there was supposed to be a post here....

but i left the file sitting back on the machine. hrm. it was rather long. we'll try that again tomorrow.

in the meantime, here's a link to peter watts's Blindsight, which you can read on the website or download in pdf. it's some hard sci-fi about first contact with an alien species in the very cold lonely reaches of outer space. there are multiple personalities, vampires, and a guy who had a radical hemispherectomy as a child (he literally only has half a brain). quite worthwhile, here's a quote from the notes at the end of the book, this section dealing with the evolutionary advisability of having a sense of aesthetics vs. having simple self-awareness.

"Art might be a bit of an exception. Aesthetics seem to require
some level of self-awareness—in fact, the evolution of aethestics
might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first
place. When music is so beautiful if makes you shiver, that's the
reward circuitry in your limbic system kicking in: the same
circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or
gorging on sucrose. It's a hack, in other words; your brain has
learned how to get the reward without actually earning it through
increased fitness. It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life
worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us. Those
rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own
pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They
pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat.
They starved to death. I've no doubt they died happy, but they
died. Without issue. Their fitness went to Zero.
Aesthetics. Sentience. Extinction."