The basic premises of Anathem
Jan. 27th, 2012 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackWorld Building
I've said it before, but I think what I love most about anathem is the idea of the concents full of people who talk about maths all day. I think the idea is really problematical in lots of ways, and by no means an ideal way to run our lives, but having the idea of "being in dialogue" really helps me to distinguish those conversations that turn into an argument, and those where someone throws out a statement, but everyone deliberately plays a game of "can we justify this" without being emotionally involved in it being true, or false.
I like several of the fictional philosophical ideas, but far and away my favourite is Diax's Rake: don't believe something just because you hope it to be true. (At least, not if you want to find out the truth.) Stated like that, it's obvious, and everyone would agree, but having a name for it meant I kept seeing it come up again and again.
Q. If there's no objective morality, then there wouldn't be any way of saying [some atrocity] is actually wrong. Wouldn't that be really terrible? Really really really terrible?
A. Diax's rake. "I really really wouldn't like it" isn't a good reason to think something is false.
Polycosmological interpretation of consciousness and suspension of disbelief
So, the premise is that consciousness's relies partly on quantum interference between possible worlds, and being connected to a world which is slightly different is how minds reason about "what if"? I can't decide if I like this premise or not.
On the one hand, any book musing about the nature of consciousness and quantum mechanics simulataneously is good.
And it's not logically impossible that minds use quantum effects.
But the closer you read, the more you question. Biology does lots of things that we can't do in labs yet, but it looks like "maintaining a quantum superposition without collapsing it" probably isn't one of them. If you don't know how minds work, then the idea that consciousness is "some special magic thing" is very attractive. But the more we know about minds, the more the amazing things they do seem to be build out of lots of simpler heuristics and tricks, which is best explained by "single nerve centres evolved more and more complicated until they became brains" rather than "some extra-neurological trick". And lots of simple counterfactuals don't correspond to simple physical changes, so how would a parallel universe help?
I think the trick with premises is not to make them small but to make them self-contained. For instance, lots of steampunk stories effectively postulate that "complex machinery, including thinking robots, can be made out of cogs". Asimov's Foundation novels postulate that "in aggregate, society can be predicted accurately with sufficiently complex mathematical models". Both of those are basically completely false (as premises generally are) and some people resent them for that. I think both are fine, because they're neat: I think most people have an intuitive sense of what things those premises allow their world to have, and so they're not an impediment to a good story (as long as the story doesn't deliberately mess with the premise).
It's probably fairer to describe Stephenson's premise slightly more abstractly, as something like "thinking very hard lets you do magic via quantum effects" and ascribe the details to technobabble. That's a little unfortunate, as it throws away some of the versimilitude, but I think it's a more accurate representation of how the story works: I think you can more accurately predict the things that are possible by asking "does this fit the right feel" than by "is there a plausible explanation of this in terms of quantum mechanics."
I've said it before, but I think what I love most about anathem is the idea of the concents full of people who talk about maths all day. I think the idea is really problematical in lots of ways, and by no means an ideal way to run our lives, but having the idea of "being in dialogue" really helps me to distinguish those conversations that turn into an argument, and those where someone throws out a statement, but everyone deliberately plays a game of "can we justify this" without being emotionally involved in it being true, or false.
I like several of the fictional philosophical ideas, but far and away my favourite is Diax's Rake: don't believe something just because you hope it to be true. (At least, not if you want to find out the truth.) Stated like that, it's obvious, and everyone would agree, but having a name for it meant I kept seeing it come up again and again.
Q. If there's no objective morality, then there wouldn't be any way of saying [some atrocity] is actually wrong. Wouldn't that be really terrible? Really really really terrible?
A. Diax's rake. "I really really wouldn't like it" isn't a good reason to think something is false.
Polycosmological interpretation of consciousness and suspension of disbelief
So, the premise is that consciousness's relies partly on quantum interference between possible worlds, and being connected to a world which is slightly different is how minds reason about "what if"? I can't decide if I like this premise or not.
On the one hand, any book musing about the nature of consciousness and quantum mechanics simulataneously is good.
And it's not logically impossible that minds use quantum effects.
But the closer you read, the more you question. Biology does lots of things that we can't do in labs yet, but it looks like "maintaining a quantum superposition without collapsing it" probably isn't one of them. If you don't know how minds work, then the idea that consciousness is "some special magic thing" is very attractive. But the more we know about minds, the more the amazing things they do seem to be build out of lots of simpler heuristics and tricks, which is best explained by "single nerve centres evolved more and more complicated until they became brains" rather than "some extra-neurological trick". And lots of simple counterfactuals don't correspond to simple physical changes, so how would a parallel universe help?
I think the trick with premises is not to make them small but to make them self-contained. For instance, lots of steampunk stories effectively postulate that "complex machinery, including thinking robots, can be made out of cogs". Asimov's Foundation novels postulate that "in aggregate, society can be predicted accurately with sufficiently complex mathematical models". Both of those are basically completely false (as premises generally are) and some people resent them for that. I think both are fine, because they're neat: I think most people have an intuitive sense of what things those premises allow their world to have, and so they're not an impediment to a good story (as long as the story doesn't deliberately mess with the premise).
It's probably fairer to describe Stephenson's premise slightly more abstractly, as something like "thinking very hard lets you do magic via quantum effects" and ascribe the details to technobabble. That's a little unfortunate, as it throws away some of the versimilitude, but I think it's a more accurate representation of how the story works: I think you can more accurately predict the things that are possible by asking "does this fit the right feel" than by "is there a plausible explanation of this in terms of quantum mechanics."