Read The Weaver Fish for Free Online Page A

that some of these advances might have led to a rigorous method of dream description.
    Tøssentern set out from Madregalo on Greater Ferende in fine weather on 1 April. He was an experienced navigator and was flying alone. Authorities describe Abel as an all-weather steerable balloon with hurricane-rated burners, fully equipped for emergencies, and provisioned for three weeks of poweredflight. It carried specialized skipping traps thought suitable for the capture of weaver fish, though these were unlikely to have been deployed in very rough conditions. Final contact with Abel was an automatic status signal recorded by ground stations at 1543 hr GMT on 3 April, approaching midnight local time. Far Eastern news services report that an extensive air-sea search was downgraded after failing to locate any trace of the craft or its pilot. Investigations continue locally, and statutory enquiries will be conducted both by the United Kingdom and by Norway.
    Tøssentern had many friends, and some will remember back a few years to a convivial evening at Chaucer Road when Edvard spoke movingly of spiritual and psychological identity, and his own sense of statelessness. Trans-cultural parenthood, birth at sea, international schooling and his being non-discriminately multilingual were the complex predicates to an indistinctness of personhood that he revealed as deeply saddening. His words were memorable in being both very exposing but also surprising, because he was a man of considerable fun, with evident certainty of self, and appeared relaxed in his many worlds. It is difficult to accept that his last experience was like his first, travelling in the night, again at sea.
    Edvard Tøssentern never married. He is survived by his close companion, the psychiatrist and aviation writer Anna Camenes.
    Rede Professor Wallis Pioniv contributes: The proposition that primitive dream imagery might reproduce, albeit imperfectly, the experience of one’s ancestors, including their terrors, was rather too existentially charged for post-modern sensitivities, for which the meaninglessness hypothesis of memory de-junking was much more appealing. Even worse, the notion that one’s own ideation, one’s own monsters, or indeed oneself as a monster, might be transmitted forward to future generations threatened deeply held assumptions about the privacy of the mind and an individual’s discretionary power of inviolable concealment over unedifying thoughts.
    For a suggestion so injurious to universally approved beliefs about personal identity, free will and autonomy, Tøssentern was subjected to a firestorm of attacks, many ad hominem, and manybased fallaciously on accusations of essentialism, teleologism, and Lamarckism. Nevertheless, despite a temperamental disdain for the non-rational, he responded to all his critics with practical argument, recourse to first principles, appeal to precedent, and a methodical display of the evidence. Only occasionally here did exasperation intrude on formality: in the appraisal of competing theories, he applied, along with standard measures of best fit and parsimony and the rest, a novel test of ‘least silliness’, which quieted whole blocs of academe indefinitely.
    Tøssentern knew, of course, that from a biological point of view the outstanding problem to address was the claim of heritability. Recent decades had brought to pre-eminence the molecular genetic basis of life, and the idea that a dream synthesized from experience in the parent could be passed to offspring was stigmatized by discredited theories of acquired-trait inheritance. Tøssentern argued, however, that although the nucleotide sequence was clearly necessary for inheritance in complex organisms, it had not been proved sufficient, and to suppose otherwise was conceptually restrictive (and, he thought, an act of hubris). Indeed, it could not be so proved until the mechanism of every potentially heritable feature, including,