Anathem

By Neal Stephenson

 

This book was recommended by my son Tj.  His recommendation came with a general commentary that within it comes a moral code that he can identify with.  It is a classic sci-phi involving the cosmos and numerous civilizations, where one alien civilization is in search of a natural resource, lost on their own planet, but found on a new planet.  Hence the over arching dilemma of the rule of scarcity prevails.  The setting of the story takes place on what would be presumed as future Earth, Stephenson eventually gives it a different name Arbre.  Laced through the book are definitions of words inclusive of an epistemology that the reader must learn.  These definitions build on each other in order to construct Stephenson's moral code that has no bias to our history.    However the effort is thinly veiled rendering the effort as obviously taking his own stand on philosophy.  Which is oneness of societies.  None the less the reader should be ware to learn the definitions as you go in order to get the most entertainment value and philosophical moral message being conveyed by Neil Stephenson.   It would not be a sci-fi without a moral message involving multiple civilizations.

In one sentence: this book is about consciousness and cognition at brain, social and cosmos level rendering our thoughts with semantic content over and above the ones and the zeros, the black and the white that seem to define our thinking at theoric level

This book is a tale of two philosophies coming together to save themselves from destruction.  One magisterium is the Saecular Power.  The other is the Mathic World – in joining hands for sake of survival, thee two are well - running the world?  In shaping this dichotomy there is a theme of multiple upheavals in the history of man, that would amalgamate a set of rules for which peoples of certain Praxes and Concents (Stephenson defined terms) would abide by.  Generational learning that is somewhat parallel to tradition, only with a mathematical line of reasoning. Stephenson layers the civilizations first on earth and then about two thirds of the way through the book he adds a new dimension; aliens from the cosmos.  The prime characters hale from what is defined as a math.  Maths take on every characteristic of a monastery, turning the common dichotomy of religion and science upside down  whereby the main characters adopt the look and feel of a monk. The catch is monasteries and these monks in particular are science oriented with everything being mathematically explained.  This explains my son who holds a Masters In Quantative Analysis, and a love for the book.  While Math Monks live a reclusive life, seeing the outside world once every ten years, these main characters are expelled, or really sent out on a mission to save their world.  The reader has to read 250 pages of life in a monastery to get to the next layer of intrigue, which is how well they survive in the outside world with common civilization as their allies and at times secular foes.

Si-Fi’s usually have a quest so Stephenson uses a quest over the north pole to shape the alliance of Maths, and common folks. And then the plot turns on a dime with the smashing of giant rod into the earth, killing who up to then was the key protagonist and mentor to all those of the math.  Orolo like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings is vanquished; meanwhile his ‘math (philosophy)’ lives on in the minds of the ‘math monks’.  Now they in alliance with Arbre’s outside civilization, the mystery of Orlo’s movements and mission becomes real clear to the reader.  Arbre  has been invaded by an alien spaceship hovering above.  The key word in the story is hovering and not orbiting, as that point gives the Arbrelings a strategic advantage that makes no logical sense to a reader who does not appreciate the finer points of the time & space part of earth science. A puzzle within a puzzle.  That person puzzles over this fun fact only after finishing the last 300 pages of the book.  The law of physics and time spins around objects in motion. 

So the strategy to foil the alien ship’s attack on Arbre involves objects in motion, and the concept of space time.  It would be rude of me to go in to detail but suffice it to say that there is an incident that occurs in the planet saving mission that at the closing of the book, has the reader searching back to those critical pages for an explanation.  Entwined with this explanation, is the thread of Stephenson’s philosophy and moral message.  Alter realities are a theme of this book and in fact the alter reality or parallel plane exists through Jad in the end, where he lives and is a hero but in reality he dies.  It involves time, space, and Oneness of the Universe and a Hylean Flow of consciousness through a Wick that transcends cosmi.  All are intriguing subjects to me.

Consciousness:  “All it needs to do is to perceive – to reflect- the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.”   This is the theme of my book of poems.   And a quote from a recently read book, How Yoga Works:  “all things are themselves by themselves” for you to awaken to. Oddly and still coincidentally here again vouches the phrase.   Seek and ye shall find” … in everyplace you look …even if coincidentally.

My favorite metaphor:  I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I’m almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension.  I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore.  But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves.  Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it.  But then, before I can form any form impression of what it is I’m seeing, I sink back down of my own weight, and get slapped in the face by another wave.

Bibliography: I have many comments for which the bibliography note in conjunctions may invite you to respond

Page 40:  [metaphor] was like an ant of the wrong color

Page 52:  [time] He hadn’t seemed to have heard me.  “If there were another universe, altogether separate from outs- no causal linkages whatsoever between Universe A and B – would time flow at the same rate between them? 

“Well it depends on how you measure time”

“it depends on what time is! I’d said.  I had spent a few minutes going up various avenues of explanation, only to find each of them a dead end.”

“Well,” I’d said finally, “I guess I have to invoke the Steelyard.  In the absence of a good argument to the contrary, I have to choose the simplest answer.  And the simplest answer is that time runs independently in Universe A and Universe B.”

“Because they are separate causal domains.”

Orolo said” What if these two universes –each big and old and as complicated as ours –were entirely separate, except for a single photon that managed to travel somehow between them.  Would that be enough to wrench A’s time and B’s time into a perfect lockstep for all of eternity?”

My comment:  This hypothesis places each individual as the causal factor of time.

Page 53:  [time}“What if you found a way to sever links to the world extramuros?”

“That is utterly ridiculous.  You are giving Incanter like powers to these people.”

“But if one could do it, then one’s math would become a separate universe and its time would no longer be synchronized with the rest of the world’s.  Causal Domain Shear would become possible.

Page 57:  [metaphor]  like sparrows from a belfry

Page 88:  Orolo’s yarn about a math that floated freely in time, surfing on cocurrents of Causal Domain Shear, had really stirred my emotions, and so a few moments I let my imagination run away

Page 101:  [metaphor]  fact had been released, like a bubble of swamp gas deep in dark water.

Page 111:  [philosophy] I was claiming I saw a meaning in it.  But this meaning had no reality, outside my mind.

Returning to the Periklyne he had proclaimed his doctrine that all things we thought we knew were shadows of more perfect things in a higher world.

This had become the essential doctrine of Protism.  If Protas could be respected for saying so, then what was wrong with me thinking that our Mynster, and this machine hall were both shadows of some higher thing that existed elsewhere – a sacred of which were both shadows, and that cast other shadows in such places as Bazian arks and groves of ancient trees?”

Page 116:  [metaphor] I had feared that she and Cord were going to fall upon each other like two cats in a pillowcase.

Page 123:  We don’t think the ITA are dirty in a sense of not washing.  But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.

Page 126:  At the Convoxes following the first and Second Sacks, “ I said.  “You see, even after the end of the Praxis Age, the concents obtained a huge amount of power by coupling processors that had been invented by their syntactic facilities to other kinds of tools – in one case, for making new matter, and for another for manipulating sequences.  This reminded people of the Terrible Events and led to the First and Second Sacs.  Our rules concerning ITA, and which praxes we can and cant use, date from those times.

Page 129:  “Literally two thousand years ago, a Saunt put forth the idea tha- “ “ That every idea the human mind could come up with, had already been come up with by that time.  It is a very influential idea…”

Page 135:  Shortly before Rebirth, several maths took the unusual step of altering the Discipline to sanction the Perelithian liaison..

Page 137:  “Nothing is more important than that you see and love beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

Page 139:  “Beauty pierces through like that ray through the clouds, “Orolo continued.  “Your eye is drawn to where it touches something that is capable of reflecting it  But your mind knows that the light does not originate from the mountains and the towers.  Your mind knows that something is shining in from another world.  Don’t listen to those who say its in the eye of the beholder.”

Page 139: [metaphor]  like a butler counting his spoons

Page 151:  Cnous drew the conclusion that it was a mistake to worship physical idols such as the one he had been building, for those were only crude effiges of actual gods that lived in another realm, and we ought to woership those gods themselves, no artifacts we made with our own hands.

“ Hylaea said that Cnous had actually been having an upsight about geometry.  What her sister Deat had misinterpreted as a pyramid in heaven was actually a glimpse of an isosceles  triangle: not a crude and inaccurate representation of one such as Conus drew on his tablet with a ruler and a compass, but pure theorical object of which one could make absolute statements.  The triangles that we drew and measured here in the physical world were all merely more or less faithful representations of perfect triangles that existed in this higher world.  We must stop confusing one with the other, and lend our minds to the study of pure geometrical objects.

Comment:  Whether words, symbols, architectural expressions of nature or cosmos or thought: the true expression of higher self/god is through nature itself.

Page 170:  The only shard that lodged in my memory was his concluding line”  “If this all seems ambiguous, that’s because it is; and if that troubles you, you’d hate it here but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.

Page 173:  “But the answer is well… geometry.  It’s pure.  It doesn’t matter what you are applying it to.”

And it turns out that the same is true for other kinds of theorics besides geometry,” I said.  “Your can prove something.  Later the same thing might be proved in a totally different way; but you always end up with the same answer.

These truths seem to come out of another world or plane of existence.  It’s hard not to believe that this other world really exists in some sense – not just in our imaginations!  And we would like to go there.

Page 173:  I just flashed on how weird the whole thing was – two of us both relating to this image – this model – of another person’s body that was in his and in my mind, but – Also seemingly in a third place,” I suggested, “a shared place

Pages 206,207, 208:  No nuance of sun, soil, or wind was too subtle for the library grape to take into account.  Nothing that the cultivator did, or failed to do, went in detected or failed to have its consequences in the flavor of the juice…The stuff was tremendous, like drinking your favorite book.

Page 228:  to go Hundres (Derogatory slang)  To lose one’s mind, to become mentally unxound, to stray irredeemably from the path of theoriescs.  The expression can be traced to the Third Centennial Apert, when the gates of several Hundreder maths opened to reveal startling outcomes, eg: at Saunt Rambalf’s a mass suicide that had taken place only moments earlier. …These and other mishaps prompted the creation of te Inquisition and the institution of hierarchs in their modern forms, including Wardens Regulant with power to inspect and impose disciplines in all maths.  THE DICTIONARY, the edition  A. R. 3000.

Page 233:  “once you open the door to these hypotheticals that don’t have to make internal sense, you quickly find yourself looking at arrange of possibilities that might as well be infinitely numerous,” Jesry said>  “So the mind rejects them as being equally invalid, and doesn’t worry about them.” 

So it is an intrinsic feature of human consciousness – this filtering ability.”

My comment:  Godel, Escher, Bach; recursive analysis.  How deep do you have to think to come up with the same outcome?  Which in this instance, is ironic because the author takes many subjects to their depths and is exactly why the book is worth reading.

Page 234:  “There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next.  If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without restrain.  It becomes pretty meaningless

My comment:  What the author is saying is that you are a  part of nature, but nature prevails over the propensity for  random creations of reality.

Page 235:  “but I think you have a Steelyard problem,  Bringing in Hemn space and action principles seems like unnecessarily heavyweight way of explaining the fact that the mind has an instinctive nose for which outcomes are plausible enough to worry about.”

My comment:  Mystics –v- Science.  Ironically theorics is a discipline of science.

Page 236:  [metaphor] And I don’t mean that in a bug under a microscope way

Page 237:  That’s right people have to feel that they are a part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them.  It creates the feeling of stability.

My comment:  Here is an argument for mystics, if feeling (intuition) has no place in science.

Page 259: [metaphor] being worried about these things was a little bit like attempting to see distant stars against the daytime sky.

Page 261: [metaphor] did create a negative association in one’s mind that bobbed to the surface at awkward moments

Page 272:  “Did Orolo have an answer?”

“It think he did, I said., he was trying to explain it to me at Apert.  Look for things that have beauty – it tells you that a ray is shining in from –well-“

“A true place?  The Hylean Theoric World

Page 307:  Anyway there was something about her physical form that matched her soul

Page 314:  But as time went by, and I thought about it harder, the real nature of the thing became clear:  I had made a mess inside someone else’s soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me.  Now it was closed.

Page 371:  Still if a group of religious fanatics had wanted to abduct a few carloads of avout, they couldn’t have done a slicker job of it.  That’s why I snapped awake when I heard Freman Bell mention God

Until now He’s avoided it, which I could no to understand.  If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?  Instead of which Deolaters like Beller would go on for hours without bringing God into the conversation at all.  Maybe his God was remote from our doings. Or more likely the presence of God was so obvious to hem that he felt no more need to speak of it than I do to point out all the time, that I was breathing air.

Frustration was in Beller’s voice.  Not angry or bitter.  This was the gentle, genial frustration of an uncle who can’t get something through a nephew’s head.  We seemed so smart.  Why didn’t we believe in God?

Page 372:  We’re observing the Sonic Discipline,” Arisbalt told him – happy and a bit relieved, to’ve been given an opportunity to clear it up…..”It’s not the same thing as believing in God.  Though – hastily adds – I can see why it looks that way to one who’s never been exposed to Sonic thought.”

My comment: This is where Stephenson brings science and religion together. Separate disciplines thou the same pursuits of happiness and reality.

Page 373:  so Lady Baritoe was the only constant, She wrote books, bu, was careful to say, the ideas in them can’t be attributed to any one person.  Someone dubbed it Sonic thought and the name stuck.

My comment:  Sonic thought, Holy Spirit, collective thought; call it what you want.  It is the energy of thought transcending through many media, paper, radio, sound, sight, intuition etc… it is all One atom of energy.

Page 375:  Well, that ‘more’ is by definition outside of space of time.  And the Sconics demonstrated that we simply cannot think in a useful was about anything that, in principle can’t be experienced through our senses.  And I can already see from the look on your face that you don’t agree.”

I don’t Beller affirmed.

But that’s beside the point.  The point is that, after Sonics, the kinds of people who did theorics ane metatheorics stopped talking about God and certain other topics such as free will and what existed before the universe.  And that is what I mean by Sonic Discipline.  By the time of the Reconstitution it had become ingrained.  It was incorporated into our Discipline without much discussion, or even conscious awareness.”

“well, but with all the free time you’ve got – sitting in your concents – couldn’t someone be troubled in four thousand years to be aware of it?  To discuss it?

“we have less free time than you can imagine,”  Arisbalt said gently, “nit nevertheless, many people have devoted much thought to the matter, and founded Orders devoted to denying God, or believing in Him and  currents have surged back and forth in and among the maths.  But none of it seems to have moved us away from the basic position of the Sonics.”

“Do you believe in God?  Beller asked flat out.”

I leaned forward, fascinated.

“I have been reading a lot, lately,about things that are non-spatiotemporal – yet believed to exist.”  But this I knew he meant mathematical objects in the Hylean Theoric World.

Doesn’t that go against the Sconic Discipline?”  Beller asked.

“yes”  Arisbalt said.  “ but that is perfectly alright, as long as one isin’t going about it in a naive way as if Lady Baritoe had never written a word.  A common complaint made about the Sonics is that they don’t know much about pure theorics.  Many theoricians, looking at Baritoes’s works say wait a minute, there is something missing here – we can relate directly to non-spatiotemporal objects when we prove theorems and so on, ‘The stuff I’ve been reading lately is all about that.”

“So you can see God by doing theorics?”

“Not God,” Arisbalt said, “not a God that any ark would recognize.”

My Comment:  once again, in story, Stephenson makes my argument.  God is a metaphor.  It is a word symbol.  Take that away, and the disciplines can hold hands.  In fact in the rest of the book Arisbalt and Beller get along. 

This notion that religion is the cause of angst between men is no less valid than theoric science can cause angst among men.  But to a different point, mine, The fundamental difference I read in Stephenson’s story is religion institutes free will and theorics does not.  To correct Stephenson’s position I would suggest that only Christ’s teachings preach free will.  The church, temples, and mosques do not.

Page 388:  In spite of all my prejudices against extramurous culture, I kept being surprised by moments of beauty in these songs.

Page 394  “you think these people are like us. That they will be sympathetic to our point of view as followers of Our Mother Hylaea,” He said, trying these phrases on me for size.

Page 397:  We always opened our meals by invoking the memory of Saunt Cartus.  The gist of it was that our minds might be nourished by all matter of ideas originating from thinkers dataing all the way back to Cnous, but for the physical nourishment our bodies relied upon one another, joined in the Discipline that we owed to Cartas..

My comment:  This says a lot towards the ever expanded now as well ast the interconnectedness we all have with one another.

Page 397:  The four monks seemed to enjoy this very much, and when we’d finished they stood up and did an equally ancient sounding prayer.  It must have dated back to the early centuries of their monastic age, just after the Fall of Baz, because their Old Orth was indistinguishable from ours, and it had obviously been composed in a time before the music of the maths and the monasteries had diverged.  If you didn’t listen too carefully, you could easily mistake this piece for one of ours.

Page 401:  “Okay”, now some of the traps are suspended from strings.  The worms can’t reach them or feel their vibrations,”

Too bad for the worms! Beller said.

“The flies can’t see anything at night.”

“Poor flies.”

“Some parts of the cavern are so noisy that the bats can’t hear a thing.”

“Well it sounds as though the flies, the bats, and the worms had better learn to communicate with one another.”  Beller said.

How?  This was the sound of Arisbalt’s trap closing on his leg.

“Uh, by communicating I guess.”

Oh.  And what exactly does the worm say to the bat?”

What does this have to do with the Cousins”  Beller asked.

“It has everything to do with them!”

“you think that the Cousins are hybrid fly-bat-worm creatures?”

“No”, Arisbalt said “I think we are.”

“AAARRRGH” Beller cried, to laughter from everyone.

Page 404:  “Or brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage.  These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time.  Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language geometry.  That’s what a brain is.  That’s’ what it is to become conscious.

Page 408: [metephore] a requiem for the stars that were being swallowed up in the dawn

Page 408: When you spend three houts singing the same note, something happens to your brain.  And that goes double when you have fallen into an oscillatory lockstep with others around you.

And if I were a craggy old Thousander – not a nintteen-year-old Teener – I might just have the confidence to assert that when your brain is in that state it can think things it could never think otherwise.

:Pag3 413:  “This cosmos, or causal domain represents a flow of information.”  Cause-and-effect relationship, was my guess recalling Orolo’s talk of Domain Shear.”  “Those two mean the same thing.”

Page 415: always moving in the same direction, as oil moves through a wick

Page 432: The night before, at the Basian monestary, I head accommodated certain new, odd facts in my mind just by sleeping.  A similar trick might work for me now:  by doing something completely different for a few days, I might chance upon a better understanding than I could get by kneeling in a cell and concentrating on it, or having a wordy discussion in a chalk hall.

Page 437:  Now that had changes, and instead of thinking of myself as a member of the Provener team, or of the Decenarian math, or the Edharian order, I felt like a citizen of the world and was proud to be doing my little bit to protect it.  I was comfortable with being a feral.

Page 440:  [metaphor]I was like an ape in a tree, looking at whatever moved fastest in my environment.

Page 458:  So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like.  Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organization where people  were interchangeable parts.  All of the story had been bled out of their lives.  That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy.  But it would be easy to see a will at work behind  this; not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will.

My comment:  Just stop a minute and think about this one.  Our 21^st century is not that far away  from this accusation on society.  Where is the selfishness?   Stephenson makes it sound bleak.  But is it?  Or is this simply an order, a divine order promulgated by the individuals marching in their places.

Page 480: “yes sort of a prophet, according to them who found a proof of the existence of God and was Thrown Back because of it.”

“That’s funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we’d just tell him ‘Nice proof’, Fraa Bly’ and start believing in God, I said.

My comment:  So here Stephenson throws out the challenge.  If Religion threw out a proof that God existed, what would Since do.  Refute it outright?  Or counter it?

Page 514:  In any soul, the Condemned Man argued, was the ability to create a whole world, as big and variegated as the one that he and the Magistrate lived in.  But if this was true of the Innocent, it was true of the Condemned Man as well, and so he should not – no one should ever – be put to death.

Page 515:  If that-if our-world seemed, on balance, like a decent place to him, he would let the Condemned Man live and our world would go on existing in his mind.  If the world as a whole, only reflected the Condemned Man’s depravity, The Magistrate would have him executed and our world would cease to exist.  We could help keep the Condemned Man alive and thus preserve the existence of ourselves and our world by striving at all times to make it a better place.

Page 516:  Second, the Inspiration that had passed from the Innocent to the Condemned Man at the moment of her death was viral.  It passed from him into each of us.  Each of us had rte same power to create whole worlds.  The hope was that one day there would be a Chosen One who would create a world that was perfect.  If that ever happened, not only he and his world but all of the other worlds and their creators, back to the Condemned Man, would be saved recursively.

My comment:  The religion comments move into the true meaning of  our oneness that transcends  from man to man, over many generations.  There is no time in the solution.

Page 540:  Even as I was saying this, an old rattletrap coach was pulling off the road.  At its controls was Magister Sark.  It was one of those freakish coincidences that made some people believe in spirits and Psychic phenomena.  I explained it away by supposing that my unconscious mind had seen the coach out of the corner of my eye a few moments before I’d consciously recognized him.

My comment:  Right

Page 541:  Wast there really that much of a difference between the Lelex notion of having one’s story related to the Magistrate, and the Valor’s concept of emergence?  The seemed to produce very similar behavior; I owed my life to the fact that Sark and Osa and been of one mind.

My comment: the beginning of Stephenson’s suggestion that while different maths, or any other point of reliogo-phylso point of reference on this planet, in the cosmos of alter worlds we are all one energy.

Page 544: {mete[hor]  like warer that wants to find the ocean

Page 558:  the looked like jery on the hoof

Page 558: {metaphor]  made it glow like flesh in candlelight.

Page 563:  “ We’re speaking, remember, of Aboutness.  You and I can think about things.  Symbols in our brains have meaning.  The questions is, can a syntactic device think about things, or merely process digits that have no Aboutness – no meaning=.”

Page 564:  Reconstitution, Fann was the FAE of Syntactic Faculty – followers of Proc.  She took the view that Aboutness duidn’t exist – was an illusion that any sufficiently advanced stndev creates for itself.  By this time Evenedric was already dead but he like Halikaarn before him had taken the view that our minds could do things the syndevs couldn’t – that Aboutness was real-“

That our thoughts really did have semantic content over and above the ones and the zeros.”

Page 564:  “If it lacks Aboutness, it is incredibly vulnerable, so yes”  Sammann said.  “But systems with true Aboutness, or so  the myth goes, should be much more difficult to deceive.”

Page 577:  The ancient Prithenans suspected, but didn’t know how to prove, that the tiles of the Teglon would have been easy – it would have been automatic – with square or triangular tiles, or any tiles system that was periodic.  With aperiodic tiles, it was impossible, or at least very unlikely, umless you had some Godlike ability to see the whole pattern in your head at once.  Metekoranes had believed that the final pattern existed in the Hylaean Theoric World, and that Teglon could only be solved by one who had developed the power of seeing into it.

My comment:  Jad is the one which enables him to die on the way to the spaceship and at the same time be on the spaceship in the end.  But this is my unfounded theory at this point.

Page 579:  Ah, but that’s no what the fly-bat-worm says.” Said Orolo.  “it says that only pure thought alone doesn’t enable us to draw any conclusions one way or another about things that are non-spatiotemporal – such as God.

the same observations that the Sonics made about themselves must also be true of alien;s brains. No matter how different they might be from us in other respects, they must integrate sensory givens into a coherent model of what is around them – a model must be hung on a spatiotemoral frame.  And that in a nutshell, is how they come to share our ideas about geometry.

My comment:  I interpret this to mean that internal thought, not connected to those around you – the universe is not the path to God.  That path is the inevitable collision course of the energy that carries thought.

Page 580:  [metephor]  kicking away all the ankle-biters sent after him

Page 580:  {metaphor]  you fear that I am navel gazing

Page 592  [metaphor]  I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I’m almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension.  I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore.  But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves.  Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it.  But then, before I can form any form impression of what it is I’m seeing, I sink back down of own weight, and get slapped in the face by another wave.

Page 594:  I agree that thinking often feels that way, “Isaid.  “You have a jumble of vague notions in your mind.  Suddenly, bang!  It all collapses into one clear answer that you know is right.  But every time something suddenly, you can’t simply chalk it up to quantum effects.”

My comment:  Here you see that Stephenson, does not yet draw any conclusion on the argument of rationale thought and intuition..  But once again he provides a glimpse that perhaps dejavous events can be explained away by glimpses of the answer that finally presents itself.

Page 597:  “Yes, Now, in the polycosmic interpretation of how quantum theories works, what does all of this look like?”

“There is no longer superposition.  No wave function collapse.  Just a lot of different copies of me – of my brain- each really existing in a different parallel cosmos.  The Cosmos model residing in each of those brains is really, definitely in one state or another.  And they interface with one another.”

“You don’t even need a model any more”

“It’s so much simpler this way”

“My brain doesn’t have to support this hugely detailed, accurate, configurable, quantum-superposition-supporting model of the cosmos any more!  All it needs to do is to perceive – to reflect- the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.

“The variations – the myriad possible alternative scenarios – have been moved out of your brain,” Orolo said, rapping on his skull with his knuckles,  “and out into the polycosim, which is where they all exist anyway!  He opened his hand and extended it to the sky, As if releasing a bird.  “All you have to do is perceive them.”

My comment:  YEAS!!!  Knowing is only a matter of perceiving what already is..  Awaken to it through meditation ….and then learning a synonymous word for perceiving.

Page 625:  And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all. 

My comment:  I believe if I proposed this to a mathematician, he would look at me as thought I had a third eye.  Yet in reality this phenomena seems to be common place.  Why is that? …Perspective and the processing of the same observation.  But then When I get to the end of the book the author writes two alternative events at the same time.  In the story line Jad survives to meet with Erasmus in front of the alien leaders.  But in the re-cap at the end Jad dies en-route to the alien ship.

Page 637:  “Electronic behavior is basically synonymous with chemistry, “ Jesery put in.  “That’s why newmatter was invented:  because monkeying around with nucleosymthisis gave new elements and new chemistry to play around with.”

Page 638:  “And the functioning of living organisms is founded on chemistry.”

Page 664:  The givens that you and I are taking in all the time, simply by virtue of being conscious, and that we can observe and think about on our own, without any need for scientific instrument.”

Fraa Lodoghir blinked in fake amazement. “Do you mean to claim the the subject of your dialogue was consciousness?

Page 666:  “As to your first point.: I continued, “namely that we still don’t understand ourselves after six thousand years of introspection, I believe that Orolo was of the view that we might be able to settle some of those ancient questions now that we have access to conscious beings from other star systems.”

Page 682:  I shall play my role, and say this: we have nothing in common with the Geometers.  No shared experiences, no common culture. Until that changes, we can’t communicate with them.  Why not?  Because language is nothing more that a stream of symbols that are perfectly meaningless until we associate them, in our minds, with meaning: a process acculturation.”

Page 683:  the philosophy of Saunt Proc: put simply, that language, communication, indeed thought itself, are the manipulation of symbols to which meanings are assigned by culture- and only culture.

“Plurality of Worlds means a plurality of world cultures – cultures hermetically sealed off from one another until now – hence, for the time being, unable to communicate.”

My comment:  I believe he is speaking of the role of an archaeologist.  Therefore it is possible and perhaps in this futuristic setting it is possible in a matter of seconds.  But the real deal in this excerpt is his definition of meaning.  Acculturation in the dictionary means assimilation of cultures.  So does the author suggest that there is no meaning to anything until two disparate bodies agree on the same observation? Back to the archeologist; he looks at symbols along side many artifacts and constructs an interpretation of the symbols.  Interpretation is thus meaning.  Yet there is no one from the past to agree with the archeologist.  Does the fact that we a different people in a different time and culture find meaning?  And then is it possible that we are in conflict with the people of the past.  And then suppose we could time travel and meet up with this civilization would we clash?  Would there be Acculturation, only when the dominant civilization forces assimilation of the weaker civilization.  Is that how meaning is constructed?  If you read Dr. Jarad Dimond’ book Guns Germs and Steel you would agree. 

Page 683:  “ The purpose of this messal, accordingly, is to develop and, I would hope, implement a strategy for Saeular Power, assisted by the avout, to break down the plurality – which is the same thing as developing a shared language.  We shall put ourselves out of business by making the Plurality of Worlds into One World.

My comment:  And then if religion (Secular Power)  cannot agree on a common language for fear of ‘going out of business’ how can we meat John Lennon’s Imagination of living all as one.  This is the essence of my book, Love is a Blooming Rose.

Page 687:  Except for Jad.  “The words fail.  There is one universe, by the definition of universe.  It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes – that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through Hemm space shared by many other Narratives besides ours.  Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it.  The Geometers came from other Narratives – until they came here and joined ours.”

Page 688:  And te vast stok of knowledge that she, as a Lorite, carried around in her head made he good at explaining things; she could always reach back to a useful analogy or clear line of argument that some fraaa or surr had written down in a distant past.

Page 689:  “ The point I was getting at wa that you can string the lergitimate points – ones visited by our world track, but that makes sense – inot other world tracks that make as much sense as ours,”  “But they’re not real,  Emman said.  Or are they?” 

I balked.

Arisbalt said, “ That is rather a profound question of metatheorics.  All of te points in Hemm space are equally real – since they are nothing more than lists of numbers.  So what is it that imbues on set of those points – one worldtrack – with one that we call realness?”

Page 690:  “Use of Narrative is somewhat – well – loaded.”…”what do they mean by it” …”and is it associated by lineage, in some peoples minds, with Lineage.”…what is the link you see between the f of different kinds of matter, and the worldtracks?

Page 703:  “are you saying that there would be one-to –one correspondence between our Saunts  an theirs?  Like the same mind shared across multiple worlds?

Page 704:  “How might the knowlwdge propagate from a common Theoric World – I won’t call it Haylean, since presumably there was no person named Hylaea on Quator – to minds of different Saunts in different worlds?  And is this still going on at this moment – between us, and them?”

Page 705:  The configuration of the cosmos encoded in that point, I said, “includes – along with all the stars and planets, the birds and te bees, the books and speelies and everything else – one star that happens to have a big chunck of ice in the middle of it.  That point, remember, is just a long string of numbers – coordinates in space.  No more or less real than any other possible string of numbers.”

“its realness – or unrealness in this case – has to grow out of some other consideration.”

Page 706:  See, It’s not just about what is possible- since anything is possiblein Hemn space- but what is copossible, meaning all other things that would have to be true in that universe, to have a block of ice in a star.”

Page 707:  “but it’s a way of answering the question ‘what other things would have to be true about a cosmos that included a block of ice in a star? 

So those numbers and recordings, you’re saying, are themselves parts of the configuration encode by that point in Hemn Space

“yes.  When you go all praxic on me and dream up the ice missile delivery system, what you’re really doing is figuring out what Narratives would create the set of conditions – the traces left behind in the cpsmos by the execution of that project – that is compossible with ice in a star.”

Page 708:  That’s what a world track is – a sequence of Hemn space points strubg together just so, to make it look like the laws of nature are preserved.”

My comment:  The key and operative words in this statement are ‘look look’; in other words perspective.  The narrative construct of realness.  One could through layers upon layers of recursive thought, or close your eyes and simply accept what is.  If you did one over the other, would the meaning be the same?

Page 718:  there is a Hylaen Theoric World, that is populated by mathematical entities – coons, as we call them – that are non spatial and non temporal in nature, and that our minds have some capacity off accessing them.

The discussion so that it can’t be touched by rational.  I can’t prove you’re wrong any more than I can prove the non-existence of God!

Page 720:  Over the speaker, Paphlagon was saying: “the Adrakhonic Theorem is true here.  It’s apparently true in the four cosmic the Geometers came from.  If their ship had turned up in some other cosmos, the same as ours, but devoid of sentient beings, would it be true there?

“Not until the Geometers arrived to say it was true,” said Lodohir

…”the more I hear of this, the less I understand your position, Praa Lodighir.  Three is a prime number. It is prime today, was prime yesterday.  A billion years ago, before there were brains to think about it, it was prime.  And if all the brains were destroyed tomorrow, it would still be prime.  Clearly its primeness has nothing to do with our brains.”

“It has everything to do with our brains, Lodoghir insisted, “because we supply the definition of what it is to be a prime number!

“No theor who attends to these matters can long escape the conclusion that the coons exict independently of what may or may not be going on in peoples’ brains at any given moment”’ Paphlagon said.  “It is as simple application of te Steelyard.  What is the simplest way of explaining the fact that theors working independently in different eras prove the same results – results that do not contradict each other, even though reached by different proof- chains-results, same of which can be turned into theories that perfectly describe the behavior of physical universe?  The simplest answer is that coons really exist, and are not of this causal domain.”

Page 721:  “A fully generalized Directed Acyclic Graph, with no distinction made any more between, on the one hand, so called theoric worlds, and, on the other hand, inhabited ones such as Arbre, Quator, and the rest.  For the first time, we have arrows leading away from Arbran Causal Domain towards other inhabited worlds.”

“Do you mean to suggest,” Lodghir asked, as though not quite believing his ears, “that Arbre might be the Hylaen Theoric World of some other world that has people living on it?”

Page 733:  “Turns out that once you get an organization started, it takes on a life- lives by a logic – of its own

Page 746:  ”This percolation you speak of:  until now, I fancied it was all thoers seeing timeless truths about isosceles triangles, “  Lodoghir said.  “ I oughtn’t to be the ever-exca;ating grandiosity of these claims, but aren’t you now asking us to believe something even more colossal?  Correct me if I’m wrong: but did you just try to link percolation of information through the Wick to biological evolution?”

An akward pause.

“You believe in evolution, don’t you?” Lodoghir continued.

“yes, though it might have sounded strange to someone like Protas, who had frankly mystical pagan views about HTW and so on,” said Paphlagon, “but any modern version or Protism must be reconcilable with long-established theories, not only of cosmpgraphy, but of evolution.  However I disagree with the polemical part of your statement Fraaa Lodoghir.

I am only claiming what is reasonable.  That – as yourself pointed out during your Plenary with Fraa Erasmas – tends to be the smallest, in the sense of least complicated, claim.  What I claim is that information moves through the Wick in a manner that is somehow analogous to how it moves from past to present.  As it moves, one of the things that it does is to excite physicall measurable changes in nerve tissue…

Page 748:  “We agree on something!” said Lodoghir.

“ A much more economical claim, in Gardan’s Steelyard sense, is that the mechanism – whatever it is- acts on any matter whether or not that matter is part of a living organism – or a theor!  It’s just that there is an observational bias at work.”

“Yes, Papllagon said, “and just as cosmographers can only see stars in a dark sky, we can only observe the Hylean Flow when it manifests itself as perceptions of coons in our conscious minds.  Like starlight at moon, it is always present, always working, but only noticed and identified as something remarkable in the context of pure theorics.”

Page 750 [metaphor] like seaweed killing a swimmer

Page 751:  …we are going to have to toil in the laboratory of consciousness, which is the only setting we know of where effects of the Hylean Flow are observable.”…:Though instead of one single HTW we should now speak of the Wick instead: the Flow percolates through a complex network of cosmic ‘more theoric than’ or ‘prior to’ ours.”

Page 752  And that was how I came to spend the entire course recounting my two Ecba dialogs with Orolo:  the first about how, according to him, consciousness was all about the rapid and fluent creation of counterfactual worlds inside the brain, and second in which he argued that this was not merely possible, not merely plausible, but in fact easy, if one thought of consciousness as spanning an ensemble of slightly different versions of the brain, each keeping track of a slightly different cosmos.  Paphlagon ended up saying it better:  “ If Hems Space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness  is a spot of light moving, like a search-beam, over that landscape- and brightly illuminating a set of points – of cosmic- that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges.  In the bright center of te beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain.  Fewer contributions come in from the half-lit periphery, and none from the shadows beyond.

Page 755:  “I should tell you first that he wa knowledgeable about theorics.  He knew the laws of theorics were time-reversible, and that the only way to determine the direction of time’s arrow was to measure the amount of disorder in the system.  The cosmos seems oblivious to time.  It only matters to us.  Consciousness is time constituting.  We build up time out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment.  Then they recede into the past.  What is this thing we call the past?  It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue – records that tell a consistent story.”

Page 756:  “ I understand Atamant’s point, Lodoghir said, “ but making such a move does he not exile himself from rational theoric discourse?  This power of consciousness takes on a sort of mystical status – it can’t be challenged or examined,  it just is.

But the nub of it is this:  Consciousness is enacted in the physical world, on physical equipment-“

“Equipment?  Igentha Floral asked sharply.

“Nerve tissue, or perhaps some artificial device of similar powers.  The point being that it has what Ita would call hardware  …  The full cosmos of the physical stuff and consciousness.  Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Page 757:  Lodoghir said’ “ Please explain something to me.  I was under the impression that the kind of crosstalk you are speaking of could only occur between two cosmic that were exactly the same for a difference in the quantum state of one particle.”

Page 758:  Fraa Jad threw his napkin on the table and said:  “ Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between tree, web Narratives together.  Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.”

…If you don’t agree with the polycosmic interpretation, you must find some other explanation for those effects.  But if you agree with it, then, to make it compatible with what we have long known about quantum mechanics, you must buy into the premise that cosmic interfere with each other when their world tracks are close together.  If you restrict yourself to one particular cosmos, this cross talk may be interpreted as a signal – a rather weak one, since it only concerns a few particles.  If those particles are in an asteroid out in the middle of nowhere, it hardly matters. But when those particles happen to be at a certain critical locations, in the brain, why, then, the signals can end up altering the behavior of the organism that is animated by that brain.  The organism, all by itself, is vastly larger than anything that could normally be influenced by quantum interference.  When on considers societies of such organisms that endure across long spans of time and in some cases develop world-altering technologies, one sees the meaning of Fraa Jad’s assertion that consciousness amplifies the weak signals that web the cosmic together

Consciousness is spatiotemporial in nature

Page 760:  They [our brains] are not merely crystal radios!  They compute.  The cognate. The outcomes of those cognitions can my no means be easily predicted from their inputs.  And those outcomes are the conscious thoughts that we have, the decisions we put in to effect, our social interactions with other conscious beings, and behavior of societies down through the ages.”

Page 761:  “But recall that the signals in question only pass between cosmic whose world tracks are close together. There is your feedback! Crosstalk steers world tracks of consciousness bearing cosmic; world tracks that steer close together exchange more crosstalk.”

Page 791:  The loaf had been made by braiding several ropes of dough together in a non-trivial pattern that, I feared, had a deep knot-theoretical significance and was named after some Elkhazgain Saunt.

Page 794:  Plurality of Worls Messal about the Wick and the idea that Arbre might be the HTW of other worlds, such as Urnud.  … “you’re saying that’s like what it might have been like to the Urndon theors on that ship,” I said, when the received – I don’t know- emanations, hints, signals, percolating down the Wick from Arbre.”

Page 807: philosophical musings with which I’d whiles away the time: that Orolo’s death, and Lise’s, had prepared me to accept my own.  That it was good I’d sent that message to Ala.  That even if I died in this cosmos I might go on living in another.

Page 830:  [metaphor] My brain had become like an old sponge that has sopped up more water than it can hold.

Page 831:  [metaphor] But now all I could see was the back side of a crinkley blanket, as if I were poultry in a roasting pan.

Page 851:  We’ve become like Fraa Orolo’s wondering 10,000-year math,” Arisbalt proclaimed.  “A causal domain cut off from the rest of the cosmos.”

“Whew”

“But there was a side effect that Orolo never warned us of,” he continued, “ which is that we have gone adrift.  We don’t exist in one state or another.  Anything.’s possible, any history might have happened, until the gates swing open and we go Apert.”

Page 861:  Fraa Osa was answering:   “To my fraas and surrs of t Ringing Vale I have a loyalty that can never be dissolved precisely because it is no rational thing but a bond like that of family.  And I will not waste oxygen by discussing all of the nesting and overlapping loyalty groups to which I belong: this cell, the Mathic World, the COnvox, the people of Arbre, and the community, extending even beyond the limits of this cosmos, that unites us with the likes of Jules Verne Durand.”

Page 862:  “ This is dangerous, Jesry said flatly.  “It leads to saying that we may abandon the Rake and behave like a bunch of Enthusiasts, and everything will work out just fine because we have achieved holistic oneness with the polycosim.”

Page 863:  Not even Jad.  He did say this:  “Those who think through possibleoutcomes with discipline, forge connections, in doing so, to other cosmic in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities.  Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitivly different from one that has not undertaken the same work and yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use”

“I think it has already gotten somewhere, I said.  “ When you and I re-joined this dialog a few minutes ago, passions were inflamed and people were still trying to frame the decision in terms of allegiances and loyalties.  Fraa Osa has shown that any such approach will fail because we all belong to multiple groups with conflicting loyalties.  This made the conversation less emotional.  We’ve also developed an argument that it’s not possible to work out all the moves in advance.  But as you yourself pointed out, going on naive emotion is bound to fail.

Page  896:  “ I suppose not.  But it is easy, after all this time, to harbor doubts.  To think of it as a religion whose god has died.”

Believe then, that information – the Hylean Flow – passes between cosmic.

Page:  908:  “This happened after you left Arbre.  One magisterium is the Saecular Power.  The other is the Mathic World – now the Antiswarm.  The two of them are well - running the world?”

Page 927:  The Hylean Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across world tracks!”

Page 949:  “he mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for the moment but soon becomes false.  The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.”

Page 956:  Orolo said that the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextrably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle – not in quite the same sense that our Deolaters (common folks with little discipline)use them, for he considered it altogether natural.  He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the the miracles catalogs down through the ages by religions of the world.  And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in doing sought to draw limits around it.  Thai’s why he’d chosen the path that he had.  Now the coming of our friends from Urnud, Tro, Earth, and Fthos has demonstrated certain things about how polycosim works that who had only speculated about before.  We must all of us re-examine everything we know and believe in the light of these revelations.  That is the work hat begins here now it is a great and gradual beginning that encompasses smaller but no less beautiful beginnings – such as the Union of Ala and Erasnus.