"I've always identified with the 'Other'" - Adrian Tchaikovsky - Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author - Episode:126
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- Adrian Tchaikovsky (sentientism.info/sentientist-...) is a multi-award winning #fantasy & #sciencefiction author. He is known best for his series Shadows of the Apt & for his novel Children of Time. Children of Time was awarded the 30th Arthur C. Clarke Award.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: apple.co/391khQO & pod.link/1540408008.
We discuss:
00:00 Preview!
00:55 Welcome
02:15 Adrian's Intro
- "I write books about giant spiders from outer space"
03:45 What's Real?
- "I'm very much on the science end"
- "We weren't a religious household"
- US/UK religiosity
- "A fascination with the natural world"
- Dabbling w/#spirituality "It's amazing how many people have been King Arthur"
- "I believed in every damn thing... desperate to find the 'other'"
- "The people who want to believe don't examine it"
- "Still... looking for that strange but within a scientific boundary"
- #aliens
- #evolution
- "I am pretty much entirely naturalistic"
- #briancox
- #homeopathy & "special cases"
- #scientificmethod
- Tech & magic. Apt & Inapt
- #telepathy , #psychics, #ghosts "people are out there trying to fake it is... tangential evidence that it is not real"
- "I'm not saying 'this cannot be' but I am saying 'show it to me'"
- "There is no supernatural"
- Do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?
- #cryptids
- "I don't want to be fooled by some... snake-oil salesman"
- "There's a weird sort of science cosplay going on"
- Folklore, fiction, speculation, narrative "this is a long way from saying 'this is the case'
29:15 What Matters?
- "Try to do no harm & don't be a dick"
- The Golden Rule & improvements
- Autism, pronouns... considering others
- Freedom & constraints on freedom
- "Being considerate & egalitarian... if you have the luck & the resources to be able to"
- "I get my morality from other people"
- "I could so easily have fallen in with a very different group of people"
- Divine command theory, relativism, nihilism, egoism
- "Science can be mis-used... race theory for example"
- "Religion defaults to a faith-based argument that effectively is not an argument"
- "I accept the theory of relativity but I don't understand it"
- Studying animal behaviour: Skinnerian behaviourism: "Animals... can't really feel pain"
- Animal intelligence. Spiders dreaming
- Phil of mind: #Illusionism, eliminativism, #panpsychism
- Origins of sentience "those are the things that make life do what it does"
- AI sentience (lacking bio evo drives)?
- A #UniversalDeclarationofSentientRights ?
- "Freedom to & freedom from"
51:14 Who Matters?
- Does "do no harm" extend to non-humans?
- Hypocrisy
- Vegetarianism, eggs, dairy and veganism
- "But I am very fond of a bacon sandwich in the morning... a philosophically untenable position"
- Saving trapped insects from the conservatory "with as much care as possible... seems the right thing to do... the idea of them getting stuck & dying upsets me"
- "I can construct an insect in my head - that I know what it feels like... I have an empathy there"
- "I feel considerably more for insects... than most people ever will"
- Sci-fi/fantasy & non-human sentience: "It's a very good genre to explore these things in"
- #starshiptroopers film & Adrian's SpiderLight book. Dehumanisation. "The creeping realisation that we are the bad guys."
- #fascism , #colonialism , #anthropocentrism
- "I've always had a brief for the other"
- Battle Beyond the Stars film & a heroic alien lizard "You have the permission to make anything you want into a hero - it doesn't have to be the guy from the Waltons"
- What would aliens thing of animal farming? Who are the monsters?
57:50 A Better Future?
- Utopias & distopias
- Sci-fi / fantasy "They can be good fun, they can be very very serious philosophical tools"
- #thehandmaidstale
- "Getting people to think about an idea without immediately triggering all of their defenses"
- Polarised culture & politics
- "Make my own point of view the villain..."
- Iain M. Banks' #Culture series
- "The domination of selfishness & greed" via dogma & hierarchy
- Win-wins
- "I'm a natural pessimist but there are limits... surely... the dam breaks"
- "We have the resources & technology to turn things around"
- Re-distribution & equality
- Slavery, democracy, war, disease... "Things have actually got better"
... And much more! Full show notes at sentientism.info
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If you enjoyed this conversation you might like this one with Blindsight author Peter Watts too: th-cam.com/video/7399QuK1Bl8/w-d-xo.html
youtube algorithms sentient for years TALKS like THIS knows the future
I look forward to this discussion
I look forward to seeing you type a novel comment, Mr. Condoner-of-child-murder. 🥸
@@TheWorldTeacher
*Karma* 😆 🤣 😂
@@LouisGedo, I’m STILL awaiting your definitions of both the word “karma” and the term “parasite”, Mr. Condoner-of-child-murder. 🥸
Good episode!
Thank you!
Sentientism is my new philosophy/framework/religion. I take these truths to be self-evident. 😁
I also think those jumping spiders, fruit flies, and other little beasties (- and those old dinosaurs called birds, sparrows in particular) can read my mind, or at least my intent - whereas I'm just a slow lump of self-preoccupation... That's not as self-evident... 🤔
Btw. I have your podcast on TuneIn in the car now, so I'll be commenting less here on TH-cam from now on...
PS: Your intro-tune is great. Much better than the Knowing Animals intro.
PPS: Sorry, no Facebook for me, on principle.
Thanks Roy - wonderful to have you as a listener and I'm so glad sentientism resonates with you as a worldview (if not maybe a "religion" :) ). If you don't do FaceBook (I understand) we're on Signal, Telegram, Discord, Reddit etc. too... sentientism.info/where
@@Sentientism Yes, "worldview"! (I knew you'd find the right term for me.) I particularly like that term because I sailed around the world alone, so I already have a distinctive worldview.
At the end of interviews you ask the prescriptive question. My prescription, one of them anyway, is population reduction (or at least stabilization). It is urgent that we decompress the pressure cooker that is humanity, so as to gain more time to improve, to wise-up. We do need time, yet some big improvements, like going vegan, could actually occur overnight (as it did with me).
In my short lifetime human population has exploded from 3 bil. to 8 bil. - and consumption/waste has far outstipped even that growth rate.
How to decompress the human pressure cooker? - a hot topic for an interview I think... Many things, besides population alone, unnecessarily pressurize our behavior: the economic "need" for constant growth and debt servicing, nationalism - to name just 2. (If we don't reduce the pressure for ourselves and all the other sentients, it will be done for/to us - via another kind of pressure!)
@@rwess Thanks Roy. I see the primary population problem as that of farmed animals (~100bn on land) more than us humans (~8bn). Our pop growth is flattenning off already and may never go above 11bn. I can see us being able to sustain that population well if we make the right changes - and do it fast. But maybe I'm being too optimistic. I've had two conversations centred on this so far that you might enjoy, with Nandita Bajaj th-cam.com/video/0ztqJalDjdk/w-d-xo.html and Carter Dillard th-cam.com/video/YPQokwpHZJQ/w-d-xo.html. We need to face up to the challenges of population but also be very aware of the dark, unethical traps that some with this concern have fallen into.
@@Sentientism Yes, thanks. The flattening projection is interesting. Most population restraint happens in affluent countries, due to perceived economic constraint (and perhaps education). Yet that is where the mass animal "farming" happens.
Maybe the Earth can sustain a few more billion poor, but not a few more billion affluent, based purely on consumptive behavior. China and India are bringing many more people out of poverty and into the consumer class, and every country strives to do the same. Unfortunately that increases "farmed" animal consumption. We need time to change that social dynamic. Less population, more time.
How to do it? I don't know. Some sort of humane incentive structure. Unethical traps abound for sure, and the religions will battle it every step of the way too...
PS: And even educated parents is no guarantee of better behavior. I'm thinking of vegan Jane Goodall and her fisherman son (just as a one-off example)...
Met Tchaikovsky last night at a book singing. He was lovely.
Now a book singing is a wonderful idea! :) It was such a pleasure talking to Adrian. Did he mention if he's gone vegan yet as a result of our conversation? He already has a powerful sentiocentric instinct - at least for spiders and octopuses. Here's hoping...
Sadly not. It was a brief thing. Just me gushing for a bit, he singed my copy of Dog of War and I moved on.
@@max4pne 🙂 I've only read the "Children of..." series so far. Awesome. The rest of his writing is on my list though.
During the Intro: Oh nice! This dude explicitly cares about arthropods, way too many vegans carve out a special-pleading case for why they don't matter.
During "Who Matters": My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Sorry :( It hurts - and I really struggle to handle it during the conversations where it happens. I can understand a little more when it's some rando on Twitter. But when it's someone with a clearly brilliant mind... Damn those social norms.
5:40
The entire concept of alleged reincarnation is manifestly absurd taking into consideration what is known today.
Korek ka dyan, SLAVE! ✅
17:28
YES!!!
31:38
There's a serious problem with this position since how other's may want to be treated is an infringement on either the way that you want to be treated or an infringement on your own intetests including your interest in not being compelled to accept something that you find abominable or wrong.
I agree that we shouldn't just take account of how another wants to be treated - but should consider how that treatment might affect every other sentient and how they want to be treated. Often they won't be compatible... trade-offs required.
@@Sentientism what is your META ETHICS?
Right and wrong are RELATIVE. 😉
@@ReverendDr.Thomas Can you give me some multiple choice options?
@@Sentientism, your podcast is centred on ETHICS but you have repeatedly proven that you have very little notion of the meaning of the word, and then, when I explained it to you several months ago, you simply contradicted me with a straw man. 🤡
11:36
Zzzzzzzzzactly
37:55
Your guest is vague in what he means in regards to "race theory".
Your guest appears to be implying that anyone who evaluates the available data on races and concludes that this available data demonstrates that certain races exceed in the performance of certain tasks over other races in general, that this necessarily means that the person believes that one or more races is morally superior to one or more other races. And if this is what your guest is implying, your guest is absolutely engaging in uncritical thinking since it's clearly possible to objectively assess and accept the available data on general differences in performance of races without concluding that one or more races is morally Superior to other races.
As a complete aside, there is an argument to be made as to whether "race" is even a sensible categorization.
I can't speak for Adrian - but I think he was referring to the way racists have often warped "science" in attempts to justify their racism. Making the point that just because someone claims a "scientific" approach doesn't guarantee that their science will be of good quality or that their ethics are sound.
@@Sentientism
That's possible but IMO, "racist" is a term that is defined VERY differently by MANY people. It's also a term that, lately, is haphazardly strewn about and cast upon others with sufficient justification.......... often as a weapon meant to either demoralize, silence, or harm people whom in no way, shape, or form are racist ( *racist* = the belief that one or more races is morally inferior to one or more other races).
Certain people in certain governments do the same thing with "terrorist" and "extremist"
@@LouisGedo Maybe. But the sense I got from Adrian is he was referring to historical people who clearly fit that "inferior" definition you posted. Many of them described here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
"...there is an argument to be made as to whether "race" is even a sensible categorization."
Are you implying that race is non-existent? :/
@@ReverendDr.Thomas
There's an argument to be made that "race" is way to arbitrary and/or vague.
I don't particularly hold that view but many people I've come across seem to hold that perspective.