Well, considering what will happen to their souls upon death, I don't know that they want to take the risk of dying and being brought back.

I think they fought the Nonmen mainly because they were attempting to reduce the world the the 144,000.

One of the only issues I have with this article is the pigment thing. In TJE Theliopa suggests that the Sayothi Skin-Spy is a further novelty beyond the advent of the Skin-Spy generally.

Good catch, I had actually forgotten that.  Perhaps in innovation, perhaps also a happy coincidence, like the Skin-Spy of Simas, that just happened to have a soul?

Relevant quote:

"Black-skinned?" she said, turning to Maithanet. "Have we ever captured a Satyothi before?"

"This is the first," the Holy Shriah replied, nodding toward Theliopa as he spoke. "We think it might be a test of some kind."

Well, as for concrete clues, all I can think of would be that when Kellhus speaks to Aurang, he confidently says to him that he knows how his actual physical body is really in the Ark, with the Consult sorcerers making it possible for him to inhabit the Synthese.  If Kellhus was lying, I feel Aurang would have been quick to point out how little he actually knew.  Then again, there is the chance it was just a cat-and-mouse statement, with neither knowing which role they were truly playing.

That, paired with the idea that Aurang was concerning himself with the Holy War and the South, while Aurax scoured the North.

Keep in mind that they are twin brothers.  I think it is reasonable that they should look alike.  The chapter does speak of "cancerous growths" that I don't recall ever being described on Aurang, as well, IIRC.

Well, if I understand correctly, the Elephant is the "whole thing" in the sense that it's what moves it all, so to speak.  I guess to use a Bakker-ism, it's the darkness the comes before...

In the old proverb of the three blind Indian gurus and the elephant, one grabs the tail and says the elephant is a rope, the other grabs a leg and says the elephant is a tree, while the third grabs the trunk and says the elephant is a snake. In each case, the gurus mistake the part for a whole. This is the Blind Brain Thesis (which I simultaneously can’t stop arguing and can’t bring myself to believe): the thalamocortical system is the guru and the greater brain is the elephant. Intentional concepts such as belief, desire, good, perception, volition, action–all the furniture of conscious life–are simply ropes and trees and snakes. Misapprehensions. According to BBT, there are literally no such things.

The reason they function is simply that they are systematically related to the elephant, who does the brunt of the work. They have to count as ‘insight’ or ‘understanding’ simply because they are literally the only game in town.

Enter what I call Encapsulation, the strange mereological inflation that characterizes consciousness. Mistaking parts for wholes, I want to argue, is constitutive of experience. Dennett wants to say we are actually experiencing the elephant. But as a matter of empirical fact, the thalamocortical system only has access to a fraction of the information processed by the brain, a fraction it cannot but mistake for wholes. We are experiencing elephant parts as opposed to the elephant, and we’re experiencing them as wholes, something they are not.

As magicians well know, the brain makes default identity mistakes all the time: In “The Mark of Gideon,” Captain Kirk unknowingly beams into a perfect replica of the Enterprise, and so assumes that the transporter has malfunctioned and that his entire crew has been abducted. His inability to discriminate between the real Enterprise and the replica leads to their thoughtless conflation. The BBT suggests that experience seems to unfold across a substrate of self-identity simply because its margins, those points where the absence of information are expressed, must always remain the same.

By marking the limit of differentiation they endow us with the illusion of a soul.

We are the elephant in such a way that we are a rope, tree, and snake. Anything but an elephant.

I think it's odd we don't have a thread about Bakker's BBT.  It definitely has influenced his fiction, so here's a thread for us to maybe try to piece together some of it.

I was just thinking, having been visiting Bakker's TPB several times this week...

Are the Dunyain, Inchoroi and Nonmen different representations of transhumanism and the dangers of it?

I could see each as embodying a different extreme.

The Dunyain as the amoral pursuit of logic and pragmatism.

The Inchoroi as the amoral pursuit of pleasure and hedonism.

The Nonmen as the amoral pursuit of immortality.

What would the implications of this be?  Are any of these things really 'good?'

Yeah, that is basically how I think I had it in my head.  That somehow, the Onta and the physical world are like separate, but connected 'layers.'  The Anagogis perhaps modifies the Onta through the physical world, while the Psûkhe modifies the physical world through the Onta?

That does make me question how a Chorae works though, since in my head I had what was the (certainly mistaken) idea that it 'locked' in place both layers, in relation to each other, i.e. if both frames don't match, nothing will happen.  Perhaps that does still sort of work, even if it most certainly is a fundamentally flawed idea.

Actually, wait, what if the Onta is simply what everything is comprised of?  Then there is no difference between the physical world and the Onta, the former is just the tangible aspect of the latter.  What is difference is the frame of reference.  For the few, they see both the tangible and the fundamental at the same time.  I guess a real-world analogy would be like seeing both as we see now and the quantum-mechanical nature of everything, at the same time.

Perhaps the Mark is the soul's inability to resolve what is and what should be.  So changes to the Onta, to the sighted, are fundamentally wrong, because both frames of reference do not match.  While blind to the tangible, the Cishaurim suffer no dichotomy.  Their soul only 'sees' what should be.  Perhaps this is why it is magic of 'passion?'  Because you must truly believe that what you do is 'how it should be.'

...I'm not even sure what I'm talking about now...