LOL! yeh, I suppose I'm in a slightly paranoid place, lately, w.r.t. to institutional power. I should probably also explain that I take it as given that interrogation-by-torture regimes are not really at all about eliciting information, and much more about achieving a desired performance. That's how the North Koreans and the Soviets used them: To get people to publicly do and say what they wanted them to. Orwell (and Richard Condon in *The Manchurian Candidate*) took it a step further into the realm of belief, and that's where this kind of technology could take us: Given some precision and a disciplined regime of execution, you could pretty reliably mind-f*ck someone into behaving and at least thinking that they believe exactly the way you want them to.
But, angels, sure. Not sure exactly what you're thinking, but my first thought is it's a little dry. I'm probably atypical in this regard, but I usually don't care too much for physical explanations of fantasy elements. Some people find a story about neurological angels more interesting if there's an explanation of how they came to be; what's interesting to me is the subjective experience of seeing angels in the modern world, and the tensions that go along with that. It's not that I believe in angels -- my own bias is to assume there's a physical explanation for everything -- it's just that it seems to me that to the person experiencing the hallucination, the reality is liable to be not as relevant as we might hope. I.e., explaining the angel to a true believer is likely to get you either hostility or patronizing indulgence (if not just being totally ignored). I've been noodling off and on for a number of years with an idea for a detective novel, where the sleuth is schizophrenic. When I fist conceived of it I admit I had some rather romantic ideas about that. My ideas have changed since then, but the core idea is pretty much the same: his reality is not the same as everyone else's, even though it occupies the same space and the same objective results occur. He solves a crime that to us is about theft or adultery or jealousy, but to him is about God fighting rebel Angels. He's able to *almost* totally conceptualize everything in those terms. I'll probably never write this in no small part because what I've been reading lately leads me to believe that mental illnesses really don't work that way, but that's an example of the kind of approach to induced hallucination that interests me. On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Jason Olshefsky <[email protected]>wrote: > On May 12, 2010, at 8:31 AM, Eric Scoles wrote: > >> The applications for Big Brother / North Korea style interrogation are >> obvious. >> > > Funny you go there ... I (of _all_ people; see also: everything I do on > Facebook) was thinking much less nefarious purposes like the idea of angels, > miracles, gods, seeing-is-believing, etc. > > > --- Jason Olshefsky > http://JayceLand.com > http://JayceLand.com/blog > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<r-spec%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
