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Apsinthion Protocol Chapter One, Page Five written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)

Lon did remarkably detailed work for this page, executing my finicky demands for complex scenes and scene-to-scene transitions with great care and fidelity, showing what he’s made of as an artist.  Not that this would come as much of a surprise to any of you who have been following his work.   If any of you haven’t, here’s a chance to jump in.  Issue #3 of Lon’s own series The Perils of Penelope Pornstarr (“The Bodyguard”) has just become available.  (And if you’ve been reading this site for a while, you’ll know what a merry mad-science romp that is!) You can buy it — not just pixels, but a real comic book you can hold in your hands — at Lon’s store on E-bay, along with lots of other cool stuff, including prints and original art from the comic series you’re reading now.  So stop in and pay a visit, won’t you?

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Okay, so I’ll admit I was in something of a dark place when I came up with this gloss on the Myth of Pandora that I am later able to write up as a speech given by Donna.  It’s just how my mind works at moments of real disappointment.   It’s not something I would endorse as a general proposition, but I can see how someone might get there.

Donna at least is proving you can get a pretty good education at a state university if you halfway try. She’s perhaps only twenty and already able to steal thoughts from this guy:

“Man kann unser Leben auffassen als eine unnützerweise störende Episode in der seligen Ruhe des Nichts,” is what I believe Donna is playing off in her speech.

Okay, so maybe Schopenhauer isn’t all that erotic.  Or is he?  He made a very pretty youth:

Just sayin’.

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Metaethics might seem like a very strange thing to post on at all in a blog entitled Erotic Mad Science.  Or it might seem very strange until you reflect on defiant pronouncements like the one that appeared below the fold in yesterday’s post in response to an imagined critical interlocutor:

Finger-wagging moralists will doubtless appear to tell me that I need to feel really bad about myself.  (Or would, since I think anyone answering to the description of “finger-wagging moralist” who attempted to read this site would quickly have to retire with a case of the vapors.) But I think I’ll decline this invitation.

“But Faustus,” you might say, “how could you possibly feel free to decline that invitation.  What if you’re just wrong?”  Well folks, it’s like this:  after a long time sitting on the fence on the moral realism versus moral anti-realism question I’ve decided to hop off the fence and spend my time frolicking in John Mackie‘s garden.  Yes, having already come out of the closet as a thaumatophile, I feel a need also to out myself as a moral error theorist.  Like Mackie, I think there are no objective values.  I’m simply unpersuaded by the attempts of people who believe in the existence of objective moral facts to deal with the reality of human moral diversity, and I find the notion of moral prescriptions somehow woven into the fabric of the universe to be impossibly queer.

(Painting Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489-1534), Allegory of Vice, ca. 1530.  Found here.)

Even I can’t bring myself to be so boring as to discuss the matter at length.  One way of getting to error theory (which I personally find persuasive) is explained in a five-step argument by Richard Joyce in his The Myth of Morality (2001).

1. If x ought morally to φ, the x ought to φ, regardless of whether ve cares to, regardless of whether φing satisfies any of vis desires or furthers vis interests.
2. If x morally ought to to φ, then x has a reason for φing.
3. Therefore, if x morally ought to φ, then x has a reason for φing, regardless of whether φing serves vis desires or furthers vis interests.
4. But there is no sense to be made of such reasons.
5. Therefore x is never under a moral obligation.

Finger-wagging moralists can therefore go suck it:  their views aren’t true in any possible world.

Readers who are interested in (or enraged by) this argument are urged to follow up by reading either John Mackie’s classic Ethics:  Inventing Right and Wrong or Joyce’s book.  There’s also a fine new just-published anthology called A World without Values edited by Joyce and Simon Kirchin, although since it’s published by Springer you might have to take out a second mortgage if you actually want to buy a copy.  You can also peruse the “Thinkers” links to the right hand of the page for links to Joyce’s website, as well as to that of Richard Garner (under “Beyond Morality.”)  I aim to provide useful information here…

(Correggio, Allegory of Virtue.)

The implications of moral error theory are startling and, if you’re in the right mindframe, liberating.  It’s as exhilarating as losing your religion all over again, as recent moral de-convert Joel Marks has remarked in a recent essay.  And there are even rather cool atheological implications, as Jordan Howard Sobel (may he rest in peace) shows in Logic and Theism.  (Sure, theists are wrong.  That’s old news.  But many atheists — ones like Sam Harris certainly and many other probably — are also significantly wrong.)

Right.  Enough philosophy. Possibly going there was tedious, but it was something I had to get off my chest.  More proper mad science tomorrow, I promise.

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I decided to take a little break from fictional mad scientsts recently and devote some energies to reading something by a real sane scientist, in this case Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who has a splendid new book out called How Pleasure Works:  The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.

Now How Pleasure Works is a remarkably rich book in spite of its short length and it is difficult to do much justice to it in something like a blog post, but one major take-away therefrom is a lot of evidence for the thesis that the pleasure we take about things depends critically on our beliefs about their natures and histories, and not just their sensory properties.

Let’s bring that down a few levels:  Bloom is defending at least three theses here:

1. People are innate essentialists.  They think that things are what they are not just be virtue of their perceptible properties, but that they have some sort of deeper structure or inner nature that makes them what they are.  A robot that simulates the behavior and appearance of a tiger is not a “real” tiger, even if it can fool an experienced observer.  Your spouse’s monozygotic twin is not your spouse, even if ve is so identical that ve can fool you.
2. The history of how things is (usually) a part of their essences.
3. Our beliefs about the essences of things affect the pleasure we take in them, over and above just how they strike our senses.

That’s still abstract, so perhaps some illustrative examples will help:

1. People will take a lot of pleasure in a painting that they think was done by Vermeer, but if the painting is subsequently shown to be a forgery, they will take a lot less pleasure in it (and its value will drop precipitously), even though it’s the same painting as before and presents the exact same image to the retinas as before.
2. Children who have comfort objects (teddy bears or dolls or special blankets, as examples) really do not want substitutes for these items, even if the substitutes are identical.
3. You might be turned on a lot by an attractive model in an erotic photography shoot, but if you were to suddenly that she was your mother at age nineteen, your attitude might change.

I guess I read Professor Bloom’s book with unusual fascination, because if his understanding of pleasure is correct, it becomes easier for me to make sense of some of the stuff that spills from my fingers onto the page.  Bizarre claim?  Well, consider the notion that something has an essence that remains even if its perceptible qualities change.  It’s a curious piece of common sense, only in light of which can a weird declaration like the following even make narrative sense:

Corwin holds the phial up. Its contents are pale green and appears to glow slightly.

CORWIN

And there we have her.

NANETTA

(looking fearful and disbelieving)

Her?

CORWIN

Anwei!

NANETTA

Anwei?

CORWIN

Yes, Anwei. The beautiful young Anwei, as liquid essence. Liquid girl! Feel..

Corwin tries to press the phial into Nanetta’s hand.

corwin

…she is still warm.

The conceit here relies on an essentialist notion. The appearance of what’s in the phial is a warm pale-green liquor, but its essence is that of a pretty young woman. (Hard to read this over without thinking that perhaps it’s a satire of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and perhaps that’s what it really is.)  Without a certain kind of essentialist intuition, you wouldn’t even be able to make sense of the action here, which I am sure you can, even if you think it’s very weird.

Indeed, pretty much any kind of transformation fantasy relies on a certain kind of essentialist notion in order to be readily accessible.  At the moment in Progress in Research when Willie and Professor Waite engage in their Freaky Friday Flip, we can still locate a character who is “really Willie” and another who is “really Waite” and make sense of characters who appear to be other that what they are on that basis.

Professor Bloom also spends rather a lot of time discussing cannibalism, of all things, drawing on the notion that somehow essences might be transmissible across objects (one anthropological explanation of cannibalism is that cannibals are trying to absorb properties of the people they are eating). He even discusses the notorious Armin Meiwes voluntary cannibalism case (don’t read if you squick easily).  Fascinating, because I ran into that before.  There’s an exchange between Jill and Iris in Study Abroad about Iris’s experience of being cannibalized but (maybe) surviving due to being re-created:

JILL

Why not just make a backup, and eat it?

IRIS

I did think to ask. I was told that the clientele thought that experienced meat tastes better.

BRIDGET

Ew.

Apparently the diners in Club Cuisine preferred eating a real American college student with a real life history to merely a simulacrum of one. Like I said, don’t read if you squick easily…

The notion of essences transmitted over history might also be of help in understanding phenomena like agalmatophilia.  When Iris queries Mr. Takayama about why anyone would go the trouble to petrfy another person, he responds in terms that Iris can immediately understand.

TAKAYAMA

There will always be a deep appeal to whatever it was that was once alive. In luxury goods markets, real leather, real silk, real fur will always command a premium over their synthetic substitutes, precisely because of the seductive fact that they were all part of something once alive. Add to that the natural erotic appeal of a well-formed sculpture, and you can see commercial viability.

IRIS

Yes. I see. That was certainly the appeal I sensed behind the Club Cuisine.

A statute that was once a beautiful woman is a very different sort of thing from merely a statue of a beautiful woman, and (for at least some people) something that carries a vastly greater erotic charge.

Indeed, Paul Bloom’s analytical framework might even give a way of explaining what thaumatophilia is.  It’s someone who gets a real kick out of pushing the boundaries on essentialism, either by imagining scenarios where appearance diverges wildly from essence (human subjects become liquid, or statues, or giant spider goddesses), or we push beyond our essentialist intuitions altogether:  people are happy to be replaced with copies of themselves just to prove a philosophical point, or rejoice in being the fusion of two previously existing people.

A reflection that occured to me after reading Bloom’s book is that a thaumatophile is someone not content merely to be a sexual deviant.  Ve wants to be an ontological deviant as well.

While I heartily encourage anyone interested in the subject of this post to buy How Pleasure Works, you can get good stuff for free on the subject by watching Professor Bloom’s recent Bloggingheads diavlog with Robert Wright. And I also heartily recommend this excerpt in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the pleasures of the imagination, something this site itself is all about and which is not merely and instructive discussion of pleasure, but a fine source of it.

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MADDER

(handing him the dossier)

Transmit this to the Kupler op, and make arrangements to receive a transfer into the special operations account.

HORST

(leafing through the dossier)

She’s very pretty. Are you sure nothing about these ops bother you, sir?

MADDER

(leans back, calmly)

Nothing in either Hebrew or Greek scriptures forbids slavery, Horst, and some of us are inclined to the view that its classification as an evil is merely a heresy of secular liberals. Did not St. Paul himself enjoin slaves to obey their masters? In any event, we are having no one killed, and as long as the girl still lives, there will be an opportunity for repentance, as I once explained to your predecessor, prior to his unfortunate disappearance.

HORST

The girl will suffer terribly, I do not doubt.

MADDER

The evil of suffering is another liberal heresy, Horst. The presence of suffering reminds us of our fallen nature and brings us closer to God.

HORST

It is heartening to see that you have thought this through, sir.

And that’s worth reflecting on, and not just because it’s an opportunity for posters like me to post from the world’s abundant collection of slave-market art.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, "Slave Auction in Rome"

No, clearly this is an opportunity to look a little more at Colonel Madder’s reading, because when he tells us that nothing in the Greek or Hebrew scriptures forbids slavery, he’s not making it up.  And he could have gotten it from Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation.  Read below, or if the embedding doesn’t work, follow this link.

Food for thought.

Henri-Frederic Schopin, "The Slave Market" (detail)

Back in my graduate school days we sometimes had a saying:  “One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens,” and that seems to be true here.

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Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), "The Weapons of Mars"

…who taught us that “War is the Health of the State.”

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TAKAYAMA

Don’t you feel, what is the word? “guilt” at having in effect murdered one of your professors?

iris

Thanks to you and your associates, Mr. Takayama, I have already been dead any number of times. It changes one’s perspective.

TAKAYAMA

Ah, an excellent answer, Miss Brockman.

Or even further and odder the moment where Iris gazes on the petrification device provided by Takayama’s mysterious and somewhat sinister organization and contemplates something awful — to most people.

Iris picks up the camera-petrifying device, which is sitting on her desk, and looks into its business end.

IRIS

(to herself)

It has its appeal, doesn’t it?

But it must be said that even these strange and disturbing thoughts have some sort of science-fiction antecedent.

(My source for this image is the blog Posthuman Blues.) If that isn’t as mad-science as it gets,  I’ll eat my rheostat.  I don’t know much about the story, although the Wikipedia entry on author Paul W. Fairman indicates that the story “The Girl who Loved Death” was published in 1952.  Casual nosing around hasn’t yet turned up a copy of the text of the story (did nobody ever love it? — the closest thing to a review I was able to find wasn’t terribly positive) but the cover itself surely speaks volumes.

The 1950s were supposedly a bland and conformist decade, the time of Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, but looking more carefully one finds some very strange stuff back there.

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Adherents of the academic movement known as postmodernism, at least with respect to the the poseur attitudes they struck toward science and technology, were the viri that made me break out in such sores for years.  Condescending, glib, smug…and for the most part shockingly ignorant of the substance of what they aimed to criticize. they blighted my academic years and left me with the enduring sense that the academic enterprise was at least in part fraudulent.   So it was perhaps inevitable that I would create a character like Aphrodite Mora and the seminar she runs at Gnosis.

I wish I could point to something erotic about this particular scene, but sadly I find willfully cultivated obscurity something of a turn off.  But I can at least point to a source text for the scene, which is to wit the excellent and witty book shown to the left, especially pp. 54-5 thereof.  Enjoy!

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Frontispiece to _Leviathan_ (1651). Click through to see an amazing collection of politico-religious visual references in the larger image

Now you, dear reader, might well at this point be scratching your head and wondering what a 17th century English political philosopher is doing in the middle of all this erotic mad science.  Well, for one thing, Hobbes is a natural go-to for the thaumatophile, because in his striking image of a political commonwealth as a sort of man-made man, he got close to the whole Frankenstein theme a century and a half early.  From the introduction to Leviathan:

Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

And the erotic is not an element lacking in Hobbes.  The passage quoted by Rob is real.  It’s cited seriously by the contempoarary Cambridge philospher Simon Blackburn.  Blackburn’s a delight as a writer.  Not only did he administer a well-deserved intellectual spanking to theism-apologist John Polkinghorne in the pages of The New Republic a few years back, but he also gave the lecture on “Lust” as part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins put on at the New York Public Library.  It’s there that Blackburn actually quotes Hobbes.  Have a look, if it’s your thing.

(Well, it’s at least my thing.)

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As the distinguished proprietor of Bondage Blog has observed and as I have myself argued on occasion, there’s kind of a submission and suffering kink going on in Christianity.  Here are the first two verses of real hymn that neither of us is making up:

1.	Make me a captive, Lord,
	and then I shall be free.
	Force me to render up my sword,
	and I shall conqueror be.
	I sink in life's alarms
	when by myself I stand;
	imprison me within thine arms,
	and strong shall be my hand. 

2.	My heart is weak and poor
	until it master find;
	it has no spring of action sure,
	it varies with the wind.
	It cannot freely move
	till thou hast wrought its chain;
	enslave it with thy matchless love,
	and deathless it shall reign.

Full words along with a score and midi music available here, if you’re interested.

Unsurprisingly, someone is willing to push the metaphor, and not just weirdos like me.  There’ a real sex toy — honest! — called the Jackhammer Jesus, a crucifix in the form of the dildo, so I’m not making up some weird fetish just to advance the plot.

“Invisible man having sex with girls” is of course also a well-established trope — I had to throw in the anal Jesus thing just to give it a touch of originality.  You might well be familiar with it’s appearance in comics especially.  It shows up, for example, in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill‘s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a story of a group of late-Victorian characters (many with mad-scientist origins) who group together to fight the enemies of the British Empire.  The Invisible Man is one of them.  He is first “seen” in the series in a girls school, busily having his way with the students (some of whom, impregnated, interpret their experiences as divine visitations).

And of course there is also always that classic of European comic-book erotica, Milo Manara‘s Butterscotch, which has a merry time with the whole Invisible Man theme.

As with so many kinks, the roots of this one turn out to be ancient.  Remember that we have asked before the question about why people put so much energy into thinking about possible morality-free zones?  Well, as it turns out, people in fifth and fourth century B.C.E. Athens were thinking about this as well.    In Book II of Plato‘s Republic, Glaucon, a young companion of Socrates, challenges Socrates on the value of justice using — you guessed it! — a story about an invisible man.

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.

So now Glaucon, who’s clearly been giving the matter a lot of thought, quickly jumps into the “invisible man having sex” theme, before swiftly moving into the more philosophical challenge.

Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other;,no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.

Whole text available here, in case any of you want to see how it ends.

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