By the Book

I love books; I love reading them, writing them, and having them.

In the Taiwanese school system, we had to memorize Chinese classics of history, philosophy, and poetry. When children inevitably complained, teachers and parents would admonish us to remember the purges of the Qin dynasty (秦, ca. 200 BCE, not to be confused with the 清 dynasty, romanized 'Qing'; I will leave the angry Pin-Yin rant for another day).

Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, accomplished many great deeds--'great' as in 'large', not as in 'good'. He unified China, standardized the Chinese script, and connected fortifications built by various warlords into what we know as the Great Wall. Like many 'great' rulers, he was also a mass-murdering, megalomaniacal tyrant.

Aside from killing pretty much anyone suspected of disagreeing with him, Qin Shi Huang also ordered books that might be used to question his regime burned, and those who studied them buried alive. Scholars risked their lives protecting the proscribed texts--carrying them into exile, hiding them, or committing them to memory.

Thus, our elders argued, we should cherish the freedom of our time, but always remember that tyrants exist in every age.  If we studied hard, we could, make it impossible for the next tyrant to destroy the knowledge of our ancestors. As a child, I took their words at face value and dutifully memorized the classics. The idea of becoming a sort of living library appealed to my young imagination.

As soon as I had any disposable income, I became a hoarder of books. From the very start, I knew this would cause problems. I never seemed to have enough shelf space or money to feed my hunger for books. I made concerted efforts to avoid book stores, to little avail.

Discovering the intersection of ebooks and the public domain saved both my wallet and the sanity of my housemates. I got the original Amazon Kindle, and used it constantly despite all of its flaws. Since the Kindle went the way of all hardware, I do a great deal of reading on my Android phone, and avoid paper books unless I have no digital recourse.

I have forgotten much of what I memorized in primary school, but not the lessons on censorship I learned from Qin Shi Huang. Moreover, I know now that digitization and open distribution of books has far greater potential for protecting knowledge than storing information 'in the meat'.

Over the next few months, I intend to clean up some novels and short stories I have written and put them in the public domain. I could wax philosophical about intellectual property and all that, but in the end this was largely an emotional decision.

I love books; I love reading them, writing them, and sharing them.

Nothing Unreal Exists

I seem to lack an intuitive confidence in reality that most people exhibit.

The first piece of philosophy that made any sense to me was Zhuang-zi's 'butterfly dream'. For those unfamiliar with the story: Zhuang-zi has a vivid dream of being a butterfly, then wakes up and wonders whether he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man.

In other words, we have no means of independently confirming our perceptions of reality.

That idea later drew me to the practice of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. For the same reason, the only part of Western Classical philosophy that immediately interested me was Skepticism. Perhaps ironically, my uncertainty about perception also led me to place a high value on the scientific process and empiricism.

Even verifying an observation with instruments or other observers relies on information gathered by our senses and interpreted by our brains, which (as illustrated by the butterfly dream and cognitive experiments) are notoriously inconsistent. However, given that all other methods are also prey to the fallibility of human cognition, science provides the most reliable known framework for interpreting the world around us.

I accept consensus reality as a plausible theory, and usually behave in a manner consistent with it. Even if suffering is an illusion, it still feels unpleasant, so I do my best to avoid it. All the same, I consider it good practice to entertain other hypotheses, hence my fascination with fiction in general, and speculative fiction in particular.

Recently, my partner coined a phrase ('conspiracy chic') that gave me insight on a pet peeve of mine: I revile fiction that puts too much emphasis on its (supposed or actual) basis in reality. I do not mean historical fiction or hard sci-fi, but rather conspiracy thrillers, true crime stories, and the like. Well-known examples include The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and The Blair Witch Project.

Realism in fiction (or lack thereof) does not bother me, but I reject the notion that I ought to find a story more compelling just because it is 'real'. Dan Brown begins The Da Vinci Code with a list of 'facts'; the (very poor) pedigree of those 'facts' aside, that gimmick relies on the conceit that fiction is inferior to non-fiction.

I understand that people want to believe stories, but I do not grok how a story's alleged reality makes it more believable. As I see it, a 'true' story has a higher burden of proof than a fictitious one. This does not mean I cannot enjoy true stories, but somehow I always feel a need to independently verify them, which damages my ability to suspend disbelief. Fiction frees me from that uncertainty.

Beyond my own peculiar preferences, fiction communicates many things as well as--if not better than--non-fiction. Consider the fables and parables that litter various philosophies and philosophies, or thought experiments in theoretical physics, not to mention the entire linguistic concept of metaphors. Literal existence is not a requirement for relevance.

Just as we can question reality without losing touch with it, we can value fiction without conflating it with reality. Besides, all ideas and all fiction (and all fake non-fiction, too) have some measure of reality--if not in their effects on our agency, then at least in the chemical, electrical, and metabolic activities our bodies go through when we think about them. That opens another can of butterflies in terms of theories on how reality works.