- Q: What are we here for?
- A: To criticize the Aleph FAQs (my copy reached me on 7 June 1993), both as FAQs and as statements of ideas.
- Q: Are these FAQs supposed to diminish the ignorance of newcomers to Aleph?
- A: Such is their nominal function.
- Q: Both my parents are civil servants. I have worked for the Federal government and been part of the student administration at one of the most bureaucracy-choked universities in the world. Why, then, were the FAQs the worst examples of gibbering bureacratic prose I have ever seen?
- A: Incompetence - specifically, an inability to use the English language to communicate.
- Q: Why does it assume that ``AmbiStruction of The AAleph is our penultimate goal; the gnowledge gleaned therein will guide us in the performance PAN'' - to take a passage at random - would make things clear to a newcomer?
- A: Incompetence - specifically, an inability to think, probably connected with the inability to communicate.
- Q: But maybe FAQs are necessarily fatuous, obscure, unhelpful wastes of bandwidth?
- A: Get real.
- Q: Could you translate the first paragraph?
``We are attempting to create an unprecedented, open-ended global interactive artwork which we refer to as FIXION, utilizing the Internet as both a creative medium and quasifictional context, for the purposes of evoking the artist in all of us, and for testing the possibility of changing reality through fiction. FIXion [sic] may be seen as a fusion of NetWorking [sic] and RolePlaying [sic].''
- A: ``We are trying to make a text adventure (or something similar), set in and accessed through the Internet. We call it FIXION, and hope it will make an artist of everyone, and change the world besides. Think of it as turning the net into one big MUD.''
- Q: Are text adventures, even fancy, multimedia, open-ended ones, art?
- A: I will merely say that, archaic usage aside, making ornamental salt-shakers, ritual scarification and sewing quilts are properly crafts or even hobbies; and most art is bad or mediocre art.
- Q: Is everyone an artist?
- A: Obviously not.
- Q: Could everyone become an artist?
- A: It seems likely that, given adults with sound minds and the use of a normal complement of limbs, twenty years of diligent study would ensure they could sketch passably in charcoal, throw clay pots, or write sonnets that scanned. Rather more is being claimed, and evidence is not forthcoming. Having attended several schools which set out to unlock the artist within me, I can identify a number of methods enjoying less than absolute success.
- Q: Would it be a good thing to make everyone an artist?
- A: Evidently, but I should like to know why. Art is good, as is the removal of sewage, and the experience of both is, perhaps, enhanced by understanding their methods and history. It does not follow that one should become either an artist or a plumber.
- Q: Can fiction change the world?
- A: Certainly. The production of paperback romance novels (for instance) produces observable changes in certain tissues of certain primates, darkens hectares of wood-pulp, and changes the location of many small slips of ornately printed paper.
- Q: I meant, can it affect political changes?
- A: Well, Emile and Uncle Tom's Cabin did, but Pride and Prejudice, ``Zork'' and The Naked Lunch have been utterly without influence. (I liked ``Zork.'') It is far more reliable to repose one's trust in God --- which is to say, the bigger battalions.
- Q: Are the political changes the authors of FIXION hope for desirable?
- A: We don't know what they are yet. Read on.
- Q: Whatever they are, are these the ones likely to take place (if any)?
- A: No. There are always unintended consequences, misinterpretations, unforseen ramifications... If Rousseau could have foreseen that one of the consequences of his writings would be the Holocaust, he might have had the decency to shoot himself; beyond doubt, it is not what he had in mind. The chain linking him to Hitler and Eichmann is, nonetheless, clear.
- Q: Well, what about the next paragraph ---
``We are attempting to cohere a continually-scientifically-evolving, rigorous system of ontological and epistemological data for use in predicting and/or guiding the fate of humanity. In order to accomplish this, we must examine as many ontological models as we can find; `scientific' or `mystical,' ancient or modern, sacred or profane.
``We must translate, learn, correlate and unify them all. We seek The [sic] Rosetta Stone.''
I mean, isn't ``cohere'' an intransitive verb?
- A: Just so! Here, is anywhere, ``create'' could be used without cringing.
- Q: Why is it implied that continual evolution is good?
- A: Prejudice. Either the ``evolution'' does not replace the current system with anything better, in which case the exercise is at best Sisyphean, or it does, in which case this is pride at eternal and confessed imperfection, inaccuracy and error.
- Q: Isn't ontology the study of the ultimate nature of reality?
- A: Yes --- but it's not geology, or even particle physics.
- Q: The ontologies of Plato, Democritus, Chuang Tzu and the Upanishads are about as different as can be, but they're compatible with all the changes in physics in the last three millennia. So what's a ``scientific'' ontology?
- A: Strictly speaking, there is no such animal. Natural science --- which is to say, science --- has been combined with every ontology, up to and including solipsism.
- Q: It would seem that, if humans were rational, the practical relevance of ontology would be exactly nil.
- A: True, but humans are notoriously not rational, and ontologies get tangled up with lots of other ideas, for no good reason, and treated as a package deal. (A ``meme complex,'' for the Dawkinites in the audience.) The ``right'' ontology might win a convert --- or cost one. Here, ``right'' does not mean true, though it entails lying and pretending it does.
- Q: So are there such things as ``ontological data''?
- A: No; they, and a fortiori a ``continually-scientifically-evolving'' systems of such data, are meaningless concepts. (Objectors are invited to produce so much as a single ontological datum.)
- Q: What possible use could ontology be in ``predicting and/or guiding the fate of humanity?''
- A: None.
- Q: Is epistemology the study of knowledge?
- A: I would prefer ``of the acquistion of knowledge.''
- Q: Is it a science?
- A: As a descriptive activity, i.e. a study of how we try to acquire knowledge, it might conceivably be a science; now-a-days, such research is called the psychology of perception and cognition, or cognitive science. As a prescriptive activity, obviously not. That we attempt to learn certain things in certain ways, does not make those good or even possible ways to do so. Prescriptive epistemology is a department of logic, and as such is not a science.
- Q: Do we have data on human learning?
- A: Yes, though it is disappointing in both quantifty and quality, and generalizations based on it are even more meager.
- Q: Might this be useful in predicting the future?
- A: If we knew what which humans were tring to learn, under what circumstances --- which, clearly, we do not know, and could not predict without an incredible amount of knowledge which we lack.
- Q: What is meant by ``guiding the fate of humanity''? Isn't fate what cannot be altered?
- A: The thought appears to be, ``Let us decide which way we want the world to go, and give it a shove in that direction.''
- Q: Even supposing this possible, how do they propose to pick a direction?
- A: They don't say.
- Q: And what gives them the authority to shape the life, not only of everyone now living, but of everyone who will live?
- A: Do the phrases, ``dictatorship of the proletariat'' and ``führerprinzip'' ring any bells?
- Q: Isn't it possible that some past models are simply wrong, and have nothing to offer?
- A: It would seem to be possible.
- Q: Isn't it possible that some past ``models'' are completely incompatible?
- A: Indeed; solipsism and Platonism spring to mind.
- Q: Would you attribute their failure to see this to modern egalitarianism and relativism?
- A: I would attribute it to muddle-headed stupidity, and prescribe mathematics, Bertrand Russell and David Hume, not necessarily in that order.
- Q: By conspicuously limiting themselves to past systems, aren't the Alephians unnecessarily hindering themselves?
- A: Not if you assume that everything important, and certainly everything true, has already been said. This is perhaps excusable in a term paper by a not very bright student. The very best it can do is no harm, and the best is always rare.
- Q: Are you saying that they think the true metaphysics can be found by sifting through the existing ones for whatever suits their fancy?
- A: Indeed; and the lack of support for this fascinating opinion is conspicuous.
- Q: In light of the next passage,
``The two focci explained above may be considered diametrically opposed (and indeed they are intended that way), because we need to attract input from both `creative/intuitive' people and `analytical/scientific' people. We are aware that most people fall into one or the other of these groups, and that they are often unable to understand the terms used by the other groups,. or the context in which such terms are used. This `babel-effect' has separated and stymied the intuitive and metaphysical arts from the physical and psychic sciences for a few thousand years. Now that the findings of Quantum Physicists [sic] are beginning to coequal [sic!] the pithy aphorisms of Mystics [sic], and even as the hypothesized Singularity draws near, it is high time to attempt their union into a single, relativistic, globally-available model.''
--- What happens to people who consider things diametrically opposed without first being given permission?
- A: They become coequal with the void.
- Q: What does ``coequal'' mean?
- A: ``Equal.'' --- One hopes.
- Q: If the two ``focii'' (projects? groups, even?) ``may be considered diamterically opposed,'' and ``indeed'' ``were intended that way,'' are they diamterically opposed or not?
- A: It would seem they are.
- Q: Why didn't the author say so?
- A: Incompetence. See above.
- Q: By saying that most people are either creaitve/intuitive or analytical/scientific, does the writer mean creative people are never analytic, or scientists never intuitive?
- A: One hopes not, but it is hard to be sure.
- Q: Is the average illiterate ``creative'' or ``analytic''?
- A: One gathers that such individuals never entered the writer's mind. That the overwhelming majority of all humans past and present did not figure into ``most people'' is perhaps something of an oversight.
- Q: How is something ``stymied from'' something else?
- A: This question is too profound to have an answer.
- Q: Have the ``physical and psychic sciences'' been stymied for the last few thousand years?
- A: Arguably, yes; but not in the last few hundred, while the lamented separation has grown wider and wider.
- Q: Now that you mention it, what are the ``psychic sciences''?
- A: Either (a) the form of witchcraft pioneered by the Fox sisters and the late Professor Rhine, or (b) psychology or (c) both.
- Q: What are the ``intuitive and metaphyscal arts''?
- A: The gods alone know. Probably the old tired con-acts of fortune-telling and putting the hex on your neighbor's hoat, glossed up with gibberish borrowed from pop science tracts in the last two centuries, the Scholastics, or even (if we're lucky) the neo-Platonists, trying to slink their way to a place in the curriculum. (Why not? Everything else is.) Presumably the writer has some grasp of the English language, and would write ``the humanities'' or ``art and philosophy'' or the like, if he meant them.
(Those who feel fortune-telling or hexing goats to be something more than delusions are invited to try their talents upon me. Put whatever spell you like on me. Don't tell me about it, but send a description of the intended effects, and when they should take hold, to Mitchell, who can query me at the end of the deadline, and hopefully vouch for my integrity. I will provide nail-pairings, hair-clippings and old socks upon request, but not (owing to the difficulties of shipping) semen or excreta, and promise to not put any counter-magic into effect.)
- Q: Which mystics are these with pithy sayings?
- A: Well, whoever wrote the Tao Te Ching stuck to 5,000 characters, which is fairly brief. On the other hand, we've been arguing about what it means ever since the ink was dry, so he might have spared us a few words of explanation.
- Q: What is the connection between renormalization and the Nous of Plontius?
- A: The one is a mathematical technique, and the other an intellectual doctrine, so neither belong to Quantum Mystics, the exciting new transdisciplinary field that combines millennia-old catch-phrases with the latest in buzzwords and immortal fuzzy thinking. (Special trade-ins on used Bergsonism still available; ask about our up-coming Chaotophilia model.)
- Q: What's a ``creative/intuitive'' way of deciding which of two ideas is better?
- A: Flipping a coin is the closest you'll get to one.
- Q: What's an analytic way of coming up with a new idea?
- A: Go through the set of all possible ideas in order.
- Q: What is meant by a ``relativistic, globally-available model''?
- A: As near as I can make out, ``relativistic'' here means ``universal.'' So does ``globally-available,'' but in the sense that everyone would, or could, learn the model.
- Q: Model of what?
- A: That, too, is too deep to have an answer.
- Q: Can we put this paragraph into English?
- A: We can try: ``The two parts of this project are for `creative/intuitive' and `analytic/scientific' people, respectively. Their mutual incomprehension is unproductive, in these times perhaps even dangerous, and certainly unnecessary. We hope to effect a synthesis, to the advantage of all.''
``At current there are several models which are being used as the skeletii of this memestruct, which we call The AAleph. These include, but are not limited to, Terence McKenna's `TimeWave Zero,' the Wabalistic [sic] Tree of Life (with a large dash of Crowleyanity), the Tarot Deck, the eight-fold circuit structre of Timothy Leary (expanded by R. A. Wilson), Bucky Fuller's ``Synergetics,'' The Dictionary of the Khazars, the Periodic Table of the Elements, and the entirety of recorded art, history and science.
- Q: Who taught this unfortunate that the plural of ``skeleton'' is ``skeletii''? Was it the same one who taught that something has more than one skeleton? who taught the writer to say ``At current'' instead of ``Currently,'' or, given the rest of the sentence, nothing at all?
- A: Someone who knew neither Greek nor Latin, and, No doubt, respectively.
- Q: One presumes that the items mentioned by name are neither recorded art, nor recorded history, nor recorded science.
- A: That would seem to be implied.
- Q: This seems odd for the Dictionary of the Khazars, not to mention the periodic table.
- A: Odd things happen.
- Q: Do any of the Alephians read Mongol? Kanada? Ancient Chinese? Hittite?
- A: One must admit it unlikely, especially in combination.
- Q: How, then, can they claim access to all of recorded art and history?
- A: Three alternatives present themselves. First, they may entertain unreasonably optimistic beliefs about translations. Second, they are displaying a hopefully unconscious egocentricism, assuming that everything important is in languages they can read --- though these FAQs cast doubt on their linguistic skills. Third, it was a piece of empty and grandiloquent rhetoric; advertising; a come-on; a lie.
``Aleph began as a brainstorming arena and stage for a FIXIONal-like [sic] global.net+live.event [sic] conceived by Mitchell Porter.
``Like most things Alephian, this struct soon bifurcated. `Alpha/Omega' became the name of a prospective book which focuses on the events of the last day of the 20th century, and `GAIA 2000' was the RL group which would launch the fiction into reality. The idea was to simulate a huge worldwide networked Millennial Climax, complete with self-consistent ontologies and internal struggles. Specifically, this VR Di Gras was to result in an entirely changed perception, on the part of the world's participants, of how their reality was to be viewed; how their future was to be approached. In the words of Mitch Porter, AO is `the attempt to enact a psychodrama which will end the conflict of history by showing a way in which humanity can have a united purpose.' ''
- Q: Has any book, not necessarily fictional, changed peoples' ideas as much as this `AO' and `VR Di Gras' are hoped to?
- A: None has ever come close; certainly not in so short a time.
- Q: How about ``psychodramas''?
- A: Don't make me laugh.
- Q: Do they have any reason to think they can create such an unprecedented work?
- A: Yes --- arrogance.
- Q: Do they have any reason to think they can predict what the effect of their work will be?
- A: At the moment, none. They are giving themselves seven years to turn psychology and sociology into exact, predictive sciences.
- Q: What would you call deciding how reality should be perceived, what future is desirable, and how it may be obtained, before deciding to rewire the human race?
- A: Common sense and simple courtesy suggest themselves. It would also be good tactics --- it helps immensely if you know what you are trying to sell.
- Q: What is the ``conflict of history''?
- A: Who knows? It could be anything from a typo for ``the conflicts of history'' to some lingering Hegelian miasma.
- Q: Why should we end it?
- A: No reason is given. Perhaps it is assumed that conflict is automatically bad --- an assumption, it should be clear, which I do not make.
- Q: What would it mean for humanity to have a united purpose?
- A: Presumably, that, in addition to all their other goals, all, or almost all, humans would share at least one non-trivial, impersonal goal. The ``almost all'' qualification is intended to handle those incapable of holding rational goals - infants, lunatics, the senile, autistics, etc. The goal must be impersonal, because otherwise ``I want to live,'' (e.g.) would be the united purpose of humanity --- which may be true, but is not what the Alephians mean.
- Q: How do they know that humanity can have a united purpose, and the one pushed in AO at that?
- A: Some sort of benevolent brainwashing seems implied, the mechanics of which have never been gone into. Since we haven't the foggiest what the purpose AO will advocate is, the second half of your question is unanswerable.
- Q: Why should humanity have a united purpose? Why theirs?
- A: It makes some people feel warm and tingly inside, and, Prejudice, respectively. (There may be other reasons in favor of their purpose, but it's hard to tell until you know what it is. Apparently this is a mystery revealed only to initiates at the dark of the moon after drinking liters of fresh bull's blood and a night spent in the cemetary.)
- Q: What do they plan to do with those who don't want their ``united purpose''?
- A: Liquidation springs to mind, but Mitchell's a fairly humane guy, so it seems more likely he's counting on either re-education (through labor? Those long Siberian sunsets...) or our blissing our hostility away in the millennial orgasm. The gods only know about the others.
- Q: What is the most common purpose which unites large numbers of human beings?
- A: Harming many of their fellow human beings. We almost always manage that.
- Q: What is meant by, ``Specifically, this VR Di Gras was to result in an entirely changed perception, on the part of the world's participants, of how their reality was to be viewed; how their future was to be approached''?
- A: ``We hope it will change people's ideas about the world, and about the kind of future they should desire.''
- Q: When the FAQ says that
``The Global Alliance of Internet Anarchists is the group which will `physicalize' the findings of the Aleph group as a whole, spreading the word through "above ground" media, and performing vital meat-tasks: mailing, promotion, recruiting, fundraising, organization and PR....''
--- What does it mean?
- A: That they propose to first, recruit a horde of anarchist technologists who agree with them; second, turn them into a missionary and political movement avowedly based on a rather strange work of fiction; and third, use them to create a mass following in the developed countries.
- Q: And this?
''One early idea, not yet dropped, is that a very well thought-out fictional org would in fact become a real one, much in the same way [sic] as Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and the Church of the SubGenius have their own real vitality.''
- A: I submit again that, regardless of Stang's paranoid delusions, the (slight) popular success of the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu and the Church of the Subgenius is largely due to their being treated as jokes. No doubt there are also some lunatics who take it seriously, but mercifully few. Notanda, the Cthulhu Mythos has not, and could not, become real.
- Q: What's the point of the ``PanOptiCon''?
- A: Presumably to marvel at virtual performers, be repulsed and fascinated by virtual freaks, and have your virtual pocket picked. If you can have a good party without body language and verbal subtleties which don't travel well across the net and sounds and (probably) smells, so much the better for you. I can't tell if it's a good or bad omen for the success of such a party that your idea of a ``carnival'' is a bull-session about a ``cultural climax'' seventeen years in the future.
- Q: When they say, ``Net.wide,'' do they mean the festivities will be on (say) comp.sys.amiga.advocacy?
- A: You can't even tell if they are going to have it as an IRC channel, #PanOp, or a FIXIONal event set on a FIXIONal #PanOp, or a FIXIONal event in which the party spills over the entire net (the virtual merry-makers seize the participants in one of the perpetual c.s.a.a flame-wars by their virtual hands, ply them with virtual gin, and force them to join the virtual dance...), and if it's the later, whether they plan to implement this when the time comes around, or just have a real #PanOp.
- Q: They say that ``Another provisional topic is the discussion of ways to manifest this event [presumably the `ATTRACTOR'] in VIRTUALITY so as to divert potentially destructive forces from manifesting in REALITY due to self-fulfilling prophecies.'' Isn't it a bit odd for a group whose entire program is based on virtuality changing reality to consider this a safety valve?
- A: They're odd people, you knew that.
- Q: Isn't it implied that the only way this event could be destructive is through a self-fulfilling prophecy?
- A: We've established that logic and English are both foreign to them. Don't beat a dead horse.
- Q: But how could a culture climax in virtuality, and not in reality? How does a culture climax in the first place?
- A: To take the last first, cultural climaxes are like any other sort of climax. One starts out wanting just a thrill, and besides, all your older peers and neighbors are already doing it, maybe one of them takes you in hand, then you find yourself growing attached, and before you know it you've got kids running around driving you insane and bills to pay and nothing but problems, problems, problems, and even that doesn't seem as good as it used to, and frankly you don't know why you bother going on: so one day you don't. In this view, a culture has many climaxes.
- Q: Be serious for once.
- A: They mean that on the twenty second day of December, in the year of grace two thousand and twelve (XI ante Kalendas Ianuarias, anno urbis conditae MMDCCLXV), every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough place plain --- in short, life as we know it will be replaced by something staggeringly different. If this is so, there doesn't seem to be any way to keep this to ``virtuality,'' which, after all, is just a small part of human culture.
- Q: Since you mention Isaiah, let us move on to the ``HyperQabalah.'' Are any of them fluent in medieval Hebrew?
- A: Possibly.
- Q: Are they experts in the Talmud, the philosophies, cults and pseudo-sciences of late antiquity (especially neo-Platonism), in Christian and Islamic philosophers, mystics and occultists of the period? Would they have any idea who (say) Hildegard of Bingen was?
- A: The combination seems improbable --- but then, they have seven whole years to remedy these minor intellectual deficiencies.
- Q: What reasons do they have for thinking the doctrines of the Qabalah are true?
- A: None that I know of. The strongest claim I've heard them make on its behalf is Mitchell's, that the Tree of Life is ``useful'' as a ``model'' of different ``levels of reality'' --- whatever that means.
- Q: It seems that Principia Cybernetica is to be ``the major source of epistemological data'' for the "Aaleph."
- A: Yes, as opposed to the HyperQabalah, which ``will be the major source of epistemological data'' for the Aaleph. A profound distinction!
- Q: And yet the Aaleph --- or rather, ``gnowledge gleaned'' in its ``AmbiStruction'' --- ``will guide us in the performance PAN,'' the first part of which is the Principia Cybernetica.
- A: It would seem that they propose to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
- Q: But why bother with mere contradictions, when there are bigger things at hand?
- A: Why indeed?
- Q: ``A point from which all other points can be seen'' --- and presumably seen properly --- is a metaphor.
- A: For a fact, they are not conducting a geographical survey.
- Q: Unpacked, it seems to say, ``The ultimate theory, which accounts for everything, including all other correct theories, is called the Aaleph; furthermore, there is such a theory, though we don't know what it is yet.''
- A: Seemingly accurate so far.
- Q: Are the highest good, the Rosetta stone, or the Elixir of Life, good descriptions of such a theory?
- A: Some people have very low standards.
- Q: How about the "MetaVersal Absolute Ground Zero"?
- A: That is advertising, i.e., affective, meaningless noise.
- Q: What are their prospects for creating such a theory?
- A: I consider the magnitude of what they attempt, the resources they bring to bear, the deadlines they set, and the quality of what they have produced to date, and find optimism impossible.
- Q: Where is the ``heart of the net,'' from which the ``Ghost in the Machine'' is supposed to observe the Singularity?
- A: One gathers from the outlines of AO that it is somehwere in Antartica.
- Q: Who are these programming geniuses, who expect to have something worthy of the name ``AI'' by --- 2001? 2012? who can tell with these people? --- and to have no better use for it, and their talents, than staring at humans making fools of themselves?
- A: Can't you read? `` 'Nuf [has been] said'' when we are told that ``there are groups moving in this direction.'' Even to say that they are more likely to be inspired by Gibson than by Clarke's ``Dial F for Frankenstein'' is unpardonable presumption.
- Q: Is life extension possible?
- A: For all I know, yes.
- Q: And a ``final victory over death'' ---
- A: Is bollocks. Suppose the available universe comes to an end in time --- whether by heat death, crunch, or being sat upon by God's hydrocephalic nephew. This is clearly no setting for a final victory over death, merely a prologned holding action. On the other hand, in a universe going on forever, there is infinite time for error, coincidence and malice. Wait long enough, and the probability that one half of your brain barrier-tunnels to Alpha Centauri and the other to the Pleiades --- to say nothing of more plausible events --- gets arbitrarily close to one. Back-up bodies just increase the time you will have to wait before they suffer simultaneous fatalities. (Assuming that you could make a read-out of your brain, transfer it to another brain, and keep the two from getting out of synch. As neurologists will be ecstatic when they understand the nervous system of a sea-slug, I would not hold my breath.) What they want is a universe infinite in time, and bodies with which absolutely nothing can go wrong. This is literally incredible.
- Q: Why did they spell Necronomicon with a ``k''?
- A: Presumably, their classical education was even more rudimentary than Lovecraft's.
- Q: What had Wells's The War of the Worlds done to deserve being picked out as the model for FIXION?
- A: Become confused in the writer's mind with the Mercury Theater of the Air adaptation, narrated by Orson Welles on 30 October 1938, which many people mistook for an actual Martian invasion.
- Q: Does the FAQ ever say what the plot is, be it in ever so bare, tentative and sketchy a fashion?
- A: I can puzzle out that it involves the lead-up to the Millennial Climax of Alpha and Omega and the end of the world in 2012; but whether a complete newcomer could do so is doubtful. Certainly, the ``answer'' to this question does not explain the plot, and even leads me to doubt that the writer knows what a plot is. This does not augur well for the success of the venture.
- Q: Is FIXION self-organizing?
- A: The question is ill put --- what is FIXION? If it is the text of the eventual posts, necessarily no. That is just a static string of characters. If it is the eventual posts and rough drafts, abandoned portions, suggestions, etc., then such organizing as takes place is accomplished by the authors, who are outside the system - so again no. If the authors are included, FIXION is self-organizing --- as is every other text and social group. (Ilya, Ilya, why did you have to flake out?)
- Q: Will FIXION be a perpetual body of fiction?
- A: We do not seem to do the authors an injustice if we think they are not quite in the same league as Gilgamesh and Homer --- and will anyone read those in a thousand years? More likely it is meant that the writing will never be finished, and this I find easier to believe.
- Q: ``McKenna has created software called `TimeWave Zero' which he sets forth as a fractal pattern to history and time.'' Does McKenna say that a piece of software is the pattern of history?
- A: No; the software produces a representation of the fractal pattern.
- Q: What does it mean to say that ``A is the pattern to B''?
- A: That the speaker's grasp of English is less than perfect.
- Q: Is history a fractal?
- A: History is not a geometric object; a fortiori history is not a fractal. McKenna's `novelty curve' is a fractal if and only if it is self-similar and has a fractal (similarity, box-counting) dimension greater than its topological dimension. I doubt anyone has checked, but for all of me it could be. If the curve is self-similar, unless McKenna has a precise way to measure the `novelty' of a previous point in time, he has no way of establishing the scale, and linking (say) one peak with the Dinosaur-Killer, and another with 2012. I once went to a lecture by Mandelbrot, where he showed a series of slides of a rock formation. It was clearly self-similar, but there was no way of gauging the scale, until he showed one with a lens-cap in front of the rock. The next picture, of course, showed a man as well, and the `lens-cap' was obviously about three meters in diameter. (One could see that the man was a man, and not a doll.) The moral, I trust, is clear.
- Q: Is time a fractal?
- A: No. Neither is it a poached egg, nor is it a conspiracy of the prime numbers against the irrationals.
- Q: What is the connection between humans being ``negentropic'' and their being ``novel''?
- A: None. If one accepts the identity of negentropy and order, a constant supply of negentropy is needed just to maintain a condition more interesting than that of a tub of luke-warm water. Whether or not a thing acts in a "novel" way has nothing to do with whether its entropy is increasing or decreasing. When you drop a sugar cube into a glass of water, its diffusion is certainly not something which has happened before, i.e., it is novel, and it increases the entropy of the system.
(Actually, the identity of negentropy and order is questionable. Two brief arguments will suffice here. First, order is usually equated with symmetry, but many entropic changes increase symmetry, e.g., the dissolving sugar going to a uniform solution. Second, the molar entropy of graphite (at STP) is 1.372 cal/K, and that of urea is 25.00 (So sayeth the CRC.) The ``naive physicist'' concludes that the mole of graphite is far more ordered, yet a biologist holds exactly the contrary view, and seems rather more reasonable. If we remember that entropy is k log W, and order is a very fuzzy and non-mathematical word, no paradox results.)
- Q: Are humans ``inclined to produce more and more novel things and events''?
- A: In one sense, yes. No event is any past event; by definition it is novel. By this standard, however, humans are no more novelty-prone than anything else. Even by more exacting standards, the proposition is dubious. In the Plaeolithic --- i.e., for most of human history, such artifacts as have come down to use remained essentially unchanged for tens of thousands of years, and whether the changes were improvements or drifts is often unclear. As to the rest of history:
``It is difficult for the average person to achieve an historical perspective in which progress shall have been reduced to its proper dimensions.... A sailor from the ship that took Saint Paul to Malta would have been quite reasonably at home as a forecastle hand on one of Joseph Conrad's barks. A Roman cattleman from the Dacian frontier would have made quite a competent vaquero to drive longhorn steers from the plains of Texas to the terminus of the railroad, although he would have been struck with astonishment with what he found when he got there. A Babylonian administrator of a temple estate would have needed no training either in bookkeeping or in the handling of slaves to run an early Southern plantation. In short, the period during which the main conditions of life for the vast majority of men have been subjected to repeated and revolutionary changes had not even begun until the Renaissance and the great voyages, and did not assume anything like the accelerated pace which we now take for granted until well into the nineteenth century.''
(Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, ch. 2)
In fact, novelty is subjective, in the sense of context-dependent, and the problem is supurious. I should find life on the Central Asian steppe very novel, as an Uighur would America, but neither is novel to the natives. Likewise, there are still parts of the world where agriculture is a novelty, and --- hard as it may be to believe --- people for whom the latest version of gopher or irc is not novel at all.
- Q: But, as the FAQ says, ``Culture and technology... is [sic] the most extreme form of this sort of novelty,'' and for a fact they do change.
- A: Only change in culture and technology (is technology not part of culture?) can be novel --- by definition --- and then, again, we have the problem of deciding whether or not the change is significant. Since novelty is subjective, this is (as the logical positivists used to say) a pseudo-problem.
- Q: What does it mean that the Dinosaur-Killer, the ``high renaissance'' and the first atom bomb (at Almogordo or Hiroshima?) are all very novel?
- A: That McKenna - or the author of the FAQ --- is ignorant of extinction cycles. That M.o.t.a.o.t.f. thinks the extinction of every land creature over a hundred kilos is novel, which leads me to think that the Really Novel Thing in 2012 is an asteriod which does the job right. That there is an odd prejudice agains the Reformation and Scientific Revolution at work here. That M.o.t.a.o.t.f. misses the obvious parallels between the Renaissance and classical Greece and Warring States China, which even that fraud Spengler saw ``big as a watermelon,'' and presumably make such periods less than absolutely ``novel.'' That the entire perspective is incredibly parochial, one for which Darwin --- never mind Copernicus --- might as well never have lived. ``The explosion of the first atomic device corresponds in the wave to the `big bang' in its importance as a novel event'' --- that is, when a tribe of apes adds to its already extensive collection one more implement of destruction, which with improbable diligence and application might end biology in the thin watery crust of a rather undistinguished planet lost in a commonplace galaxy, it is an event of the same importance as the beginning of the universe.
Now that is hubris.
- Q: How could they use TimeWave Zero to ``time out'' FIXIONal events?
- A: To answer the question, ``Could event E happen at time T,'' they need only calculate E's novelty, and the novlety of everything else happening at T, and see if the combined novlety is compatible with the net novlety at T as given by TimeWave Zero. Nothing could be simpler!
- Q: How do ``novel events'' ``re-iterate''?
- A: In tightening cycles, of course.
- Q: What time is dawn?
- A: On 22 December 2012, the end of time.
- Q: ``What significance is human culture?''
- A: What sort of feeping cretin asks such a question? A good answer to ``What was the significance of culture to Plato?'' will not serve for ``What was the significance of culture to Nietzsche?'', and neither is even a false but intelligble answer to ``What is the evolutionary significance of human culture?'' This would be so, even if ``culture'' meant the same thing in all three cases, which normally it would not. To see that ``What is the significance of human culture?'' is not a well-posed question, does not require a genius.
- Q: ``What effect is it having on the world?''
- A: For ``the world'' at large, the only one I can think of is this: During this century, the amount of radio noise in the immediate vicinty of the solar system has increased. In a few centuries, we may become important to the plants and invertebrates. (The microbes will take longer.)
- Q: Is Foundation or The War of the Worlds or The City and the Stars or The Stars My Destination or Stand on Zanzibar an attempt to answer, ``What significance is human culture, and what effect is it having on the world?''
- A: No. Ergo, they are not ``good science fiction,'' according to the FAQ.
- Q: What cyberpunk fiction deals with the signficance and effects on the world of T'ang dynasty poetry, Galois theory, table manners, or menstrual taboos?
- A: None. We conclude either that these are not parts of human culture, or that the distinctive concern of science fiction, of which cyberpunk is a rather stylized subset, is not culture in general, but technology and the future, especially the future as shaped by technology. (For the record, Sturgeon wrote a novel involving menstrual taboos, Some of Your Blood. [Thanks to Mitchell Porter for reminding me of the title.])
- Q: Is there any literary form which is well-adapted to explicitly developing and examining ideas?
- A: The dialogue (of which this is an exceptionally malformed specimen) and the essay both developed for exactly this purpose. We need not wonder, therefore, that they are virtually extinct.
- Q: Why does the author of the FAQ think that a prophetic scheme which is admittedly ``as dubious as anything'' provides the best way of introducing or dealing with themes which, by his/her/its own account, many others have dealt with very well, without its help? (And if not the best, why bother with it?)
- A: People are strange.
- Q: Presuming they mean ``Gaia'' in the non-theological sense, could humanity ``become integrated'' with it?
- A: No. Ex hypothesi, we already are.
- Q: Are the Alephians really such idiots, such numbskulls, such utter clueless dupes, as to be taken in by every drug-addled crackpot who can throw a few buzzwords like ``fractal'' and ``negentropic'' together with half-decent computer graphics?
- A: Perhaps not every.
- Q: Shall we turn to ``Navigating the Singularity to the infinite payoff''?
- A: Indeed, and with relief.
- Q: Is ``unity of purpose'' necessary to ``navigate the Singularity?''
- A: If by ``navigate'' you mean ``survive,'' no. It seems perfectly possible (for instance) that part of the species will blow itself up, another part turn to ``nanarchy'' (a nice coinage, for once!), and another give it all up as a bad job and go back to lurking at water-holes.
- Q: Suppose my concept of ``naivgation'' is a bit more demanding, and I wish for a more specific state of affairs than mere survival --- what then?
- A: That depends on how specific you are. The more picky you are about the future, the better the social engineering you need.
- Q: What do you mean by ``social engineering''?
- A: What you are asking for is the creation of a particular society, or at least a society with certain features. The hypothesis of the Singularity rules out merely modifying some aspects or other of our current society --- remember, nonthing less than ``the human condition'' (whatever that is) will change. Now, are you just going to sit tight and hope that the society you want emerges?
- Q: Not if I can help it --- ``it presumably requires some input from us to bring it about.''
- A: So, unless you want to do things at random and hope for the best (again!), you need to know what actions on your part will have the effect, under the circumstances of the Singularity, of bringing about the society you want. Such knowledge would constitute a ``social engineering.''
- Q: Does the required knowledge exist today?
- A: Nothing even remotely approaching it exists.
- Q: How long would it take to gain it?
- A: Our ignorance is such that we do not even know if it is possible to gain it. Social engineering is a field so backward it is still in the hands of the philosophers. [See: Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook, esp. part III, and Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies.]
- Q: Would my being good enough at social engineering to know how to create the society I desire, ensure that I could?
- A: No. In the first place, there may be no way to create the society you desire (in general, or from society as it now stands). In the second place, you may lack the power to act appropriately. In the third place, you may be undone by mere accident and error.
- Q: If I could create the society I want, ought I?
- A: It is by no means self-evident that you should decide the future of humanity, or any portion thereof.
- Q: Turning to the Principia Cybernetica, how does one develop ontology out of cybernetics and system theory?
- A: No how. Cybernetics is compatible with every ontology. (For an explicit illustration of this from one of the masters, see w. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, section 4/15, ``Materiality.'')
- Q: How does one develop epistemology out of cybernetics and systems theory?
- A: Descriptively, one does cognitive science or neurology. Prescriptively, no how. Accepting cybernetics a priori forces you to reject epistemologies which deny mathematical knowledge, and arguably those which deny observation, but it entails nothing more specific than that.
- Q: How does one develop logic out of cybernetics and systems theory?
- A: No how; logic is anterior to both.
- Q: How does one develop aesthetics, ethics or politics out of cybernetics and systems theory?
- A: By committing the fallacy of taking an ``is'' for an ``ought.''
- Q: Would any of this assist the development of social engineering?
- A: No. If social engineering is possible, cybernetics and systems theory may be parts of it, but this has nothing to do with the program of the Principia Cybernetica.
- Q: What, then, remains of that program?
- A: The opportunity for hours of fun and profit, if one doesn't think too clearly. (That might do as Aleph's epitath.)
- Q: If fiction ``represents in many ways the horizons of imagniation,'' what are the horizons of imagination?
- A: We know that he meant, that fiction is one of the most imaginative things humans produce; which is dubious. I would give that position to philosophy --- and that, as Mr. Smothers said, is not a compliment. ``Parmenides said that nothing can move. Yet he travelled, and knew he travelled, around Greece and southern Italy, defending the opinion; and he defended it, of course, by moving his tongue and lips. So, what in the name of God, or sanity, or whatever you value most, is to be made of his theory?'' (David Stove, The Plato Cult, p. ix). What indeed? What mere novelist or story-teller has the imagination, to say nothing of the shamelessness, to match this? And this is a typical philosophical theory (as Stove points out). The City and the Stars or ``Blood Music'' are pedestrian in contrast.
- Q: And magic?
- A: Is, once more, bollocks. Malinowski discusses this in Magic, Science and Religion; I do not have my copy to hand, so I paraphrase. The Trobiand Islanders, among whom he lived for years, practice two sorts of fishing. Fishing in the lagoons is safe, reliable, and under control; there is no magic associated with it. Fishing out of boats on the open ocean is dangerous, unpredictable, a matter of chance and luck. Ocean fishing is associated with elaborate ritual and magic, designed to overcome exactly these factors. Magic is a dream of power, entertained because the magician knows he does not really have power. This may be natural, but it is still discreditable, and unworthy of rational beings.
- Q: We've dealt with overcoming death, but what about ``achieving a cosmic existence?''
- A: Modesty forbids me....
In all serious, there's no point to ``achieving a cosmic existence,'' and no need. Right now, just as you are, you are as much a part of the cosmos as you can ever be. For a brief time you are here, alive and gifted with sight, part of a vast universe which isn't even indifferent to you, the blind workings of which will eventually return you to the arms of Our Lady of the Carbon Cycle, whence you came. None of this is a cause for joy, and that for so many of us, this one brief life is filled with needless suffering, is obscene, but it is not a cause for despair either, nor indulging in futile dreams while there is work to be done.