Posts Tagged ‘Science Fiction’
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going”*…
As Anne Lawrence-Mathers explains, centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, and AI emerged promising quick command of any subject to any of us, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users…
Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.
Its complex diagrams were at the center of its appeal. Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Nor do they act as models to be replicated in three-dimensional form as pieces of magical equipment. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters.3 Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.
Several factors made the Ars notoria fundamentally different from other magical texts. First, this is not a text in conflict with the church. In fact, the rituals framing and shaping usage of the images are presented as extremely pious, and the texts to be recited are identified as prayers. The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”, and are claimed to preserve both the names of angels and words used to communicate with them. Second, the advantages offered are relatively virtuous: contact with spiritual beings and full knowledge of the subjects taught in medieval universities. Such claims cut little ice with thirteenth-century theologians, however, who saw clear links to things condemned as superstitious and demonic by St Augustine, despite the text’s assertion that it contains wisdom revealed to King Solomon.
St Thomas Aquinas was worried enough by the Ars notoria to name and condemn it specifically in his Summa theologiae — one of the most authoritative summaries of Christian teaching. He dealt with the very serious issue of superstition in Book Two, Part 2 — Question 96 is effectively devoted to the Ars notoria. Aquinas’ conclusion is wholly negative: the “art” is both “unlawful and futile”. It is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises. Still more seriously, its “signs” are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons.
That may seem a conclusive case for the rejection of the Ars notoria, especially as Aquinas’ objections were echoed by other major theologians. However, the number of surviving medieval copies of the work, and the fact that it was copied and owned in religious institutions until the end of the medieval period, show that the church ultimately had neither the interest nor ability to stamp it out. Moreover, it was translated in the early modern period and also went into print, demonstrating an ongoing — and more widespread — interest…
[Professor Lawrence-Mathers explains how the Ars notoria was used…]
… For some users, the rituals were so powerful that they seemed demonic. One of these was Brother John, an early fourteenth-century monk of the abbey of Morigny, near Étampes. John’s account of his introduction to the text, his powerful attraction to it, and the terrifying experiences he underwent while using it, was given in several chapters of John’s own, visionary work, the early fourteenth century Liber florum celestis doctrine.6
The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more. This led to an encounter with a “medical expert” from Lombardy, who informed John that what he needed was the Ars notoria, and that a copy of it was to be found within the walls of the school (at Orléans) where John had been sent. These details provide important evidence of the liminal status of works of ritual magic. They were recognised as dangerous, and were far from being officially approved, and yet were well known, owned and recommended by educated individuals, including monks and clerics.
For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body…
Medieval “technology”: “Artificial Intelligence– Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
Pair with: “The Cost of Seamlessness” from @taotuner.bsky.social, and “Experience vs. Efficiency: Why the Human Still Matters in Learning,” from @lnddave.bsky.social.
Also a (vaguely) apposite, but (very) amusing (in a macabre kind of way) report on a piece of OpenAI’s handiwork: “US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference.”
* Beverly Sills
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As we do the work, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Frank Herbert’s Dune was published.
Herbert published a three-part serial Dune World in the monthly Analog, from December 1963 to February 1964. The serial was accompanied by several illustrations that were not published again. After an interval of a year, he published the much slower-paced five-part The Prophet of Dune in the January–May 1965 issues. The first serial became “Book One: Dune” in the final published Dune novel, and the second serial was divided into “Book Two: Muad’dib” and “Book Three: The Prophet”. The serialized version was expanded, reworked, and submitted to more than twenty publishers, each of whom rejected it. The novel, Dune, was finally accepted and published in August 1965 by Chilton Books, a printing house better known for publishing auto repair manuals. Sterling Lanier, an editor at Chilton, had seen Herbert’s manuscript and had urged his company to take a risk in publishing the book. However, the first printing, priced at $5.95 (equivalent to $60.79 in 2025), did not sell well and was poorly received by critics as being atypical of science fiction at the time. Chilton considered the publication of Dune a write-off and Lanier was fired. Over the course of time, the book gained critical acclaim, and its popularity spread by word-of-mouth to allow Herbert to start working full time on developing the sequels to Dune, elements of which were already written alongside Dune.
– source
Herbert died in 1986; his son Brian Herbert and author Kevin J. Anderson continued the series in over a dozen additional novels since 1999. Among them was Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, a prequel which chronicles the fictional Butlerian Jihad, a crusade by the last free humans in the universe against the thinking machines, a violent and dominating force led by the sentient computer Omnius.
“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.”*…
Henrik Karlsson argues that it can be more symbiotic than that…
Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. Often, these epiphanies are accompanied by a sense that I actually know this already, it had just somehow slipped my mind.
And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes—I regress to being the same person as ever.
The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”
is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.
You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.
In the same way that it is not enough to make a resolution that you will learn the piano, it is not enough to realize that when the kids act out, you shouldn’t lose your temper but slow down, listen, and regulate their nervous systems with the help of yours. Imagine how good a person I would be if having insights were enough! But reacting to the frustrations of your children with calm and curiosity is a skill as much as playing the piano is—and as with the piano, the act of learning it requires rewiring your nervous system through sustained attention and practice. Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.
And this is much harder than making a habit out of playing the piano. When you’re trying to make something like piano practice a habit, the standard advice is to chain it onto some already existing habit—to practice immediately after you brush your teeth in the morning, for example, or after you change out of your work clothes in the afternoon. Chaining the new habit to an already existing one provides a predictable trigger that helps remind you to practice. But the habits that make up our characters often do not follow a predictable schedule like this. I never know, for instance, when our children will act out (except that it will usually be when I’m least capable of handling it with grace—whenever both they and I are unusually hungry and tired). The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. If Johanna and I talked about how we want to deal with the kids’ conflicts the night before, I will nearly always handle the situation well. The problem is to keep it top of mind.
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
This was, as I understand it, an exercise designed to combat the problem I outlined above. Meditating on what matters is a simple habit, which you can chain onto your morning routine, but it reinforces the habits you can’t plan, the habits that make up your character. It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises…
…
… I have often noticed that my experience of reality improves if I write and think about something.
But it strikes me now that the practice Foucault wrote about was probably more transformative than what I’ve ended up doing. Essay writing is incredibly time-consuming, and a lot of that time is spent on things that aren’t self-transforming: I spend less time reshaping my mind than I spend solving literary-technical problems that help me write more functional and beautiful essays, for the joy of the craft and for the benefit of readers. Another limitation of my practice is that when an essay is done, I move on. The ideas—though they have been much deepened and more firmly lodged in my mind—fall out of attention and start to fade.
There is an element of self-deception involved here. I like to write essays, so it is comforting to think of it as a powerful practice, something that helps me live more fully and grow as a person. But if I look at it soberly, it is clear to me that essay writing is not a practice that is ideal for the purpose of ethopoiesis.6 It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.
The most important ideas we need to return to weekly, even daily. Essay-writing, then, is not a functional substitute for having a practice that keeps the important truths top of mind, day after day. But it did help me reach that conclusion…
On a particular kind of commonplace book and staying centered: “How not to forget what matters,” from @henrikkarlsson.bsky.social.
* Abert Einstein
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As we contemplate contemplation, we might that it was on this date in 1949 that the first science fiction series debuted on American television, the DuMont Network’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Written by such luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, and Jack Vance, it was– even in its time, when early television productions often were thrown-together affairs– considered crude, owing much to the fact that the daily show was done live on a meager budget. Indeed, the actors were paid so little they actually made more money from appearing in character at supermarket openings, county fairs, and the like than they did from their salaries.
Still, it ran for a total of 1,537 episodes, and quickly spawned competitive sci-fi offerings like Tom Corbet, Space Cadet and Space Patrol.
For episodes on YouTube, see here.
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”*…
… nor, perhaps, as widely read as it should be. “Urubos” is here to help…
The Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.
The catalog connects stories (novels, novellas, short stories, films) to the speculative ideas they explore: thought experiments about technology, governance, biology, society, and more. Every idea is tagged with domains, scenario types, and outcome types so you can filter by the kind of future you are thinking about.
How to use it:
- Search by title, author, synopsis keywords, or idea descriptions
- Filter by domain (AI, biotech, climate, space, governance…), scenario type, outcome, decade, or series
- Browse ideas to find transferable thought experiments, then follow links to the stories that explore them
- Browse stories to see what speculative ideas a particular work contains
- Book Club discussions (marked with 📖) offer section-by-section roundtable analyses by AI personas modeled on SF authors
- What-If Query (via the What-If Query page/link) lets you describe a real-world scenario in plain text and get ranked matching ideas
The archive is designed for decision-makers in government, industry, and NGOs who want to widen their thinking by surfacing fictional precedents for novel real-world challenges…
Over 275 ideas, which cluster into 20 different “domains,” explored in over 1,900 stories, via over 3,500 links…
Mapping real-world scenarios to the science fiction stories that explored them first: “Extrapolated Futures Archive“
* William Gibson
###
As we ponder prescience, we might spare a thought for Charles Hoy Fort, the prolific chronicler of paranormal phenomena; he died on this date in 1932. Fort collected accounts of frogs and other strange objects raining from the sky, UFOs, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, stigmata, psychic abilities, and the like, publishing four collections of weird tales and anomalies during his lifetime: Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). So influential was Fort among fellow-questers that his name has become an adjective, “Fortean,” often applied to unexplained events… The Truth is Out There…
“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”*…
Most historians of science fiction begin their stories with the likes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and lean on the extraordinary impact of Hugo Gernsback. Art and culture historian Fleur Hopkins-Loféron reminds us that there was an early 20th-century movement in France that prefigured much of what we now celebrate in speculative fiction…
When Nicolas Vermont entered the greenhouse, he would make a gruesome discovery. It was the early 20th century in rural France, and Nicolas was visiting his uncle – a scientist and surgeon called Dr Frédéric Lerne – after 15 years apart. However, he had soon grown suspicious about his uncle’s odd behaviour, so for answers had decided to explore the grounds of his relative’s estate late at night.
Inside a greenhouse in the garden, Nicolas discovered that Dr Lerne had been conducting disturbing scientific experiments. At first, he saw plants grafted onto one another: a cactus growing a geranium flower, and an oak tree sprouting cherries and walnuts. His uneasy curiosity, though, soon turned to dread. ‘It was then that I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two treated leaves, so like ears, I felt them warm and quivering,’ he recalled. Grafted onto the stem were the parts of an animal: the ears of a dead rabbit. ‘My hand, clenched with repugnance, shook off the memory of the contact as it would have shaken off some hideous spider.’ [Quotations from published English-language editions translated by Brian Stapleford; the rest are the author’s own.]
Dr Lerne was in fact an impostor. His assistant Otto Klotz had stolen the true uncle’s body through a brain swap, and would not hesitate to punish Nicolas for his ill-placed curiosity… by transplanting his consciousness into the body of a bull.
Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), or ‘Dr Lerne, Demi-God’, was a celebrated novel by Maurice Renard, hailed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a ‘subdivine novel of metamorphoses’.Published in English as New Bodies for Old, it heralded the dawn of a new French literary genre – one that ventured boldly into the uncertain and the unknown. Renard called it ‘merveilleux-scientifique’ (‘scientific-marvellous’) and its ambition was to help the reader speculate on what could be, and on what exists beyond the reach of our senses, rather than what will be. In other words, allowing a better understanding of what Renard poetically called ‘the imminent threats of the possible’. As he wrote in 1914, the goal was to ‘patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present’.
Rejecting the ‘scientific adventure’ storytelling of the celebrated French sci-fi writer Jules Verne – who had died only three years before the publication of Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu – the merveilleux-scientifique genre was grounded in plausibility and the scientific method. According to Renard, only one physical, chemical or biological law may be altered when telling a story. This strict discipline, he argued, is what lent the genre its power to sharpen the reader’s mind, by offering a wholly original kind of thought experiment. For example, Renard modelled Dr Lerne on the very real surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, who had experimented with surgical grafts, transplants and animal tissues… to the point that he even grafted a dog’s severed head on another living animal (the attempt failed). Following in his footsteps, Renard imagines an exchange of brains – and personalities.
Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.
Perhaps more importantly, the lesser-known stories of merveilleux-scientifique allow us to question the official history of science fiction – a term that did not even exist in France at the time as it as it would be popularised in English by Hugo Gernsback only in the 1920s. Whereas today it is sci-fi writers like Jules Verne or H G Wells who are most remembered from this period, the merveilleux-scientifique novels were just as imaginative and visionary, but often far more provocative, daring and strange…
Much more– with wonderful reproductions of the works’ covers: “Merveilleux-scientifique” from @aeon.co.
* J. G. Ballard (in a 1971 essay, “Fictions Of Every Kind“)
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As we speculate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1850 that the first U.S. patent for magic lantern slides made of glass plate was issued to their inventor Frederick Langenheim of Philadelphia, Pa. (No. 7,784) as an “improvement in photographic pictures on glass.” Magic lantern shows were largely informational, but (especially in Europe in the 19th century) magic lanterns were used to stage “Phantasmagoria,” a form of horror theater that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images – such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts – typically using rear projection onto a semi-transparent screen to keep the lantern out of sight.
“The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion”*…
Yunsuh Nike Wee, Daniel Sznycer, and Jaimie Arona Krems on an example of human values that seems due more to shared intuitions than local customs or social practices…
The Bible’s lex talionis – “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Exodus 21:24-27) – has captured the human imagination for millennia. This idea of fairness has been a model for ensuring justice when bodily harm is inflicted.
Thanks to the work of linguists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, researchers know a lot about how different body parts are appraised in societies both small and large, from ancient times to the present day.
But where did such laws originate?
According to one school of thought, laws are cultural constructions – meaning they vary across cultures and historical periods, adapting to local customs and social practices. By this logic, laws about bodily damage would differ substantially between cultures.
Our new study explored a different possibility – that laws about bodily damage are rooted in something universal about human nature: shared intuitions about the value of body parts.
Do people across cultures and throughout history agree on which body parts are more or less valuable? Until now, no one had systematically tested whether body parts are valued similarly across space, time and levels of legal expertise – that is, among laypeople versus lawmakers.
We are psychologists who study evaluative processes and social interactions. In previous research, we have identified regularities in how people evaluate different wrongful actions, personal characteristics, friends, and foods. The body is perhaps a person’s most valuable asset, and in this study we analyzed how people value its different parts. We investigated links between intuitions about the value of body parts and laws about bodily damage…
… If people have intuitive knowledge of the values of different body parts, might this knowledge underpin laws about bodily damage across cultures and historical eras?
To test this hypothesis, we conducted a study involving 614 people from the United States and India. The participants read descriptions of various body parts, such as “one arm,” “one foot,” “the nose,” “one eye” and “one molar tooth.” We chose these body parts because they were featured in legal codes from five different cultures and historical periods that we studied: the Law of Æthelberht from Kent, England, in 600 C.E., the Guta lag from Gotland, Sweden, in 1220 C.E., and modern workers’ compensation laws from the United States, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates…
… Our findings were striking. The values placed on body parts by both laypeople and lawmakers were largely consistent. The more highly American laypeople tended to value a given body part, the more valuable this body part seemed also to Indian laypeople, to American, Korean and Emirati lawmakers, to King Æthelberht and to the authors of the Guta lag. For example, laypeople and lawmakers across cultures and over centuries generally agree that the index finger is more valuable than the ring finger, and that one eye is more valuable than one ear.
But do people value body parts accurately, in a way that corresponds with their actual functionality? There are some hints that, yes, they do. For example, laypeople and lawmakers regard the loss of a single part as less severe than the loss of multiples of that part. In addition, laypeople and lawmakers regard the loss of a part as less severe than the loss of the whole; the loss of a thumb is less severe than the loss of a hand, and the loss of a hand is less severe than the loss of an arm…
… Much of what counts as moral or immoral, legal or illegal, varies from place to place. Drinking alcohol, eating meat and cousin marriage, for example, have been variously condemned or favored in different times and places.
But recent research has also shown that, in some domains, there is much more moral and legal consensus about what is wrong, across cultures and even throughout the millennia. Wrongdoing – arson, theft, fraud, trespassing and disorderly conduct – appears to engender a morality and related laws that are similar across times and places. Laws about bodily damage also seem to fit into this category of moral or legal universals…
“An eye for an eye: People agree about the values of body parts across cultures and eras,” from @us.theconversation.com.
* Voltaire
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As we contemplate corporeal consensus, we might recall that on this date in 1974 (after the 1973 airing of a series of made-for-TV movies that established the character), The Six Million Dollar Man debuted as a weekly hour-long series.
Unlike superhero movies today, The Six Million Dollar Man TV series was not based on a comic book title. Instead, the science fiction, fantasy, adventure series was based Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg and its three sequels. The series starred Lee Majors as an astronaut whose life is forever changed after a NASA test flight accident. Colonel Steve Austin awoke after the accident to find that his body had been rebuilt with bionic parts including two legs, one arm and one eye. The cost of the operation ran roughly $6 million. Now a super-human, Austin could run over 60 mph and had incredible strength. He found work as a secret agent for the Office of Scientific Intelligence. Before the show debuted on this day in 1974, three movie pilots had already been shown on ABC the year before. In 1975, a two-part episode featured Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), a professional tennis player who experienced a parachuting accident and was given bionic parts as well. However, her body rejected these parts and died. Then again, he character was so popular, Sommers’ character came back to life to star in her own series, The Bionic Woman. Both series were hugely popular and ran through 1978. Then, three new made-for-TV movies starring the couple aired in 1987, 1989 and 1994 and all three also starred Lee Majors’ son (Lee Majors II) as OSI agent Jim Castillian… – source
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