Some notes on Dara Horn's "A Guide for the Perplexed"
First things was to find out if the book "A Guide for the Perplexed" that this book is named after is actually real. There are lots of books called A Guide for the Perplexed (or subtitled such). But the book Dara Horn references is also real and luckily is available as a PDF on line http://www.teachittome.com/seforim2/seforim/the_guide_for_the_perplexed.pdf. Turn to page 40 for an analysis of the book.
The novel is kind of like a meta novel of a meta life in a way. It's like 12th century philosophy meets 21st century cyber reality. Josie has constructed a software program that "recreates" an individual by sorting and filing all of our metadata behind "doors". This is not sufficiently explained to be believable (luckily) but it works as a metaphor for kind of replacing loved ones
with files about them. Meanwhile, she is asked to help work on a library in Egypt where she is kidnapped, her family is told she is dead and she is then asked to, first hack the police station and erase all the files, but later to create one of her programs for the son of her kidnapper who had been killed by the police. Meanwhile, when she isn't coding in her kidnapped cell, she is reading the book, "A Guide for the Perplexed" and thinking about the issues that it raises.
The issues the book raises that Horn shares with the reader are interesting. The book divides the evil that befalls mankind into three parts (after arguing that humans focus too much on evil when good by far outweighs it (wonder if Pinker discusses this book in his book "Angels of our Nature")
1. caused by the circumstances of the body (illness, disease, mutation, etc)
2. caused each other
3. cause ourselves (it is this evil that we complain about most, the soul desires things that are not necessary . . .)
This 3rd seems to be related to my earlier post from Tim Parks book Sex is Forbidden and the idea of generous acceptance and this idea of letting go of grasping for those things that we do not NEED to control. At the same time though, wanting more is what makes us human, and is the wanting the thing that brings us "evil" or is it our response to the wanting or the getting that is actually where the "evil" comes from?
For a minute let's take God out of the equation and think of it as "physics of the universe." The Guide has us imagine a person overlooking a valley that people are walking in. The person can see obstacles up ahead, or things in the path that will stop them and thus can know where they will end up, but the people experience free will because they do not forsee these things upahead and see themselves as making a choice. Could it be that our construction (biological at an atomic level) is such that our lives are predetermined (the way we will respond to a certain stimulus is in our genes, if you will) but we cannot see that. We are not able to know ourselves at that level so it is unseen to us and is experienced as free will?
The novel is kind of like a meta novel of a meta life in a way. It's like 12th century philosophy meets 21st century cyber reality. Josie has constructed a software program that "recreates" an individual by sorting and filing all of our metadata behind "doors". This is not sufficiently explained to be believable (luckily) but it works as a metaphor for kind of replacing loved ones
with files about them. Meanwhile, she is asked to help work on a library in Egypt where she is kidnapped, her family is told she is dead and she is then asked to, first hack the police station and erase all the files, but later to create one of her programs for the son of her kidnapper who had been killed by the police. Meanwhile, when she isn't coding in her kidnapped cell, she is reading the book, "A Guide for the Perplexed" and thinking about the issues that it raises.
The issues the book raises that Horn shares with the reader are interesting. The book divides the evil that befalls mankind into three parts (after arguing that humans focus too much on evil when good by far outweighs it (wonder if Pinker discusses this book in his book "Angels of our Nature")
1. caused by the circumstances of the body (illness, disease, mutation, etc)
2. caused each other
3. cause ourselves (it is this evil that we complain about most, the soul desires things that are not necessary . . .)
This 3rd seems to be related to my earlier post from Tim Parks book Sex is Forbidden and the idea of generous acceptance and this idea of letting go of grasping for those things that we do not NEED to control. At the same time though, wanting more is what makes us human, and is the wanting the thing that brings us "evil" or is it our response to the wanting or the getting that is actually where the "evil" comes from?
For a minute let's take God out of the equation and think of it as "physics of the universe." The Guide has us imagine a person overlooking a valley that people are walking in. The person can see obstacles up ahead, or things in the path that will stop them and thus can know where they will end up, but the people experience free will because they do not forsee these things upahead and see themselves as making a choice. Could it be that our construction (biological at an atomic level) is such that our lives are predetermined (the way we will respond to a certain stimulus is in our genes, if you will) but we cannot see that. We are not able to know ourselves at that level so it is unseen to us and is experienced as free will?
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