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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (57126)	9/6/2002 10:53:56 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I don't think anybody doubts that real people are pressing the keys that put the messages up on this board. That's not the issue. The issue is whether the persona which emerges from those key pressings is in any sense a real person, whether pressing keys that say "I am a lawyer" makes one a lawyer or proves that one is a lawyer. If poster A writes to poster B "I hate you" does that mean that the physical person pressing the keys under the alias A really hates the physical person pressing the keys behing the alias B? Or is it as though A were an author of a book, and in the book character M says "I hate you" to character N. If you are going to associate the character or persona with the real person, then that author hates him- or herself. And every author who writes a sex scene is having sex with him- or herself. In writing fiction, it is easy for us to recognize the disconnect between author and charcter. If John MacDonald has Travis McGee say "I have hated Houston since the day I arrived there in a tornado and my favorite hat was torn from my head and deposited on the steeple of St. Mary's Church, there to reside as a beacon of ridicule for the next month," does anybody take that prove that John MacDonald really was ever in Houston in a tornado and had his hat ripped off his head? I think not. Yes, John MacDonald is a real person. And yes, he physicall wrote those words. And yes, he said it in the first person -- "I have hated..." And we know that MIGHT have happened to the real person John MacDonald, but we start out doubting it. So why, when the physical person who is typing the words for the character X the Unknown says something about Santa Barbara, should we intrinsically believe it any more than we believe it of John MacDonald and Travis McGee?