Otherness

by David Brin

  Mikaela cut short as Isola cried out an oath, staring at the pseudo-life chaise, then at a waiter-servitor that shambled in carrying drinks, a construct eight days old and soon to collapse from unavoidable build-up of errors in its program. Isola looked back at the holographic image of Tenembro's universe, then at Mikaela with a strange light in her eyes.

  "It . . . has to be that way," she said, hoarse-voiced with awe. "Oh, don't you see? We're pretty smart. We can make life of sorts, and artificial universes. But we're new at both activities, while nature's been doing both for a very long time!"

  "I . . ." The pale woman shook her head. "I don't see . . ."

  "Evolution! Life never designs the next generation. Successful codes in one lifetime get passed on to the next, where they are sieved yet again, and again, adding refinements along the way. As Jarlquin said—whatever works, continues!"

  Mikaela swallowed. "Yes, I see. But universes . . ."

  "Why not for universes too?"

  Isola moved forwards to the edge of the chaise, shrugging aside the arms that tried to help her.

  "Think about all the so-called laws of nature. In the 'universes' we create in lab, these are almost random, chaotically flawed or at least simplistic, like the codes in pseudo-life."

  She smiled ironically. "But Tenembro Universe has rules as subtle as those reigning in our own cosmos. Why not? Shouldn't a child resemble her mother?"

  What came before me?

  How did I come to be?

  Will something of me continue after I am gone?

  Isola looked up from her notepad to contemplate Tenembro Nought. This side—the deceptively simple black sphere with its star-tiara. Not a scar, she had come to realize, but an umbilicus. Through such narrow junctures, the Home Cosmos kept faint contact with its daughters.

  If this was possible for universes, Isola felt certain something could be arranged for her, as well. She went back to putting words down on the notepad. She did not have to speak, just will them, and the sentences wrote themselves.

  My dear child, these are among the questions that will pester you, in time. They will come to you at night and whisper, troubling your sleep.

  Do not worry much, or hasten to confront them. They are not ghosts, come to haunt you. Dream sweetly. There are no ghosts, just memories.

  It wasn't fashionable, what she was attempting—to reach across the parsecs and make contact. At best it would be tenuous, this communication by long-distance letter. Yet, who had better proof that it was possible to build bridges across a macrocosm?

  You have inherited much that you shall need, she went on reciting. I was just a vessel, passing on gifts I received, as you will pass them on in turn, should selection also smile on you.

  Isola lifted her head. Stars and nebulae glittered beyond Tenembro's dark refraction, as they did in that universe she had been privileged to glimpse through the dark nought—the offspring firmament that so resembled this one.

  As DNA coded for success in life-forms, so did rules of nature—fields and potentials, the finely balanced constants—carry through from generation to generation of universes, changing subtly, varying to some degree, but above all programmed to prosper.

  Black holes are eggs. That was the facile metaphor. Just as eggs carry forward little more than chromosomes, yet bring about effective chickens, all a singularity has to carry through is the rules. All that follows is but consequence.

  The implications were satisfying.

  There is no more mystery where we come from. Those cosmos whose traits lead to forming stars of the right kind—stars which go supernova, then collapse into great noughts—those are the cosmos which have "young." Young that carry on those traits, or else have no offspring of their own.

  It was lovely to contemplate, and coincidentally also explained why she was here to contemplate it!

  While triggering one kind of birth, by collapsing inward, supernovas also seed through space the elements needed to make planets, and beings like me.

  At first, that fact would seem incidental, almost picayune.

  Yet I wonder if somehow that's not selected for, as well. Perhaps it is how universes evolve self-awareness. Or even . . .

  Isola blinked, and smiled ruefully to see if she had been subvocalizing all along, with the notepad faithfully transcribing her disordered thoughts. Interesting stuff, but not exactly the right phrases to send across light-years to a little girl.

  Ah, well. She would rewrite the letter many times before finishing the special antenna required for its sending. By the time the long wait for a reply was over, her daughter might have grown up and surpassed her in all ways.

  I hope so, Isola thought. Perhaps the universe, too, has some heart, some mind somewhere, which can feel pride. Which can know its offspring thrive, and feel hope.

  Someday, in several hundred billion years or so, long after the last star had gone out, the great crunch, the Omega, would arrive. All the ash and cinders of those galaxies out there—and the quarks and leptons in her body—would hurtle together then to put "finis" on the long epic of this singularity she dwelled within, paying off a quantum debt incurred so long ago.

  By then, how many daughter universes would this one have spawned? How many cousins must already exist in parallel somewhere, in countless perpendicular directions?

  There is no more mystery where we come from. Had she really thought that, only a few moments ago? For a brief time she had actually been satiated. But hers was not a destiny to ever stop asking the next question.

  How far back does the chain stretch? Isola wondered, catching the excitement of a new wonder. If our universe spawns daughters, and it came, in turn, from an earlier mother, then how far back can it be traced?

  Trillions of generations of universes, creating black holes which turn into new universes, each spanning trillions of years? All the way back to some crude progenitor universe? To the simplest cosmos possible with rules subtle enough for reproduction, I suppose.

  From that point forward, selection would have made improvements each generation. But in the crude beginning . . .

  Isola thought about the starting point of this grand chain. If laws of nature could evolve, just like DNA, mustn't there exist some more basic law, down deep, that let it all take place? Could theologians then fall back on an ultimate act of conscious Creation after all, countless megacreations ago? Or was that first universe, primitive and unrefined, a true, primeval accident?

  Either answer begged the question. Accident or Creation . . . in what context? In what setting? What conditions held sway before that first ancestor universe, that forerunner genesis, allowing it to start?

  Her letter temporarily forgotten, with mere galaxies as backdrop, Isola began sketching outlines of a notion of a plan.

  Possible experiments.

  Ways to seek what might have caused the primal cause.

  What had been before it all began.

  OTHERNESS

  The final essay of this volume has been edited from a transcribed talk I gave on February 14, 1989, at Brigham Young University. It concludes my series of wild speculations on a topic I find endlessly fascinating—Otherness.

  The Commonwealth of Wonder

  I earn my living as a writer. In other words, as a magician, shaman, metaphorist. By chant and incantation—and with the active collaboration of my clients, the readers—I create images, characters, alternate realities in other minds. It is an ancient, venerable profession. All tribes have had storytellers, who wove legends round the campfire. My specialty involves epics not about long ago, but about times and places yet to come. It attempts to weave realistic might-bes, and vivid might-have-beens. Above all, it is the literature of change.

  These are bold days for such a genre, since change is the very fabric of our time. If today's modern "priesthood" consists of scientists, we SF authors are like those wild-eyed folk in hair shirts who once stood outside the Temple gates, performing tricks and dazzling the crowds, generally tole
rated by the official guardians of wisdom, for astute priests understand that people need myths, as well.

  In fact, the best of today's scientists seem to enjoy reading far-out, speculative tales. Perhaps they, too, like to be taken far away now and then, exploring possibilities that require no proof, only plausibility. Having worked on both sides, both inside the Temple and out, I can say that, for all their differences, science and science fiction have something deep in common. You might call it a shared frame of reference . . . a new and different way of looking at the world.

  I alluded to this worldview in earlier essays. Now I want to look one more time at the Dogma of Otherness.

  Consider the following statement:

  Subjective reality is what I see and experience; objective reality is what's really out there. They aren't necessarily the same thing.

  In other words, I look through my eyes and see only a version of the world, a version that can be, and often is, colored or twisted by what I want to see. Another person may witness the same events and yet observe something entirely different.

  This is the first of two ideas on which I believe Otherness is based, and to a modern reader it probably sounds pretty obvious. Who among us hasn't noticed the effect of subjectivity in daily life? The illusions others are prone to, and those (if we are honest about it) that we ourselves nurture or allow? In fact, awareness of this problem has been around for a long time. Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha, and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same message—that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty in an imperfect world. That one can never know complete truth about physical reality via our senses alone. Much is made of the differences between their systems . . . Socrates teaching reason, Buddha urging meditation, and Jesus prescribing faith. But what they all had in common was far more important. Each of those sage-prophets worried that the power of human egotism tends to make each of us lie to ourselves, leading to error, hypocrisy, and all too often the rationalizing of evil actions.

  Moreover, each of these great savants offered a variant on the same cure.

  "Give up," they preached. "Don't bother trying to figure out how the flawed world works. Perfect knowledge is to be found only within the mind, the soul. Seek your own private salvation, then, apart from the world, and don't bother getting your hands dirty trying to piece together the nuts and bolts of God's handiwork."

  Before Galileo very few philosophers in any culture dared question this near-universal, dualist mysticism, which almost always was accompanied by top-heavy hierarchies of magicians, shamans, priests, or art critics. Only from time to time would a rebel dare counter:

  "Hey, I may not ever be able to be certain what is absolutely True . . . but I sure as heck can work to find out what isn't! Moreover, I can improve my model of the world by slowly, carefully finding out what is truer than what I already knew."

  In other words, by slowly, carefully testing the things you and others believe, through a process of elimination, you can falsify, get rid of, a lot of wrong ideas—even ones you cherished—until the resulting picture, imperfect as it is, lets you see the world a little more clearly than before.

  This is the second half of the declaration, the manifesto, of a new revolution—one that began to take hold only a couple of centuries ago and is still tentative, uncertain, incomplete, yet has already achieved incredible wonders. To the problem of imperfect knowledge it suggests a new and unprecedented solution—honest work.

  To come close to what's really going on, I must learn to double-check, to experiment, and even to consult and cooperate with other people. Mutual deliberation, or giving of "reality checks," helps us agree on common ground, and criticism is the only anodyne human beings have ever discovered against error.

  It has always taken great wisdom, maturity, and force of will to overcome ingrained human egotism and say—"Hey, I can fool myself! I might even be wrong, from time to time."

  But it has taken an even more remarkable revolution for people to be able to add—"Instead of retreating into ourselves, let's try taking the problem apart into little pieces, see where I'm wrong, where you're wrong, and where we both may wind up being surprised."

  NUTS AND BOLTS

  I should pause for a moment to explain something that may have perplexed you. Yes, I did lump faith and reason together a little while ago. There is a hoary notion that the two mental systems are essential foes, forever in opposition, but this is not so. Any thoughtful scientist will tell you that reason is just another type of faith. You scribble down a scenario on paper—as Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, Marx, and Freud all did—and convince yourself, after a lot of "ifs" and "therefores," that something must be so.

  After all, can't you prove things on paper . . . in mathematics?

  In fact, mathematicians are considered the idiots-savant of the scientific family—because they actually believe in logical "proofs." Mathematics is certainly the most brilliant, accurate, and useful metaphor-generating system ever conceived. It contains systems to check for self-consistency, so that most flaws are weeded out before publication. Yet even the most elegant theorem must be tested against reality or remain a nebulous thing. A curiosity. Just another pretty incantation.

  In other words, mathematicians are shamans, too.

  Reason can be just another form of faith—a tower of words or symbols that seem to demonstrate what you wanted to prove, forgetting that in other hands the same tools can be used to show opposite conclusions. Take the famed philosopher, René Descartes, who decided to throw out everything he knew and start from scratch—then proceeded, step by painstaking step, to logically "prove" all of the premises and prejudices he had started out with! When you have an ideology or theory that ought to be true, it takes great strength of character to overcome the very human desire to believe your own spell-weaving, and instead allow others to test the edifice you've created. Testing it against the possibility of being wrong.

  Fitfully, hesitantly, we have begun preaching this lesson to our youth—especially those entering science—yet it is a hard standard to live up to. To a surprising degree the new priesthood manages to work by this new code, but the siren call of egotism and self-righteousness can never be escaped. It resonates within our Cro-Magnon skulls, ever beckoning us back toward the narcissistic joys of magic.

  Today one hears fundamentalists—those preaching a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis—attacking so-called secular humanism by claiming it is "just another religion." Meanwhile they promulgate what they call "Creation Science." The irony of this implied compliment—that science is more trustworthy than older ways of knowing—seems to escape notice by both sides in the public debate.

  The same people proclaim that "evolution is just a theory." And, of course, we know that all theories are equal, yes?

  Cultural Relativism, a myth springing up at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Creation-ism, also proclaims not only that all ideas have equal value, but that no worldview or culture has any better inkling what is going on than any other. That there is no such thing as good or bad, right or wrong . . . only an amorphous sea of relativity, with every concept mutually exchangeable. The only thing valid is individual aesthetics. A repackaging, in other words, of the same old prescription—a retreat to the inner world.

  But all theories aren't equal! Human thought thrives on competition among ideas. Some are disproved and go deservedly to the dustbin. Meanwhile, others graduate to become models of the world. Anyone can come up with a metaphor or notion, but a model of the world offers consistent explanations for what people see going on around them.

  More important, a valid model goes on to make testable predictions.

  Most first-rate scientific papers end with a statement saying, in effect: "If this wonderful theory of mine is true, so-and-so will be discovered in this-and-such experiment. On the other hand, my theory will be disproved if trials X or Y show contrary results."

  That's the way it works, and not just
in science. It is also how honest men and women live their lives. If you believe in something, then by all means try to prove it, even convince others. But always leave room for the possibility that someone else may prove you wrong.

  What about these so-called "models of the world," then?

  The name could be applied to any theory that best describes the universe at a given time. Call it a monarch among theories, for as we said before, all ideas are not equal. In any month or year, in any subject area, one description is usually the leader—generally the one with the fewest inconsistencies and the best accumulated evidence to back it up.

  In science no model lasts forever. Leading theories are rewarded by becoming prime targets! More experiments are aimed at testing them than any others. Even if a model survives trial after trial, it inevitably changes in the process. Usually, these new versions are incremental improvements rather than rejections, as Darwin's concepts have matured during the century since his death, while retaining their basic validity. But revolutions are also known to happen. Plate tectonics did not start out as the Best Model in geology. It won its place after a long process of criticism, successful predictions, and comparison to evidence.