Darkagers

I know it's fashionable to fret over a supposed decline of male competence, but sometimes that editorial line can overlook more pertinent concerns.

The research by the Tesco Computers for Schools programme found girls were more likely than boys to be able to perform key tasks, such as creating documents.
BBC News

A higher percentage of girls aged over seven could carry out tasks such as finding what they needed on a search engine, creating and editing a Word document and downloading photos.
Metro.co.uk

Printing of geek certificates clearly won't be stepped up in the foreseeable future.

The poll found, for example, that 'among teenagers... 59% could download music' – hence that forty-one percent couldn't – and yet the headlines are about a gender gap—leading me to wonder at the depths of expectation generally.

Now of course 'being able to download music' is technically meaningless: being able to click on a link to an audio file in a pre-configured Web browser can be described thus, as can installing a BitTorrent client from scratch before operating it. Editing a Word document? Downloading photographs? The only mildly interesting criterion is that of image manipulation, and without seeing the survey questions one can't tell whether it means retouching, etc. or just, say, resizing.

It's worth noting the other part of the story: that these variously competent people apparently still tend to outdo their parents. The lack of an earlier generation with which they can be compared, and of one amongst which the triviality of these 'skills' is generally recognised, helps explain the 'girls vs. boys' angle of the reporting.

Erskine May Cry

The topic of parliamentary procedure came up at last night's Postgrad. Formal, and I was motivated to seek out transcripts of the Great Paper Hat Debate of 1993. Our elected representatives should do more of this; getting rid of the covering requirement was a horrible idea that not only saps character from proceedings but, worse still, encourages hon. Members to get on with passing laws.

Somewhere in the broadcasters' archives is the scene as recorded for television; alas, as far as I can find it has yet to escape onto the Web.

Mr. Campbell-Savours : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Will you confirm—

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. Where is the hat?

Mr. Skinner : He does not need a hat.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. Where is the proper hat?

Mr. Campbell-Savours : Will you confirm, Mr. Deputy Speaker—

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. The House insists on hats. There is one at either end of the Chamber.

Mr. Skinner : His head has only got to be covered.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. The hat must be on.

Mr. Campbell-Savours : Where does it say that I must wear a hat? Which page?

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. I ask the hon. Gentleman to wear a hat.

Mr. Skinner : He does not have to.

Mr. Campbell-Savours : Mr. Deputy Speaker, will you confirm—

Mr. Deputy Speaker : I call upon those supporting the motion to rise in their places. I call upon those opposing the motion to rise in their places.

Mr. Bennett : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. The hon. Gentleman must sit down. Question agreed to.

Mr. Bennett : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. As I understood the rules, an hon. Member has to be covered. I understood that the recommendation from the Select Committee on Procedure was to provide the House with two hats but, because many hon. Members felt that it was not dignified to wear a hat like that, an hon. Member was entitled simply to have his head covered. I understand that it was custom and practice for an hon. Member to put an Order Paper on his head. If you can direct us to where it says that an hon. Member has to wear one of the hats as opposed to covering his head, I shall be grateful.

Mrs. Ann Taylor : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. There seems to be great concern in the Chamber about the way in which proceedings are developing. Would it be appropriate for Madam Speaker to be asked to come to the Chamber so that we might have proper rulings on these matters?

Mr. Redmond : On a further point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You will be aware that Madam Speaker's predecessor allowed the practice of an hon. Member covering his head with an Order Paper. Has there been a change of practice?

Mr. Michael Connarty (Falkirk, East) : On a further point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My point of order is much more simple. In the year that I have been in the House, I have not heard three consecutive points of order go unanswered. It seems strange that we have a new procedure in the House. I have heard Madam Speaker say that she will answer one point of order before another is taken. We now have three points of order outstanding without an answer.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : My understanding is that the Select Committee on Procedure said that a hat should be worn. As the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) was provided with a hat, courtesy to the Chair suggests that he should have worn it.

There follows a brief interlude in which the House tries to return to its intended business.

Mr. Fatchett : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I should like to take you back to your ruling on the point of order during a Division when an hon. Member was told to wear a hat. The penultimate paragraph of page 366 of "Erskine May" states :

"Only when a question of order arises during a division may a Member speak seated and covered."

My hon. Friend did exactly that. You, Mr. Deputy Speaker, might argue that there has been a change of practice—

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. There have been a number of points of order. To which hon. Member and to which point of order is the hon. Gentleman referring?

Mr. Fatchett : I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify the matter. I was referring to my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours).

I should like to refer to the footnotes in "Erskine May". One argument that may have been available to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, is that there has been a change of practice. The footnotes on page 366 refer to parliamentary debates, and it is important to put them on the record. They read :

"Parl Deb (1883) c 854 ; (1886) (1904) (1945-46)". The footnotes also state :

"See also 2nd Report from the Sessional Committee on Procedure, (1976- 77),".

Some long-serving Members will recall that there was a debate on this issue in 1979-80 and a further debate in 1983-84. There has been no subsequent debate or reference.

Mr. Speaker Weatherill always allowed a point of order during a Division when an hon. Member wore a hat or was covered in some other way. I shall refer to personal experience. Under Mr. Speaker Weatherill, I raised a point of order during a Division and I wore a handkerchief, as if I were on the beach at Blackpool. It was knotted in the peculiar seaside way and looked appropriate. Mr. Speaker Weatherill accepted that point of order.

With respect, Mr. Morris—I am sorry, Mr. Deputy Speaker ; we have spent so much time in Committee debating Maastricht that you will understand my mistake—the footnotes on page 366 show that my hon. Friend the Member for Workington was in order, and it would be appropriate for you to recognise that. We all make mistakes and I think that you have made a mistake on this occasion and should allow my hon. Friend to make his point of order in the appropriate way, the way in which he was behaving. We need clarification.

If we are to protect minorities, the practices of the House should not be changed from the Chair. They should be changed only with the agreement of the House, and there has been no such agreement or debate. My hon. Friends have not been able to contribute. This is an important change in procedure and should not be made unilaterally by the Chair. I contend that you are out of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and that my hon. Friend the Member for Workington was in order and should be upheld.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : I am not seeking to change the procedure. I am guided by the Procedures Committee's recommendation in 1977, subsequently endorsed by the House, that the definition of "covered" was wearing a hat. It need not necessarily be an opera hat : it may be a handkerchief. Some of us wear handkerchiefs in that way in the summer in strong sunlight, especially those of us who are a little short of hair. It is clear that an Order paper is not a hat.

Dr. David Clark (South Shields) : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Your ruling is important, because

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. I did not make a ruling : I gave the reference on which the ruling was based.

Dr. Clark : Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Was your reference to the Order Paper a ruling, and are you saying that custom and practice since 1977 has been changed and the understanding is that hon. Members' heads will not be deemed to be covered if they are wearing paper, as has been the custom? To clarify the situation, would it be helpful to suspend the House for a short time so that the matter can be sorted out through the usual channels, because you are making an important ruling?

Mr. Deputy Speaker : I can envisage a situation where a properly constructed paper hat was appropriate, but not an Order Paper.

An even briefer interlude.

Mr. Connarty (seated and covered) : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I wish to know whether the hat which I am wearing will fit the description of being covered—or must I turn it this way? Must I also put my hand in my jacket? Is this sufficient covering?

Mr. Deputy Speaker : In my judgment, for this evening, it is.

A longer interlude, with a Division.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : ... It might be for the convenience of the House if I try to clarify matters. I now have the second report of the Select Committee on Procedure from the 1976-77 Session, paragraph 5 of which on page 6 says :

"Your Committee consider that the requirement to be covered should remain, and that any form of headgear should be acceptable, but that for reasons already stated, such articles as hankerchiefs or Order papers, which are instantly available to all Members, should not be accepted."

The Committee considers that the same rule should apply to lady Members. It recommends that a second piece of headgear should be kept behind the Chair. I hope that hon. Members will accept that that is the reference that has guided me this evening.

Mr. Campbell-Savours : Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Will you remind the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), who I understood was a master of procedure, that he is wrong? A Labour Government did not exercise the procedure ; Mr. Speaker did. Perhaps he should know the rule.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : I thought that I had made that clear.

Mr. Campbell-Savours : Will you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, clarify the position with regard to wearing the hat? Many of us are deeply embarrassed at having to wear headgear of such a nature. [Interruption.] It is a fair point to make. We believe that it brings ridicule on Parliament and on us as Members. Therefore, as the proceedings of the House are now televised and transmitted all over the world, will you consider raising the matter with the Chairman of the Procedure Committee with a view to avoiding such embarrassment for Members?

Mr. Deputy Speaker : The hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do that any Member can raise such a matter with the Procedure Committee. I shall cogitate on whether it is appropriate that I should, but the hon. Gentleman may wish to make his own submission. I hope that that has finished the issue of the hat.

Mr. Cryer : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. During this evening's discussions and points of order, it has become clear that there are difficulties with the new microphone system. When hon. Members remain seated, as they are required to do during a Division, particularly those on the Front Bench, they are well out of range of the microphones. The new microphones were installed relatively recently, and clearly they are inadequate--particularly in respect of right hon. and hon. Members seated on the Front Benches near yourself, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Also, the microphones are normally switched off until a right hon. or hon. Member is called, when the nearest microphone is switched on. However, there appears to be some delay in that respect. I did not hear, for example, the point of order of my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, North-East (Mr. Barnes) because he was inaudible—not because of the noise in the Chamber but because of the lack of amplification. If this procedure is invoked again, that could lead to myriad points of order by seated right hon. and hon. Members. It might be helpful if the sound engineers could ascertain whether the microphones might be pointed downwards, so that points of order from seated right hon. and hon. Members wearing appropriate headgear might be heard.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Life is full of difficulties, but I will bring the hon. Gentleman's point to the attention of the Supervisor of Broadcasting.

Mr. Connarty : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You quoted a definition to the effect that a readily available item would not be considered suitable headgear. You probably saw me labouring away at making this hat, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Would placing it behind the Chair be appropriate? Also, I am not someone who naturally wears a bonnet or an opera hat. Could not a decent, well-designed fedora also be placed behind the Chair?

Mr. Deputy Speaker : I quoted the reference, and I urge the hon. Gentleman to read Hansard tomorrow morning and then decide on the kind of hat that he considers appropriate, within the rules of the House.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman (Lancaster) : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) to sit in that laconic way on the arm of his Bench?

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Right hon. and hon. Members should sit on the Benches.

In Threes

Some administrative or technical glitch kept me from knowing about next year's accommodation contract signing; only by chance did I find out it was today. [Update: it now seems there was confusion regarding undergrad. vs. postgrad. signings.] (Admittedly there are far worse horror stories on record.) Meanwhile, a certain unwanted visitor has been scouring this place again, and Maria remains apparently advice-retardant. The cumulative effect of which is that I am thoroughly disgruntled: when a sequence of even minor misfortunes emerges, the effect of each new addition is to reinforce a tiresome impression that the world has it in for me.

Strange rights, strange game design constraints, and a spot of awful dialogue

Strange phrasing of the day: 'Germany's highest court has restricted the right of the security services to spy on the computers of suspected criminals and terrorists.'

The right? This twist goes somewhat beyond mere rights inflation.

Puzzling quotation of the day: 'Videogame developers should dis-incentivise gamers from long periods of play by allowing players to achieve the highest scoring aspects of a title early on in the game's life cycle.'

No, I don't know what it recommends either. Until the minutes are published I shall have to assume that the fault doesn't lie with the journalist but that the recommendation really was so unclear that a professional games journalist could phrase it no better—which scarcely bodes well.

Oddly enough, I keep reading (very reasonable) complaints about long periods of play necessitated by poor placement of save points. I wonder whether Parliament is also on that case.

As for the 'absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence' line, hopefully I break no libel laws by merely drawing attention to the total absence of evidence that John Carr is— oh, fill in the blanks yourself.

Bidding to break the despondency for this last section: here's a nice example of amusingly bad dialogue, courtesy of Lufia: The Legend Returns. Today is frustrating, but at least I don't have a Tower of Death or a Doom Island nearby.

Guess the Song Titles

...bearing in mind that these reflect my tastes in music rather than what anyone else might reasonably be expected to know. (Check the original page rather than anything based on a syndication feed, otherwise some formatting may be missing.)

1. ^an_gels

   (Hint)

   Answer (highlight to reveal): Angels Fall First (Nightwish, 2002)

2.   Side  

   (Hint)

   Answer (highlight to reveal): The Wrong Side (Abney Park, 2005)

3. First Witch: When shall we three meet again / In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
   
   Second Witch: When the hurlyburly's done, / When the battle's lost and won.
   
   Third Witch: That will be ere the set of sun.

   (Hint)

   Answer (highlight to reveal): Succession of Witches (Final Fantasy VIII OST)

4. Barium Thallium

   (Hint)

   Answer (highlight to reveal): Battle Metal (Turisas, 2004)

5. PIIECES

   (Hint)

   Answer (highlight to reveal): Small Two of Pieces (Xenogears OST)

More Mystery Books

There's a member of the exclusive list of mystery scripts of which I hadn't previously heard: here we seem to have a sort of Rosetta Stone equivalent, complete with a candidate language, but the mystery has yet to be unlocked. It's a distinctive case: a translation and a dictionary, but uncertainty as to the language.

Perhaps the truth is that the secret sank with the Katakamuna civilisation...

Rotating and Explaining

It's interesting to see how 3D artists represent Escher's visual games. Image links are to MCEscher.com.

Expanding/contracting this post...

'Belvedere', or 'Belvédère' depending on whom one asks (which has also been done in Lego bricks, and is still inspiring manipulations):

'Waterfall':

'Ascending and Descending'; the last video is especially elaborate, and would be worthy of a post by itself:

Congealing Moral Concepts

Given my wish not to produce a theory of heritage ethics which so depends on work done elsewhere that a shift in academic vogue outside the theory itself might easily capsize it, I want to address this matter directly, since, once I do, objections are easily perceived. [Preliminary digression: there seems to be disagreement regarding whether 'capsise' is a form existing in British English. According to one source the word was previously capacise...]

• There's not much one can do by way of future-proofing. Radical new ideas are by definition tricky to anticipate.
• Attempting to maintain compatibility with every single strand of thought currently supported somewhere, however dodgy and however incompatible with others each may be, looks like a recipe for unwieldiness at best, incoherence at worst. At some point one has to accept that the theory will have round holes somewhere into which square pegs are never going to fit.

Of course, mine will never be the approach of proclaiming, 'I am going to embark on a poststructuralist neo-Marxist-Foucauldian-deconstructionist-feminist-Kuhnian psychoanalytic critique of culture-theoretic texts, and they will yield answers in that vein if I throttle them enough'. However, since I don't have a 'view from nowhere' either, and since what I happen to think is uncontroversial is exactly the kind of reflection of my own intellectual background I ought to treat with caution, I'm going to have to develop something a little more nuanced than simply trying to minimise dependencies wherever I notice a risk of taking sides.

I suppose the optimal minimalist path is to start with a putative conclusion and work backwards to possible sets of assumptions: it sounds dodgy, but realistically one naturally does go 'Oooh, that looks promising... and hopefully I can fill in these blanks properly to get a working supporting argument'. Given the scale and complexity of this whole topic of heritage though, what I'm doing can feel more like hermeneutics than a simple model of working things out in either direction.

If I delve right into the foundations at this point, I'm going to find myself mucking about with realism vs. anti-realism, supervenience theory, etc.—and I haven't time for a full metaethical investigation. Clearly I do have commitments down there: for a start, I'm committed to thinking it makes sense to talk about the moral value of cultural heritage. People fear my realist tendencies. This, I think, is where there will have to be reasonably sharp-edged assumptions; I'm just not wildly keen on enumerating them.

Further up, the central theme of methodological trickiness seems to be that I want to talk about the value of cultural heritage, not value simpliciter, and consequently I'm obliged to lay out the ways in which heritage can have moral value qua heritage, which precludes keeping everything cleanly abstract. I begin with this rather amorphous concept of 'heritage' in hand, and have to tease out a coherent account of value therein: in that respect I'm somewhat subject to the contingency of the concept. However, it's not my job to be a crowd-pleaser; if my results don't suggest that the conceptual apparatus of e.g. the World Heritage Convention is perfectly suited to construing heritage value, then so be it. That kind of incompatibility isn't a problem, or at least not a philosophical one.

What remains a philosophical complication is that I'm dealing with a very thick concept, and tidying it up in the interests of a neat normative analysis won't change that. Specifically, it's not a discrete package: things don't just happen to be part of the heritage of such-and-such a group. (Even starting with the view that everything is heritage, albeit not necessarily very important heritage, the question still remains of how the relevant group identities get sorted out.) Consequently one can't really cordon off the concept to begin with.

So, what to do? I think I need to stick with the 'x is a reason for valuing heritage item y' approach – for one thing it leaves room for the possibility of novel reasons not yet thought of – and maybe shift to a bit more of a transcendental footing: given the conception of heritage as a value-bearer which I've found emerging from reflection on certain plausible reasons for valuing it, what are the conditions for being something on account of which some heritage accrues value?

Whereupon the question becomes, how shall I approach doing that...?

It Turns Out Ventilation Ducts Exist In Real Life Too

I had some photographs knocking around of the vaguely industrial-looking wonder that is the view from my room in College:

Here's how my mind's eye sees it. Too much time playing FPSs, or my imagination making the best of things...?

E Pluribus...

My current thinking on the universal/parochial problem: I maybe can't directly appeal to scientific (in the broad sense) or æsthetic worth in heritage as reasons for its being valuable qua cultural heritage, since both are open to anyone—and religious elements of culture are often bound up with a still greater claim on universal correctness. (Some further legwork will be required to address the respects in which enculturation sculpts æsthetic responses and perhaps in some respects knowledge, but it seems minimally reasonable to say that nothing prevents anyone from 'legitimately' responding æsthetically to or enquiring into another culture's creations somehow – assuming adequate knowledge, e.g. competence in relevant languages – and attributing value thereby.) Yet I think appealing to creativity may offer a bridge for this gap.

A lot can be said about creativity, but sticking to minimalism (to avoid awkward dependencies) I'm construing it as a process whereby specific and thereby parochial output (artefacts, practices, whatever) can arise from universal input. A painter, for example, operates with a functional understanding of painterly æsthetics: some grasp of what it is to have an æsthetic response to a painting. That's the 'universal' aspect. (Of course, inasmuch as it's specifically his grasp it isn't; but see below...) This grasp gets used in the act of painting by which he produces a new work: it too is open to the universality of æsthetic responses, but the work itself is a specific thing, exhibiting certain characteristics and created in certain circumstances. This particular beautiful work is not itself Beauty: it, and maybe the circumstances of its exhibition too, may be considered parochial.

Is that a solution in the making? I was concerned about reasons for value, and it still seems that anyone – whoever perceives the work as beautiful, etc. – thereby has a reason for valuing it, whether or not his is the culture from which it emerged. Moreover, it initially looks as though I've bypassed culture altogether in favour of individual genius (especially given my interest in Outsider Art).

Well, this is potentially where I can make some use of a notion of 'standards' (though maybe not what Professor Scarre had in mind). Creativity doesn't occur in a vacuum: the creative is surrounded since birth by already existing particular creations (which act as media for acquiring 'universal' knowledge), so 'culture' can be associated with the emergence of specific ways in which creativity is structured: styles, movements, techniques, etc. That preserves the specificity of instantiations without bypassing any 'cultural' element.

I wonder whether a possible side-effect might be to push value further from the objects themselves, to being located in the constraints: given my earlier thoughts on categories, it doesn't sound all that outlandish. (One might even speculate that objects have heritage value in part because they embody information about the cultural constraints involved in their production.) I'm not sure that's an immediate concern, so long as 'universal' responses to objects turn out to involve reference to their cultural specificity... Actually, that needs clarification: I'm not claiming psychological responses involve the way their objects were created, but rather that 'universal' benefits of objects can constitute legitimate reasons for valuing those objects qua (parochial) cultural heritage. Qualifying universality should permit that.

Okay: potential problems (a non-exhaustive discussion)...

This could get problematically complicated and divergent from its intended focus if I have to delve into different perceptions of creativity. For example, the provocatively entitled 'Against "Creativity": A Philistine Rant' [PDF] notes this claim:

For some time now, psychologists have been active in promoting the values of creativity. Psychology, especially popular and managerial psychology, has in fact become akin to a sort of modern techne of creative powers. For much contemporary psychology, creative individuals are not those who simply innovate within accepted conditions, but those who can change the domain in which they work, that is, those who can change the conditions themselves.

That section of the paper is actually concerned quite heavily with creative problem-solving in business, but this point about innovation can be put generally: doesn't creativity actually work in opposition to the strictures of convention? Of course we never see pure, unadulterated, 100% ex nihilo creation; but that doesn't invalidate the objection. Obviously one can and should counter with a 'shoulders of giants' reminder, but that doesn't constitute a full resolution.

I think the proper response is to understand these constraints as emergent: certainly they can become neck-halters, in an atmosphere of suitable dogmatism, but they come into being as part of creativity at work. (Nothing as stimulating as fellow-travellers...) Each act of creation is itself a modification of the constraining landscape. So while a given act of creation may involve a struggle to free oneself from arid convention, creativity as a general phenomenon can't really be considered in like terms.

Another potentially tricky aspect is that creativity – bringing forth something new – is an event in a historical process: things start out novel and may end up as clichés. Alan Goldman writes, regarding 'historical relativism' in criticism:

There can be no doubt that some works are valuable and highly regarded because they strongly influence the devlopment of a style, foreshadow much later developments in art, bring an existing tradition or set of æsthetic ideals to its conclusion or ultimate fruition, or alter the course of art history.
Æsthetic Value, p. 120

It's because of this that James O. Young finds himself obliged to accept a limited relativism of æsthetic value as a consequence: the 'degree to which an artwork strikes some critics as original does introduce a measure of relativism into the evaluation of art, but this relativism should not be exaggerated' ('Relativism and the Evaluation of Art', p. 20), since 'the value of a work of art is relative to temporal art worlds, but aesthetic value is not relative to individual critics' (ibid, p .21).

Is instability of this input into the heritage value calculator a problem? (Besides the usual epistemic concerns, I mean.) Perhaps, in that there's a feedback loop: is it not definitive of a cliché that it represents an established practice, a 'genre staple' gone too far? That, again, makes the establishment and development of commonplace standards look antithetical to creativity—or rather, it casts doubt on cultural constraints on creativity being part of the explanation of the value of creative works.

I can't get out of this one quite so slickly: thinking of constraints as emergent avoids casting them as static and unyielding, but there's still the rejoinder that, yes, they can therefore get to the point at which they're burdensome. I think the most promising course of action is probably to draw on my thoughts regarding fanfic and other derivatives: it's the cluster of ideas as a whole that's valuable, and if it's reached the point of cliché, at least it's a cliché we have and can make use of. (Someone can always parody it...) This approach will need bolting on more tightly, but being sans magic wand I can live with it.

As usual, these are rough-edged notes, hot from the oven. While mulling over them and browsing a couple of books on the psychology of creativity, I'm also going to write a post on the technicalities of minimising dependency on other fields of research, since all this risk of getting drawn into commitments in the ambit of æsthetics is making me nervous—

Spritely

As Algus's FAQ file had made pretty clear before I entered, the SaGa Frontier debug rooms are mostly a big sprite gallery: after making montages of the numerous rooms I think I understand better why Google Image Search didn't produce any already existing efforts. I'm not going to post shots of every room here, but I've compiled a complete external gallery. [Update: I later did find a previous effort, but it used the 'photograph the TV screen' approach.]

The background is the same in all rooms: 'sample' scrawled in hiragana.

This is the room of Doppelgänger transformations:

Most of the sprites give their names (internal names like P_WOMAN0 and so forth, and sometimes 'proper' names too); some of them also switch between animations when spoken to.

As the FAQ file notes, this room shares with the Xenogears sprite viewer the property of featuring nudes:

This... is merely an animation test:

A room of clones:

I've barely played this game, so I can't comment on the unfinished scenario mentioned in the FAQ file. (Hmm, I wonder whether they left any unused text in the files...) As a set of debug rooms, these have a certain atmosphere, but they do get rather repetitive, despite some mad sprite arrangements.

Super Game Boy 2 Menus

This is the Super Game Boy 2 interface, made usable on an emulator thanks to Ugetab's codes. (The GSHI also has codes for the original SGB, but the border selection constitutes the only significant difference.) Not being able to run a Game Boy game, I can't exhibit the palette changers very well, but you do get to see me honouring the majesty of tradition and writing Hello World.

It's not as distinctive as the BS-X interface, but it's a nice piece of history.

Keeping, Informed

Following on from my attempted interpretation of Floridi's 'information ethics', I'm looking at someone else's use of 'information' in value theory. Mark Rowlands seems in The Environmental Crisis (2000) to employ something that in one place even sounds like extended cognition to account for environmental value. (Fittingly, he's also written a book on externalism.) Please note that this post is based on my reading of just one chapter, so it can't very well be considered authoritative.

The post-humanist account of environmental value... rehabilitates certain features of the objectivist account. In particular, the objectivist intuition that value is something genuinely in the environment, and not merely something projected on the environment through human acts of valuation, or those of other sentient creatures, is an intuition that the post-humanist account is capable of safeguarding... The first essential element of the environmentalist model of the mind lies in the concept of information. Information exists in the environment. It can also be contained in the head. But, fundamentally, information is a matter of nomological dependence; and the relevant dependencies can be instantiated both in the head and, crucially, in the world.
p. 144

He asserts (p. 145) that 'value is to be identified with a certain type of information' which is 'embodied in certain environmental structures': he employs what looks like a dispositional analysis, but with built-in normativity/evaluation based on certain creatures' needs (p. 146), to talk about 'affordances' (in the sense that a cliff affords danger to humans, whether or not any exist to fall off it) and 'indicators' of these affordances in the environment, arguing that it's the information carried in these indicators which should be identified with environmental value (relative to a given kind of organism).

What makes this information value... is the fact that it is valued by valuing creatures, or that it would be valued by valuing creatures if there were any around. And the reason creatures have come to value this information is because it essentially bears on, in fact is essentially composed of, affordances of the environment. The information is essentially bound up with what the environment offers, furnishes, or provides valuing creatures. The valuing of the environment, then, is an act which transforms information into value, or, more accurately, allows us to see information as value. And our valuing of the environment is something that has an instrumental origin, but one that is sufficiently shrouded in the mists of our biological history that it has outgrown this origin and now possesses intrinsic content. In this respect, it is precisely like the orginism's valuing of itself, or the parent's valuing of its child.
p. 154

So, this can be loosely characterised as a genetic/historical/developmental argument, supported by an 'environmentalist model of the mind' to undermine 'valuing' as something that goes on inside the head in favour of presenting it as a matter of practical engagement with the environment (p. 157)—hence my being reminded of extended cognition. Rowlands tackles what one might call the gratuity problem in valuing by appealing to organisms' survival needs. However, the fact that we satisfy our needs in different ways from our ancestors, and often in ways that have involved transformation of parts of the environment, obliges him to invoke this 'outgrowth of origin' step, which looks rather fragile. Why do I still require this historical basis to bestow legitimacy upon my attitudes, if I am not the same as, merely descended from, the organisms for which those attitudes were a matter of survivial?

What I'm looking for, of course, is potential for adoption into my work on heritage ethics. Given that I've thought of invoking the idea of transgenerational communities in the past, and that 'heritage' by nature lends an intergenerational aspect to questions of value, some cross-over wouldn't be surprising; one thing that does cross over is that I face similar objections if I attempt to patch in $ancestor's valuing $object as a reason for valuing it oneself without further explaining why $ancestor's reasons for valuing $object should automatically transfer to us or, if they don't, why we should value $object 'just because' $ancestor did even though $ancestor did so with regard to those reasons. (I think it's probably necessary to have regard to $ancestor's reasons insofar as ignorance or error presumably negates them: should $object turn out to be a forgery, such that had $ancestor known he wouldn't have valued it, then I should imagine that ceteris paribus we have no reason to value it either.)

Of course, I can't appeal to survival to begin with: humans as naturally sociable beings + culture as media of sociability would probably be about as close as I could get, and it looks a bit of a stretch. So where does that leave my interest in the value of information in heritage? Presumably exactly where it was: if I can't loop it through ancestral valuations, I'm still here with the universals/parochials question.

I do think there's still something attractive in the way Rowlands employs information, and I wonder whether it might help with my concern about the role of reasons: information is constantly what you need to determine what reasons are available to you in choosing courses of action. But still: just what kinds of reason? If 'heritage' actually is a relevant concept then some constraint must be in operation— Maybe I should borrow some of this 'environmentalist model of the mind' and appeal to a Science of Discworld-style 'extelligence' in culture...

Revenance Man

Sceptical though I am about the idea that elements of 'culture' are sufficiently divisible and measurable from any standpoint to permit conclusions about evidence of natural selection in cultural development, one must hold back when the research hasn't even been published yet (and philosophy of science isn't my field anyway): but what struck me about the linked article was the rapidity of its shift from empirical study to normative didacticism.

Unfortunately, people have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption... [leaving us at risk from] everything from the economic incentives, industrial technologies and growth mentality that cause climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity, to the religious polarization and political ideologies that generate devastating conflict around the globe.

Clearly it's possible to find a grand moral narrative in the development of canoe designs if one looks hard enough. Indeed, this is almost a parody of its own genre, with the kitchen-sink approach to buzzword-aggregation. The question then is, are the authors genuinely silly (hardly uncommon, or widely discouraged), or are they playing to a political purse-string-holder gallery, like Philosophy apologetics which emphasises inculcation of the arts of clear thinking over enquiry into fundamental questions?

I'm rather struck by the totalising holism of it all: it sounds less like the post-Enlightenment specialisation that saw 'the sciences' themselves split away from 'natural philosophy', and more like the great world-philosophical Systems, or even the Mediæval apprehension of 'the handwriting of God' that saw sympathies and correspondences throughout Creation, and the whole in a moral light. Perhaps the long-term influence of environmental thinking will be to encourage a reconnection of the domains of enquiry... hopefully in a more cohesive and reflective patchwork than this example.

[Update: Now I'm wondering whether revenence or indeed revenience (cf. convenience) might be more correct; but I wanted to play up the link to revenant, and given the existence of a noted French -ance tendency [PDF] I think I'll leave it alone in this case.]

‘He does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues... and walks in the twilight...’

They make it up as they go along, don't they? An E.U. 'internal market commissioner' defending plans almost to double the duration of performance rights:

It is the performer who gives life to the composition and while most of us have no idea who wrote our favourite song, we can usually name the performer.

Now the first key to interpreting this is that the same person cites moral rights—i.e. the foundation here is the 'authors' rights' (and 'neighbouring rights') tradition of IP justification, rather than that based on the production of incentives to create new works. In this light, 'giving life' emerges as a device for elevating performers to the status of co-creators.

However, the appeal to popular recognition serves no obvious auxiliary purpose (although twisting it into an argument for reducing composition rights to 50 years would be an amusing intellectual exercise): why should it matter for the construction of an intellectual property regime whose names are most apt to be popularly known? Is public recognition being held up as intrinsically worthy of reward, rather than (as one might imagine) being a reward itself? Is this a rough attempt to contend that known → important, and important ∝ deserving?

I suppose it's still an extension of the 'author's rights' theme: the idea that we typically know – typically want to know – the names of performers because they 'give life' to the song—whereas we kick sound technicians into the gutter as we sweep past on the street, however important their contribution might in fact be. The human voice as life-giving versus anonymous mechanical work. Making this the kind of argument I really loathe: the difficulty in critiquing it is that it's baseless phantasy from the roots upwards.

Mind you, in other contexts McCreevy's defence would look like some sort of joke. 'People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said' (IHT)—almost as though some mischievous angel had whispered in his ear, tell the rest of the working world why they should shed nary a tear. He even used the 'copyright as a pension for people who forewent to invest in pensions' line, by now a bête noire of mine. How perverse to reward a lack of forward planning: perhaps one should infer that copyright is an obstacle to the encouragement of sensible financial management...

Powerful Institutions

I am now Chair of the Middle Common Room. This post isn't about that institution; it's work-related again, a set of half-developed ideas. Today I can say with unassailable truth that I offer cutting edge research.

The value of the Buster Sword, incommensurable values, and the role of cultural institutions

If I were an economist, I might understand how we benefit from legal regimes that create monoplies sweeping enough for their holders to seek to eliminate whole secondary industries. My question of choice, however, is different (not least because it isn't clear what kind of IP rights are being invoked here): besides the fairly eyebrow-raising implications of using the word 'replica' to denote a physical instantiation of a computer-generated original – does it work the other way around, and if not, why not? – there's a possible point of interest for me in that my own approach to value in cultural heritage treats these different instantiations of 'the Buster Sword' as making up a cluster which itself is the value-bearer (insofar as the Buster Sword has a cluster of its own).

I think this example makes that a more immediately intuitive conclusion than other cases I employ, notably 'original publication + fanfic': when we talk about 'Cloud's Buster Sword' we're already doing a certain amount of philosophically interesting mental work in order to refer to an element of a fictional story which even in the original FFVII (before anyone had conceived of the Compilation) is visually instantiated by two different polygonal models (one for battles, one for a few field cutscenes). Show me the real, one, true, original Buster Sword—a screenshot is the best you'll manage. A cluster of abstract objects is all there ever was.

Looking at the Boston Globe article on repatriation that's been doing the rounds (with interesting reactions at Looting Matters and Illicit Cultural Property), I was struck by this:

[James] Cuno... is this spring publishing a book-length argument against returning cultural artifacts, Who Owns Antiquity? Cuno... argues that laws meant to keep antiquities in the countries where they're found are wrongheaded and counterproductive. They limit the number of people who can see the objects, he says, while putting artworks at risk and driving collectors and dealers into the black market. They also present an existential threat to great 'encyclopedic' museums like the MFA or Metropolitan Museum, places that provide a unique opportunity to see the full breadth and diversity of the world's cultural history in one place.

Such arguments have triggered fierce responses, not only from source country governments, but from archeologists who see in the recent repatriations and prosecutions the best chance for protecting the fragile sites from which antiquities are too often looted. Ricardo Elia... describes Cuno as an 'aesthetic fundamentalist' willing to ignore ethical and archeological values to get his hands on pretty objects.

A reminder that I'll have to consider what happens when different kinds of value aren't easily complementary: it's all very well saying an artefact has such-and-such an informational value and such-and-such an æsthetic value, but there may still be a gap between that and a happy ending. Although I wonder how much moral philosophy can address that kind of practical problem, beyond determining whether either party really does have 'ethical... values' altogether on his side.

I suppose the critical problem will be: do value-scores always stack, even where that assumption ignores problems in accessing the value in heritage? This question could mess up my characterisation of heritage value in terms of potential: on top of existing concerns about potential's being dependent on and therefore relative to various possible circumstances, now I face the prospect of a whole undulating landscape of peaks and troughs in different kinds of value cancelling each other out. I shan't be happy if this raises the spectre of Leibnizian incompossibility and the best of all possible worlds.

I was speculating during my last meeting with Professor Scarre, when he was casting some doubt on my characterisations of value, that maybe I've been too ready to think of 'value' as a scalar phenomenon – hence the expectation that it'll stack – and perhaps thinking of it in terms of vectors would offer better conceptual machinery. Of course, that isn't automatically helpful: it needs an explanation of how to reconcile or select between the various possibilities...

Something caught my eye while perusing Peter Railton's 'Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and the Ambitions of Naturalism' (in Æsthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection). At one point (pp. 72 - 4) Railton argues as follows. Imagine that æsthetic taste was wholly idiosynscatic. 'Discovering commonalities and differences would be rather... like discovering that others have the same or different birthdays, a curiosity perhaps, but not evidence of much else.' So our æsthetic discourse would differ from how it actually is, and therefore our world isn't like that. Now imagine that 'powerful cultural institutions are in place to attempt to regulate opinion': since we do have differences of taste within cultures, such institutions as exist can't wholly explain our æsthetic judgments either. Therefore something else is going on.

I'm not worrying about whether this is a forceful argument; what got my attention was the role of those 'powerful cultural institutions', inviting the thought that maybe cultural institutions (obviously a source of interest) and æsthetic judgment can interrelate in interesting ways. That, of course, adds extra flavouring to my concerns about the implications for cultural heritage of non-parochial significance.

Maybe a nice motif would be that of gravitational fields. As Railton notes (p. 73), there is such a social phenomenon as the cultivation of 'good taste'; and whether or not I am considered a successful product of this enculturation and education, I make my æsthetic judgments from the position of having such a background. A sufficently influential cultural institution will be surrounded by a marked 'distortion' (not actually an unobjectionable term; what counts as 'undistorted'?): this indeed will make up part of local, epochal or otherwise distinct culture.

Now what's really interesting is that these instutitional distortions are, quite arguably, themselves 'cultural' and hence themselves presumably bound up with heritage value—bringing me back to my interest in categorisation, but played out in a more concrete social form: the category is an intellectual medium, the institution a blunt reality in the world. Which has the upshot that, while the category is universal in the sense of being potentially thinkable by everyone (though in fact, of course, our particular education determines what categories we employ), the institution is clearly parochial. (Even global institutions aren't universally influential.) This could mess up my universal/parochial distinction... or suggest a means of bridging the gap.

Significance

More fun with signs: as with yesterday's image, I don't guarantee that these ideas are unprecedented. (They're not all that well drawn either, but they're functional.)

Mutual reference:

Self-loathing or denial?

Futility:

‘Creature of Light’

Another 'just because it's beautiful' post: this creation of a fractal manipulator is sublimely mesmeric. I love the conceit that these writhing visions are exotic or angelic beings...

Redundancy

I should imagine someone's had this idea before, but the closest thing I could find is a bit different.

Adapted (very inexpertly) from a photograph by net_efekt and published under the same Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence

‘That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.’

One of my fellow Durham postgrads is researching changing conceptions of maturity: he thinks there are implications for Biblical hermeneutics to be found in appreciating that our understanding of what it is to be 'mature' ('the post-Enlightment... identification of autonomy as the goal of human development') differs from that of the scriptural authors. It was this that a recent Aberrant Gamer article brought to mind: the manner in which the terms 'juvenile' and 'maturity' are tossed around confuses me.

Mark Hughes pointed out that traditional fantasy, which often has a very influential role in today’s video games, is primarily 'juvenile, sexless material'. As an example, he points out that Tolkien, essentially the 'father of the genre' as we know it, features almost no women in Lord of the Rings—and those that appear are '"romantic" (but non-sexual) interests for the men, kept at a distance.'

So video game sex lacks maturity because the dated constructs it has inherited lack maturity. No one would call Lord of the Rings an unsophisticated novel, and its heroes are most definitely nuanced. But like most hero stories, complexities within people’s spirits and the ill deeds they commit can be explained away by evil magic—the main characters with whom readers largely identify are almost implausibly focused on noble deeds, not intimacy.

I'm fond of musing, when I read Kaufmann's asides on Nietzsche's 'adolescent' moments, that here is a strange asymmetry: Nietzsche is said to write like an adolescent, but nobody would say that adolescents write like Nietzsche. Of course, it is objected, what this means is that the thoughts and emotions presented are more like those of an adolescent than like those of an adult; but since Nietzsche was an adult when he wrote, to deny that Nietzsche's thoughts were like an adult's would be to assert that Nietzsche's thoughts are unlike Nietzsche's thoughts—clearly silly. But of course what was meant was that such a temperament is typical among adolescents and atypical among adults—however, since it's neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being an adolescent, that's about as illuminating as calling a fondness for wine a French attitude. (Real and stereotypical tendencies aside, some people just like wine.)

Of course, Kaufmann wasn't just casting about for a suitable form of description: those 'painfully adolescent emotions' present themselves in a fully normative light. 'Maturity' is a term with heavily normative/evaluative/presciptive overtones despite its crisply descriptive calling card.

I'm not going to waste time mounting a critical defence of Tolkien in the face of these bizarre statements about the role of 'evil magic' (presumably meaning the use of Palantírs to ensnare Saruman and Denethor), etc. I'm wondering why someone would set out to write about the portrayal of sex and sexuality in video games and draw on 'maturity' as a relevant concept. More generally, why seek to evaluate the libido in terms of maturity (other than to note that adolescence is when it becomes active)?

'Growing up' can involve a complicated mess of things, like realising that sometimes the best thing for the damsel is for her to learn (with support and more-or-less gentle coaxing) how to deal with her own distress, or, indeed, coming to understand that seriousness can suffocate itself... to pull examples from personal experience, because there isn't a general-purpose map. No doubt maturity of æsthetic appreciation isn't distinct from this: no doubt I have a deeper appreciation of, say, erotic elements in the work of Amano (no, not that one) than I might have had in my teens. However, that looks like addition rather than replacement: a transformation, true, but not one in which earlier experiences vanish. Meanwhile, the presence of undignified and animalistic elements in human sexuality can be considered something of a constant (something Alexander presumably wouldn't deny). As an empirical claim, it is simply false to suggest (if anyone unambiguously does) that a visceral immediacy in sexual stimulation belongs particuarly to youth; but more than that, mature human relations don't really look like anything.

Okay, maybe I should distinguish between mature acts and mature treatments. (Calling Ico's bond with Yorda itself mature would be... strange.) So we're rising above 'the direct, exploitive route to nudity' towards 'characters that act like adults' with a 'sense of intimacy'. Except I still don't see a linear progression in that, just different ways of being sexual. Possibly one is better than another, but then an appeal to 'maturity' is perhaps superfluous...

I don't think mere caprice led Kierkegaard to structure Either/Or as the writings of a young æsthete and an older and more sober man; but I think he offered something quite different from a pseudo-empirical criterion of progression. Judge Wilhelm, as he never tires of telling us, is married: his maturity is laid out as a social fact (his realisation of the Universal) rather than being wholly a matter of his biological and psychological characteristics. I wonder whether the temptation to assess the 'maturity' of a creative work, scouring what comes before one for traces of the 'juvenile', itself reflects the decline of a less individualistically focussed conception of maturation, and an urge to find maturity anew.

Information Ethics Information

Having been pondering the relation (if there is one) between what's discoverable in a heritage object and what value it has, my eye was naturally caught by Luciano Floridi's paper On the Intrinsic Value of Information Objects and the Infosphere (2003), according to whose abstract it 'develops and supports the thesis that the minimal condition of possibility of an entity’s least intrinsic value is to be identified with its ontological status as an information object. All entities, even when interpreted as only clusters of information, still have a minimal moral worth qua information objects and so may deserve to be respected.'

Floridi's paper is apparently committed to making objects the repositories of moral worth: it opens with a primer in OOP. Still, that inspiration leads him to consider what (intrinsic) value is possessed by an entity by virtue of both 'local' and 'inherited' attributes – he criticises what he sees as Kant's emphasis on the former – which immediately makes me think of my own interest in categorisation and value. Later he says his argument 'defends the intrinsic value and moral respectability of systems as well as individuals'; in another paper, Ethics In the Infosphere (2001), he talks of a need for an 'environmental ethics for the information environment', bringing to mind Boyle's 'environmentalism for the Net', and contends that 'we need... to fight any kind of destruction, corruption, depletion (marked reduction in quantity, content, quality, value) or closure of the infosphere' (which he terms 'information entropy'). [N.B. A variant version, Information Ethics: An Environmental Approach to the Digital Divide (2002), adds 'pollution' to the initial list and specifies 'unjustified closure'.]

Even so, I wasn't overwhelmed by the paper overall: something of a sketch of a general approach, perhaps, it left me rather mystified as regards any really substantive argument in favour of 'information ethics', all the Kant-bashing notwithstanding. This seems to be a critical passage, and it's more assertion than argument:

What, then, is the most general possible common set of attributes which characterises something as intrinsically valuable and an object of respect, and without which something would rightly be considered intrinsically worthless (not just instrumentally useless or emotionally insignificant) or even positively unworthy and therefore rightly to be disrespected in itself? The least biased and most fundamental solution is to identify the minimal condition of possibility of an entity’s least intrinsic worth with its nature as an information object. The information nature of an entity x that may, in principle, act as a patient p of a moral action is the lowest threshold of inherited attributes that constitutes its minimal intrinsic worth, which in turn may deserve to be respected by the agent. Alternatively, to put it more concisely, being an information object qua information object is the minimal condition of possibility of moral worth and hence of normative respect. This is the central axiological thesis of any future Information Ethics that will emerge as a Macroethics, to use another typical Kantian phrase.

Elsewhere Floridi talks of a need for workable 'information ethics' to show 'that the agent-related behaviour and the patient-related status of information objects qua information objects can be morally significant, over and above the instrumental function that may be attributed to them by other ethical approaches, and hence that they can contribute to determining, normatively, ethical duties and legally enforceable rights'. (Invoking complicated social phenomena like legal rights seems curious, but anyway...) So, combining this with all his references to levels of abstraction, I think he's saying that you can strip away all the essential attributes of an object (as an example of an 'information object' he offers a pawn in chess: a thing defined by function) and be left with something that still makes a difference in normative ethics, hence the need for a normative moral theory that operates at this level (though not one required for all occasions). From that a moral circle argument follows (bioethics gets cited, including Leopold's 'land ethic'), in which case the question is how to respond to Rolston's 'Nothing in the stamp collection is alive; the collection is neither self-generating nor self-maintaining. Neither stamp nor collection is valuable on its own.' Floridi calls this bias: according to Information Ethics: Its Nature and Scope (2005) 'Bioethics and Environmental Ethics fail to achieve a level of complete impartiality, because they are still biased against what is inanimate, lifeless, intangible or abstract (even Land Ethics is biased against technology and artefacts, for example).' So...?

IE is an ecological ethics that replaces biocentrism with ontocentrism. IE suggests that there is something even more elemental than life, namely being – that is, the existence and flourishing of all entities and their global environment – and something more fundamental than suffering, namely entropy. The latter is most emphatically not the physicists' concept of thermodynamic entropy. Entropy here refers to any kind of destruction or corruption of informational objects (mind, not of information), that is, any form of impoverishment of being, including nothingness, to phrase it more metaphysically.

A little later in the same paper:

IE holds that being/information has an intrinsic worthiness. It substantiates this position by recognising that any informational entity has a Spinozian right to persist in its own status, and a Constructionist right to flourish, i.e. to improve and enrich its existence and essence.

Oh my... Rights... Right: I suppose (thinking aloud) the appeal to Spinoza ties his monism into the idea of 'the infosphere'. 'Constructionism' gets discussed in Internet Ethics: the Constructionist Values of Homo Poieticus (2003): it's pro-active, in contradistinction to predominantly reactive ethics, and with the character-building of virtue ethics given as an example, though one rejected (ineptly) as a possible basis for 'cyberethics'. I don't see rights coming to light here, though...

Nature and Scope again:

If ordinary human beings are not the only entities enjoying some form of moral respect, what else qualifies? Only sentient beings? Only biological systems? What justifies including some entities and excluding others? ... Why biocentrism and not ontocentrism? Why can biological life and its preservation be considered morally relevant phenomena in themselves, independently of human interests, but not being and its flourishing? In many contexts, it is perfectly reasonable to exercise moral respect towards inanimate entities per se, independently of any human interest; could it not be just a matter of ethical sensibility, indeed of an ethical sensibility that we might have had... but have then lost? It seems that any attempt to exclude non-living entities is based on some specific, low [level of abstraction] and its corresponding observables, but that this is an arbitrary choice. In the scale of beings, there may be no good reasons to stop anywhere but at the bottom.

This has a discomfortingly rhetorical flavour... Well, structurally it basically is a moral circle case; but I want to see something positive to explain why anything should be worthy of moral respect. These aren't questions nobody has attempted to answer.

What's principally bothering me, given my putative interpretation, is an apparent lack of fleshing out for that 'making a difference' aspect (which I don't see how Floridi can do without). From an earlier paper, Information Ethics: On the Philosophical Foundation of Computer Ethics (1999): 'Without information there is no moral action, but information now moves from being a necessary prerequisite for any morally responsible action to being its primary object.' He observes in various places (citing Socrates) that information is important in moral deliberation, but that's clearly instrumental value. Showing that this theory has some sort of impact on normative deliberation is important, but not sufficient to show that it 'gets it right'.

There's naturally some appeal in a chap who can write (in ibid), 'Suppose a process – e.g. torturing an innocent child – is utterly morally wrong. This means that it generates a neat increase in the level of entropy in the infosphere...' It's exhilarating in its brazenness... but that's not the same as being persuasive. I think Floridi expects it to be an easy ride with the expanding circle from existing approaches to ethics to 'ontocentrism'; and I'm not convinced that it is.

Omnibus Erudition

I'm starting to wonder whether the term 'value' might be getting in the way... since I've already carved out a place for something else, provisionally called flourishing. Professor Scarre has advised me to improve my (admittedly weak) grasp of æsthetic valuation/judgment/standards: this shouldn't have a direct bearing on my work in heritage ethics, since I want to avoid dependency on any given theory of æsthetic worth as far as possible – indeed, it's a general strategic desideratum that my work should have minimal dependencies – but I think what he's hoping is that the idea of 'standards' in æsthetic judgment will shed some light on the status of heritage value.

That does lead to a promising line of thought, which is that the Kantian claim that judgments of beauty have an expectation of universal validity doesn't obviously sit easily with the parochialism of cultural heritage, i.e. being the heritage of some culture (in the case of 'World Heritage' or the 'common heritage of mankind', of human, not extraterrestrial, culture). Æsthetic worth is sometimes cited, e.g. in the Waverly Criteria, as a reason for considering an object to be of cultural importance; how then is it that we move from the universal to the parochial? Invoking Kant may not be altogether necessary (though he's good for bibliographic girth, and his emphasis on disinterested judgment maybe accentuates the point): if a work is admired in many and various places, commonly amongst humanity in general rather than only within a certain culture, then is this in any way a source of 'cultural' significance?

Can a culture gain interests in a work through appreciation? Perhaps æstheic importance, even if it can be a reason for the culture within which a work originated to value it as heritage, is no reason at all for any other culture to value it as anything more or less than beautiful. Perhaps individual people may gain interests in it through appreciating it, but not their cultures. Or then again, maybe if enough people with a shared culture are united in appreciation of a work, that's a sufficient condition for its being minimally part of their culture.

I recall a dispute some years ago with an American gentleman who cited 'the Pac-Man phenomenon' as a paradigmatic example of American (i.e. U.S.) culture. He couldn't see how, with its reception and adoption as a popular icon, Pac-Man could fail to qualify as a component of American culture; whereas I couldn't see how a game made and first popularised in Japan could be 'American'. I suppse my inclinations generally are to expand outwards from the parochial rather than multiply it: so rather than say e.g. that Christianity is a Middle Eastern religion that expanded to become part of {British, North American, French, German...} culture, I think of it as a 'world religion', albeit one more widely followed in some regions than in others. (Its doctrines don't exactly hinder this classification, of course.)

Returning to the central question: does the æsthetic importance of a work add anything to its status as part of the heritage of the culture within which it originated, or are we simply less interested in making much of our cultural claims to less exalted objects (i.e. we also have cultural interests in ugly things, but ceteris paribus we don't care so much about them)? The (supposed) fact that an object isn't beautiful only within its originating culture doesn't eliminate the fact that this culture gave rise to this beautiful object: I suppose it's thoughts like that that are involved in national pride when bolstered by the admiration of the world at large. So perhaps æsthetic importance isn't itself a reason to regard an object as anyone's cultural heritage at all. Similar things can be said of embodied information: take the case of the Pyramids of Egypt. As an architectural accomplishment they are admired the world over, and they are a source of historical/archæological knowledge which is intelligible and interesting to people from many backgrounds. These look like generally applicable reasons for valuing the Pyramids, not reasons specific to Egyptian culture.

Perhaps this line of argument leads to a strong parochial/universal distinction: parochial heritage is a kind of demotic heirloom, valuable by virtue of its history and consequent association with a particular group/culture, while universal heritage is prized for being beautiful, informative, etc. rather than because of contingencies of history. (The use of 'heritage' as a term for both may then be dismissed as an inconvenient linguistic coincidence.) Or maybe, having come this far, I should jettison æsthetic and informational worth altogether as reasons for treating things as 'heritage': what does it add, to the observation that an object is a beautiful work of art that can be profitably studied as a repository of information, to call it 'heritage' on account of that?

I think this is another place where I shall want to apply the suggestion that objects aren't the primary heritage value-bearers anyway. (I should have realised sooner that that would raise questions about the role of æsthetic worth.) This line of thinking reflects and encourages a tendency to emphasise the universal: when you're thinking of genres and movements, rivers with many tributaries, that downplays the author or craftsman and, by extension, his particular cultural background. I've been tending to think that any half-baked fanfic. adds some value to the cluster of abstract objects into which it falls, just not necessarily very much: a fan's efforts presumably won't corrupt the integrity of the ideas brought forth in the original. Hence I haven't had much to say about any notion of purity.

At the moment I'm unsure where to go next. I still have to give more consideration to the question of 'standards', but I'm not sure it'll help with this universal/parochial question.

This Resembles a Meaningful Post

Lurking on the VMS List, one hears about interesting things. A book 'written... almost entirely in gibberish Sanskrit' and adorned with astrological pictures, for example: as Mr. SantaColoma says, 'imagine the havoc that could be caused by the same work if it were done on ancient materials with ancient techniques'.

Like the Voynich Manuscript, this 'prop book' could be considered a real-life weird tome: this one apparently is meaningless, although we're required to take the creator's word for it. If someone simply found it somehow, it would look pretty much like the weird tome:

Apparently consisting of pages of magical music, attempting to read it without extremely high (far in excess of normal) stats and perfect scores in the relevant skills will just confuse the player for a long period of time. Although general consensus is currently that the book's contents is [sic] just a huge red herring, a couple of other characters in the game say interesting things if the book is given to them.

I suppose the crisply linear statistics of game mechanics bring into relief the agonies of the mystery artefact (even one of known origins, like the Codex Seraphinianus): the possibility that someone with sufficient natural capacities (probably including luck), supplemented with the necessary knowledge and skill, might just be able to crack the enigma... if it can be cracked.

Being presented as a meaningless work, the 'prop book' lacks an aura of mystery, but being reminiscent of really mysterious artefacts gives it an aura of its own: it's what the VMS may really, 'merely' be. Perhaps there's some strange sense in which it is (or, perhaps preferably, 'can be viewed as') a work about undeciphered works: at any rate, it wouldn't be as interesting if we didn't have the VMS, the Phaistos Disc, and so on.

Dream Colours

These are from a Flickr photoset called Explore In/Out: the 'wild river reflection images' are stunning.

The use of colour reminds of me John McCabe's 'Sinet' videos, but nature provides a more lively rippling. Unfortunately some of these images, including a couple of my favourites, aren't CC-licensed; so to make up for that, here are some leafy wonders from the same photographer:

These images by denis collette are used here under the terms of their Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic licence

Tiresias

It seems that in the topsy-turvy world of censorship, it's possible to ban a work, then poll public opinion on this work the public is forbidden to experience in order to gauge support for the ban.

The research found that 80% of respondents thought the office was right to ban the Manhunt 2 game last year, because of the extreme violence portrayed in it. 16% disagreed with the move and 4% had no opinion.

Given the public's apparently oracular competence in this field, perhaps we could turn it to higher advantage in the domain of unseen hermeneutics: we may never unearth Cicero's lost speeches or the vanished books of Suetonius, but with suitable polling we might nevertheless be able to discover aspects of their content, in particular its moral impact. We have, after all, the title of Lives of the Famous Whores.

No Save Point

Maybe there are solutionless problems in ethics... I want to say that a problem with no solution is a pseudo-problem, but that's no help.

Two thoughts: the first, that among human needs is the need to be needed, and sometimes, faced with blossom that against nature seeks to cower back into a bud, the way to help her come to terms with herself isn't just to talk up her objective virtues but to tell her, honestly, how much she means to me: that she really is worth so much to someone, really has made a difference where no-one else did.

The other, that doing so piles pressure on the already fragile: that holding her somehow responsible for anyone else's happiness may then discourage her further from spreading her wing.

In the end... I have to say something, so it had better be the truth. And this truth is beautiful, really.

'Neon flower bud' image by TonivS and used here under the terms of its Creative Commons licence

Fairs Please

Where M. Sarkozy's intellectual property maximalism is concerned, the IPKat has it right: 'There aren’t many other industries where success in your youth guarantees you an income for life.'

I've said this before, in a slightly different context: there is no 'problem of fairness'. There is a fixed copyright term for sound recordings, and it's the same for everyone's sound recordings, with everyone getting the same advance warning: that's impeccably fair. At least Cameron, in noting a disparity between the copyright terms of different types of work, was pointing out a genuine, though reasonable and explicable, disparity, and therefore can be imagined to have made a genuine mistake. To suggest, as the French Culture Minister [sic] is quoted as asserting, that it is a 'problem of fairness' when 'artists who began their careers very young are being stripped today of all remuneration from their first recordings' is explicable only as either stupidity or mendacity.

The recurrent revenance of 'fairness' in this wholly unsuitable position is perhaps worthy of investigation: as I've suggested before, maybe it is a rhetorically efective story despite its baselessness. I suspect (recalling Boyle's comments about the need for a rhetoric of the public domain) that dealings between individuals are more easily grasped than relations between individuals and less tangible, more amorphous entities like cultures and nations—so the Culture Minister talks of 'the national pop heritage' simply in terms of the supposed desirability of private control thereof, because the national culture itself has no obvious form or presence.

Of course, no such difficulty got in the way of the invention of 'cultural property'...

Vanished Text of Final Fantasy VII: MTCRL_3

Another piece of unused dialogue from Mt. Corel; in the English files the dialogue on this map is all from Barret's flashback with Dyne. GlitterBerri's translation below shows a bit of extra character development on the journey through the mountains.

{Barret}{EOL} 「なあ、{Cloud}・・・・・・」{END}	Barret: Hey, Cloud......
{Cloud}{EOL} 「どうした?{EOL} おかしな声だすなよ」{END}	Cloud: What is it? Your voice sounds strange.
{Barret}{EOL} 「・・・・・・・・・・・・チッ・・・!{EOL} なんでもねぇよ」{END}	Barret: ............jeez... It's nothing.
{Tifa}{EOL} 「ひそひそ・・・・・・{EOL} ({Barret}、なんだか変ね)」{END}	Tifa: whisper whisper...... (Something's weird about Barret...)
{Aeris}{EOL} 「ひそひそ・・・・・・{EOL} ({Barret}、元気ないね)」{END}	Aeris: whisper whisper...... (Barret doesn't look too good, hey?)
{Red XIII}{EOL} 「彼が物静かになるとは{EOL} 私にとっては、大いなる驚異だな」{END}	Red XIII: Seeing Barret quiet is a wonder, as far as I'm concerned.
{Yuffie}{EOL} 「ありゃ、トイレがまんしてんな。{EOL} そこらへんですりゃいいのにさ」{END}	Yuffie: Hey, I have to go to the bathroom! I hope there's one nearby...

Presumably this scene would have foreshadowed Barret's reception in Corel Village; maybe Square decided it was superfluous.

Vanished Text of Final Fantasy VII: MRKT3, ONNA_2, ONNA_4, ONNA_52

Today we shall be visiting a house of ill repute. Emulating the following in real life is not recommended.

Succumb to base lusts/Walk the path of righteousness...

Before moving on to GlitterBerri's translations, I want to note something odd about the filenames. The Honey Bee Inn has six rooms: onna_4 is the main lobby, onna_2 is the dressing room at the top, and the left and right sides each have a pair of rooms sharing a single map file (i.e. one background with the dialogue for each of two rooms): onna_5 to the right, onna_52 to the left. (The extra terminal 2 seems to suggest an alternative version of an area: cf. ealin1 and ealin12, the ground floor of Aeris's house viewed from two different camera angles.) onna_1 and onna_3? They exist on the disc, as does onna_6, but each is a mere 2KB in size and lzs.exe can't decompress them.

Other odd aspects are quite a number of blocks that don't correspond to anything found in Loveless and, for some reason, the absence of the room names familiar from the English script.

Here's mrkt3, just outside the Honey Bee Inn: the following (with the exception of one block, {AERIS} "Hey!! {CLOUD}!!") is blank in the English files. Cloud apparently believes Tifa's inside, so he can't have discovered she's in Corneo's Mansion yet.

{Aeris}{EOL} 「{Cloud}・・・・・・!! 」{NewScreen} 「ま・さ・か・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ ここは俺にまかせておけ{EOL} ☞ ここに{Tifa}がいるんだ、きっと{END}	Aeris: Cloud......!! You're kidding...... Option 1: Leave this place to me! Option 2: This is where Tifa is!
{Aeris}{EOL} 「女装に必要ななにかがね。{EOL} ・・・・・・ふ~~ん」{END}	Aeris: Female clothing is necessary here. ......hmm-mm.
{Aeris}{EOL} 「ふ~~~ん!{EOL} そういう態度にでますかねえ」{END}	Aeris: Hmm-mm! You need to have the right attitude.
{Aeris}{EOL} 「はやかったのね、{Cloud}!{EOL} どうだった? よかった?」{EOL} ☞ よかったよ{EOL} ☞ {Tifa}はいなかった{END}	Aeris: You were fast, Cloud! How was it? Did it go well? Option 1: It went well. Option 2: Tifa wasn't there.
((Option 1 response)) {Aeris}{EOL} 「あ・・・・・・!」{NewScreen} 「なんか、想像しちゃった。{EOL} さ、いきましょ!」{END}	Aeris: Ah......! I can imagine. Well, let's go!
((Option 2 response)) {Aeris}{EOL} 「最初からわかってたくせに。{EOL} ま、いいけど・・・・・・{EOL} わたしもけっこう楽しんでるし」{END}	Aeris: You knew that from the beginning. Oh well...... I'm having fun too!
{Aeris}{EOL} 「それに、{Cloud}、待ってるのって{EOL} 楽しいの」{NewScreen} 「考えるんだ、いろんなこと。{EOL} 変だよね、まだ出会ったばかりなのに」{END}	Aeris: Anyway, Cloud, waiting is fun. I've been thinking about some things. It's weird that we've only just met.
{Aeris}{EOL} 「うん・・・・・・。{EOL} 帰ってきて、はやく」{END}	Aeris: Mm hmm...... Come home quickly.
{Aeris}{EOL} 「満足した、もう?」{EOL} ☞ ごめんな、またせて{EOL} ☞ もうすこし、まっててくれ{END}	Aeris: So, are you satisfied? Option 1: Sorry for making you wait. Option 2: Please wait a little bit longer.
((Option 1 response)) {Aeris}{EOL} 「{Cloud}!!{EOL} やっぱり・・・・・・」{EOL} {Tifa}を助けるためだ{EOL} 感じるんだ・・・・・・{END}	Aeris: Cloud!! I knew it...... It's to help Tifa! I feel it......
((Option 2 response)) {Cloud}{EOL} 「{Tifa}を助けるためなんだ。{EOL} わかってくれるよな」{END}	Cloud: It's to help Tifa. You understand, right?
{Aeris}{EOL} 「・・・・・・はいはい、いってらっしゃい。{EOL} 興味ある年ごろだもんね」{END}	Aeris: ......yes yes, see you later. You're at the age to be interested in girls, huh.
{Aeris}{EOL} 「な~るほどっ!{EOL} 言いたいことはそれだけ?」{END}	Aeris: I see! Is that all you want to say?

There is a smidgeon of unused text in onna_2...

きついメイク{END} 自然なメイク{END} 派手なメイク{END}

Intense make-up Natural make-up Flashy make-up

...which is just one indication of a more involved quest for transvestite pulchritude. Behold the untranslated text of onna_4, starting with another indication that something about the Inn's layout may have changed during development:

「ポッ・・・・・・♥{EOL} お客さん♥」{NewScreen} 「4つのお部屋から{EOL} 好きなコースを選んでね♥」{NewScreen} 「空いてないお部屋は{EOL} ダメなのよ♥」{END}	Oh...... ♥ Sir ♥ There are 4 rooms so choose your favorite course ♥ You can't choose occupied rooms ♥
「ポッ・・・・・・♥{EOL} お客さん♥」{NewScreen} 「はやくっはやくっ♥」{END}	Oh...... ♥ Sir ♥ Hurry hurry ♥
「お客さん。{EOL} はじめてかしら?」{EOL} ☞ はじめて、か・・・・・・?{EOL} ☞ どうなんだ・・・・・・{END}	Sir. Is this your first time, I wonder? Option 1: My first time......? Option 2: I don't remember...... [These few blocks occupy the place where the names of the rooms appear in the English files.]
「ああ・・・・・・」{END}	Ah......
「そうだな・・・・・・」{END}	Is that so......
「そう・・・・・・。{EOL} 5つのお部屋から{EOL} 好きなコースを選んでね♥」{NewScreen} 「空いてないお部屋は{EOL} ダメよ♥」{EOL} ☞ え・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ わかった{END}	So...... There are 5 rooms so choose your favorite course ♥ You can't choose occupied rooms ♥ Option 1: Er......? Option 2: Got it. ((Note: the last version of this dialogue listed 4 rooms and said ダメなのよ instead of ダメよ)) [The first version also lacks the reactions; the version below has them too.]
「もう!! お客さん!!{EOL} 人の話、聞いてるの?」{END}	Hey!! Sir!! Are you eavesdropping on people?
「・・・・・・選んでね♥」{END}	...... go on and choose! ♥
「4つのお部屋から{EOL} 好きなコースを選んでね♥」{NewScreen} 「空いてないお部屋は{EOL} ダメよ♥」{EOL} ☞ え・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ わかった{END}	There are 4 rooms so choose your favorite course ♥ You can't choose occupied rooms ♥ Option 1: Er......? Option 2: Got it. ((Same as the first one...)) [But with reactions]
「お部屋を選んでね♥{EOL} (変なお客・・・・・・。{EOL} ま、いつものこと♥)」{END}	Go on and choose a room! ♥ (Gosh, he's so weird...... but then again, they all are ♥)
((Option 1 response, I guess it starts here...)) {Cloud}{EOL} 「はじめてだ」{END}	Cloud: It's my first time.
((Option 2 response, I guess it starts here...)) {Cloud}{EOL} 「はじめてかどうかなんて{EOL} わすれたな・・・・・・」{END}	Cloud: I forget if it's my first time......
{Cloud}{EOL} 「使用中のようだな」{EOL} ☞ 聞き耳をたてる{EOL} ☞ のぞき見る{END}	Looks like this room's being used. Option 1: Take a listen Option 2: Take a peek
{Cloud}{EOL} 「・・・・・・すごい!!」{END}	Cloud: ......Woooow!!
「不適切な内容がふくまれているため{EOL} 残念ながら、お見せできません」{END}	This broadcast contains material which might be considered unsuitable for younger viewers
{Cloud}{EOL} 「・・・・・・・・・・・・」{END}	Cloud: ............

Now I really begin to wonder what Square's staff meetings were like:

「んっ・・・・・・?{EOL} まだなんかあるの?{NewScreen} 「あたし、しつこい人はきらいなのよね♥」{EOL} ☞ あのその・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ なんでもないんだ{END}	Hm......? Is there something else? I hate stubborn people ♥ Option 1: Um, those...... Option 2: It's nothing.
「なによっ!!」{END}	What!!
「しつこいわねっ!!」{END}	You're sure stubborn!
「わかったわかった・・・・・・。{EOL} う~ん、熱意に負けたわ♥{EOL} あなただけ、特別ね♥」{NewScreen} 「はい♥ 大事にして♥{EOL} 支配人にはないしょよ♥{EOL} ふたりだけの秘密♥」{END}	I see I see...... Oo, I'm overcome by your enthusiasm ♥ You're special to me! ♥ Okay! ♥ Take care of them! ♥ Don't tell the manager ♥ It's our little secret! ♥
「安心して、お客さん・・・・・・{EOL} 女装が趣味だってことは{EOL} ふたりだけの秘密ね」{NewScreen} 「じゃあね♥{EOL} バイバ~イ♥」{END}	Relax, sir...... It's our little secret that you like wearing girl clothes. Okay ♥ Bye bye! ♥
「じゃあね♥{EOL} バイバ~イ♥」{END}	Okay ♥ Bye bye! ♥
{EOL}      『セクシーランジェリー』を手に入れた。{END}	Received "Sexy Lingerie"
{Cloud}{EOL} 「あの・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ 危険な任務のためだ。君の下着を貸してくれ{EOL} ☞ ほかの言い方はないのか・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ やっぱりなんでもない{END}	Cloud: Um...... Option 1: It's for a dangerous mission. Please lend me your underwear. Option 2: Isn't there another way to say it...... Option 3: No more! Forget it.
{Cloud}{EOL} 「その・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ 彼女へのプレゼントなんだ。君の下着を・・・{EOL} ☞ うそっぽいか、ほかの言い方はないのか・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ もういやだ。忘れてくれ{END}	Cloud: Those...... Option 1: I need a present for my girlfriend. Those underwear of yours... Option 2: It sounds like a lie, isn't there another way to say it...... Option 3: No more! Forget it.
{Cloud}{EOL} 「あの・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ なにか思い出になるものを。君の下着を・・・{EOL} ☞ だめだな、ほかの言い方だな{EOL} ☞ もういいんだ{END}	Cloud: Um...... Option 1: I'd like something to remember you by. Those underwear of yours... Option 2: I need a better way to say it. Option 3: Ah, nevermind.
{Cloud}{EOL} 「その・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ じつは女装が趣味なんだ。君の下着が・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ う~ん、ほか{EOL} ☞ あきらめる{END}	Cloud: Those...... Option 1: Actually wearing female clothing is my hobby. Those underwear of yours... Option 2: Um, something else Option 3: I give up.
{Cloud}{EOL} 「あの・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ 俺、変態なんだ。君のにおいをかぎたい・・・{EOL} ☞ いやだ、ほか{EOL} ☞ バカ!{END}	Cloud: Um...... Option 1: I'm a pervert. I want to smell your scent... Option 2: No, something else Option 3: Idiot!
「その・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ 俺に君の下着をくれないかぁぁ!!{EOL} ☞ 熱血風か・・・、ほかの言い方{EOL} ☞ やめとく{END}	Those...... Option 1: Won't you give me those underwear!! Option 2: Too zealous, gotta think of something else Option 3: I quit.
{Cloud}{EOL} 「あの・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ 俺、君のこと好きだ。下着くれないか?{EOL} ☞ ごめん、ほかないか{EOL} ☞ やめ{END}	Cloud: Um...... Option 1: I like you. Won't you give me your underwear? Option 2: Sorry, is there anything else? Option 3: Stop
{Cloud}{EOL} 「その・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ 下着くれ!!{EOL} ☞ 開き直りか、ほかがいいな{EOL} ☞ やめだ{END}	Cloud: Those...... Option 1: Your underwear please!! Option 2: Are you serious? Something else. Option 3: Okay, stop
{Cloud}{EOL} 「あの・・・・・・」{EOL} ☞ 俺、病気で・・・ハァハァ。君の下着が・・・。{EOL} ☞ どんな病気だ・・・、ほかの{EOL} ☞ いかん{END}	Cloud: Um...... Option 1: I'm sick... haha. Your underwear... Option 2: Sick with what? Something else. Option 3: I'm not doing this.
{Cloud}{EOL} 「う~ん・・・・・・{EOL} ({Tifa}を助けるために女装するとして{EOL} 使えそうなものは・・・・・・{EOL} まさか、この蜜蜂ルックは目立ちすぎる・・・。{EOL} う~ん、下着ぐらいか・・・・・・)」{NewScreen} 「ええ・・・・・・!! 下着ぃ?」{END}	Cloud: Mm...... (It looks like I can use this female clothing to help Tifa...... This Honey Bee Inn look is way too flashy... Mm, maybe just the underwear......) Er......!! Your underwear?

Maybe if the people who want an FFVII remake ever get their wish, Square-Enix will let them play the game as it was meant to be experienced, with all these insights into social behaviour and manners restored. Finally, here's onna_52, with an extended version of the scene where Cloud loses consciousness:

「この部屋にするよ・・・・・・。{EOL} 今夜は大切な夜なんだ」{END}	I'll take this room...... Tonight's an important night.
「ソルジャーさん?{EOL} 若いのに大変なのね」{END}	You're a SOLDIER? But you're so young... it must be hard.
「・・・・・・まった?」{END}	...... Did you wait for me?
「ねえ、決まった?{EOL} ここでいいのね♥」{END}	Hey, you decided? This one is nice, isn't it ♥
「さ♥ はじめましょ♥」{NewScreen} 「ハイ♥ まずはぁ・・・・・・。{EOL} おふろにはいって♥」{EOL} ☞ まってくれ・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ え・・・・・・{END}	Well ♥ Let's begin ♥ Okay ♥ First of all...... get in the bath! ♥ Option 1: Please wait...... Option 2: Er......
{Cloud}{EOL} 「俺、ふろには入らない主義なんだ。{EOL} ☞ ふろに入るなら死んだ方がましさ{EOL} ☞ 水がこわいんだ・・・・・・{END}	Cloud: Bathing is against my principles. Option 1: I'd rather die than take a bath. Option 2: I'm scared of water......
{Cloud}{EOL} 「わすれたな・・・{EOL} ふろなんて何年ぶりか・・・」{NewScreen} 「安心しろ。{EOL} 下着は常に新品だ」{END}	Cloud: I forget... how many years it's been since I've taken a bath... But you can relax. These underwear are new.
{Cloud}{EOL} 「こまかいことは気にしない」{NewScreen} 「頭も自然に決まるしな」{END}	Cloud: I don't worry about little things like that. I keep my hair natural.
「なに、ばかなこといってんの?」{END}	Why are you saying such silly things?
「おおげさな人ね♥」{END}	You exaggerate a lot, don't you?
「さ♥ お客さん♥」{NewScreen} 「つべこべいわないっ♥{EOL} ぬいで! ぬいで!」{END}	Well ♥ Sir ♥ Don't complain ♥ Undress! Undress!
「やだ~♥{EOL} あせくさ~♥」{END}	Eww ♥ You smell like sweat ♥
「ほんとにおふろ入ってないんだぁ~♥」{EOL} ☞ もう何年になるか・・・・・・{EOL} ☞ なれればどうってことない{END}	You really haven't taken a bath ♥ Option 1: How many years has it been...... Option 2: I'm not worried about it.
「いいわ♥{EOL} ゆっくりつかってね♥」{END}	It's okay ♥ Take your time ♥
「でも・・・・・・{EOL} すごいよ、においが・・・・・・」{END}	But...... You really smell......
「ゆかげんはどうかしら?」{EOL} ☞ のぼせそうだな{EOL} ☞ 悪くないな{END}	How is the water temperature? Option 1: A little hotter would be good. Option 2: Not bad.
「がまんがまん♥」{END}	Be patient! ♥ ((Note: Japanese tubs have a heater so it takes a little while for the water to warm up if you increase the temperature))
「あら♥{EOL} うれっし♥」{END}	Yay ♥ I'm happy ♥
「あらま♥{EOL} お客さん、すご~いぃ♥{END}	Wow ♥ Sir, amazing! ♥
「かっこいい~♥」{EOL} ☞ なにいってんだ?{EOL} ☞ ん・・・・・・?{END}	You're hot! ♥ Option 1: What are you saying? Option 2: Huh......?
{Cloud}{EOL} 「あ、あれ・・・・・・?{NewScreen} 「ブクブクブクブク・・・・・・」{END}	Cloud: H-huh......? ((Cloud slips and loses consciousness)) *he sinks*......
「やだ!♥{EOL} お客さ~ん♥{NewScreen} 「たいへ~ん!{EOL} だれか~だれか、きて~♥」{END}	No! ♥ Siiir ♥ Oh no! ♥ Someone, anyone, help! ♥
「明日、族立つ。{EOL} 危険な任務だ・・・・・・」{END}	I leave tomorrow. I'm on a dangerous mission......
「いいのかしら?{EOL} こんなところで遊んでいて。{EOL} ソルジャーさん」{END}	Are you sure it's okay for you to be in this sort of place, Mr. SOLDIER?
「あの子、待たしてるんでしょ?」{END}	That girl is waiting for you, right?
「いいさ」{NewScreen} 「正直、つきまとわれて{EOL} 迷感してるんだ・・・・・・」{END}	It's alright. Actually, being followed is annoying...... ((Note: The above line could be interpreted as coming from another person, I suppose, if the いいさ was translated differently)) [I expected this to be Cloud's line, but his name isn't attached to it, so...]
「モミモミモミ・・・{EOL} モミモミモミモミ・・・・・・」{END}	rubrubrub... rubrubrubrub...... ((massaging noises))
「タントントン・・・・・・{EOL} タントントントン・・・・・・」{END}	chopchop...... chopchopchop...... ((massaging noises))
「ツンツン・・・・・・{EOL} ・・・・・・チクッン♥」{END}	pokepoke...... ...... pinch! ♥
{Cloud}{EOL} 「うっ・・・・・・{EOL} いてっ!!」{END}	Cloud: Oog...... Ouch!!
{Cloud}のHP/MPが回復した!{END}	Cloud's HP/MP restored!
「キャッ! お客さ~ん!!{EOL} たいへ~ん!{NewScreen} 「だれか~ だれか、きて~」{END}	Kyaa! Siiir!! Oh no! Someone, anyone, help!
「ふぅ~♥{EOL} よかったぁ♥」{END}	Sigh ♥ Phew ♥
「お客さんっ♥{EOL} びっくりさせないでよね」{END}	Sir ♥ Don't scare me like that
「つかれはとれたかしら?」{EOL} ☞ ああ・・・・・・?{EOL} ☞ うう・・・・・・?{END}	Are you alright now? Option 1: Yes......? Option 2: Oog......?
「んっ・・・・・・?{EOL} まっ、いいわ♥」{END}	Hm......? Ah, oh well ♥
「もう時間よっ♥{EOL} じゃね♥」{END}	Time's up! ♥ Bye ♥
{Cloud}{EOL} 「そうだ!{EOL} 任務を実行しなきゃな」{END}	Cloud: Right! I have to take care of the mission!

Some of the onna_4 text ("I hate stubborn people", etc.) is repeated after this.

I don't know quite what to make of the revelation that Cloud keeps his hair natural.