The person who bristles at being labeled is being childish. You are not a special snowflake; you are always a member of some category. The only matter with a label is its accuracy.

Call me a Thomist and you would be right. More to the point, presume that my metaphysical ruminations hardly originate with me. I'm not trying to break ground, here; I'm sharing an understanding that I have acquired. 

So I am David. David is not a soul inhabiting a body. My body is not a vessel. There is no ghost in the machine. While my soul, having immaterial aspects due to its rational nature, can exist apart from its material aspects, a human soul without a body is incomplete. Truncated; crippled. My soul is the form of David and that form properly entails the material.

I am reducible to neither my body nor my soul.

There is a tendency these days to think of the mind as a computer plugged into a body. It seems a useful analogy, sometimes. The problem is that one starts to think of separated processes in the mind because that is how computers work. Most especially, one thinks that the "mind" is the conscious bit of oneself, the you, and the unconscious bits are just the "brain," all but independent of the true self.

However, much as you must stop thinking of the soul and body as independent, you must stop thinking of the mind and brain as independent. When you drive to work and are thinking the whole time about something else and yet you are stopping at traffic lights and making those familiar turns, it is not a drive-to-work brain-bound subroutine that is getting you there, but you.

There is only one actor. And that assertion is not semantic; it is metaphysical.

Now, I'm not going to give a thoroughgoing defense of this idea. A good Thomist can do so (visit Edward Feser whenever you can). Rather, in this little blog post, I want only to prompt a shift in your thinking.

Do you recall that experiment that "proved" free will was an illusion? I recall that, eventually, the empirical facts were shown to be wrong; but accept that the experiment was empirically accurate in its results.

The "proof" was that when a subject picked up a cup, the brain fired off the muscle signals to pick up the cup before the subject consciously acted to pick up the cup. In other words, the decision to pick up the cup followed the movement to do so.

As you can see, the problem in this "proof" is the presumption that the conscious part of you is all of you; more subtly, that free will is implicated only in consciousness.

Or consider this. The free will in this case doesn't consist in the "decision" to pick up the cup; the free will was prior to that, when the subject decided to do what was asked of him. Picking up a cup does not require will as such. The subject knows how to pick up a cup. He is primed to act already. His muscles are in play even before he is consciously aware of what he is doing.

If the subject were instead told to stab someone, an if-then morality check — i.e., his conscience — kicks in. The muscle process is blocked. The consciousness is made aware, affirms the delay, and no stabbing occurs. And a well-formed conscience — that perennial check on "mindless" action — is the result of prior learning and training; of prior free will. Even the reflexive refusal to stab a man is ultimately the consequence of free will, whatever the milliseconds timing of this or that neuronal impulse.

Or consider this. Ultimately the mind is immaterial. The decision to act is made in an immaterial space. That a material detection of a "decision" should follow the material detection of a "movement" does not tell you what happened prior to both in the immaterial aspect of the mind.

Think about it.

Generally I like what Supernatural does with Biblical mythology. Mind you, the writers are only scraping the mythology. They never explore the actual point of this or that story, but only steal from the cultural detritus of a society once Christian, re-purposing folktales they once half-heard in Sunday school.

Take, for example, the arc about the Darkness and the Mark of Cain.

Beware! Spoilers follow. 

So, before Creation, indeed before God, there was chaos, a force later called the Darkness. The Darkness was defeated by God and His Archangels and was locked away. The key to the cell containing the Darkness was entrusted to Lucifer (before his fall). Lucifer, having rebelled against God, used the key to corrupt Cain. The key became the Mark.

There have been three possessors, or keepers, of the key: Lucifer, Cain, and now Dean Winchester (one of the two brother heroes of the show, the other being Sam). Dean took on the Mark so that he could wield the First Blade (the very blade used to kill Abel) and destroy the last remaining Knight of Hell. The Knight is destroyed.

The Mark is corrupting, however, and Dean is becoming like Cain, the King of Murder. Sam conspires with a witch to remove the Mark from Dean. Unfortunately, if the key is not being held, the cell containing the Darkness will be opened. When the Mark is removed from Dean, the Darkness escapes.

No one quite realized what the Mark really was. The business about it being a key was not revealed until it was too late. Even then, given the bond between Dean and Sam (who have literally let the world suffer rather than let the other be ruined or taken away), Sam likely would not have stopped it anyhow.

Now, that is good mythmaking. I love the bit about the First Blade, the mere jawbone of a donkey that, having been used in the first murder, becomes a legendary weapon. I love how the Mark, in magical fashion, is itself a powerful object. And every episode with Cain is just great (the casting of Timothy Omundson, an actor I have otherwise never heard of, was somehow perfect).

You can see, of course, how this arc is not entirely Biblical. Its infidelity to Scripture is not the bothersome part. Nothing wrong — at all — with treating the Bible as a source of folktales to be reshaped in fiction. What bothers me, rather, are the polemical flavorings of the arc.

To begin with, Supernatural says that Cain did not kill Abel out of jealousy. Abel was not being faithful to God; he was worshiping Lucifer. Cain killed Abel to liberate his brother. In other words, Cain was motivated by love. The goody-two-shoes Abel was in fact beholden to the Evil One. Abel, like any other model to the Christian, was actually a deluded hypocrite.

How's that for a retcon? Why, it's only the conventional perspective of any de-Christianized modern.

It gets worse. It turns out the Darkness did not precisely predate God; it is, in fact, God's sister. God, though still the Creator in Supernatural's scheme, is really just a god, one of a two-member pantheon.

And because Supernatural cannot embrace the truly Christian definition of God as, in principle, being incapable of sharing a genus or family with anything, the writers are free to put God in the dock. Or, probably more to the point, intending to put God in the dock, they found it easier to diminish Him.

Ever since the Angels first appeared in Supernatural, back in the fourth season, the absence of God — His failure to help prevent even the Apocalypse, let alone the deaths or ruinations of characters — has been decried. Thematically, of course, God represents the absent Father, which plays off the failures of Dean and Sam's human father. But His absence (which, admittedly, is real enough to the superficial observer of the real world) also grounds Supernatural's judgments against Him.

For a long time I've tolerated Supernatural's take on Angels and Heaven and God. It is conventional nonsense about how following the mandates of Heaven — i.e., the will of God — is a loss of freedom. We are at our best when, like the crowd in Life of Brian, we cry out together, "We are all individuals!" We are better than Angels because we defy God. Supernatural takes this human self-worship to such a degree, that it casts Lucifer's rebellion as a refusal to venerate Mankind.

But again, I tolerated this because, hey, I have a soft spot for the monster-hunting and melodrama.

In the eleventh season, however, God makes an explicit appearance, and this is when the show becomes disappointing. The season itself has some good episodes (I particularly liked the one about imaginary friends), but the resolution of the Darkness storyline entails a rehearsal of every small-minded conception of God the Failure.

See, this is Chuck. He is an anxious, agitated drunk. A loser. In a meta-fictional turn, he writes a series of books called Supernatural. He knows what has happened and will happen to the Winchesters. He, it seems, is a Prophet.

No. Wait. Turns out Chuck is God. Or rather, this is how God manifests Himself. Yet it's not an act. God really is a sad sack. He is petulant and whiny. He doesn't listen to prayers. He stopped intervening miraculously because it was pointless. He is fatalistic. He ran away. Supernatural reduces God to One of Us. In fact Man has surprised and surpassed Him by creating music and nacho cheese. God may be the Creator, but at heart He is Chuck.

Supernatural's contribution to theodicy is that God is precisely as small as you fear that He is. Rather than deal with the problems of evil and suffering as, for example, does the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, especially in its great thinkers like Aquinas, Supernatural finds refuge in the usual, limited conception of God as a guy out of his depth, not much better than another Zeus.

Above all, this is an artistic failure in Supernatural. It is common enough. Supernatural is hardly alone in its portrayal of God; many college sophomores would concur. But it is facile. Imagine, rather, that Supernatural had foregone the Chuckism and dealt with the actual Christian God, the actual God. Artistically, yes, that would have been bad, too, since the previous seven seasons had not been preparing you for such a turn. But if the prep had been good, how much more intellectually interesting everything would have been!

By making God Chuck, the writers took the easy way out and, not so incidentally, allowed themselves to feel superior to the Deity who has so terribly failed us, we who are, despite all our faults, the most wonderful people ever.

Thus the Gospel of the Moderns.

My book The Giant's Walk has been added to the library at Speculative Faith. Click here. For the time being, at least, my book is also showing up (with others) on their front page. I invited myself to their library, but they have been kind enough to let me in. Thank you, Speculative Faith.

There's a lot of advice regarding self-publishing. Much of it involves leveraging Facebook or Twitter or writers' conferences and forums; networking, as it were. I am incompetent at networking. I am generally incompetent at peopling. But one bit of advice I can take is to create a series.

I tend not to make separate works that involve the same characters or worlds. I did write several short stories involving Pugnacious Footefake, but those together barely constitute a single book. The idea, rather, is to offer several related books. 

It makes sense. A series encourages the reader to buy another book. A series makes the author's back-catalog attractive. A series creates fans. People like series. I myself, as a reader, like series.

Give the people what they want!

Creating a series would, in my case, be a particularly good discipline. If you look at my books as a collection, you can see that eclectic is the charitable description. I am not in any niche; not really. It's the strange reader who, having enjoyed The Spare Midge, would be attracted to Sideways of the Earth. A series at least creates its own niche.

Fortunately, I have a rich idea for a certain world and a beginning trilogy. And so, perhaps, rather than finish yet another eccentric novel like The Giant's Walk, I should devote myself to creating a series.

Yes. I think I will.

"Aggressively self-promoting" does not describe me. I have made a few bold moves in my writing career (one of which paid off), but I have never been guilty of dogged legwork on my own behalf. My works therefore tend to age, unread.

I have recently retired from my day job. I am still young enough (and not in the self-delusional sense of 60-is-the-new-40) that I now have more than enough time to work a lot harder at getting myself either noticed or traditionally published.

I thought of trying, yet again, to get Noah, Penny published by someone other than myself. Then I reviewed the story in my mind. I realized that it is dated. No cellphones; no texting; no TV on demand; no internet at all. Not one of the characters — all of them in the eighth grade — makes any reference to social media. And how could they? The book was written in the mid-'90s. 

What's worse, the kids communicate via landlines and — gasp! — notes dropped in lockers and at front doors. No texting through the noosphere. Then there's the discussion of a certain VHS videotape — a thing modern children probably can't even identify.

Well. Okay. Does Noah, Penny have a charm as, perhaps, a period piece? Hardly. In what possible way could the '90s charm anyone? The book is not even touched by any particular cultural markers, as if Kurt Cobain makes an appearance. Perversely, it was written to be timeless and instead it just seems off. "Oh, look, a story about two eighth-graders circa 1995. Um. Why should I care about 1995?"

I've flirted with the idea of upgrading the tech in the book. Hey, I'll just pretend it is set in 2015! But we all know how instant access to the noosphere invalidates a lot of dramatic turns. ("What do you mean you can't find Hansel and Gretel? They've got GPS on their cells, right?") The choices my characters make are not likely to survive the possibility of tweeting.

I'll keep thinking about my options; but Noah, Penny may have missed its chance.

So I resurrected my blog in the spring of 2015. And then, having coded it and deployed it and spun it up with a few entries (some reused from long ago), I disappeared. Isn't that the way?

Now I am back, perhaps to disappear again.

Fickle blogger I be.

I am a voter for the 2015 Hugo Awards. I am posting my thoughts about the candidate works. Be warned that spoilers abound.

There are five short stories on the Hugo list. I'll be referring to them using the following abbreviations.

OSP — On a Spiritual Plain by Lou Antonelli
PBB — The Parliament of Beasts and Birds by John C. Wright
SS — A Single Samurai by Steven Diamond
TT — Totaled by Kary English
TC — Turncoat by Steve Rzasa

My comments on these shorts will be short — and scattered.  

PBB is beautifully written.

Above the coliseum and circus, where athletes strove and acrobats danced and slaves fought and criminals were fed alive to beasts for the diversion of the crowds...

That is just one early phrase, with no particular thematic purpose. But read it aloud. It is pointed and rhythmic. And the argument among the Beasts, about who dare enter the final city of Man, is adroitly — let us say — highfalutin'. SS, though less blatantly poetic, turns words in a way that makes a fight with a Godzilla contemplative.

I appreciated that, right after a brief setting of weirdness (narrator huddled on a polar plain with aliens and a human ghost), OSP just explained the mechanics of the situation. I love piecemeal revelation; but especially in a short story, sometimes bluntness is best. TC makes very fine use of a biblical quote, one not well known, that enriches and does not merely decorate. TT's ultimate point is emotional, and to that end nicely uses emotional imagery as part of the SF mechanics.

TC's villain, if you will, is not an AI, but a post-human. The genocidal impulse of the Integration is grounded in hatred from humans for humans. This is better than the usual (often inscrutable) hatred of the Golem for its Master. All I know about samurai I know from fiction yet it seems to me that SS well depicts the point of a samurai, and makes use of it for the resolution. The defeat of the kaiju comes not from some superpowered hero but from the soul of the samurai, as distinct from the souls other warriors. I can't help but think that TT is a commercial for euthanasia; it seemed a little sour, somehow. In the end it's all emoting, not even a frank assertion of this or that point of view on human life.

That the rebellious AI in TC calls itself 'Benedict' at the end seems inapt. Arnold was a turncoat, yes, but not in a good way. Using the name of an American villain as a kind of punchline nearly knocks over the plot. Meanwhile, TT makes a cheap jab at conservatives (calling them 'Treaders'), which, like most left-wing jabs, incorrectly ascribes to conservative intent some evil that leftists actually do (i.e., government-run healthcare-rationing panels).

What distinguishes SF from other sorts of fantastical fiction is, of course, the science; and nothing says 'science' like numbers. TC's litany of empirical specifics just tickles me. True, in some ways it is less science than tech porn, but it is a milieu I love. Wright, who loves to work in eons, is very good at depicting the End of Man, no less so in PBB. SS makes the kaiju a force of nature, frightening in a way that a mere Godzilla can't be; the enormousness and enormity are very well evoked.

I love hard SF. These stories weren't thrilling me in that regard, at least not until I got to TC. Then again, I don't always like cold-hearted SF. (One of the reasons I love Solaris is that — rarely for Lem — there is actual human emotion amid the philosophy.) So while I was disappointed by the rotten paucity of robots, I did like what I read (except for TT, which is nonetheless well-written). In fact, my favorite was SS, which had nary a vacuum tube.

My final vote will be, in this order: SS, TC, PBB, OSP, TT.