Still, we have come into the possession of a piece of definite and new knowledge. As is usually the case with knowledge, it tells us more concerning the limitations of action than about the power. Certain theoreticians today maintain that the Players, if they so desired, could remove the limit to the precision of measurements which is imposed upon them by Heisenberg’s relation of uncertainty. (Dr. John Command has put forward the idea that the uncertainty relation is a tactical maneuver introduced by the Players on the same principle as the rule of the Silentium Universi: that “no one may manipulate Physics in a manner undesired if he is not himself a Player.”) Even were this so, the Players cannot eliminate the bonds that exist between the changes in the laws of matter and the working of the mind, for the mind is composed of that same matter. The notion that it would be possible to devise a Logic or Metalogic valid “for all constructible Universes” is mistaken, and even today this has been successfully shown. I myself think that the Players, well aware of this state of affairs, are encountering difficulties—difficulties obviously not on our scale or measure!
If the realization of the nonomniscience of the Players should cause us alarm, since through it we become sensible of the immanent risk of the Cosmogonic Game, by the same token this reflection brings our existential situation unexpectedly closer to the condition of the Players, for no one in the Universum is all-powerful. The Highest Civilizations also are Parts—Parts That-Do-Not-Fully-Know-the-Whole.
Ronald Schuer has gone the furthest in the advancing of bold conjectures: he states in The Mind-made Universe: Laws vs. Rules that the more profoundly the Players transform the Universe, the more markedly do they alter themselves. Change brings about what Schuer calls “the guillotining of memory.” For, in fact, he who transforms himself in a very radical way thereby obliterates to some extent the memory of his own past, his past prior to that operation. The Players, says Schuer, in acquiring greater and greater cosmometamorphic power, are themselves effacing the traces of the path by which the Universe has so far evolved. Creative omnipotence, taken to its limit, spells the paralysis of retrognosis. The Players, if they strive to impart to the Universe the property of a cradle of Mind, to this end reduce the force of the law of entropy; in a billion years, having lost all memory of what was with them and before them, they bring the Universe to a state of which Slysz spoke. With the elimination of the “entropy brake” there begins an explosive growth of biospheres; a great number of undeveloped civilizations prematurely join the Game and bring about its collapse. Thus, through the collapse of the Game, chaos ensues ... out of which, after eons, there emerges a new Collective of Players ... to begin the Game anew. So, then, according to Schuer, the Game proceeds in a circle, and therefore the question of the “beginning of the Universum” is meaningless. An unusual image, but unconvincing. If we can foresee the inevitability of the collapse, only think of what prognoses the Players are capable.
Ladies and gentlemen, the crystal image of the Game, carried on by Intelligences billions of parsecs apart, who are hidden among the nebular clusters of stars, I have outlined for you, in order then to muddy it with a downpour of obscurities, opposing suppositions, and wholly improbable hypotheses. But such is the normal course of knowledge. Science currently sees the Universe as a palimpsest of Games, Games endowed with a memory reaching beyond the memory of any one Player. This memory is the harmony of the Laws of Nature, which hold the Universe in a homogeneity of motion. We look upon the Universum, then, as upon a field of multibillion-year labors, stratified one on the other over the eons, tending to goals of which only the closest and most minute fragments are fragmentarily perceptible to us. Is this image true? May it not be replaced someday by another, a successor, one radically different, as this model of ours—of the Game of Intelligences—is radically different from all those arisen in history? In place of an answer, I should like to quote here the words of Professor Ernst Ahrens, my teacher. Many years ago, when, still a youth, I went to him with my first drafts containing the conception of the Game, to ask him his opinion, Ahrens said: “A theory? A theory, yet? Maybe it is not a theory. Mankind is going to the stars, yes? Then, even if there is nothing to it, this thing, maybe what we have here is a blueprint, maybe it will all come to pass someday, just so!” With these words of my teacher—not altogether skeptical, I think!—I conclude the lecture. Thank you.
* Credo quia absurdum est (Prof. Dobb’s note in the text).
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A Perfect Vacuum Page 24
