wagga Werewolf, his triumph over the Bandon Banshee, and so on.

Alas, the shine quickly wears off, and as the year progresses his ineptitude becomes obvious.

But if he’s so inept, why consider him a killer? He didn’t bludgeon the banshee, or whack the werewolf. Indeed, none of his adventures actually occurred! He’s a liar, maybe, but a murderer?

Let’s step back from Gilderoy for a moment.

In an earlier article, I wrote about persistence and personal identity:

What makes you, you? What could be changed or removed and still leave the ‘youness’ intact? …[W]hat is it that enables you to persist, despite the changes you’ve undergone, from one day to the next?

One of the possibilities I considered was material continuity: in short, that having the same body – or the relevant bits of the same body – is what makes you, you. But early in the Harry Potter series we see that, in the lore of the world Rowling has created, drastic changes to one’s body don’t undermine persistence. For instance, Polyjuice Potion allows one to assume the form of someone else, even if they are of a different gender or a drastically different age.

But we don’t think that Harry-and-Ron-polyjuiced-into-Crabbe-and-Goyle stop being Harry and Ron.  We’re not confused as to what’s happening, or worried that our heroes have disappeared. And this isn’t limited to swapping body parts for other human ones: at one point a Polyjuice mishap has Hermione turn into a catgirl.

So if it’s not material continuity that matters for persistence in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, then it must be something else. A plausible alternative is psychological continuity. The idea, roughly, is that it’s some feature of our psychological makeup that makes us the same person from one day to the next: what feature/s varies by account, but usually it involves some sort of inheritance of beliefs, preferences, dispositions and/or – crucially – memories. Whereas some might locate these features in the brain, in Harry Potter memory is located in the soul:

"You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self any more, no memory, no...anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever...lost."

Remus Lupin, in JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

(I take it that the ‘you’ Lupin is referring to is merely Harry’s body. And as we’ve seen, the body isn’t what’s relevant for full ‘youness’ in Harry Potter. We see another example with those summoned back from death with the Restoration Stone: despite not having physical brains or bodies, they retain the power to think and remember.)

Now Lockhart doesn’t remove souls, but he does tamper with memories. Lockhart has cultivated a single magical skill: Memory Charms. He entices people to tell him their stories and then takes those stories and passes them off as his own. Usually he is selective in which memories he ‘obliviates’ (and there is debate in the fandom about whether memory charms, properly cast, suppress or erase memories).^[2] But when confronted by Ron and Harry towards the end of Chamber of Secrets, his attempted erasure is much more significant:

'The adventure ends here, boys!' he said. 'I shall take a bit of this skin back up to the school, tell them I was too late to save the girl, and that you two tragically lost your minds at the sight of her mangled body. Say goodbye to your memories!'

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

If what Lockhart is attempting is to erase Harry and Ron’s memories such that that they ‘lose their minds’, and if memories are crucial for persistence, then what he is attempting is tantamount to murder. Harry and Ron – as we know them – wouldn’t survive such a loss.

Thankfully, the spell backfires, and so the murder is merely attempted. In backfiring, though, the spell hits Lockhart instead, erasing – seemingly permanently – his own memories, and leaving behind a body with wavy golden hair, the knowledge of how to write in cursive and a penchant for signing autographs. If these are not enough for persistence, then Lockhart’s final victim was himself.

Further Reading

For more on the persistence question, including further reading, see "On Persistence and Memory"

If you're interested in Harry Potter more generally, we have both philosophical and linguistic musings on the matter.

…and, more recently, financial advisors.

There are lots of interesting features of Stoicism – and indeed, the other ancient philosophical schools (we are the Epicurean Cure after all) – but I want to focus on one idea in particular and one neat (and seemingly overlooked) representation of it in popular media. First, a caveat: this piece is both brief and rather rough-and-ready, so see the further reading below for more precision and to dive deeper.

In 2001, K-Pax was released: a film about a psychiatric hospital with a patient who claimed to be an alien from the eponymous planet of K-Pax. I’m loathe to recommend a film starring Kevin Spacey, but thankfully the whole script is available online, so if you’re interested you can read it there and mentally substitute whatever person you like into the lead role.

At the very end of the film, there’s a voiceover from the main character – the possible alien – with advice for his psychiatrist.^[3] First he tells us that the K-Paxians know something that humans don’t:

The Universe will expand, then collapse back on itself – then expand again. It will repeat this process again and again, forever.

At first this just sounds like a Big Bang/Big Crunch sort of picture, but in the context of what comes next, the Stoic influence becomes obvious.

Stoic doctrine speaks of a

cosmic ‘fire’ which combined the creative functions of light and warmth – this latter including that of the warm ‘breath’ or pneuma (which in its Latinized form became our word ‘spirit’) that served as the vitalizing force of the Stoic world. God is sometimes defined as a ‘creative fire that proceeds methodically to the world’s coming to be’.

Brunschwig & Sedley, p. 170

This ‘coming to be’ isn’t a singular occurrence. For the Stoics, the world comes into being and then ends again in cycles.  The end is a state of total fieriness or godliness called ekpyrosis (often translated as ‘conflagration’), during which the deity sets up the new cycle.

Now there’s nothing there to worry about, just yet. It’s quite nice to think that if things don’t shake out as well as they could this time round that we (or others like us) would get another shot next cycle. But as the voiceover from K-Pax tells us, that’s not what we should expect:

What you don’t know is that when the Universe expands again, everything will be as it was before. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through again. Over and over, forever.

The Stoics thought so too:

The deity, being supremely wise, has no reason to do things differently from one world to the next. So successive worlds are indistinguishable from each other, even in their details.

B&S, p. 171.

I’ve written this sentence infinitely many times in previous cycles, and will write it again infinitely more times in subsequent cycles.

So, you might ask, why bother? Why study for an exam, if whether I pass or fail is predetermined (and not just now, but for infinitely many repetitions?) Why go to the doctor when I’m sick – I’ll either get better or I won’t. This is the charge of fatalism, and the critics of Stoics raised the same objections, sometimes called ‘The Lazy Argument’ or ‘The Idle Argument’.

Undeterred, the Stoic Chrysippus replied that outcomes are not fated no matter what, but rather ‘co-fated’ along with other factors, such as our decisions, actions, and dispositions. That you are you – rather than someone else, with a shorter temper, a tendency to make decisions by rolling dice, or a preference for honeycomb ice-cream – factors in to how the world is. Fate gives us a push, says Chrysippus, but it works through us; how fate unrolls depends on the kinds of beings we are. (Editor’s note: I’m paraphrasing here, and Chrysippus spoke Ancient Greek.^[4])

We might understand it like this: it is determined by the deity that I am who I am. But if I had been different, things would have turned out differently.

There is nothing new under a sun which, even itself, is not new.

One of the reasons people might be worried by the idea of fate is that they think it’s only appropriate to blame or praise someone for their actions – to hold them accountable – if the action originated with them.^[5] For the Stoics, it’s appropriate to praise and blame people even though the world is determined, because the kinds of people we are makes a difference to how the world turns out. Fate ultimately causes the kinds of people we are, and what happens to us: “how we respond, however predictable in the light of our own past history and present character, is ‘in our power’: the responsibility for it is our own.”^[6]

Scholars have different views on the nuances of Stoic determinism and what we should take from it. For instance,

In embracing this strange conceit, the Stoics may well have been attracted by its moral implications: don’t dream of what you could do, or might have been able to do, ‘in another life’, because another life would be just the same as this one. There is nothing new under a sun which, even itself, is not new.

B&S, p. 171.

But the message from K-Pax is slightly more upbeat:

[M]y advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because… this time… is all you have.

I might have typed this sentence infinitely times before, but to me, in my chair, it feels like the first time, and it always will. Fingers crossed I’ve avoided any typos.  

References

• Bobzien, S. Determinism and freedom in Stoic philosophy, (Oxford: OUP, 1998).
• Brunschwig & Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophy in Sedley (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), pp. 151-183.

Further Reading

You can find out more about Chrysippus in Book VII Chapter 7 of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers.

If you want to read some Stoic philosophy straight from the Ancient Stoics, you could start with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.

For a general overview of philosophy in the period there are a lot of options, but one that easily fits in the handbag is Terence Irwin’s Classical Thought (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1989).

Those who ascend to rulership become Philosopher Kings^[1]:

It is a more enlightened age. Perhaps a future, or a past long forgotten, when rulers are noble and just, and rule for their people, not just for themselves. Perhaps it is an Age of Reason, in which older, barbaric measures of manhood such as war and business have been phased out, and replaced solely with pure, unclouded Thought. Only those who have the capacity to Think have the right to Rule. In this realm, the Philosopher King is found.^[2]

In this short but sweet piece of pop(culture)corn, we highlight some gender-inverted instances of the Philosopher and Philosopher King. Let us know your favourite, or other characters deserving the mantle of Philosopher Queen, in the comments or on Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook.

"Eternal life for those who can afford it means eternal control over those who can’t."

Quellcrist Falconer

Quell is an academic and political revolutionary in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. The Netflix adaptation presents her as a fighting philosopher rebel queen, whose actions against the ruling elite are underpinned by her eponymous political philosophy:

Quellism is the political theory created by Quellcrist Falconer for the establishment of a hi-tech social democracy, having elements of socialism and anarchism. Quellism was an expression of Quell’s exasperation with both the inherent self-serving, elitist, corruption of right-wing politics and the back-biting, self-absorption of the left.^[4]

Technological developments have allowed the rich to prolong their lives indefinitely, ‘resleeving’ their consciousness in new bodies – in the Altered Carbon universe, Quell notes, “Your body is not who you are.”^[5] The political ramifications of this motivate Quell’s revolution:

The ebb and flow of life is what makes us all equal in the end […] We aren’t meant to live forever. It corrupts even the best of us…Eternal life for those who can afford it means eternal control over those who can’t.

Quell (S01E07)

Tallis

Tallis is an elven, Qunari assassin, from Dragon Age II’s “Mark of the Assassin” DLC. A convert to the Qun, Tallis engages in both epistemology and moral philosophy, contemplating her faith and her moral obligations.

In classic trope-philosopher fashion, she delivers pithy one-liners as she accompanies the party:

He who wishes to walk on water must first learn to swim.

She who swallows wisdom in tiny chunks avoids choking.

It’s not always meant to end in violence. There are other paths. They do not all need to lead to the same destination.

Doubt is the path one walks to reach faith. To leave the path is to embrace blindness, and abandon hope.

Princess Bubblegum

A literal philosopher queen – or at least, philosopher princess – Bubblegum rules the Candy Kingdom in Adventure Time, a prosperous land of sweet creatures with a tendency to explode when frightened. A metaphysician and philosopher of science, Bubblegum champions invention and empirical endeavours while denying the existence of magic:

Listen, all magic is scientific principles presented like “mystical hoodoo” which is fun, but it’s sort of irresponsible.

Princess Bubblegum, Wizards Only, Fool

In the course of the show, Bubblegum attends and organises conferences, fashions a potion to revive the dead, and creates a variety of creatures (including her own subjects) out of candy biomass:

As princess of candy kingdom, I’m in charge of a lot of candy people. They rely on me, I can’t imagine what might happen to them if I was gone… I am not going to live forever Finn, I would if I could, but modern science just isn’t there yet, so I engineered a replacement that could live forever.

Princess Bubblegum, Goliad

And, in true tropey fashion, Princess Bubblegum acts as a guide to the show’s adventuring heroes, Finn and Jake, sharing her wisdom and providing exposition:

Finn, sometimes you want someone and you want to kiss them and be with them, but you can’t because responsibility demands sacrifice.

Princess Bubblegum, Burning Low

"Doubt is the path one walks to reach faith. To leave the path is to embrace blindness, and abandon hope."

Mary Malone

Mary Malone is a physicist and the inventor of the eponymous device in Philip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass. Like Bubblegum, she is foremost a scientist, but Mary plays the role of the philosopher in guiding (and tempting) Lyra and Will. Drawing on her background as a former nun, she espouses her philosophy of religion as part of this process:

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

Mary Malone, The Amber Spyglass

Sha'ira, the Asari Consort

Sha’ira appears in the Mass Effect series, offering “personal services as well as entertainment and conversation”^[6], but she is particularly sought after for her advice. After providing assistance to the consort in the first Mass Effect instalment, Sha’ira offers the player character Shepard a ‘gift of words’: “an affirmation of who you are, and who you will become”. Shepard observes that, from description, the consort sounds like an oracle; in this and her advice she is much like the classic trope instances. Another character rejoins that Sha’ira is merely a woman, “with remarkable compassion and a generous spirit”.^[7]

Sha’ira has been likened to a Greek hetaira – in both cases, depending on who you ask, they are described as sex workers, escorts, and/or elite, educated women.

 Want to philosophise about other examples? Do so in the comments, or on twitter/tumblr/facebook.

Nonetheless, I normally think that the rest of you have minds too, and sometimes I even think I can know what’s going on in that mind of yours. I can’t peer into it, but based on your behaviour, and by analogy to my own experience, I predict what you’ll do, respond to how I think you’re feeling, and so on. Presumably you do that too. After all, if you don’t have a mind – if you don’t feel, or think, or want, or believe – then my efforts to ensure I’ve stocked up on your favourite tea before you visit seem rather pointless. The attribution of minds and mental states to others is ubiquitous: here are a couple of examples from Zusak’s The Messenger^[2] (emphasis mine):

She looks up at me, and for a moment, we both get lost in each other. She wonders who I am, but only for a split second. Then, with stunning realisation clambering across her face, she smiles at me.^[3]

[...] He’s still groggy but his eyes grow wide. He thinks about a sudden movement but understands very quickly that he can barely pull himself out of the car.^[4]

The problem of other minds is an epistemic one: how are we justified in attributing mental states to others, given the possibility that their minds may be very different to our own, if they have them at all? How can we know that others have minds, and what are they like?

These are questions too big for a single article, so here I just want to highlight two things: firstly, that we do attribute minds and mental states to others (whether or not we are justified in doing so, or whether we can know that they have them); and secondly that one argument for doing so is, as I hinted at above, the argument from analogy.^[5] Even if I don’t know what your mind is like (or even if you have one), can’t I still reasonably suppose that your mental life is much like mine? Can’t I use myself as a model for you and everybody else?

This sort of argument was put forward by John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, among others. Here’s Mill’s version:

I conclude that other human beings have feelings like me, because, first, they have bodies like me, which I know in my own case to be the antecedent condition of feelings; and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and other outward signs, which in my own case I know by experience to be caused by feelings.^[6]

Of course, there are always problems with induction from one case, and one case is all we have, as my mind is the only mind I can be sure about. So, there’s a difference between a generalisation like ‘If a person exhibits human behaviour then they have a mind’ and ‘If you encounter a koala in the wild then you’re in Australia’, because in the latter case we have lots of evidence it’s true (there are lots of instances of people encountering koalas in the wild, and all have taken place in Australia)^[7] and in the former I only have on instance: me!

If I was the only philosopher you had ever met, you might come to think that all philosophers were 5ft2, interested in time travel and spoke with an Aussie Accent...

The reality is sorely disappointing.

Can’t I use myself as a model for you and everybody else?

As Simon Blackburn puts it,

The mere fact that in one case – my own – perhaps as luck has it, there is a mental life of a particular, definite kind, associated with a brain and a body, seems to be very flimsy ground for supposing that there is just the same association in all the other cases.

If I have a box and it has a beetle in it, that gives me only very poor grounds for supposing that everyone else with a box has a beetle in it as well.

Perhaps worse, it gives me very poor grounds for denying that there are beetles anywhere else than in boxes.

Maybe then things that are very different from you and me physically are conscious in just the way that I am: rocks or flowers, for example.^[8]

Even if we can move past this worry, there’s another: even if the argument from analogy works for people similar to me, what about creatures who are dissimilar? And how different is too different: people with behaviour or bodies different to mine? Animals? Aliens?

And thus we arrive at Mass Effect. One of the things I like most about the series are the aliens. Less the humanoid aliens – although they’re fun too – but the truly alien aliens. Two are particularly of note (I’m borrowing the descriptions of TVTropers for these, as they’re priceless). First there are the Hanar, who

look something like dog-sized pink jellyfish with seven feet long tentacles, speak through bioluminescence (using Translator Microbes to communicate with other species), and have the tendency to refer to themselves as “This one” (because to the hanar, using one’s name in public is egotistical).^[9]

The elcor, by contrast,

resemble elephants without trunks that have been crossed with gorillas and stand about two metres tall at the shoulder. As their communication relies heavily on body language and pheromones (both too subtle for other species to decipher), they lack the ability to talk in anything but a flat monotone, which they compensate for by beginning their sentences by stating [their emotional states]…even when it is “With barely contained terror: Fine have it your way.”
However, except for their body size and unusual speech, they appear perfectly normal when interacting with other species.

The bodies and behaviour of the Hanar and Elcor are very different to ours – much more different than many of the aliens we see in science fiction.

Nonetheless, it seems, they think, feel, desire, believe. Putting aside their being fictional, there is presumably something it is like to be a Hanar or an Elcor. And we have reason to believe that at least some of what’s going on in their minds is similar to what goes on in ours. The Hanar merchant Opold displays concern for the impatience of one of its^[10] customers, and depending on the player’s actions can become angry. A particularly devout Hanar on the citadel argues to be allowed to preach on the basis of its desire to share the truth of its Gods. The Elcor too make reference to recognisable mental states states when speaking – exasperation, shock, horror, worry, delight – in contexts where we might feel the same: concern for guards that haven’t slept, shock at someone discovering a secret, the desire to move on from one’s job to something new.

A lot of the philosophical discussion of the problem of other minds has focused on what we can conceive, what’s possible, and the link between the two. If nothing else, the Mass Effect aliens make it easier to conceive of beings very different from us that nonetheless seem to have minds and mental states, not so far removed from our own.

References

• Blackburn, S. Think (Oxford: OUP, 1999).

• Mill, J. S. An examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 6^th edition (London, 1889).

• TV Tropes, Starfish Aliens/Video Games. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/StarfishAliens/VideoGames (Accessed: 21/02/2020).

• Zusak, M. The Messenger (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2002).

Further Reading

A good starting point is the SEP’s article on Other Minds.
Russell also offered an argument from analogy, which can be found in his Human Knowledge: Its scope and Limits (Allen & Unwin, 1948).

Finally, for more on Mass Effect aliens, see the fan wiki.

the lava or desert level,

the one that has you exploring a ship (often once you’ve exhausted the continent you started on and have been instructed to Get On the Boat,

the sewer level,

the fight-to-the-death Gladiator Level…

You get the idea. This scrumptious piece of pop(culture)corn centres on another (surprisingly?) common level: the one where you, your party, or both, find themselves locked up in a prison.

Unlike the aforementioned levels, which all have their own TV Tropes entry, the prison level is relegated to a subsection of the Prison Episode page, which describes the pattern thus:

A prison centred instalment in a larger work that is otherwise not about prison. It might be an episode in a serial, a sequence in a video game, or a few chapters in a book…

When this trope shows up in video games, you can expect the inventory of the player character(s) to be taken away. This results in the player having to use stealth and cunning to avoid the guards, until the hero(es) get their inventory back

TV Tropes

While it’s true that the prison level is often the setting for a stealth-based mission and provides plausible justification for stripping a player of their powerful weapons and shiny equipment, that doesn’t exhaust the potential of the prison level.

It can also be the starting zone for a game, allowing us to come to grips with the player character before we meet their comrades or providing a way to explain the player character being in a new part of the world they aren’t familiar with (if they’ve been transported from where they were arrested).

Later in the game it can provide opportunity for meaningful dialogue and relationship building with new acquaintances or old friends, as the party pulls together in a time of hardship.

It can also be used narratively to allow for a time leap where the rest of the world (and plot) moves on, but the player character (or party) stays the same.

Finally, the prison level can serve as a way of splitting up a party of adventurers, to showcase underutilised characters, play with a particular game mechanic, advance the story, or just for the lulz.^[1]

Most prison levels can’t be revisited once escaped. They are generally part of the main story, rather than optional content.

An illustrative (but nowhere near exhaustive!) list follows. Let us know your favourites, including those we haven’t mentioned, on twitter/facebook/tumblr.

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X contains one of my favourite prison levels (but I’m biased, because I really love that game). Arguably it’s two levels: the party is split, and each group finds a separate way out of the Via Purifico. Tidus, Rikku and Wakka (conveniently the three characters that can swim) navigate underwater, while Yuna is - unusually - left alone (in the narrative, the other characters serve as her guardians or protectors) in a monster-infested sewer, where she rounds up the remaining allies and heads for the exit.

This is neither a stealth or a no-gear level, instead demonstrating the wider potential of the prison level – contrasting underwater and conventional combat, using different combinations of characters, showcasing Yuna on her own, and finally reuniting the party after a significant time apart.^[2]

There are prison levels in most Final Fantasy games, but I’ll just mention one more:

Final Fantasy XII

The main characters of FFXII are arrested at least three times, but the prison level I found most memorable was the Nalbina Dungeons, full of long-imprisoned NPCs waiting to die of thirst (grim, right?).

This doubles as a No Gear and Gladiator Level as the main characters get into a fight with a prison bruiser – Daguza – and his lackeys and fight bare-handed (or with the fire spell, if you’ve learned it – it’s harder to take away magic than a sword).

Lost Odyssey

In a combination Ship/Prison level, the Lost Odyssey party are locked in the brig of the White Boa and make their escape. In a nice piece of narrative/gameplay synergy, if the players are recaptured, it doesn’t trigger a game over.^[3] Instead the guard – who you convinced to let you out in the first place, having wiped his memory – will apologise and release you again.

Elder Scrolls

Other than Daggerfall, all of the main instalments in The Elder Scrolls series begins with the player character as a prisoner. The prison levels thus frequently double as tutorial levels.^[4] Opening like this provides an in-game explanation for why the player character is unfamiliar with the basic politics and happenings in the region (which they learn at the same time as the player), as well as their lack of cool adventuring equipment.

Some redditors summed it up nicely: Why always start as a prisoner?^[5]

Because it’s easy. It opens the way for the game to unfold and gives a reasonable explanation why you start without any equipment while not impeding our headcanon to what our character did prior to being captured.

Cloud_Striker

It also means that when you are freed at the start, you can do what you want. Becoming free again is a good reason for a fresh start. You don't have any old responsibilities anymore.

Captain_Jack_Falcon

It also gives a good reason why people are asking you a ton of questions. Who are you? what do you do? What did the stars look like when you where born?????

329bubby

Dragon Age: Origins

There is an optional prison level in DAO if you fail to vanquish a particularly difficult boss in the latter stages of the game.

One imprisoned, you have the option of trying to escape, or waiting for two of your party members to stage a rescue attempt. The former is a fairly typical ‘No Gear Level’, temporarily stripping you of your equipment, but the latter has some of the funniest dialogue in the game. Depending on the pairing, the ruses the characters use to reach you differ, and the player gets to not only control characters they may not have directly controlled previously, but also to play with unusual pairings.

Dragon Age 2

DA2 has two prison levels of note, both in DLC. In The Masked Assassin, the player character (Hawke) is imprisoned alongside new companion Tallis. In a parody of the Origins example, Hawke can insist that they wait for their companions, but the other party members have gotten lost, so Tallis facilitates their escape. The level is notable for the dialogue between Hawke and Tallis, which reveals both interesting features of her character and also the Qunari belief system.

The Legacy DLC is a more atypical example: rather than being taken prisoner in the usual sense, the party finds themselves trapped in a magical prison designed to hold something (ostensibly) bigger and badder than them.

Dragon Quest VIII

In Dragon Quest VIII, the party are falsely accused of committing a crime and sentenced for life on Purgatory Island.

It takes the characters a month to contemplate escaping, despite having all their gear, but the sequence allows for some villain redemption and party bonding.

And best of all, the prison is inexplicably populated with Aussie guards.

Want to wax lyrical about other examples? Do so in the comments, or on facebook/twitter/tumblr.

One that has stuck with me for many years is Season 4 Episode 16: Grampy Rabbit’s Dinosaur Park (which scores a tragically low 5.4/10 on IMDB).^[1] The synopsis reads:

To celebrate Freddy Fox’s birthday the children go on a trip to a Dinosaur park where they follow dinosaur footprints to find Freddy’s birthday treat.

This does not do it justice.

At the opening of the episode the cast of characters arrive at Grampy Rabbit’s dinosaur safari park and Peppa asks the first instance of a question which recurs throughout the episode:

Peppa Pig: Are there really dinosaurs here?

Grampy Rabbit: No, just pretend ones.

Peppa Pig: Phew.

Following this a small elephant pipes up about the demise of the dinosaurs millions of years previously and the narrator dismisses him as a “clever clogs”. Fear not, lovely reader - we shall not be so easily deterred by this blatant anti-intellectualism.

As the children and parents move through the dinosaur park, Daddy Pig notes that the dinosaur footsteps they’re following look very real, and double-checks that there are no living dinosaurs in the park. Grampy Rabbit assures him that there aren’t, and it soon transpires that the footprints lead to a gigantic dinosaur slide. Merriment ensues.

Finally, Grampy Rabbit announces that they are to find a dinosaur egg, and thanks to Freddy Fox’s keen sense of smell the task is swiftly completed. It is at this point that the episode’s most fascinating claim is made.

But before we get to spoilers, some groundwork needs to be laid. While Peppa Pig and friends are concerned with the reality of dinosaurs – at least the ones in Grampy Rabbit’s park – their discussion readily applies to much thornier philosophical debates.

Is it real?

Back in the 11^th century, St Anselm was likewise concerned with matters of existence, albeit of God rather than dinosaurs. Anselm proposed what’s taken to be the first of a series of arguments known as ‘ontological’ arguments for God’s existence.^[2] It can be found in Chapter 2 of his Prosologion,^[3] and goes roughly^[4] like this:

God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.

Conceived doesn’t mean quite the same thing as imagined in philosophical circles – there’s debate about how exactly to conceive of ‘conceiving’ – but we can treat them as roughly interchangeable for our purposes. So the greatest thing one could imagine is God. If you can conceive of something greater than God, you weren’t conceiving God correctly.

Things can exist in the understanding alone, or in reality as well.

Anselm uses the example of a painter planning what he will paint. The painting exists in the painter’s mind; once it is painted it will also exist in reality.

That than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist in reality, not merely in the understanding.

Anselm contends that if God were just imagined – i.e. existed only in our minds – then God wouldn’t be the greatest thing of which we could conceive. Something that we conceive of as existing in reality – i.e. something we conceive of as real – is greater than something we conceive of as merely imaginary.

To make this a little clearer: take Wonder Woman. What would be better, greater, more magnificent: a Wonder Woman who exists merely in comic books, or a Wonder Woman who exists as we do?

For Anselm, the answer is obvious: the real Wonder Woman is superior to the fictional one. If God is not just conceivably great but the greatest thing of which we could conceive, and existing in reality makes you greater than existing only in our minds, then God – i.e. the greatest thing of which we could conceive – must exist, otherwise God wouldn’t be the greatest thing of which we could conceive.

So, God must exist.

In Anselm’s words:

Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater being can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

Anselm, Prosologion

Back in the 11^th century, St Anselm was likewise concerned with matters of existence, albeit of God rather than dinosaurs.

Following Anselm, big philosophical names produced their own ontological arguments: Descartes, Leibniz, Godel, Plantinga, among others. There have been various refutations of them; nowadays ontological arguments are generally not considered very persuasive. However, as Bertrand Russell notes:

The argument does not, to a modern mind, seem very convincing, but it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies.^[5]

And this is where Peppa Pig reveals its philosophical insight. Anselm’s ontological argument relies on the idea that something that exists in reality is greater than that which exists only in our minds. In other words, that something real is better or greater than something not real or imaginary. Many previous critics have argued that existence isn’t the sort of thing that bears on greatness: strength might, or goodness, but existence is a different kind of thing to those. Peppa Pig, by contrast, strikes in more direct fashion.

When we left them, our cast of characters had come upon the sought-after dinosaur egg. Peppa asks,

“Is it real?”

Grampy Rabbit: It’s better than real. It’s pretend.

References

• Anselm, Prosologion http://www.uta.edu/philosophy/faculty/burgess-jackson/Anselm,%20Proslogion.pdf. Accessed September 2019.
• Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1961.

Further reading

For more information on the ontological argument, these are a good place to start:

• Oppy, Graham, Ontological Arguments, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/ontological-arguments/.
• Himma, Kenneth, Anselm: Ontological Arguments for God’s Existence”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (ND). https://www.iep.utm.edu/ont-arg/

The Wikipedia page on Tarzan’s yell contains more information than you would ever need in order to recreate the distinctive sound (to which Grampy Rabbit plays homage in his descent on the slide): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan_yell

Finally, if you want to continue your philosophical journey by way of further Peppa Pig episodes, might I suggest starting with S3 E17 – Mr Potato Comes to Town – which introduces children to the concept of cannibalism by way of this delicious (excuse the pun) exchange:

Mr Potato: “Eat fruit and vegetables.”

Peppa Pig: “Which ones should we eat, Mr Potato?”

Mr Potato: “Apples, oranges, carrots, tomatoes…”

Peppa Pig: “Potatoes?”

Mr Potato: “Ermmm…”

Our supposed rationality is one of the most prized possessions of human beings and is often alleged to be what distinguishes us most clearly from the rest of animal creation…indeed… there appear to be close links between having a capacity for conceptual thinking, being able to express one’s thoughts in language, and having an ability to engage in processes of reasoning. Even chimpanzees, the cleverest of non-human primates, seem at best to have severely restricted powers of practical reasoning and display no sign at all of engaging in the kind of theoretical reasoning which is the hallmark of human achievement in the sciences. However, the traditional idea that rationality is the exclusive preserve of human beings has recently come under pressure from two quite different quarters. On the one hand, the information technology revolution has led to ambitious pronouncements by researchers in the field of artificial intelligence, some of whom maintain that suitably programmed computers can literally be said to engage in processes of thought and reasoning. On the other hand, ironically enough, some empirical psychologists have begun to challenge our own human pretensions to be able to think rationally. We are thus left contemplating the strange proposition that machines of our devising may soon be deemed more rational than their human creators.^[1]

There is considerable debate about what it would mean to say that a machine has a mind. But it’s clearly not an unimaginable proposition; we see lots of instances in sci-fi:

Here are two questions we might want to answer:

1. What is the mark of the mental? I.e. what is it that distinguishes or defines a mind?
2. How do we test for a mind?

There are lots of ways we might answer the first question: creativity, rationality, use of language, the ability to have feelings…

(If you’re interested, we can cover some of these in a future piece.)
As for the second, sci-fi frequently gives the same answer: the Turing Test.^[2] But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

A. M. Turing, mathematician and pioneer computer theorist, designed a test to decide whether a computer could think. A computer would pass the test if it could perfectly simulate a thinking person, that is, if anyone interacting with it would be fooled into thinking it was human. Turing spelled this out in terms of what he called ‘the imitation game’:

The “imitation game”… is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman… The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B… In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator, the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms… We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this [between a machine and a human being] as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?”^[3]

Or, as it’s explained in the film of the same name:

To see how this works, imagine you are confined to a room with a computer. On the screen are two chat windows, each showing your conversation with a different respondent. Using the computer, you can send and received typed messages to the two respondents. One of them is another ordinary human being (who speaks your language). The other is a computer program, designed to provide responses to your questions (perhaps a chat bot like Cleverbot).^[4] You are allotted a period of time – let's say 10 minutes – during which you can send whatever questions you like to the two respondents.

Your task is to try to determine on the basis of their answers which is the human being. The computer passes the test if you can’t tell which is which (except by chance – the test is repeated to rule out luck).

"We are thus left contemplating the strange proposition that machines of our devising may soon be deemed more rational than their human creators."

Whether a computer or program can pass the Turing Test is an empirical question – that is, it can only be answered by observation (unlike many of the philosophical questions we’ve considered here, it’s not a logical question, answerable by reason alone). We won’t know until we try. And indeed, there is an annual Turing Test competition in which people enter their computer programs to compete alongside humans.

As of yet, no computer program has incontrovertibly passed the test, although sometimes they have been mistaken for humans (there is debate concerning the results, and what they mean). But that’s not to say that a computer couldn’t. And fiction recognises the possibility. We see a nice example of a Turing Test being conducted in the 2013 British Sci-Fi flick, The Machine (a film that is not at all represented by the first two sentences of its Wikipedia synopsis):

Later, the computer scientist conducts another Turing Test on a much more interesting candidate – a program that, like Cleverbot, learns from conversation (the scientist is the interrogator, and ‘green’ and ‘red’ the ‘A’ and ‘B’ from Turing’s imitation game):

Scientist: I’m going to start the Turing Test now. Green. Fugley Munter is a good name for a beautiful Hollywood actress; a teddy bear; or a wedding dress design?

Green: Teddy bear.

Scientist: Red. Describe love in three words.

Red: Home, happiness, reproduction.

Scientist: Green.

Green: Happiness, sadness, life.

Scientist: Green. Mary saw a puppy in a window. She wanted it. What did Mary want?

Green: The window.

Scientist: Why?

Green: Windows look out onto the world. They are pretty and help you feel less alone.

(An aside: what questions would you ask to tell the computer from the human being? Are there any questions you could ask that would assure you that something had a mind?^[5])

Green doesn’t pass the Turing Test, but it’s not hard to imagine a computer that would. In Westworld, Ford mentions that the hosts passed the Turing Test within the first year. C3PO, the synthetics from Alien, the cylons from Battlestar Galactica – all would pass the Turing Test with flying colours. Indeed, the creator of Ava from Ex Machina was so convinced she’d pass a Turing Test that he had the interrogator test her knowing that she was a machine:

Caleb: …in the Turing Test, the machine should be hidden from the examiner. And there’s a control, or –

Nathan: I think we’re past that. If I hid Ava from you, so you just heard her voice, she would pass for human. The real test is to show you she is a robot. Then see if you still feel she has consciousness.

After all, even if something passes the Turing Test, is that enough? Is the bar in the right place? Does passing the test necessarily mean you have a mind? Let us know your thoughts on twitter or via the comments, and we'll delve deeper into those questions in Part 2.

References

• Lowe, E. J. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
• Turing, A. Computing machinery and intelligence, Mind Vol. 59 No. 236, 1950, pp. 433-461.
  ]]> https://www.epicureancure.com/563/the-turing-test-part-1/feed/ 0 https://www.epicureancure.com/479/on-persistence-memory/ https://www.epicureancure.com/479/on-persistence-memory/#respond Fri, 17 Mar 2017 18:00:13 +0000 https://www.epicureancure.com/?p=479 What makes you, you? What could be changed or removed and still leave the ‘youness’ intact? More specifically, what is required for you to persist: to be the same person tomorrow as you were yesterday?

  Fiction and philosophy alike have offered various ways to answer this question. They tend to approach the problem in similar fashion as well: they ask us to entertain some pretty strange hypotheticals – be they thought experiments or fictional scenarios (what’s the difference, really?) – and then see what intuitions fall out.

  One of the classic personal identity thought experiments is called Theseus’s Ship. It goes like this:

  Over a period of years, in the course of maintenance a ship has its planks replaced one by one – call this ship A. However, the old planks are retained and themselves reconstituted into a ship – call this ship B. At the end of the process there are two ships. Which is the original ship of Theseus?^[1]

  People differ in their response: some think ship A – after all, it’d be the one they’d insured – and others think ship B (including those looking for forensic evidence of the bloody murder you committed before deciding to overhaul your ship). Some think there isn’t a clear answer one way or the other, or that they’re both the original ship (whatever that means).

  We find variants of Theseus’s Ship throughout our fiction. In the Doctor Who episode Deep Breath, the Twelfth Doctor asks,

  If you have a broom, you replace the handle, and then you replace the brush, and do it over and over, is it still the same broom?

  (We might, of course, ask the same question of the Doctor).

  

  And in Westworld (which is full of interesting musings about identity, but here’s just a small example) we hear of Dolores:

  You know why she's special?

  She's been repaired so many times, she's practically brand-new.

  Don't let that fool you. She's the oldest host in the park.

  Westworld, S01E01

  I am inclined to think that Dolores continues to be Dolores, despite her modifications and repairs. Likewise, I can accept that each incarnation of the Doctor is, in some sense, the same continuing Time Lord (your intuitions might differ from mine – in which case, tell me in the comments!). Perhaps the Ship of Theseus example is extra tricky because there are two ships: if the old planks had been left to rot, rather than reassembled, maybe our intuitions would be clearer.

  Many people would write off these questions as idle speculation: a matter best left for sci-fi, or philosophers in their ivory towers. But I am confident that you, dear reader, know better. After all, your cells die and are replaced. Your thoughts change – you’ve gained and lost memories over time, changed your convictions, developed your dispositions. The planks that make up you are no more permanent than those in Theseus’s Ship. So what is it that enables you to persist, despite the changes you’ve undergone, from one day to the next?

  “If you have a broom, you replace the handle, and then you replace the brush, and do it over and over, is it still the same broom?”

  Material Continuity

  We might answer the persistence question in terms of material continuity:

  You are that past or future being that has your body, or that is the same biological organism as you are, or the like.^[2]

  That body can undergo change, but so long as there is some physical continuity between the different stages of you – baby, toddler, misunderstood teen etc. – there is persistence. In fiction we’re willing to believe that a person can undergo a great deal of change and persist. Upon seeing Hermione’s failed Polyjuice Potion transformation in Chamber of Secrets, did you stop, in outrage, and exclaim ‘Oh my god they’ve killed Hermione! A giant cat-person has taken her place!’

  

  Of course you didn’t. Just like you don’t worry that Bruce Banner has died when the Hulk appears, or that Jacob has ceased to be when he leaps into wolf-form. And remember that kid from Sky High who could turn into a guinea pig?

  

  The whole premise of Animorphs is that people can drastically change their bodies and yet remain fundamentally the same person. The body can change a great deal – indeed, undergo full metamorphosis^[3] – and yet we’re still willing to believe the person remains intact.

  

  That’s not always the case though – sometimes we can go too far. You might believe that your BFF has turned into a beetle, a werewolf, or a luminescent green beefcake, but you mightn’t be so optimistic about their continued existence if they had been transformed into a tea cosy.^[4]

  In fictional worlds without magic – including, perhaps, the world we live in – the brain is often the limit. We can survive losing a few limbs, organs, even everything below the neck, but it’s the brain that makes us who we are. Thus we can make sense of brain swap stories, where characters wake up in new bodies.

  

  But is the brain really the limit?

  Psychological Continuity

  In more recent fiction, the brain swap has been superseded by the brain scan, where it isn’t the brain meat that matters (the hardware) but rather the mental content (the software), frequently thought to include memories, beliefs, desires and so forth – all the stuff thought to make up our personality. There are both sci-fi and fantasy variants of this idea: the brain upload/download in the former case – think the baddies in The Sixth Day, the avatars in, well, Avatar, or the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica – and the Freaky Friday flip in the latter.

  What exactly is required for persistence – even of the psychological variety – differs between accounts, both fictional and philosophical. One common but contentious possibility is memory. A particularly pervasive trope is the Quest for Identity, which occurs when a character

  wakes up stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no recollection of who he is. The plot involves, at least in part, his efforts to discover the identity he cannot remember.^[5]

  We are used to characters exclaiming, ‘I can’t remember who I am!’

  

  See? But there is a difference between knowing who you are and being the same person over time: the former is an epistemic matter and the latter a metaphysical one. When thinking about persistence, it is the latter that we should have in mind.

  Here are two strikingly different takes on the importance of memory for identity:

  1. In the film version of Allegiant (which proved, if nothing else, that sometimes it’s better to write just one book rather than making everything a trilogy), Four discovers that some children are going to have their memories wiped. He is horrified by this, and pleads,

  If you take away what they know, you take away who they are.

  

  2. When the Dollhouse’s madam Adelle Dewitt discovers Echo poking about some files, she says:
     

     This is Caroline. Minus the memories, but it’s her and this is exactly what Caroline would do.

  In the first case, memory maketh the man (or small child). Consistency in memory is crucial for persistence. That’s not to say that all of our memories must remain intact – that would be such a high bar to meet that Heraclitus (and Pocahontas) would have been right in their insistence that we can’t step in the same river twice…

  … not just because the river has changed, but because we have too. None of us would persist for very long at all.

  Instead, what is commonly thought to be required is some sort of continuity. Memory is a bit like a rope: not one continuous thread, but a series of short overlapping fibres wound together. My ten-year-old self remembered the antics of five-year-old me, my fifteen-year-old self the angst of ten-year-old me, and so on. If we suddenly underwent a total memory wipe, then, according to at least some views of persistence, we’d no longer be the same person.^[6]

  “If you take away what they know, you take away who they are.”

  In the Dollhouse case, by contrast, what matters is still psychological – Adelle doesn’t think that the blank-slate dolls are their former selves in any meaningful way, so bodily continuity isn’t enough – but something other than memory: dispositions, perhaps, or some feature of personality that guides behaviour at an instinctive level.

  In consuming fiction, we seem to adapt to whatever account of persistence the text throws at us: Wolverine loses his memories but keeps his claws, astonishing muscles, and aggression; Lindsay Lohan loses her entire body in Freaky Friday, but is still easily embarrassed by her mum; Buffy remains Buffy despite coming back from the dead. Twice.

  

  But finding the right answer to the persistence question matters, not only because it’s nice to know what sort of things make us ‘us’, but also because with new technological developments we might need to make tough decisions about what counts as surviving: if my brain is transplanted into another body, do I – the very same me – wake up in their skin? If I am vaporized in a teleporter in true ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ fashion and then reconstructed at the other end, do I survive the trip? If time travel involves disappearing at one time and instantaneously (from the perspective of the voyager) reappearing at another, can we be sure the time traveller is the same person? A time turner is a much scarier prospect if in using it I cease to exist.

  And if all of this seems far-fetched, then think about the more mundane, but hugely significant, ramifications persistence has for punishment and praise: what sense does it make to punish someone for a wrong they committed two weeks, years, or decades ago, if we can’t be sure they are the same person today? Is there any point to praising someone for the good they’ve done, or encouraging them to pursue such acts in future? We think that people do persist, at least some of the time, and perhaps that’s true... but if we’re going to be justified in attributing blame or credit, we better figure out how, and under what circumstances.

  

  What other interesting personal identity examples can you find in the games you play, books you read, or shows you watch? Let me know in the comments, or on facebook/tumblr/twitter.

  Footnotes

  [1] Michael Clark, Paradoxes from A-Z, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2007). Adapted from Hobbes, De Corpore Part 2, Chapter 11, section 7.

  [2] Eric T. Olson, Personal Identity, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/identity-personal/

  [3]The Trope Namer is Kafka's 1915 Novella Metamorphosis. Spoiler: contains a beetle.

  [4] Petrification is a common type of transformation where one’s survival is questioned – take the sun-drenched trolls in The Hobbit, or the victims of Medusa. A related trope occurs where characters are frozen or petrified, and then shattered.

  [5] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuestForIdentity

  [6] Oh you’ve scrolled down to the footnote! Well done you! Let me take the opportunity to encourage you to watch the anime Ergo Proxy. It’s great, trippy, and deals with memory in interesting ways. Off you go!

  ---

  References

  • Clark, M. Paradoxes from A-Z, Second Edition, London: Routledge, 2007.
  • Olson, E.T. Personal Identity, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/identity-personal/

  Further Reading

  If you're interested in the teleportation cases or psychological continuity, see Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, especially Chapters 10 and 12.

  Otherwise, for a comprehensive reading list, see the bibliography in Olson's Personal Identity.

  ]]> https://www.epicureancure.com/479/on-persistence-memory/feed/ 0 https://www.epicureancure.com/459/trope-alert-the-supernatural-detective/ https://www.epicureancure.com/459/trope-alert-the-supernatural-detective/#comments Fri, 10 Mar 2017 18:39:20 +0000 https://www.epicureancure.com/?p=459 You’ve got super powers. You’ve been bitten by a vampire, turned into a werewolf, woken up a zombie. But hey, you’ve still got to make a living. What are you going to do?

  Become a detective. Because obviously.

  There’s an uncanny number of private eyes with a dark background. And it’s frequently justified – these are characters who are up all hours, have connections to the underworld, and the ability to sneak or spy better than the average mortal. But rather than undertaking corporate espionage, writing crime novels, or planning weddings, they don a trilby, defeat the flim-flammer, and save a dame.

  Unsurprisingly, there are already a host of identified detective-related tropes. Today, though, we introduce a new one: The Supernatural Detective. The Supernatural Detective is different from the Occult Detective, who investigates the paranormal but may not be supernatural themselves…

  

  …but there is, as one might expect, some overlap (the more-than-human often encounter others like them).^[1] It includes, but is not limited to, the Vampire Detective Series. The Supernatural Detective is perhaps best understood as a subset of the Exotic Detective, where their unusual trait is specifically some supernatural characteristic. The crimes they solve may be mundane or mystical.

  An illustrative sample follows. Let us know your favourites, including those we haven’t mentioned, in the comments or on twitter/facebook/tumblr.

  The Vampire Detective

  As noted above, vampire detectives have a trope of their own:

  [T]his might be because vampires fit so easily into the Film Noir Private Detective with their tendency to be out at night, tendency to wear long coats, messy backstories, inevitable love difficulties, not-so-clean morality, and in some sense of the word, a drinking problem.^[2]

  Angel is the television exemplar – broody, dark, giving up the love of his undead existence, and in aesthetically film noir fashion (at least in season 1), using his powers to solve crime.

  

  The Werewolf Detective

  Need flexible working hours because you turn into a ravening monster at the full moon? No worries: become a detective. Larry Talbot – aka The Wolf Man – does just that in Neil Gaiman’s short stories Only the End of the World Again and Bay Wolf (an adaptation of Beowulf, as the name suggests).

  

  The Superhero Detective

  Although frequently male, the Supernatural Detective is not bound to a single gender. In both the comics and recent Netflix series, Jessica Jones – former superhero, with superhuman strength (and, in the comics at least, ability to fly) – works as a private investigator.

  

  And she’s not the only one. Marvel’s Jamie Madrox works as a PI in New York along with Wolfsbane and Strong Guy.

  But perhaps best of all, DC’s Detective Chimp solves crimes while wearing a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker hat, frequently assisted by the Bureau of Amplified Animals, including Rex the Wonder Dog. This stuff writes itself.

  

  The Lord of Hell Detective

  You’d think we were making it up, but no, even Lucifer gets a turn as a gumshoe. Based on Lucifer Morningstar from Sandman, and appearing in Vertigo’s Lucifer, the eponymous TV show follows the fallen angel as he “decides to help the LAPD Detective Chloe Decker solve homicides for his own amusement.”^[3]

  

  Lucifer isn’t the only divine being to get caught up in the PI business – in the manga (and anime adaptation) The Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, the Norse trickster opens the Enjyaku Detective Agency to investigate the paranormal (and y’know, collect evil auras that take over human hearts in order to return to Asgard. It’s important to have hobbies).

  

  The Zombie Detective

  In iZombie, the central character finds work at a morgue for a steady source of brains. ‘But that doesn’t sound like detective work!’, you exclaim.

  

  Suspend your disbelief, dear reader:

  Whenever Liv eats a dead person's brain, she temporarily inherits some of their personality traits and experiences flashbacks of their life. Those visions are generally triggered by sights (events or objects) or sounds (repeated sentences). In the case of murder victims, the flashbacks offer clues about their killers. Liv uses this new ability to help Police Detective Clive Babineaux solve the crimes, passing herself off as a psychic…^[4]

  A pseudo-psychic zombie two-for-one! Take that Simon Baker!

  

  (Also, here’s a fun fact: The Walking Dead was almost a zombie detective show – but with zombie crimes, rather than zombie detectives. The Master notes that, having recently reached Series 4, he “would not have made it that far through a Zombie detective series.”)

  The Extra Lucky Detective

  I was originally going to call this section ‘The Magical Detective’. After all, it would be strange to have even one example to put under such a specific heading, but to my surprise, here are two:

  

  John Constantine of DC Comics fame (played by Keanu in the movie) has a range of magical powers including “synchronicity wave travelling… an instinctual supernatural ability for Constantine to make his own luck.”^[5] Like Angel and Loki, he overlaps with the Occult Detective.

  More recently, Stan Lee’s The Lucky Man has appeared on television, starring a homicide detective that can ‘control luck’ thanks to an ancient magical bracelet….

  

  I guess the FFX-2 Lady Luck suits weren’t available. Shame – he would’ve looked dashing.

  

  ---

  So that’s it for our first serving of pop(culture)corn – I hope it proved a tasty morsel. Know of any other examples, or alternative employment opportunities for the charmed/cursed/divine? Tell us in the comments, or on facebook/twitter/tumblr.

  Footnotes

  [1] For more examples of occult detectives, see this list. Sometimes the two are conflated, e.g. http://www.tor.com/2016/10/12/supernatural-detectives-we-love-to-drag-into-trouble/

  [2] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VampireDetectiveSeries

  [3] http://lucifer.wikia.com/wiki/Lucifer_(TV_series). NB. Eating people’s brains (or other body parts) to inherit their powers or memories is itself a trope: the Cannibalism Superpower.

  [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IZombie_(TV_series)

  [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constantine#Powers_and_abilities

  ]]> https://www.epicureancure.com/459/trope-alert-the-supernatural-detective/feed/ 2 https://www.epicureancure.com/419/catherine-sangster-on-dictionaries-pronunciation-and-geekery-part-3/ https://www.epicureancure.com/419/catherine-sangster-on-dictionaries-pronunciation-and-geekery-part-3/#respond Sun, 26 Feb 2017 22:56:52 +0000 https://www.epicureancure.com/?p=419 Catherine Sangster is Head of Pronunciation for Oxford Dictionaries. Before moving into lexicography, she spent nine years in the BBC Pronunciation Unit, and completed a DPhil in sociolinguistics. Catherine's research interests include language and gender/sexuality, feminism, accents and dialects, Latin, Germanic languages, and the phonology of conlangs. In this final instalment, we discuss how dictionaries can be subversive, the connection between academia and fandom, and texts that do interesting things with language. You can find out more at Oxford Words, or keep up with Oxford Dictionaries on twitter @OxfordWords and @OED.

  This is Part 3. If you missed them, here is Part 1 and here is Part 2.

  ---

  TD: So, given that you can have multiple pronunciations of a word, and presumably multiple meanings of a word, is the continued existence of dictionaries – whether paper or digital – threatened by internet enterprises like Wiktionary or even the Urban Dictionary?

  CS: Dictionaries basically are becoming an online thing. The Oxford English Dictionary is an online entity; it does of course also exist in physical form, but in terms of the updates that happen to it, and the way that most people work with it and use it, it’s an online thing. Now the ones you mentioned are crowd-sourced. If they’re not the sort of sites that scrape dictionary content and then present it, a lot of them are crowd sourced. I think that contemporary dictionary producers are interested in crowd sourcing, but that there’s a value to expert editorial input to weigh things and to make sure that there’s a balance, and people aren’t creating things the way they wish they were, rather than the way things actually are.

  TD: That makes sense. Again, this is from the linguist, so do forgive me. Can dictionaries ever be subversive?

  CS: I’d say lexicographers can certainly be subversive, yeah! There’s not a lot of scope for subversion in the pronunciation part of a dictionary entry, although probably not none; the decision for instance to include the northern ‘A’ (bath, glass) [rhyming with ass, not arse] forms subverted the norm of giving only the close RP versions.

  In parts of the dictionary that aren’t my specialism I’m wary of speaking for my colleagues too much, but say you have a dictionary entry. As well as the pronunciation, part of speech, definition, and the etymology, you’d have some quotations or example sentences.

  

  CS: Those are drawn from massive corpora of real data –we don’t make them up, they just exist in the world and an editor picks a few to illustrate exactly how the word might be used. Now if you’re picking three from a hundred, in exercising that choice you might subvert people’s expectations. For instance if it were a word that was particularly associated with one sort of thing you might – and you’d do it partly for lexicographical reasons because you want to demonstrate the range – pick one that would surprise or upset expectations.
  I invited my colleague Fiona McPherson to weigh in on this, she says:

  The main purpose in selecting the quotation evidence is, course, to reflect the way the term you are defining is used. I’m looking for apt, clear examples which help the reader to understand, rather than baffle them – otherwise I’m not doing my job. In saying that, it is the one area where we can get a little creative. All other things being equal, I do get a kick out of choosing an example from one of my favourite books, or perhaps one that shows my football team in a good light. I do also enjoy choosing a publication that is more unusual – maybe something that is less canonical than those which spring to mind when you think of the OED. Working as I do with new words, you often get that opportunity as those publications tend to be where that type of vocabulary is found. But that is only possible if the quotation is one which aids understanding. That always has to be the main objective.

  TD: How would you explain the concept of a dictionary to an alien?

  CS: Well, what’s the alien’s language? Does the alien have language in the way we understand it?

  TD: Yes, let’s assume that there is some way to actually communicate with the alien.

  CS: Okay. I’m going to restrict myself to talking about the pronunciation bits of the dictionary.

  TD: Fair enough.

  CS: Assuming the alien had some language, and that their language was produced physiologically by some part of their alien anatomy, I would say: these symbols here, the transcription symbols, are just a sequential indication of which bit of your anatomy – which bit of alien anatomy – interacts with which other bit of alien anatomy, to produce the sound which combines to make the language.

  TD: That’s an excellent description!

  [CS laughs]

  TD: And probably helpful to non-aliens as well to be honest [laughs]. If you could bring any obsolete item of lexis back into popular use, what would it be?

  CS: Oooh. One of the nice things about OED is that nothing gets removed. There are a lot of entries in OED which are obsolete, but they won’t be expunged or deleted. I come across words a lot, actually, as I’m working through, and I think ‘oh that’s ripe for coming back’.

  TD: Linguistics questions aside, a couple of quick ones to end with. You mentioned you have a doctorate in sociophonetics, and obviously you have various academic interests. What role do you think academics can or should play in the production or consumption of geek culture?

  CS: I was thinking about this recently, because I was looking at the term aca-fan. Often people are very keen to draw distinctions, you know, ‘it’s not the same as being someone who is simultaneously a fan of something and an academic’. I don’t think there should be an artificial distinction; I don’t think that academics fundamentally think about things in a different way. We might give ourselves more space to pick things apart, or we might bring particular frameworks of thinking about something to bear on whatever our particular fandom might be, but I see it as organically belonging together. And I think really anybody can analyse, if you listen to people geeking out – so, I enjoy tabletop games, I enjoy comics books, I enjoy Buffy and various…

  TD: Anyone who doesn’t enjoy Buffy I don’t trust [she says, tongue in cheek].

  

  CS: Well thinking about Buffy as an example, I’ve watched Buffy for many years and talked about Buffy with many people, friends who are academics and not, including people who were academically working on Buffy and not, and I don’t see a fundamental difference. You can pull it apart on gender lines, you can see things on a subsequent watching you hadn’t seen before, and that might be informed by your academic work or your readings or but those aren’t things that are locked up in the ivory tower especially, or they shouldn’t be.

  TD: That’s a great answer. One of the things we do on the site quite a lot is talk about tropes. Do you have a favourite trope?

  CS: Tropes are one of the things that feed a lot of the potential new additions to the dictionary in the areas I look at. Often they’re fairly niche and specific, and so they might not make it over the hurdle to get included. Something like 'Mary Sue' for instance as a trope, or 'Sexy Lamp Test' is certainly something that we’re looking at. I was trying to pin down a definition of Strong Female Character recently – the thing with tropes is that they’re really slippery. You know exactly what you mean by them, but they can be hard to nail down. I don’t think I have a favourite one; I’m very interested in them, and it’s fun to spot them, but I don’t think there’s a particular one that’s my favourite one of all.

  TD: Are there any that you would like to stop seeing?

  CS: Oh plenty! I’m trying to think of things I’ve watched recently.

  TD: I know as soon as one puts that hat on then it’s just easy to get ragey about all the many things that they should really stop doing…

  CS: When I think about tropes that really annoy me, it often boils down to limitations placed on female characters, of one sort of another.

  TD: Agreed. Finally, do you have any recommendations for our readers: films to watch, TV series you’ve loved, books to read, or other recommendations?

  CS: Oooh. I’ll pick ones that do interesting things with language…

  TD: That would be great.

  CS: Ok, a comic book – I’m sure many of your readers will already be familiar with it, but Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga series does really interesting things with language. It uses an existing invented language for one of its languages – Esperanto – and I’m very interested how languages get used in graphic novels in different ways. So yeah, Saga would be one.

  

  I wouldn’t say I’d wholeheartedly recommend it for various reasons, but there’s lot of interesting language stuff in Game of Thrones, and I do enjoy watching it, and problematising it as we academics love to.

  I enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general, and there are some cool language things that go on for instance in Captain America: Civil War. I mentioned Scarlet Witch already, but also Zemo, Bucky and of course Black Panther with the Xhosa. I spoke about some of that at Nine Worlds this year. Agents of SHIELD has some nice language and translation bits too.

  I’m trying to think if there are any board games with really good pronunciation dimensions to them but not among the ones I love, really. Although the word ‘meeple’ – which is a little character figure from a board game – is finding its way into the dictionary.

  TD: Oh that’s cool.

  CS: Well we’re seeing what we can do.

  TD: Thank you very much for a really interesting chat!

  CS: Thank you!

  

  NB. This interview has been edited for clarity.

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  This is the third in a series of interviews with authors, developers, critics, journalists, and academics. If you'd like to make a suggestion, or be interviewed, do get in touch.

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