Trope-a-Day: Creating Life is Awesome

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-09-11 11:49:27 wrote

Which brings me to another question I’ve been meaning to ask for a bit but haven’t been sure how to word it:

What is the utility of creating another life? What sort of “return on investment” (so to speak) is the creator looking to get out of the time, energy, and attention they put into creating, raising, and assisting with a child’s development?

I mean that, on the one hand, Imperial culture as a whole has this paradigm of enlightened self-interest and contra-altruism, in the sense that simply investing time and effort in others without the possibility of accruing any measurable benefit to yourself is itself ethically dubious behavior. On the other hand, there’s also the core idea that you don’t instrumentalize another sophont and that the act of creation in and of itself does not obligate the created to the creator.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-09-14 02:00:00 wrote

Well, to clarify one point and be specific, Imperial culture is primarily opposed to altruism in the Objectivist or weak-Comtean sense, or its reverse, because that is an unbalanced exchange in mélith terms, a zero- or even negative-sum game.

More generally, I think the problem here may be in the word “measurable”, if by that you would also imply that the benefit must be concrete. (Miscounting or discounting the intangibles, and so interpreting utility in strictly utilitarianist or economic profit-maximizing terms, in considering eldraeic action, will tend to lead one into error.)

If you recall the discussion of their blue and orange morality, one translation of valxíjir is “the forcible impression of self onto the universe”, and estxíjir also has similar meaning; the predicate-form xíjirár, while hard to accurately translate into English, could be approximated as “to shape the universe in accordance with will” and has connections with the “to choose” verb family.

The point of which digression is that the “return” and the reason for an action, if you will, can be summed up as “It fulfils the necessities of my valxíjir,” or, “I would have it so, and thus I made it so.”

Or, even more simply, “Because I wished to.”

Now, the specific reasons that one might wish to do any given thing, including reproduction, are pretty much as variable as the individual having the desire.

(The last half-dozen or so paragraphs here may also be relevant.)

@fooquuxman <revan2342@gmail.com> on 2016-09-14 09:05:27 wrote

could be approximated as “to shape the universe in accordance with will” and has connections with the “to choose” verb family.

One might even say that “A Man chooses…”

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-09-14 11:57:29 wrote

daráv xíjirár; jaqef vigínár.

Some concepts translate perfectly.