Review of Kevin Decker and Jeffery Ewing, Alien and Philosophy: I Infest, Therefore I Am . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017. 240 pages.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The movie Alien first hit the box office in the spring of 1979, and it was met with critical acclaim; in 2008, it ranked seventh best film in the science fiction genre by the American Film Institute.The chestburster scene is now stuff of legend and is iconic in the world of pop-culture and entertainment.Kevin Decker and Jeffery Ewing's book, Alien and Philosophy: I Infest, Therefore I am, was also published in the spring, thirty eight years later, and not only does it also explore what it means to be human-and alien-but it does so in a way that both the movie and their book share: it is a form of entertainment.Of course, it is clear that Decker and Ewing's purpose in Alien and Philosophy is not merely to entertain its readers, but to engage the reader in philosophizing while nevertheless ensuring that the entertainment factor is sufficiently met.In a rather gripping way Decker and Ewing explore topics as diverse as "identity and personhood, morality and the political and economic forces of the Alien universe, just war theory in going into battle against the Xenomorphs, the philosophy of horror, and feminist insights into Ripley's leadership style" (3).Decker and Ewing adequately explore two features that are unique to humans in Alien and Philosophy.Firstly, unlike animals-and any known aliens-humans voluntarily spend, and sometimes end, their lives seeking and promoting the experience of fear.One need only consider that form of thrill-seeking through risky adventures such as sky-diving, bungee jumping, big wave surfing, and downhill mountain biking, all done for the rush of adrenaline.But we also stay up late reading horror ridden tales from authors like Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft.We snuggle close to our friends and loved ones while hiding behind our pillows and blankets while watching movies like Alien and Netflix's Stranger Things.We pack ourselves into theaters with our popcorn and sodas to watch movies like Halloween, fully aware that they are intended to scare us.Secondly, unlike any known species, humans spend much of their time philosophizing, questioning the meaning of life, how to define art, and how we know anything.We are curious creatures that like to debate and, presumably, are motivated by fear.Through the lens
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".