“Through an Orb Darkly”: Doctor Strange and the Journey to Knowledge

The next essay in “Doctor Strange and Philosophy” is “Through an Orb Darkly”:  Doctor Strange and the Journey to Knowledge by Armond Boudreaux.  This explores a storyline in the Doctor Strange comics where in order to hunt down the kidnapper of Clea Strange ends up inside an orb where he cannot trust any of his senses and has no idea what is or isn’t real, and Boudreaux explores what epistemologies he could appeal to in order to gain knowledge.

He explores empiricism and then rationalism, which raises a question that I’ve talked about in the past, which is as those two views were the main competitors for a long time in analytic philosophy which of them, if any, actually won.  If you listen to the scientifically minded, it seems like empiricism won and rationalism lost, given that science and most of our knowledge-seeking methods rely on empirical methods and gaining knowledge from the armchair without appealing to “the real world” is denigrated.  And yet while I was taking a linguistics course as part of my Cognitive Science studies the professor there declared that rationalism was the clear winner.  And since neither of them seem to be able to tell us whether there actually is an external world or not, maybe neither of them have actually managed to win after all.

If we can interpret rationalism as the claim that there are at least some true propositions that we can know the truth of without appealing to empirical knowledge, it looks like rationalism has indeed won.  As Boudreaux himself noted, it doesn’t look like we go out in the world and put together two objects and two objects and count them to get four objects to justify that 2+2=4.  We can prove that and all systematic mathematical truths through appealing to the mathematical systems that we construct without caring about their instantiations in the world or even without knowing whether or not they have instantiations in the world.  So the normal course is more likely to be us inventing mathematical or geometric systems and then looking to see if the world conforms to them rather than the other way around.  It seems clear that there is knowledge about the world that we can’t get without looking at the world at all, but it does seem like there are propositions that we can come to know the truth of without appealing to empirical data.  This has generally led those of the scientistic bent to claim that the important knowledge that we can and must determine empirically is what counts, and in some cases is even what counts as truth and knowledge entirely.  But it does seem like all conceptual truths cannot be known empirically, are truths, and are important ones given that they would at least underlie all mathematical truths.  It does seem, however, like the truths that Strange would need in this situation are empirical, not conceptual.

Which leads to Bourdeaux’s segue to Descartes, whose examinations are probably more relevant to Strange’s situation, as his entire schtick was to doubt everything he could and end at an at least mostly conceptual truth — I think, therefore I am — and then try to build back up to trusting one’s senses — and so justifying empiricism — on logically certain steps that could not reasonably be doubted.  As Bourdeaux notes, he ultimately had to appeal to God and His nature as an entity that would not deceive us — based on either an Ontological Argument or on a Thomistic one — to do that.  As has been noted, the issue is that it is not necessarily unreasonable to doubt whether any kind of God exists, and one can challenge his claim that such a God couldn’t be a deceiver, so it doesn’t quite seem to work without at least a lot more effort.  Bourdeaux notes that Strange has someone that he can more or less trust — Agamotto — but we are not really in that case.  So how could that work for us?

Well, the first thing to note is that we have rejected Descartes’ insistence that knowledge must be certain and proceed by certain steps that we cannot reasonably doubt.  All we need is to be justified, as I noted not too long ago.  Given this, we can accept that we could be wrong about there being an external world or that our senses are accurate and still claim that we can reasonably claim that we know the things our senses reveal to us.  This, then, would give us the proper contrast between empirical examination and conceptual analysis:  the latter is more certain but can apply to all possible worlds — as they describe concepts which are generally used to identify things in the world — and so it is difficult for us to demonstrate that the concepts do apply, at least as described, to this world, like is the case for mathematical systems, while the former definitely seems to appeal to the world we experience, but is more dubious and so is less reliable, and could be totally illusory.

We can’t really appeal to Cartesian certainty to justify the external world, because there would always be too much doubt to justify that move.  But could we move from a mostly conceptual truth to an at least reasonable justification?  Perhaps we could move from “I think, therefore I am” to “I am experiencing things” to “I seem to be able to take actions that impact those experiences” to then argue for a pragmatic answer:  all the evidence I have of the world of experience are those experiences.  Those experiences seem at least at first glace to be of an external world.  When I act as per those experiences, the experiences act as I would expect from the world of experiences as given.  It is also the case that those experiences seem to indicate an external world.  So can I not claim that my senses are both giving me a view of an external world and an accurate view of it unless I have reason to think that they aren’t, in the sense that things are inconsistent in a way that violates the basic conceptual truths that I must accept (like, as Boudreaux notes, the Law of Non-Contradiction)?  After all, this is what clues Strange in to the world inside the Orb being an illusion, as people who should know him don’t and they don’t act consistently with what he knows of them.  Then could someone who wants to challenge the examples of the Brain in a Vat or of us being in the Matrix not say that the person who brings that up would need to show what sort of evidence or inconsistencies we should expect to see in such a situation?  If there are some, then we should go and investigate them, and if there aren’t any then we seem to still be justified in trusting our experiences because they could not have given us a real reason to doubt then other than by raising the possibility that they are incorrect … which, by this notion of knowledge, we already knew.

So perhaps that’s the way to escape the conundrum here:  to reduce the challenge to one that merely says that our senses could be wrong and there might not be an external world out there, or it may not be at all like our experience tells us it is.  But outside of Cartesian certainty the fact that we could be wrong about the things we claim to know does not mean that we are not justified in believing them or even claiming to know those things.  And since all we want is knowledge, until we have good reason to think that we actually are in the Matrix, we are justified in saying that we know we aren’t.  And, again, that’s all we really want to be able to say.

Thoughts on “Cannibal Ferox”

This is the first of two cannibal-themed movies, both from an earlier time.  I am not a big fan of the cannibal genre — as my horror preferences tend towards the supernatural — and this movie might well be a giallo, which I am also not fond of, so let’s see what I thought of this one.

The movie starts with a guy looking for someone else to try to get a fix and being shot by some drug dealing criminals, with the police then investigating the death and mistaking him from that missing drug dealer.  Then we move to some South American country where we follow a woman, her brother, and their friend or whatever.  She’s come here to do research for her doctoral dissertation where she argues that cannibalism was never something that was practiced and so was an invention, by investigating what I guess would be a famously documented case of it and proving that it was false.  They head off into the jungle and get their jeep stuck in a swamp, and then have to hike out to the river, where they stumble across the drug dealer and his associate fleeing from the village they set out to find, with claims that the natives killed the guide who brought them there.  As it turns out, the drug dealer was the one who got that guy killed and first practiced the cannibalism, which seems to prove the woman’s point.  The other guy is dying and so they hole up in the village for a while as the older people in the village are just scared of them, but the drug dealer and the friend taunt and end up killing a young woman and they are then captured, with the drug dealer being singled out to be punished for that.  The brother tries to escape but while crouching in the water to hide is killed by piranha, the drug dealer is castrated — like he did to the guide — and then killed, the friend is also killed, leaving only the woman.  One of the natives that they were friendly to helps her escape, but is killed by traps, but eventually makes it back to the river and is picked up by some poachers.  She then returns to the city and presents her dissertation proving her point, but is clearly traumatized by the incident and in order to not contradict her thesis claims that the rest of the party were killed by the canoe capsizing, which is the story the natives told to the girlfriend of the drug dealer when she came to look for him.

The drug dealer is a completely unsympathetic and unlikable character, but he does get his comeuppance in the end.  The others are in general more likable, which means that we want to follow them along in their story and also want to see them survive, which makes it a bit of a Downer Ending that most of them don’t, but the main character who does survive is nice enough that we can be happy that she does survive.  It is a bit ambiguous as to whether she is completely lying about proving that her thesis was correct or if her statement earlier that they only adopted any kind of cannibalism was because of the influence of the “civilized” drug dealer, who did the very thing they end up doing to him.  This theme was the more interesting part and it made me wonder if, at the end, the rather shady characters who picked her up would end up killing her or doing something else “uncivilized” to prove the point, since they would have had no reason than the greed they already expressed whereas the natives, at least, could be acting out of a sense of justice.  But her surviving is a happier ending, at least.

Aside from that, if you like gory horror — and I’m not really a fan — there is sufficient gore in the movie, although most of it is against animals which may or may not be a good thing depending on your tastes.  I also found the police sequences rather pointless and uninteresting, as they culminate in the police at least chasing the men away from the girlfriend, but all that does is free her up to chase her boyfriend, and we could have had many other reasons for that to happen, and even that only gets the excuse of the canoe capsize into the picture, which was unnecessary.  However, those scenes are relatively short and the interactions among the main group in the jungle are interesting enough to carry things along when we get back to them.

Because the main characters are mostly likable and sympathetic, I didn’t want bad things to happen to them and so was able to maintain an interest in the movie for its run time.  But there isn’t really much to the movie aside from that and the hints about the nature of cannibalism itself, which nothing is really done with.  As such, this movie actually ends up being a more traditional “I could watch it again but am not sure when I would” movie:  it was interesting enough and doesn’t try to do too much, and so that it doesn’t manage to do all that much doesn’t count against it.  Ultimately, it was all right, but nothing special, even if you like those sorts of movies.

Additional Thoughts on “Conception Plus”

I don’t intend to make my thoughts on this game a weekly thing, but I managed to get in a few more sessions than normal at this game and found out some things that I wanted to talk about.

Most of these involve how there are a few more mechanisms than I originally gave it credit for.  As I’ve read elsewhere, Speed is indeed the stat to rule them all as it lets you move earlier, which is important for damaging and killing things before they can kill or attack you.  However, it’s also really, really important for positioning, which is making sure that the things you don’t want to get hit aren’t in a position to get hit.  I had a couple of wipes in the harder zodiac dungeon that I finished — once when I had to suck up it returning me to the surface and losing a week, and once where I just reloaded — and both times my positioning was the problem, where my main character was in a bad position and so attacked more often than was entirely healthy and before he could be healed or react properly.  And then when I finally got to the boss of that dungeon I managed to beat it on the first try, where I had one group of Star Children Mechunite — turn into a big mech — and use their bond power to wipe out the helpers and then use regular skills with the help of the main character to finish off the big boss.  The boss tended to attack the main character and hit pretty hard, but did just low enough damage for the main character to survive the attack, and then I had one group of Star Children simply use a potion that restores full health to me every turn — I had lots because you get them while grinding and I grind a lot — until the big boss went down.  But that was only possible because I moved everyone else to attack the helpers and so be away from the big boss — including the main character — leaving the mech to attack to avoid multi-group attacks from hurting everyone else.  So strategies like that are things that I will have to pay attention to going forward.

There’s also more to managing your groups of Star Children than I originally thought and normally did.  I started out balancing the groups having at least one cleric and one magician in each and then not repeating characters, but as they hit their max levels I swapped out and since more classes had opened up I didn’t manage to balance that as well.  So I don’t think that I have the teams balanced that well, but I’m not really working on that right now.  What I had been doing wrong was swapping in Star Children haphazardly instead of going for the ones with the highest max levels, which meant that I had to keep swapping them out after every run, which meant more grinding than I probably needed.  And the grinding is very, very boring, so that’s something that I want to avoid, although I need to grind up a set of something like three of them from level 1 for the next dungeon.  Yay.

The interactions with the Star Maidens are all right.  There are too many of them to level them all up equally, so I’ve been mostly focusing on my favourites, but you can only level them up so far before having to clear another dungeon to advance them further, which means that interacting with them doesn’t do you much good other than giving you bond points — used to Mechunite and to produce new Star Children — so that gives some room to focus on the others.  Once you fill one of the levels, you need to Classmate with them to get a scene to allow you to advance further, which also opens up new scenes.  There are also story scenes every time you finish a dungeon as well as special events, and the game tends to match you up with various Star Maidens based on your level with them, at one point definitely asking me to choose to listen to the ones that I had a higher bond with and at one point seemingly choosing those who I had lower levels with to give me the chance to advance my levels with them.  It’s an okay system and is definitely deeper than that of the Personas, but doesn’t quite have its charm.

So far, I’m still enjoying the game enough despite the grinding to fight my way through it, but the grinding is annoying enough that I am hoping to finish it sooner rather than later.

Thoughts on “Warehouse 13”

How I ended up purchasing this one is interesting.  There is a store that sells all sorts of CDs and DVDs and the like, and its in a mall near where I used to live which also happens to be an area that I wander around to every couple of months.  In browsing their shelves of box sets of TV shows, I was in a purchasing mood and came across it, with the premise sounding interesting and the price being reasonable.  However, I knew nothing about it and had never heard of it before, and in fact from what I recall I think I thought it was a British series, but decided to get it anyway.  In a burst of trying to clear out the DVDs that I had bought a long time ago but had never really watched, I decided to give it a try.

The premise of the series is this:  Secret Service agents Pete Lattimer and Myka Bering are trying to protect the President at an event when it gets disrupted by a very strange event that is driven by some sort of strange artifact.  Soon afterwards, they find themselves reassigned to the middle of nowhere to “Warehouse 13”, a strange, otherworldly storage centre for the strange and otherworldly.  They join with the sole remaining agent and day-to-day caretaker Artie, Mrs. Frederick who is herself strange and otherworldly and is joined in a strange and otherworldly way to the warehouse itself, and soon after super-hacker Claudia to go and track down these artifacts that can do wonderful things … but almost always have a rather nasty side effect or else can easily be used to do nasty things as well.  Later, they are joined by Steve who has the ability to tell when people are lying, which combines with Pete’s ability to have intuitive “vibes” and Myka’s ability to notice all the little details of things.

The oddest thing for me about the series was that while I enjoyed watching the main characters I didn’t actually like their characters.  The issue is not that I didn’t like their characters, but more that I didn’t feel that they were characters.  Other than that Pete has vibes, is a womanizer, and is goofy, and that Myka is serious and well-read — because her father owns a bookstore — they don’t really tell us much about them, or at least not in a developed way.  In fact, my impression of them was generally that they acted the way the writers needed them to act, and not really in a way that reflected their characters, beyond those very broad details described above.  So I ended up realizing that I liked the performers and their performances better than the characters that they were performing as, as their banter and interactions worked, but again not as character interactions but instead as performances.

I also found the character of Claudia a problem.  The issue was that every time I started to like her she’d do something that I found really annoying and lose all of that good will.  The issue was that she was a younger and less experienced member of the team and so had that sense of wide-eyed wonder and enthusiasm for the project that the others, at least, didn’t bother to show most of the time, although Pete usually and Myka commonly did express a thrill with the situations and the artifacts.  So her enthusiasm fit well and made her interesting.  But every time she did stuff like that she would eventually show off her smugness and arrogance, which was annoying.  And the fact that the show seemed to want to go along with her on that didn’t help, as she became a far better hacker than Artie who had been doing it before that — which was not unreasonable — but also being far better at anything with the technology as well, inventing new technologies out of the old ones and organizing the technologies managing the warehouse as well.  And she also had a huge destiny as she was tagged to replace Mrs. Frederick as caretaker as well, and she rarely seemed fazed by it or ever really shown that she didn’t really know anything.  Thus, when her elements as Artie’s surrogate daughter were highlighted, she was interesting, but when her uber-competent person of destiny elements were highlighted, she was annoying.  Even at the end where they show her actually taking on Mrs. Frederick’s position she comes across as more smug than Mrs. Frederick, who came across as knowing and in control but not smug and arrogant.  I think the performance was okay, but the character was weak.

This was actually a bit of a trend, as they introduced the character of H.G. Wells and gender-swapped her to being a woman, and then made her excessively skilled in all ways as well.  But she ended up being only a minor character and was a villain at one point, so that was a bit more tolerable.  Myka was also hyper-competent at times, but a lot of this ultimately followed from her being more serious than Pete.  Ultimately, for everyone except Claudia, the hyper-competent female trope was used but overshadowed by the less serious nature of the plots, and the fact that every character had their own skills, with Artie just simply knowing more about this stuff than the agents.

The show also wasted a good character in Leena, who ran the Bed and Breakfast that they stayed at, organized most of the warehouse, and did that because she could see auras and used that to help keep the agents on an even keel.  I liked the character, but they never really did much with her until they ended up killing her off.  Then they brought in a new character to — briefly — do the same thing, and she was played by Kelly Hu which I had to admit was a good change, but she got more play in a few short episodes than Leena did in the entire previous seasons, which was kinda a slap in the face to people, like me, who liked Leena and wished they’d done more with her.

The show was also a reference gold mine, as they brought in a lot of well-known actors to play parts and made references to them, with Simon and Kaylee from Firefly playing a couple, Kate Mulgrew playing Pete’s mother and called “Jane”, and Amy Acker and James Marsters playing roles as well, with Marsters playing an immortal.  Artie is also the guy who captured data for his collection, and CCH Pounder who played Mrs. Frederick was the voice of Amanda Waller in Justice League.  These did add to the show as we recognize the actors.

The show itself was generally light and entertaining much of the time, with a lot of goofiness.  This goofiness really, really worked.  The same can’t be said for their more serious storylines, which ended up being acceptable at best and unimpressive at worst.  Since the seasons were also quite short, their more serious arcs also often ended quite quickly, which would be an issue except, again, the goofier and more standalone episodes just worked so much better than them that getting them over with quickly worked so much better.

After about the first season I knew that this one was going into my closet of shows to rewatch at some point, barring it getting really stupid, which it never did.  For the most part, for all its flaws, it was just really, really entertaining, and that’s something that I haven’t seen in a long time, a long time.  So I will definitely rewatch this at some point.

Up next is “The Magicians”, from the same channel — Syfy — but that seems significantly different.  Let’s see how this one works.

NHL Playoff Predictions: Round 3

Well, thankfully I at least didn’t go with a straight “home ice advantage” set of picks, because that allowed me to go 2 – 2 in the second round for an overall record of 8 – 4, since every team with home ice advantage lost leaving home ice advantage with a 6 – 6 record.  Will that trend continue?

Eastern Conference:

Florida vs Carolina:  Florida has looked vulnerable in the first two rounds and has struggled more than one might expect from them.  They seem to have some injuries.  On the other hand, Carolina has pretty much done what everyone has expected them to do.  And yet, Florida are the defending champions and seem to know how to raise their game when they need to, while Carolina has yet to prove themselves a playoff ready team.  So I’m going to go with Florida for this one.

Western Conference:

Edmonton vs Dallas:  Dallas has had a more difficult time with the teams they had to face, although I guess it could be argued that they faced overall stronger teams.  Meanwhile, Edmonton made the finals last year and took it to game 7.  There were some concerns about their weaknesses, but they’ve been able to work their way through it, and their stars are playing well.  At some point, you kinda have to believe that they are for real and can pull it off.

Summary:

Eastern Conference:

Florida vs Carolina

Western Conference:

Edmonton vs Dallas

Overall Record:  8 – 4
Home Ice Advantage Record:  6 – 6

Zoe Herriot Diary: Mission to the Unknown

It was a surprisingly short time before I was given my first assignment.  And I think my … interactions with that Intelligence clerk or whatever came back to bite me, because while he said he was just going to give me weapons that were simple to use, at the end of it all he gave me pretty much every weapon in existence.  While it’s always nice to have tactical options, carrying all of those weapons around at once is a bit of a strain, as you might imagine.

The other thing was that they said that I had to mask my accent.  I asked them “What accent?”, since I spoke the same way they all did, but somehow the way people in the Empire spoke actually caused them to stand out from most other people in the galaxy, which I found decidedly strange.  I also got some sort of visceral fear reaction to the idea, although I couldn’t imagine from where, as I had the sense that trying to adopt that specific accent had not gone well for someone in the past.  But it was either adopt the accent or risk having my cover blown and so getting killed, so reluctantly I practiced the accent for a while until I could manage it well enough.

The mission was on the planet of Hutta, which is pretty much a rancid swamp, but it also was the main and preferred planet of the Hutts, who dominated a number of criminal organizations across the galaxy.  The Empire wanted to recruit them in their struggle against the Republic, and I was to take on the role of a notorious pirate called the “Red Blade”.  When I asked what would happen if the real Blade showed up, my contact said that no one had seen the real Blade for ages and so that was unlikely to happen.  Again, I had a visceral fear reaction, as if I had heard that before and it had never turned out well, but ultimately with little choice I adopted the role and met with the lieutenant of the prominent Nem’ro the Hutt, who was perceived as being open to joining the Empire, and the lieutenant — Kerrals — was even more leaning towards the Empire.  After retrieving some gifts for Nem’ro that had been stolen from my contact — another reason that his assurances that he had the whole “Red Blade” business under control were not all that reassuring — I was introduced to Nem’ro and discovered that he had a rival that was leaning on him, and so my job was to topple his rival.

Ultimately, my cover didn’t last all that long, although I’m not sure if that was my fault or my contact’s.  A Rattataki criminal called Kaliyo Djannis seems to have picked up on our mission and eventually pushed the issue, so Keeper, the head of Imperial Intelligence — who for some reason was giving me the mission details and was handling the mission instead of employing a Watcher to do it — decided to bring her in on things.  I do not care for Kaliyo, as she is excessively self-interested and often psychopathic, and is not at all shy about sharing her opinions with me.  I expect that these clashes will only get worse as our association continues, but at least she is likely to simply bail on me when things get too strict and wander off to find something more interesting.  But I’ll have to be on my guard with her.

And as it turns out, the nature of the Empire provided another complication.  Just as Kerrals supported the Empire, so did his sons.  And in attempting to make contact with the Empire, they ran across a Sith who was, well, about as psychotic as Kaliyo, killing one and wounding the other.  When Kerrals found out about this, it was feared, he would scuttle any attempts to have Nem’ro ally with the Empire.  Keeper directed me to eliminate Kerrals and blame it on the Republic, but he had played too fairly with me to do that to him, so instead I warned him of the issues and told him to abandon his position here and go to be with his son.  This then allowed me to fake the attempt and finally convince Nem’ro to ally with the Empire.

On the way out, another complication.  It turns out that the Red Blade had actually showed up and was looking for the person who was impersonating him.  This could have been embarrassing, but fortunately he was of the “Shoot first, think later” variety and so tried to kill me, which allowed me to end his potential threat to my mission.  Perhaps it’s a bit callous to say that fortunately I had to kill someone to keep my cover, but it was more fortunate than any of the alternatives, as the Hutts are not exactly forgiving or merciful.

Anyway, with my mission accomplished I was directed to return to Dromund Kaas to take up more “normal” duties.  Another visceral feeling assures me that my duties are likely to be anything but.

Can We Really Conclude that Women Lack Empathy?

I’ve talked a little bit about things that Vox Day has said in the past, and after it was down for a while it seems that he ended up returning, and also has a Substack called Sigma Game about his theory of the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy, where he posted this post reiterating what he himself notes is a long-held belief of his that women, at least in general, completely lack empathy.  I’ve talked about empathy before, studying it as part of my philosophical work, and had to admit that I share the reaction to his post and arguments that that doesn’t seem particularly credible.  So this post is going to examine why.

Day makes this distinction in a comment:

Empathy = understanding how the other person feels in his situation.

Projection = understanding how you would feel in the other person’s situation.

Notice that “putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes” could be interpreted either way, but most people will understand it to mean the latter.

From the post and his other comments, he thinks that women engage in the latter and not the former.  I think there’s some truth to this, but not as much truth as Day wants there to be.  And a big part of that is my reaction to the examples of a lack of female empathy given in his post:

• One Saturday, years ago, I was outside cutting grass and trimming the bushes, while my wife was cleaning and sweeping in the house. After a couple of hours I came inside and was greeted by being yelled at for not helping clean in the house. I said, “Didn’t you see that I’ve been outside cutting grass and doing the yard work?” Her response was, ” But I don’t care about that.” I’ve never forgotten that moment.
  …
• My work mate was at a shopping center on a day off. Dropped into say hi to his wife that works in a dress shop. While there he got dizzy and grabbed his chest in pain and said he was having a heart attack. Her response… “Get out of the shop, don’t do it in here”….. Fortunately a center security guard called him an ambulance out in the mall.

There are a number of others, but most of them are commentaries on the purported phenomenon as opposed to straight examples.  But these are the two that most stand out to me.  The former stands out because it does seem to be a typical example — if rather more blunt than normal — of such a conversation between men and women, and so is something that would fit into projection which is something that I’ll talk about in a minute.  But the latter stands out because if it is a real reaction it is rather atypical.  I don’t know too many women who would be that callous.  This follows on with another example:

The ex that desperately needs this message would have absolutely crucified me if i told her to watch this video. Same woman who got mad and stormed out on me when my best friend died because i was “making the night all about me”.

For the most part, both the stereotypical ideas of women and my experience with women has been that they generally would not do that, unless he had been really, really overdoing it.  In fact, examples like this are fairly common in the Buzzfeed lists of terrible spouses/significant others that I sometimes read while waiting for things to compile/install (I get that sort of news from Yahoo News, which has a plethora of those things and since some of them are interesting I read some and so get more now) … most often from women.  And I find them confusing in that case as well, but it does fit the stereotype more of the uncaring man — except for the “making the night all about me”, which traditional men would never say — than of women.  So the extreme examples strike me as being people who are in some way exceptionally lacking in empathy to an extreme degree … to a degree that people on the autistic spectrum, who have issues with empathy as a diagnostic trait would usually manage to avoid making such statements.

There’s a reason for that, which I’ll get into in a moment, but first I need to outline my own view of empathy.  In line with Day, I start with a distinction, but not the one he starts with:

• Cognitive empathy is knowing what other people are feeling.
• Affective empathy is feeling what other people are feeling.

Now, if your affective empathy is working, then if you feel what other people are feeling then you would also know what they are feeling.  Note that this is not the same thing as sympathy, although some definitions might consider it such, and the reason for that is the basis of the post of mine that I linked above, which is that for the most part when we try to do “mind-reading” (ie figure out what someone else is thinking) our underlying mechanism for that seems to be “Simulation Theory” as opposed to “Theory-Theory”.  In “Theory-Theory” what we would do is reason out what someone would be thinking in that situation, while with “Simulation Theory” we would instead put ourselves in that situation and run things forward to see how we would feel in that situation, with appropriate adjustments for it being someone else in a different situation than we are in to make it work.  And in that case just as we would when we are engaged in watching a movie we would also share their emotions.  So if our simulation is working properly, we would feel what they are feeling in the situation, and then by reading that off we would thus know what they are feeling.  So the simulation would produce affective empathy which would then produce cognitive empathy.  Note that this process is subconscious and so we need not be explicitly doing that.

This seems to be what most people do, and the example of people on the autistic spectrum seems to bear this out.  Autistics are noted for lacking the ability to engage in pretend play and to fail at conservation tasks, all of which involve the sort of things that we’d need to do in order to do simulation properly, and they also have a noted lack of empathy.  It is also the case that their ability to do empathy scales with IQ, getting better the higher their IQ is, which is not true for most people.  Thus, my working hypothesis — that I have not explored for a number of years due to all sorts of things involving life — is that autistics lack the mechanisms for simulation, and so instead turn to Theory-Theory, and it is clear that people’s ability to theorize improves with their IQ, while simulation need not.  So most people simulate, and get their empathy from the natural result of that simulation producing the right emotions in them, even if that’s at a low level, while autistics theorize and miss the emotions if their theorizing doesn’t properly conclude what they are or give the emotions as salient to the theorizing and mind-reading they are trying to do.

This, then, cycles back to the distinction Day makes, because one of my complaints about simulations producing empathy is that it works really well if the people being simulated are similar enough to you, but if they are sufficiently different and the simulation doesn’t properly account for those differences then the simulation will fail.  My initial focus for those failures has always been more towards the confusion end, where their actions will puzzle you and thus you might find them creepy, disturbing or in some way improper/immoral, and so you will be tempted to exclude them, which can easily lead to the shunning of those who are eccentric or different that we so often see in society.  But Day’s “projection” can be seen as another way for it to fail, in the sense that if someone runs the simulation, gets the emotions, and then has the subject deny the emotions insist they can insist that, in fact, they really must be feeling those emotions anyway, and are either lying about it or simply aren’t emotionally aware enough to know what they are in fact feeling.

And we can see how this would play out in the typical stereotypes of men and women.  Women are encouraged to care about feelings — and that has not changed in the modern landscape — while men are not, which leads to stereotypes that women are emotionally aware and men are not.  And since emotion in men is discouraged, when men interact with each other emotions are things to be set aside — other than perhaps anger — and not focused on, while women tend to focus on it more.  Thus, when women run the simulation and get the emotions, they consider the emotions more salient and so fail in two ways:  first, they mistake what emotion the man is feeling and, second, they consider that emotion far more important than the man does.  Which we can see in this additional comment that Day notes in his post, of a woman who seems to be realizing this very point:

I think back on my own marriage. I was always frustrated that I was in charge of the food. What we would have for each meal, creating the grocery list, and then sending my husband to the store. I wanted that mental load to not always be mine. But since separating and seeing my ex live on his own, I see that he still doesn’t prioritize food. Now I realize that he doesn’t care about food. It’s not a priority. Food is fuel for him, where for me, eating = pleasure. I’m often thinking about what I will eat for my next meal hours ahead of time.

She thought that because she cared about food, he cared about food to the same degree, and so felt the same way as she did about not having it planned.  He didn’t.  And she was indeed insistent that he was really feeling the same way as she did despite the fact that she had plenty of evidence that he didn’t.  This would also fit in with a number of household chores and the like where the woman insists that the man is just being lazy and shirking the work when in reality he simply doesn’t care enough about the chores to do them the way she wants them done or as often.  Thus, the idea of projection:  in this case, an insistence that they must be feeling the same way as she does when he really, really doesn’t.

So overconfidence in one’s empathy and giving too much importance to emotions in predicting behaviour is something that could impact women more than men.  But the examples given above are not that kind of failure.  They are not merely making a mistake about what the other person is feeling, but is instead taking a callous attitude towards it.  Fortunately, in my post that I linked above, I can also distinguish between empathy and being callous, as I did to distinguish psychopaths and autistics:  the difference between knowing what someone is feeling and caring about what someone is feeling.  Briefly, because psychopaths are good at manipulating people, I argued that they had to have at least cognitive empathy because to be really good at manipulating people you have to know what they are feeling.  However, the typical mistakes that psychopaths make seems more related to their amygdala damage that means, among other things, that they do not react to negative conditioning.  They might indeed feel those negative emotions that result from simulation that cause most people most of the time to decide not to do bad things to other people because of that negative association, but they cannot learn from or react to them, and so ultimately don’t care if they hurt other people … or even if their own goals are hurt by hurting other people.  Autistics, on the other hand, care greatly about what other people are feeling, if for no other reason than getting that wrong has caused them many issues in the past.  However, without simulation and in a culture that does not teach any other kind of empathy, they will indeed consistently make mistakes as their theories fail.  The ways psychopaths and autistics succeed and fail, then, pretty much indicate this distinction:  psychopaths know but don’t really care, autistics care but don’t really know.

The examples Day gives are firmly in the “don’t care” camp.  And there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think that women, in general, are more callous about these sorts of things than men are.  However, since this is associated with a discussion about the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy which has at its base men trying to get into relationships or have sex with the “higher status” women, we can see that there might be some bias here, as we know that people who are inherently desirable for some reason tend to be able to care less about the feelings of other people than those who are less inherently desirable.  For men, a business owner who has a business that lots of people want to work for doesn’t have to care overmuch about the concerns of the employees:  even if he treats them poorly, they will stay and he will be able to replace them if they happen to leave.  For women, physical attractiveness is a bigger factor, and so they can treat others around them — especially men — poorly knowing that if he gets fed up with it and leaves someone else will take their place.  So there might be a higher percentage of overly self-absorbed and callous women at the upper echelons of the attractiveness scale, and one could argue that modern idea that women should feel entitled to achieve whatever they want might be getting less attractive women to mimic that model.  I hasten to add that again that sort of extreme callousness does not seem to be a defining trait of most women, even most attractive ones.  But it could be something that one hits more often if one interacts with more women who are either more attractive or think they are more attractive.

But again this would not be a lack of empathy, at least in the sense of knowing what people are feeling.  They know.  They don’t care, and that’s what triggers the response.  So if Day really thinks that women are self-absorbed — at least in general — then he is not really claiming that they don’t know what other people are feeling.  Maybe there is a lack there, but I have not seen sufficient evidence to claim that.

Thoughts on “Chopping Mall”

This is an older movie on Shudder and definitely looks it, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Anyway, the plot is that a shopping mall decides to turn its night security over to a company that makes robots (rolling ones).  One stormy night, a lightning strike messes with the control center, which activates the robots and turns them homicidal, killing the people who were supposed to be monitoring them.  At the same time, a bunch of young people decide to party in one of the stores, and end up getting locked in the mall when the doors automatically lock at the designated time.  As one might expect, the robots then decide to try to eliminate them, as they try to escape death and the mall itself.

This is a pretty simplistic premise, and this is a pretty simplistic movie.  The movie spends a lot of the first part setting up the young people and showing the robots getting activated.  There’s also a lot of humour the first part which definitely sets up the impression that we probably should take this all that seriously, which is definitely a benefit.  The characters themselves are somewhat stereotypical but even the characters that lean towards the jerky side are sympathetic enough that we don’t want to see them die.  The two main characters are a nice and somewhat less sexual girl and the dorky guy they set her up with for the party, and while the others all die she manages to survive … and to make the ending at least somewhat happy the guy she was set up with and started to like survives as well despite a scene that implies that he might have been killed.

The deaths themselves are appropriately gory, some seemingly excessively so, but they work well enough.  The robots are generally a credible threat, not so much because they are fast or skilled but instead because they are incredibly tough and have a number of weapons and methods at their disposal to kill people, and I didn’t find that they seemed ridiculous despite being somewhat small.  And even tactics that manage to stop them for a while end up failing not because of a contrivance where something conveniently allows rolling robots to, say, climb stairs but instead because the robots figure out a way to get to them anyway, which allows for a brief pause in the action before the climax.

Ultimately, as I said, this is a pretty simplistic movie, which does seem to be pretty much what they were going for.  Because of that, it’s entertaining, even if at some points it dragged for a bit.  But because it’s so simplistic, there’s really nothing here to prompt a rewatch, especially since unlike movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” the robots don’t have any personality to play off of, and the deaths aren’t as creative as you might find in the better “Friday the 13th” movies.  As such, I have to say that I kinda liked it and could rewatch it at some point but don’t plan on doing that anytime soon.  That still puts this movie ahead of most of the movies I’ve been watching on Shudder, which is a feather in its cap.

First Thoughts on “Conception Plus”

So I was planning on continuing my tour down my List of Video Games with “The Age of Decadence”, but hit the issue that I had last year where I ended up being really busy in the first few months of the year and so didn’t make much progress on it.  When I did get some time to play it, I was underwhelmed (if that’s a word).  I had difficulty with the navigation and with finding where my quests were, and found the quests themselves unclear.  After some time playing it, I did manage to figure out a lot of that, and was impressed that often you could find different ways to solve some quests, as in one instance I tried to persuade someone to drug the wine sent to a bandit camp, had that fail, but then tried talking to him again and was able to tell him to run away because the law was coming for him, which then let me try to do that myself.  However, this revealed an issue with the game where if you failed a skill check — and they seem to be hard checks rather than ones you can roll for — then you couldn’t ever try again which could lock you out of things.  This convinced me that I would need to pay more attention than I could to a game that I played for a couple of hours once a week and so I decided to move on from it and play it sometime when I was off (likely at Christmas).  And so I turned my attention to “Conception Plus”.

Now, I had played “Conception 2” on the Vita, and picked it up because it seemed to be a Persona clone — although the original might well have come out first and so that wouldn’t fit — and I was interested in playing Persona clones.  I didn’t mind it, but found the grinding a bit tedious and also managed to screw up the bonds and so got an unsatisfying ending because I saved Bond Points for Mechunites to make the dungeons easier and so didn’t produce new Star Children and so didn’t advance my bonds with the Star Maidens, and so ended up with an ending where none of them were attached to me, and the game itself didn’t thrill me enough to replay it to get a better ending.  So when I saw this remake of the original game for the PS4 I picked it up as something to try when I got around to it.  And I decided that now was the time to do that.

The plot is that you and your childhood friend — female, of course — end up getting sucked into a strange world.  It starts with her thinking that she’s pregnant despite never having had sex before, and it is revealed that instead she is a Star Maiden, with the ability to produce Star Children using a process called Classmating which is a thinly veiled euphemism for sex (so thinly veiled that it might as well be wearing nothin’ at all).  Her arrival, however, is unexpected, while yours was not, because you are God’s Gift and so the guy who is expected to produce the Star Children and also enter into monster-infested dungeons to defeat the various monsters and cleanse them, which ought to also allow the people of that world to have children again.  There are also 11 other Star Maidens that you can and ought to use to produce Star Children, plus an additional bonus one in this version.

One big change that was made in the second game was that there you could take the Star Maidens into the dungeon and they fought alongside you — in various and mostly Stripperific costumes — whereas here they don’t.  I miss them going into the dungeons with me as the Star Children don’t really have strong personalities.

The grinding, however, is about as dull as it was in the second game.  There are a few tactics around using skills and positioning and the like, but because most of the monsters are very similar there isn’t all that much variation in those tactics.  You get bonuses from attacking their weak points, and it almost always just makes sense to do that as much as you can, although if you don’t you build the chain meter which then allows you, once it’s full, to lock them down and then hits on them build a combo meter until their turn comes up again that gives you extra XP and Bond Points.  I also used physical attacks when things were easy and overloaded skills when the monsters got tougher, but you get to act — in the turn-based combat system the game uses — based on an initiative and the actions you take in a round impact that, so moving and using skills pushes you back in the order and so using physical attacks can be more efficient unless you are in trouble, and skills use up your magic points and so far I get more items to heal HP than MP so it’s better to lose HP in battles than MP, which means that using physical attacks is better except on bosses and if I really get in trouble.  I also discovered that while your Star Children can’t be in the same place — you attack an enemy from one of four positions surrounding it — and you can share a place with any of them, it was better for me to be on my own to tank attacks — encourage the enemy to attack me instead of them — because while one hit does more damage to me than to them individually, it whittles down the entire group and ultimately I have a lot more HP overall than they do.  The downside to this strategy that I discovered while trying to win a boss fight is that if you go down, the entire expedition ends — although you don’t get a game over — and so you have to be a bit careful that that doesn’t happen.

I was worried early on because the dungeons are named after the seasons, and spring was proceeding too quickly for me to clear the dungeon and the three astrological sign specific dungeons there — each Star Maiden is associated with a zodiac sign — and so I thought I might be in trouble.  After beating the first zodiac dungeon, though, I was told that I was supposed to divide my time up amongst the seasons and that it was even the case that the dungeons associated with a season were more difficult during that specific season, which might explain why I couldn’t beat the first zodiac boss in the summer dungeon during the summer.

Star Children have levels, and have maximum levels that depend in some way on your own levels (and possibly your bond with the Star Maiden).  This meant that when they maxed out I was inclined to swap them out for new ones, especially since making them independent levels up your city which can add benefits.  That, however, meant grinding them up to a decent level, especially if I was going to go after a boss.  As time goes on, though, it seems like I’ve stabilized their max levels a bit, and so they get replaced more slowly, and levels where the monsters are far enough below your level let you run right through them instead of fighting them, which is a help.  Still, I’m almost 20 hours in and have only finished one zodiac dungeon, although I have cleared to those dungeons in three of the four season dungeons, so while things should get a bit less grindy I’m not doing all that well in terms of levels.  We’ll see how that works out going in.

The 13 Star Maidens are a bit overwhelming in terms of trying to bond with them, especially compared to “Conception 2” which only had about five.  That being said, a number of them are interesting, and so far I quite like the childhood friend, a nun, and the new one who was a Star Child of the previous God’s Gift.  And some of the others are more or less interesting, but again trying to navigate 13 of them is a lot more management than I usually want to do.

So far, I’m enjoying it, and even playing it more than once a week, which is unheard of with my busy schedule.  I do find the grinding and dungeons boring, though, so we’ll see how much that impacts my impression of the game going forward.

Accomplishments Update …

It has been a long time since I’ve done one of these, mostly due to being pretty busy.  I wanted to get one of these out of the way because this spring has not been all that productive and I’m planning on reshuffling things in June, but then went back and noticed that my last update was, in fact, last August.  So it may look like I accomplished more than I at least felt I did this spring.

I did pretty well with TV shows, finishing off “The Six Million Dollar Man” and then doing “MacGyver”, “Night Court”, and also “Spider-man”, and then also the second season of “Frasier”, and possibly some other things, leading up to “Warehouse 13” which I am just about to finish, and then move on to “The Magicians”, with “The Muppet Show” filling in the shorter Friday spot.  Movies have not worked out all that well, but haven’t been that bad, and I still get in about a horror movie a week.  The reason this works is that this is in a timeslot that I always hit, as it’s part of my cooling down before I go to sleep.

Reading went fairly poorly, surprisingly enough.  As I’ve noted in the past, I don’t watch TV casually anymore and so don’t read casually as much anymore, which means that it takes me a long time to get through anything.  So while I finished those Deryni novels, and got through all of the “Pretty Little Liars” books, and some small history books, that was since August, which is a very slow pace for me.  I also did manage to finish off all of my examinations of historicism vs mythicism, and then started Robert M. Sapolsky’s “Behave”, but am still working on that book.  And, of course, I am still reading “The Pendragon Cycle”.  The issue with those ones is that when I get busy things take over the weekend, which is also when I read, and also moving my laundry day to Friday instead of Saturday removes one obvious timeslot where that sort of reading fit really well.  I have to get more disciplined when it comes to that.

Video games are another area where it seems like I am doing better than I am.  I finished off the “Mass Effect” trilogy over Christmas, but then tried to pick up “The Age of Decadence” and ended up dropping it.  At first, I didn’t know how it worked and so wasn’t enjoying it, but later I figured out how it worked and so was enjoying it more … but then realized that it would take more attention than I could give it playing it for a couple of hours once a week and so dropped it and replaced it with “Conception Plus”, which is okay but I am a bit tired of the grinding, and it is still a bit puzzling.  Still, I am confident that this is getting back into a decent groove.

Projects haven’t gone very well, as I managed to keep stories going for a while but then ended up screwing up enough that I decided to take a break and reset it, and despite wanting to do programming I never did.  I plan on shuffling my schedule around and so hope to do better with this in June.

So that’s what I’ve been accomplishing for the past 8 months or so, which is less than I would have liked.  I hope to do better over the summer.