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.
  ]]> 0 The Doctor http://www.stephrennick.com https://www.epicureancure.com/?p=479 2017-08-11T20:47:42Z 2017-03-17T18:00:13Z
  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.

  ]]> 0 The Doctor http://www.stephrennick.com https://www.epicureancure.com/?p=459 2017-08-11T20:45:20Z 2017-03-10T18:39:20Z
  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

  ]]> 2 The Doctor http://www.stephrennick.com https://www.epicureancure.com/?p=419 2017-08-11T21:24:42Z 2017-02-26T22:56:52Z
  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.

  ---

  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.

  ]]> 0 The Doctor http://www.stephrennick.com http://www.epicureancure.com/?p=365 2017-08-11T20:38:05Z 2017-02-14T16:58:36Z
  There has been a lot of talk about The Six Thatchers – opening episode of Sherlock season four: disappointment, glee, parallels drawn to a certain besuited agent with a license to kill. Gatiss even wrote a poem. But there is one part of the episode that hasn’t received attention, and it’s about time it did (never fear, I’ll avoid spoilers – at least until the end).

  

  Near the beginning of The Six Thatchers, Sherlock tells a story. It’s a retelling, in fact, of W. Somerset Maugham’s own retelling of an old Arab fable. Maugham’s version goes like this:

  There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks, and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. The merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd, and he came to me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture”, I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”^[1]

  Commonly this tale is cited as an exemplar of fatalism: no matter what the servant does, it seems, death will find him. Inevitable, predestined – two words that the Holmes brothers use in their discussion of the tale. The villain of the episode references it too:

  “I’m just like the merchant in the story, I thought I could out-run the inevitable. I’ve always been looking over my shoulder, always expecting to see the grim figure of… Death.”

  But it’s not that the servant is doomed to be taken that evening no matter what he does; he is doomed because of what he does. He sees Death, believes he’s in trouble, and acts on that belief – his death is the result. We might think that if he had not been so certain – or if his Master had refused to lend the horse, or he’d been slower on the road – his fate may have been different.

  This isn’t unusual in fiction: characters giving weight to a prophecy is often what makes it come true. In Kung Fu Panda, Master Oogway has a vision in which the villainous Tai Lung escapes from his prison. To prevent the vision coming true, Shifu sends a bird to the prison to increase security, thereby providing Tai Lung with the means of escape: a feather for a lock pick. It’s not that Tai Lung’s escape was inevitable, although we might feel fatalistic were we in Shifu’s shoes (well, closed-toe sandals). (There's more to say here, but we’ll investigate other common features of self-fulfilling prophecies in a future instalment.)

  

  Throughout The Six Thatchers we return to the story of the servant in Samarra. We learn from Mycroft that Sherlock doesn’t put much stock in the fatalistic conclusion:

  M: You always hated that story as a child. Less keen on predestination back then.

  S: I’m not sure I like it now.

  M: You wrote your own version, as I remember. Appointment In Sumatra. The merchant goes to a different city and is perfectly fine.

  S: Goodnight Mycroft.

  M: Then he becomes a pirate, for some reason.

  (Vague hints that might constitute a spoiler follow)

  I’m on the side of young Sherlock – Samarra was a choice, not an inevitability. To deny this cheapens the very important choice made at the climax of the episode, and the character who made it, riding to Samarra with eyes wide open.

  

  There’s a sense in which we all get to Samarra eventually, of course. But until then I’m with Rincewind from Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, who, upon being told by Death that he’s expected soon in Psephopololis, simply declines to be there:

  “But that’s five hundred miles away!’

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME, THE WHOLE SYSTEM’S GOT SCREWED UP AGAIN, I CAN SEE THAT. LOOK, THERE’S NO CHANCE OF YOU-?

  Rincewind backed away, hands spread protectively in front of him…

  ‘Not a chance!’

  I COULD LEND YOU A VERY FAST HORSE.

  ‘No!’

  IT WON’T HURT A BIT.

  ‘No!’ Rincewind turned and ran. Death watched him go, and shrugged bitterly.”^[2]

  

  Footnotes

  [1]W. Somerset Maugham, “An Appointment in Samarra” from Sheppey (1933)

  [2] Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic, (London: Transworld, 1983), pp. 77-78

  ]]> 0 The Doctor http://www.stephrennick.com http://www.epicureancure.com/?p=354 2017-08-11T20:36:51Z 2016-11-23T22:45:23Z
  Some time ago I started to write a piece on Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats. It began:

  I don’t write reviews, and I don’t read non-fiction. Neither of these things are strictly true, of course: this is a review of sorts. And philosophy is, at least occasionally, non-fiction.

  I still mean to finish it, once I get my thoughts in order about fiction, truth, and the relation between the two. In the meantime, here’s another not-quite-a-review, or at least very-partial-rather-short-and-only-focussing-on-specific-details-review. It concerns the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) Cymbeline, which is running in London for another few weeks, and which I heartily recommend you see, if you can.

  

  Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s weirder plays. The RSC describe it as the “rarely performed romance of power, jealousy, and a journey of love and reconciliation.”^[1] Depending on who you ask, it’s billed as a tragedy, a romance, or a comedy. It’s all three, in its way.

  The original is set in Ancient Britain, with the latter ruled by the eponymous Celtic King, vassal of the Roman Empire. The RSC’s version turns this on its head, setting the events in a dystopian near-future, and casting women in many of the originally male roles. If you’re not familiar with the play going in you mightn’t notice – it just works. These aren’t merely cross-cast roles: that is, it’s not that female actors are playing male characters. Rather the characters themselves have been genderflipped, a male heir becomes a female heir, a male servant a female servant, and so on (think Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck in the new Battlestar Galactica, rather than Margaret Cho’s Kim Jong-il in 30 Rock). Most striking is the gender flip of Cymbeline – now Queen of Britain – and the formerly wicked stepmother, now the Duke.

  

  This choice subverts our expectations, and calls into question the tropes we take for granted. As director Melly Still puts it:

  I love wicked stepmothers in fairy tales. But Cymbeline is more than a fairy tale – it’s a thriller, epic and mythic. Hopefully this interpretation of the Queen as the Duke allows us to focus on his actions rather than his type. It sharpens the audience’s eyes to who he is: this is a man who is obsessively power hungry and loves his son beyond reason.^[2]

  Cymbeline’s ability to rule does not derive from masculinity, and the Duke’s villainy isn’t reduced to the plotting of a power-hungry woman. The audience is confronted with characters, not merely stereotypes.

  The play is brutal, bizarre, and in unexpected moments, laugh-out-loud funny (with the addition of musical numbers an unexpected delight).^[3] You can find more information (including an actual plot synopsis, which I’m told is a staple of most reviews), on the official RSC site.

  

  Footnotes

  [1] RSC, “About the play” https://www.rsc.org.uk/cymbeline/about-the-play.

  [2] Cymbeline programme, 2016

  [3] In particular, Marcus Griffiths was hilarious as Cloten, Oliver Johnstone wonderfully despicable as Iachimo, and Natalie Simpson a standout as Guideria.

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