The Detective Is Already Dead Episode 8 Review – Best In Show

8 thoughts on “The Detective Is Already Dead Episode 8 Review – Best In Show”

1. As you know, I’m no longer watching the show, so all I know about this episode or arc is what I read on your blog. The “emotion vs. reason” discussion has always struck me a false dichotomy. Without emotion there’s no way to reason, really. You can’t make a single decision without emotion, because you need values. Reason is all if-then, but without a set of priorities this goes nowhere. Emotion is more than immediate affect: it’s also attachment, comfort/discomfort, and stuff like that. Stuff that we take for granted like our constant body heat that we only notice when our homeostatic system is out of whack (freezing to death, or burning up from fever).

   And this is where writing comes in: here you have a situation, and what you do with it depends. From your description, what I see is this:

   In the way this plays out emotion “gets in the way” (I don’t know if it’s too late for a anime-common power-of-friendship turnaround?). Alternatively, there could have been premature certainty because we didn’t have the full information. It would have been a different story based on the same set-up – seemingly driving home opposite themes, but in reality they’re both clinging to the same still-born binary. The key here is neither emotion nor reason, but it’s certainty.

   Philosophically, I’ve always tended towards relativist points of view, and the philosophies that go well with that are structuralism (which gave rise to modern anthropology and linguistics), phenomenology (mostly the Husserl-inspired branch), and existentialism. My take is that reational thought is a powerful tool, but it’s a tool ultimately at the disposition of emotions. There’s no such thing as a unified emotional centre, I think, in the human psyche, so there are always inner conflicts to some degree or other, and they get in the way. One way to resolve this is with rational thought – directed inwards – rationalising decisions you’ve already made. And rational thought as ex-post legitimisation is really hard to tell from rational thought as problem solving when you’re in the thick of things, and if you’re aware, you hesitate.

   So the scene you describe seems to me to pick up on that sort of hesitation (in Kimi), but it’s juxtaposed to the sharper intellect and stronger control of Siesta, and so I get the idea that “emotions interfere”. However, being certain that you’re right because you have reason on your side is a form of emotional attachment, slow burn and more dangerous if you’re used to being right (either by sheer fact, or by social mechanisms like self-fulfilling prophecies).

   I can’t really talk about an episode I didn’t watch, and I don’t have a good grasp on where the show is going. I’m actually still sort of curious, but I just find the show so dull. How does Siesta know the things she does? How did she die? And did she stay dead? SF/F shows are the hardest to get a read on when you don’t trust the writer. I guess, what I’m wondering is whether Siesta’s death caught her off guard, or not. At the beginning of the season, I would have leant towards an easy no, but by the time I quit on the show, it’s been whittled down to a slight no. I sort of want to have watched the episode now, but I don’t actually want to go through with watching it.

   I’ve followed shows I dropped on blogs before, most recently Demon Slayer, but also the second season of Gacchaman Crowds. I usually get a pretty good sense whether I would have liked a show from that, and also I can usually imagine the path events took from the summeries. (I dropped Demon Slayer because of motion sickness, and Gacchaman Crowds Insight, because it annoyed me terribly.) With this show? I dropped the show without knowing what it’s about, so I have no clear frame to interpret posts about this (such as this one). And I can’t seem to let it go. It’s a really weird experience. I’m fairly sure the show would bore me, and I might watch the entire season and still not get it.

   And here’s the thing: emotion vs. reason doesn’t help. They both say I should stay away, but they both have a tiny faction that says: “But don’t you want to know.” If nothing else, that’s a first.

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   1. I almost added a line between emotion and reason that would suggest the actual implementation for humans is probably in the middle. But I was almost out of space, and I didn’t think it would be fair to readers if I dropped an unrealized thought in the middle of the post!

      “Without emotion there’s no way to reason, really. You can’t make a single decision without emotion, because you need values. Reason is all if-then, but without a set of priorities this goes nowhere. ”

      I don’t know if I buy into that, but at the same time, I’m not sure I have internalized exactly what you mean. The reason I think I have a different interpretation is that values may or may not be tied to emotions. I have a drive to protect my family. In my culture, that’s expressed through love. But it’s also a biological imperative. My instincts tell me to protect my family. Given the goal of preserving my genes, my reason also supports protecting my family.

      So I see some priorities, at least, as not necessarily having to be based on emotion.

      Though once that hair’s split, have I accomplished anything? Is this a distinction without a difference?

      “However, being certain that you’re right because you have reason on your side is a form of emotional attachment,”

      While I’m all in on the idea that we need to be cautious with our conclusions, at least in my experience of life, certainty of rightness is less emotional and more an affinity for fact. If the points I’m using to feed into my reason can be verified, and if the projects my reason comes up with align with observed reality, then I incorporate that into my experience and come closer to being certain.

      Being certain, of course, is a danger. But if it’s done right, it’s like military training: Responses under fire can become automatic, so as long as your responses match the situation, I’d see the response as reasonable. It looked to me (though the show is, as you pointed out, frustratingly vague on how Siesta learns stuff or how much she knew going into the series) that Siesta’s thought processes had prepared her to confront Alicia. Kimi hadn’t gone through that process, so his emotions were able to overwhelm him.

      We might be talking about different aspects of the same idea. English is my first language, and it still drives me nuts.

      “And here’s the thing: emotion vs. reason doesn’t help. They both say I should stay away, but they both have a tiny faction that says: “But don’t you want to know.” If nothing else, that’s a first.”

      Now, that’s interesting! I’m torn about this show. My intellect/reason does not want me to like it. My emotions are more favorably inclined. In cases where I’m divided, it’s usually the opposite!

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      1. The reason I think I have a different interpretation is that values may or may not be tied to emotions. I have a drive to protect my family. In my culture, that’s expressed through love. But it’s also a biological imperative. My instincts tell me to protect my family. Given the goal of preserving my genes, my reason also supports protecting my family.

         So I see some priorities, at least, as not necessarily having to be based on emotion.

         The issue, here, is probably what counts as “emotion”. I’d have lumped in a “bilogoical imperative” with the general category, but it’s something that I’ve never fully systematised, so I’d agree that you pinpointed a problematic spot here.

         The usual idea is that there’s this emotion, say, “anger”, and it flares up and suggests a course of action, and then you calm down and think rationally about it all. So first, you react emotionally, and then you think rationally, and then you act out a rational plan.

         The first problem I have with this is the concept of “emotion” being something that flares up (it’s in the etymology – from lat ex-movere – moving out). “Anger”, here, is the tip of the ice-berg. I think of emotion as a constant affective flow, and the base-state isn’t usually something we pay attention to.

         So in the anger-example above: why do you calm down? Why don’t you just follow the course of action the emotion suggests? What’s the impetus for this? And how can a simple emotion suggest a course of action to begin with? A reflex is simple; light hits your pupil and you blink. A course of action is something you’ve learned. You’ve accumulated experiences and created thought-habits. The instance of I’m-gonna-kill-ya anger involves plenty of traces of past rational cognition. The state isn’t pure emotion, in the same way that thinking things through calmly isn’t pure rational congnition. It’s all tangled up – very basically.

         That doesn’t mean that original distinction isn’t of value. We have impulses that we act on and later regret, so we learn to be wary of our impulses. Rational thought takes cognitive resources, and while we’re thinking things through we keep outbursts to a minimum because they’re distractions. But both states, agitated or calm, are an inherent mix of emotion and cognition, and to set up a distinction here between emotion and rational thought is, I think, misleading.

         You’re actually addressing this to some degree:

         Being certain, of course, is a danger. But if it’s done right, it’s like military training: Responses under fire can become automatic, so as long as your responses match the situation, I’d see the response as reasonable.

         The thing here, though, is that you can’t assume the “response matches the situation” for multiple reasons: first, you may misunderstand the situation; second, what “matches the situation” is itself a construct you made simply through living and is thus based on your base-line comfort. It’s the second part I find most interesting. I think we both agree that whether someone acts reasonable should be judged not by the outcome, but what information they had when they made the decision. So whether you misunderstand the situation or not should have little impact on whether the process is rational.

         The problem I have, here, is fundamental, though: I think humans inherently strive to make the “response to match the situation”, to maintain a sort of stimulus-response homeostasis. A rational response would be to not ever trust you take of the situation and always take a step a back and look at it from as many angles as you can. But that sort of flies in the face of what you are. The more rational you become, the less you’ll ever be able to reach a decision. And what’s more, the more you peel back the layers of self-deception the less things start to matter, and until have literally no concepts left to think rationally with. It’s not “rational this”, “emotional that”. It’s lived experience all the way down, affect tangled up with cognition, and a few named emotions in our analytic repartoir, and a model of what it’s like to be a good rational thinker – with people bickering about whether that’s a likable guy or not. And is that a rational thing to do or not? (Psst, it’s a trick question.)

         With fiction, though, we tend to have a narrative. The very model of rational enlightment man either succeeds or doesn’t and that’s seen as who you throw your support in. You’re avarage shounen protagonist for example is a boy of emotion. The life and the soul of party. Extends a hand to every villain. Often naive and reckless to fault, often wearing down a villain’s resolve with that density. It’s a clash of wills, not intellects. When you get a clash of intellect, it’s usually either survival games (like this season’s 5-second battle show) or shows like Death Note, which seem to deliberately revel in amoral protagonists (now that I think about it this way, Talentless Nana had a really smart set-up for its maincharacter…).

         But anime often plays far more into team structures than choosing between rivalling philosophies. It’s not that the red ranger is the hero; he’s the leader. But he needs to rely on the Blue Ranger, when he’s out of his depths. Assuming stereotypical male audiences: Western cartoons tend to be about reward allocation, while anime tends to be about social positioning.

         So how does this go with the set-up in question:

         The author sets the situation up as follows:

         The bad girl bonds with Kimi. Siesta is suspicious of her. We’re led to believe she’s jealous (I assume; i haven’t seen the show), or that’s at least how she plays it. Then they find out she’s the bad girl, and Kimi doesn’t now how to deal with it. We’re not sure just how much about Siesta’s behaviour is an affectation, and how much is actual affect (the last scene I saw in this show, the mecha entrance, seemed the first time we’ve looked under the hood, but who knows), but she has no problem to “do what’s right”. So: Kimi – strong emotions interfer; Siesta – mild emotions, if they’re genuine, don’t intefere much, and if they did, they’d likely push in the “right” direction anyway (I assume the show’s not smart enough to go deeper into characterisation, and the need to keep Siesta a mystery figure head would interfere anyway). If you view this scene as making a statement of emotion vs. rationality, I’d say the set-up is rigged, and out-come based arguments aren’t the best to begin with. If it’s just “When you’re under stress, you’re not thinking straight,” then it might work out, but I don’t think that’s particularly compelling either way, philosophically.

         Anime, though, tends to be more about team dynamics: accept your short comings, someone else will make up for them. So likely we’re just supposed to admire Siesta and feel bad for Kimi, while my hunch is that I’d have felt neither of these things, and I’d just have been bored (as that’s how it was for most of what I watched). I be myself, you be yourself – it’s for the best. That’s the usual anime take-away for me. Not always, there are exceptions. And for as long as I watched, Detective didn’t make a particular point for itself I could detect so who knows?

         Not sure how much sense I made, here, especially since I haven’t acutally seen the episode. Also, I never really felt the need to formalise why personal philosophy, so it’s not fully thought out, either. I’m playing it by ear as best I can. I didn’t address the certainty part at all – too many words already. There’s a lot in there as well, to process. What you’ve seen my type up here as much thinking to myself as it is trying to make myself understood. Bascially, I just want to say that even though it looks like a disagree, it’s more that I find contrast enlightening, and the words aren’t the result of thought, but part of the process of thinking. Who knows what I would have liked to have written in an hour or so. It’s almost never what I actually wrote.

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         1. ” It’s not “rational this”, “emotional that”. It’s lived experience all the way down, affect tangled up with cognition, and a few named emotions in our analytic repertoire”

            I do see a distinction between rational thought and emotions — I suppose I could say emotional thought, in contrast (conjunction?) with the rational. At the same time, there are times when the boundaries are not distinct.

            From a practical perspective, it’s been my experience that emotions are more easily manipulated than the intellect. So, I’ve tried to make decisions by relying on intellect and discounting emotion. The exception is when satisfying a particular emotion might be the goal of a decision — in which case, it just seemed reasonable that the emotion be involved!

            I’d go so far as to say it’s my goal to more and more disentangle my intellect from my emotions. I’m not trying to shut down my emotions. It’s more that I don’t want my emotions interfering with the decisions I’m trying to make when those decisions would not benefit from emotional input.

            I _think_ I understand you to suggest that such a distinction is artificial. Or if that word is too loaded, then maybe it’s more clear to say the distinction is not natural.

            I can’t disagree. The world is what the world is, and it’s certainly neither neat nor tidy. The broader universe is chaos contained within a framework. I’d argue that the chaos has an underlying order; what my theological education would call the logos (or The Logos, depending on your perspective). I’d go farther and say that my intellect’s goal is to align as many of my understandings as possible with whatever of the Logos we can see; and failing apprehension of the Logos, to gather facts and order them into taxonomies and other constructions that will further my understanding.

            I find the conversation of thought versus emotion as helpful as a tool to understanding, which is why I think the discuss is still interesting. On the other hand, I can’t discount that human thought is itself an artificial constructions that has severe limits. So, I can’t say that emotions have no role.

            Or maybe there’s something beyond both that offers the advantage of both while addressing the short comings of both?

            But until we find that, I think it’s a good idea we have conversations like this!

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            1. I _think_ I understand you to suggest that such a distinction is artificial. Or if that word is too loaded, then maybe it’s more clear to say the distinction is not natural.

               Not quite. It’s analytical. It’s only useful to the extent that analysis is useful. And to analyse anything on grounds of that distinction you need a model. So what’s the model? When does a decision count as an emotional one? When as a rational one?

               For example, from your first reply:

               Given the goal of preserving my genes, my reason also supports protecting my family.

               Rational thought here seems to be more directed at justifying to yourself to protect your family, which you’re going to do anyway, rather than seriously questioning whether you should stop protecting your family. If the latter isn’t really an option you consider, you’re not being rational, you’re rationalising.

               Also:

               Given the goal of preserving one’s genes, one is justified in being angry at your gay kid choosing not to breed (they don’t need to marry, but they could at least donate sperm/ova).

               Given the goal of preserving one’s genes, you should always prioritise your fertile kid over your infertile one.

               Given the goal of preserving one’s genes, adoption is a waste of resources.

               Given the goal of preserving one’s genes, you should dump your infertile spouse.

               And so on. There are a lot of implications people could ponder, but usually don’t. What’s going on here? How do people choose what to prioritise? What to pay attention to? It’s all rational? Or if it isn’t, it should be?

               Sometimes people think too much.

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               1. “Sometimes people think too much.”

                  My wife has said that to me on more than one occasion. I only had the bad sense once to ask, “You really think so? Let’s analyze that!”

                  Yeah, good times…

                  Your examples about family bring up an interesting point. In human society, I don’t need to limit my family to my own genetic pool. I know my example referenced preserving my genetic material, but I was just looking for an example of instinct versus emotion. I could easily defend an adopted child and support an infertile spouse simply because I love them. Which is using an emotion as a goal.

                  But “sometimes people think too much” probably applies here. I’m inclined towards being obsessive, and I think it shows in examples like this.

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2. “Aristotelian Thomist.”

   That’s getting really deep!

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   1. What’s weird — at least, I’ve come to think of it as weird — is that is how I see the world, more or less. Even I wonder how that happened.

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