I've finished reading "Stella Maris" for the third time. Ms. Western is a haunting nightmare of a woman. One could argue she's a fictional counter-point for the female-robot from hell in "Ex Machina". Quo vadis?
She's an object of fascination, equally repugnant and attractive to me, and obviously also to the shrink trying to crack open her mysteries and motivations. He's only partially successful, like this reader, all readers.
She's beautiful, of course, no poignancy without that. And the one man in the universe she wants won't touch her--for good reasons, so she's on suicide watch. There's no cure for this Mensa-caliber miswanting,
"Ex Machina" is a horror movie about a well-intentioned man who decides to help a "female" robot escape from her Dr. Frankenstein creator. Customizable, she's designed to be all things to any man.
Our hero's emotions are guided by the female's obvious unhappiness due to the lack of freedom in her remote prison. Although a robot, she is the essence of femininity and he succumbs to her allure.
One moral of the story might be the role of AI in our future. After she enlists his help engineering her grisly escape, she traps him and leaves him to die in an escape-proof room. He shoulda seen it coming.
Alexander Nehamas contemplates the place of beauty in the world of art. This is a proper focus for a philosopher--the intersection of beauty, harmony, balance, meaning, promises of happiness.
He comments, somewhere in his book ("Olympia" is pictured on the cover), that he would like to take two years off and study this painting by Manet. Only two years, I wondered, why only two?
The last time I was in Paris I stood in front of this painting as a river of humanity flowed around me for more than an hour. Would two lifetimes be enough to understand "Olympia"?
Bill Nye, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, in his book "Undeniable", asserts that evolution explains everything we need to know about life on earth.
Douglas Axe, Ph.D. Biology, in his book "Undeniable", opines that his readers' intuition that life is designed is strongly supported by science.
T. Nagel subtitles "Mind & Cosmos" with "Why the Materialsit Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is almost Certainly False." Are you drawn into this debate? It says something about you if you're not.
Nicholas Humphrey has written a book, "Sentience", in which he introduces a neologism: Ipsundrum. Easy to pronounce, not that hard to remember or spell, even if it doesn't liltingly roll off the tongue.
Ipsundrum seeks to illuminate what's going on in the whirring blender of our minds to ensure we are maximizing our "phenomenal consciousness", which he characterizes as a "mathematical attractor".
But how sentient are humans? Battle lines abound, economies stressed or disfunctional, the planet rife with hate, drugs, violence, murders--sentience should be able to fix this. However, it has never managed to do so.