Nrosenberg’s Reviews > Katabasis > Status Update

SPOILERS

… The point was not rehabilitation but a stripping down to form, to show that humans were blindly writhing worms, rooting about to feel anything at all. Oh, God, she thought frantically, why did you create us, why foul the universe with our failing, why not rest after the fourth day, and be content with the silent stars…

SPOILERS

Was this the end point of existence? Alice could have wept with the ridiculousness of it. Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of kibitzing rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life’s worthlessness to begin with…

“… And always, always, it ends with draining their blood. They fill up their bladder sacks, they drench their chalk sticks, and off they go.”

“That’s sick,” said Peter.

“That’s research,” said Elspeth.

**Idk who in academia hurt RF Kuang, but Jesus does she hate academia lol**

… We might share the same cells, bodily continuity, and memories as previous iterations of ourselves. But that is all. There is no further fact of the matter - no essential /us/ hovering like a specter. We bear the same relationship to the version of ourselves from ten years ago as we might to a sibling.

… that is to say, no special essence of personhood that remains stable across one’s lifetime. Using a number of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain divisions, and tele-transportation, Parfit argued that the qualities which we think define essential personhood - psychological connectedness, for instance - do not actually ground any deeper fact…

That summer, the philosopher Derek Parfit publishes the very controversial “Reasons and Persons”, and for a while it was all that anyone at Cambridge or Oxford would talk about. Alice read it with great interest. In fact, it helped her sort through much of her confusion. “Reasons and Person” argues for a reductionist account of personal identity: …