Fast TThu, Jan 14, 2010 Beautifuly written post. I am reminded of a passage I recently read in John Scalzi's Old Man's War, where the (augmented) human soldiers face in battle an intelligent race with teeming culture and technology. After beating their fleet in space they land on that race planet and stomp them to death, realizing the other race is only two inches high. That is when horror first strikes the protagonist. Indeed, it is when our scale-based perceptions and conventions challenged that we come to grips with the transitory element in forming perceptions at all. Yet, it seems to me that we gained some substantial adaptation skills in challenging ourselves thus. To relate to one of the examples you use, i think no longer of hight in terms of 'how many me' but 'how many stories', a "measure" that wasn't even relevant not so long ago. At large, it seems to me that as long as we 'reside' in our current bodies, our perceptions will be conditioned to an extent by that body's size (and durance, and biology, and so on). With it, as Xaos put it in Montevideo (part 10) , we enjoy a fragile freedom stemming of our openness, that makes the tension of how we are so interesting.
Beautifuly written post. I am reminded of a passage I recently read in John Scalzi's Old Man's War, where the (augmented) human soldiers face in battle an intelligent race with teeming culture and technology. After beating their fleet in space they land on that race planet and stomp them to death, realizing the other race is only two inches high. That is when horror first strikes the protagonist. Indeed, it is when our scale-based perceptions and conventions challenged that we come to grips with the transitory element in forming perceptions at all. Yet, it seems to me that we gained some substantial adaptation skills in challenging ourselves thus. To relate to one of the examples you use, i think no longer of hight in terms of 'how many me' but 'how many stories', a "measure" that wasn't even relevant not so long ago. At large, it seems to me that as long as we 'reside' in our current bodies, our perceptions will be conditioned to an extent by that body's size (and durance, and biology, and so on). With it, as Xaos put it in Montevideo (part 10) , we enjoy a fragile freedom stemming of our openness, that makes the tension of how we are so interesting.