Re: The best SF novel of all time

:: It's a fairly common glitch to substitute sibling for offspring,
:: mentally.  Though normally not quite like that. 

: Lawrence Watt-Evans <lwe@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
: Or spouse for offspring.  My grandfather, after his stroke, was
: completely unable to comprehend that my mother was his daughter, and
: not his long-dead first wife. 

Other possible mistaken identifications occur to.  There can even be
some structure to it; aiui, quite often a child is mistakenly refered
to by the name of the *corresponding* sibling (or cousin, or nephew,
or what not).  As in my case, I'm the youngest, and got called my
mother's youngest brother's name.  My siblings sometimes got refered
to by the corresponding sibling of the appropriate sex.

And as I say, you don't *have* to be mentally compromised to do it.
AIUI, it's like a spoonerism or freudian slip or somesuch.  Some of the
autonomic mental processes that underly our behaviors are not quite
AI-complete, and can slip up.

Oh, oh... or, you turn down a street that corrresponds to a street you
are really after, but you are one town early getting off the freeway,
or whatever.  Or just mentally, confusing the names of streets in one
college town for another with similar college-on-one-side-town-on-other
structure.  And so on and so on.  So, things that correspond by family
structure, geometric structure, linguistic structure, can be substituted
by background processes in your haid.  Scary sometimes.  
Also sometimes facinating.

Of course, the more nearly running-on-automatic you are (ie, tired,
drunk, old, whatever) the more mismatching details get overlooked...


Wayne Throop   throopw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   http://sheol.org/throopw