by Exurb1a
I am quite certain that was the beach you were after, hummingbird. And what treasure were you digging for there? As one of your papers says:
We currently codify the world in terms of natural law acting on matter. In fact, with the logical structure of corporeality understood, we may find that natural law and matter are just axiomatic expressions of a single substance, or of the property of fundamental geometry. Function and form would no longer be distinct. To that end, the starting conditions of the universe might be just as self-evident and unalterable as the three-sidedness of triangles.
No, you wanted to say to Einstein. God had no choice in how he created the world, and if he did it again a million times over, started from scratch each time, the universe would develop in this fashion a million times over. These same forces would govern it, these same particles would comprise it, and their interactions would unfold in the same manner. 'Why does physics work the way it does?' becomes just absurd a question as, 'Why don't circles have corners?' There is no condition under which they could. Nor is there any condition under which matter could appear in any other way.
This leads to another odd avenue. How deep does this all go? Would we get roughly the same type of universe over and over, or exactly the same universe, quality and quantity? This was one of the harder aspects of your work to grasp and it took me a fair while. I think I see it clearly now.
Yes, you said – if God obliterated the universe and began anew, gravity and light and electromagnetism would behave in the same way. They are so deeply rooted in nature (and logic) that it is inevitable. The lonely question though, the one which must have been sending you mad in that lifeguard tower, is whether if God struck the world down now and remade it, and one was patient enough to leave the thing another 14 billion years to bake, would I be sat here again, in these trousers, on a laptop with this serial number, writing the same letter? You were never religious, but I think you came close to spirituality. If logic determines the world that deeply, if it decided at the beginning of the universe that you and I would meet, and screw, and marry, and part like this, then you and I are built into logic as much as a neutrino may well be. Andromeda was predetermined, the Milky Way was baked into the plan at the beginning – the veritable shape of everything. Somewhere deep in your Great Axiom, if you ever did reach it, is the entire course of our lives, beginning to end – regardless of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. (As I recall, you always said the uncertainty principle would be also based in logic anyway.) In your model, the grammar of logic defines the grammar of space and time, and the lives of anything that ever had the audacity to exist. That is what you called “hard logicality”.
We went back to our hotel and drank a beer. I napped for a while and when I came around you were standing on the balcony, looking out over the ocean again.
I like oceans now because of you: mad and churning manifolds of complexity, teeming playgrounds of natural law, of biology, and chemistry, and physics. And all we get of it, all we really see, is whatever washes up and out. It's easy to forget, when picking up a shell or a fragment of sea glass, how long a journey it undertook to reach your hand, the pilgrimage, the currents it has been conveyed by, a life of salt and whimsy and time. But here it is now, on the beach, in your palm; a meteorite from the other direction. Was matter like that, for you? Formed in those initial few moments of time, condensed from energy into an is, flung out into the black, made into suns, pushed about by cosmic currents, by gravity's kiss, and baked finally into solar systems, into deserts, and forests, and fauna, and atmospheres, and us? The tide comes up again, spits out a new piece of sea glass, or a nebula, or a civilisation. Christ knows what else the laws of nature allow for, but the tide will deposit it all on the sand eventually.
And meanwhile Logic continues orchestrating the Everything, the squares on which Nature advances her infinite gambit. She may move diagonally, horizontally and vertically too. But that is the limit of her abilities, in spite of her tenacity. Logic has already set the rules of the game and need not intervene further.
It is almost tragic, knowing what I do now of the inside of your head. There you stood on the balcony, watching the ocean while I watched you, half-asleep. You were staring at eternity. I was staring at your butt.
Feel free to come home at any point. For the cat’s sake. And for mine a bit also.
B x
12.
Argie and The Navigator found themselves in a sort of old-style sapien library, on a sofa. Beyond the window were pulsing galaxies and no sign of ground. Opposite were three chairs.
“Are you quite ready to begin?” said the disembodied woman's voice.
“We're quite ready to leave, actually,” The Navigator said. “There's more of this?”
“That was not the question.”
“Yes, fine then.”
A door opened and three figures shuffled in and introduced themselves. One, dressed in a long white sheet, claimed to be Socrates, the ancient sapien thinker. The next, wearing a flamboyant robe affair, claimed to be Immanuel Kant, the renaissance philosopher. And the last announced herself as Marie Lambert, the legendary 21st century computer scientist.
“You are required to determine which of the participants is a sentient agent, and which is not,” said the female voice. “Two are facsimiles. One is genuinely conscious. You may ask any direct questions you wish.”
“What's the point in this one?” Argie murmured. “First we get cosmic sociology, now pop-philosophy?”
“It's a game,” The Navigator said. “For their entertainment.”
The woman's voice came again, “You are required to determine which of the-”
“Yes, yes,” The Navigator yelled. “Fine.”
All three of the newcomers smiled genially.
“Hello,” Argie said.
“Hi,” the three of them replied in unison.
Argie fixed her eyes on Socrates. “So, how does it feel being conscious?”
He frowned sincerely. “How would it feel not being conscious?” he said.
“Brilliant.” She moved to Kant. “What would you do in this situation?” she said.
He raised a waggling finger. “The action is not of importance. Rather, its universalisation should be allotted the highest consideration.”
“Fucking hell…”
“You,” The Navigator said to Marie Lambert. She perked up. “Are you self-aware?”
“Oh yes,” she beamed.
“Are you capable of lying?”
“Very sophisticatedly, yes.”
“Great.”
They sat in thought a while, staring back at the three bizarre guests.
“What might a sentient agent be capable of that a mere imitation might not?” Kant said helpfully.
The Navigator lit a cigarette. Argie went to the window and stared out at the whirling galaxies. “Do you fear death?” she said.
“Yes,” all three said in unison.
“Are you lying?”
In unison again: “Possibly.”
She glanced over at The Navigator. “You're Indigo, aren't you? How do you lot tell the difference up there between conscious and non-conscious denizens?”
“We don't need to. No one makes noncons or imitations. What's the point?”
“Could we try killing them then? See which ones are afraid and which aren't?”
The Navigator shook his head. “Too easy. The Lemurians are smart. The solution won't be violence.”
Kant produced a pipe and began to smoke.
“It's the woman,” Argie said finally. “It must be. Arcadia couldn't have resurrected the others, there isn't enough leftover material about their personal lives from the Sapien Era.”
“Rubbish, they might not be very close approximations, but still probably close enough.”
“I can assure you I'm the only conscious one here,” Marie Lambert said.
“Me also,” Kant said.
“And I,” Socrates chirped.
�
��All right,” The Navigator said soberly. “Let's reason this one. Is there anything a conscious denizen would know that an imitation wouldn't?”
“No.”
“Fine, then is there a way in which they would react to stimuli that an imitation wouldn't?”
“If the imitation was designed well enough, no.”
He stubbed his cigarette out on the wall. “Well then.”
“Well what?”
He called out to the narrator. “The puzzle is impossible. There is no solution. Each imitation should be treated as a conscious agent since it is impossible to tell the difference when the imitation is sophisticated enough.”
Marie Lambert smiled. “That's very good.” Socrates and Kant vanished, leaving the scientist behind. “The test is not fair of course, an Indigo should know these things anyway, but rules are rules. As a final formality, what is the object of this test?”
The Navigator raised an eyebrow. “Some kind of highbrow metaphor about consciousness inside Arcadia, I expect. The inefficacy of trying to determine sentience past a certain complexity threshold.”
Lambert beamed. “Absolutely correct. It was supposed that any entity capable of high-level conversation must, as it happens, be conscious automatically. We know now, of course, that this is impossible to prove. In fact, above a certain threshold of complexity a system will usually become conscious automatically anyway. Marvellous, no?”
“You're the narrator,” Argie said slowly. “You're the one we've been speaking to.”
“One of my roles here, yes. Primarily though I run the exams.”
“Exams?”
“Preliminary testing, if you will. We've become rather selective about who we allow into Lemuria.”
“And what the hell was the point in what we've just been through?”
“Tests of basic reasoning from first principles. The first was a sociological problem based in pure reason. The second required deductive reasoning to nullify reason itself. Lemuria would not make a great deal of sense to those who cannot complete these simple tasks.”
“Thanks, we think.”
Argie silently ran a search on Marie Lambert. One of the Original Migrants, so Arcadia said. Strange that Argie didn't remember her, but then she remembered nothing of those early days. Lambert had apparently been instrumental in developing some new method of computation. This eventually led the way to the creation of Arcadia itself, and the migration of sapiens inside it. Out of curiosity Argie did some quick research on the actual procedure for entry into Arcadia. When the sapien was dead the brain was removed, sliced into fine sections and scanned with a high-powered electron microscope. No wonder Argie had heard Lambert's name before; she might be considered the mother of Arcadia in some respects. Without Lambert's new computing substrate - the technology primitive as it was - there wouldn't have been enough computational power to support even one scanned sapien selfsense, let alone the trillions that lived inside Arcadia today. Argie's curiosity was piqued suddenly. She had known on some abstract level that the first denizen selfsenses had been constructed from sapien corpses, but now she considered the matter carefully. What in God's name must they have thought, those first minds, waking up in Arcadia? Surely they would have remembered their own deaths?
The thought intensified. Horror began to wash over her.
Presumably she would remember her own death also. Perhaps that was why she had chosen to forget.
More than that, were the sapiens even still alive? She had not considered this in depth before. She did a brief calculation. Over ten thousand years had passed outside of Arcadia, in sapien time. Perhaps they had left the home planet. Or more likely, they had gone extinct. It was impossible to tell in any case. There was no known method of communication between Arcadia and the sapien realm outside. Possibly some high Arcadian official kept contact with the sapiens, if they still existed. The Glass King, for example – if he still existed.
Cautiously she ran a search for Argie in the sapien archives. There were references to royalty and myth, and the name was indeed a common one in some times and cultures, but there was no obvious lead.
She felt not unlike poor Benjamin Hare, stuck in his barbaric century, lovesick and wandering. God, what a thing, to live in that fashion, to just stagger from indignity to indignity, always looking for that Holy Lightswitch by which to illuminate everything, and instead spend a whole life understanding nothing. She recalled his face clearly. The sapien archive was full of material on him, of course. Thousands of photos displayed his progression from childhood to his final days. Argie had often considered reconstructing him from his records, some simple imitation at least. At first it had been for company, to question him on his own era, just to feel slightly superior to someone, even a non-sentient recreation. Then she had wanted other things, to experience lovemaking with a real sapien, to know what he smelled like. She had devoured the letters to his wife from that sad time, read his obituary over and over. What an unlikely lightning rod for history he became.
“You're not a noncon,” Argie said to Lambert.
Lambert shook her head. “In as much as you can be sure, no, I am not a noncon. I'm an Original Migrant like yourselves.”
“Shit…” The Navigator whispered, evidently having run a search on Lambert too and suddenly learning of her celebrity status. “Sorry about the rudeness, we didn't know who you were.”
Lambert shrugged. “It's fine.”
Argie tried to take a diplomatic tone: “Isn't Lemuria made of Arcadian children? What's an Original Migrant doing up here?”
“There are plenty of us originals living in Lemuria these days. It's a little tricky to communicate, but some work is easier to pursue in this tier.”
Argie and The Navigator waited expectantly. Lambert appeared to think about this for a moment, then decided to share a selfsense packet rather than explain whatever it was in clunky speech. The two of them accepted the packet. Knowledge unfolded. Lambert's research, they learned, had largely been into the roots of consciousness: whether there was a threshold systems passed and became immediately self-aware, or if they simply climbed higher on a sliding scale. She had constructed a zoo of at least fifty thousand clones of her own selfsense and modified each in bizarre fashions. From some she removed the language faculty. In other cases she had subjected them to several thousand years of constant suffocation or of suspension above a searing inferno.
“My god…” Argie whispered.
“As I said,” Lambert cooed. “It's tricky to explain.”
“You're up here because the Lemurians have no damn morals, aren't you? No one can stop your research.”
“Young lady,” The Navigator said quietly to Argie. “If you're going to get on your high horse at every strangeness, then we'll never find your daughter. And it's going to get stranger than this, believe me.”
Lambert's face was blank suddenly. The congenial smile had vanished. “I don't expect you to understand.”
Gentle horror washed over Argie a second time. Lambert's pale cheeks and girlish features were undeniably beautiful. She presented somewhere in her late twenties, in sapien years. One could imagine her wearing summer dresses and maintaining a rose garden. Instead she had spent thousands of years torturing copies of herself for some obscure scientific objective. Then Argie understood.
“You're trapped here,” she said. For the first time Lambert actually looked a touch regretful. “The Lemurians do have morals. This is your punishment for torturing clones, administering their entrance exam for them.”
“Greatness is rarely appreciated during the stages of its becoming,” Lambert said quietly to herself.
Argie continued reading through the woman's history. In an extremely rare move the Lemurians had actually come together on a single issue democratically and agreed that Lambert should be stopped. Their main fear, the archive speculated, was that if left unchecked, she might start creating imitations of the Lemurians and subjecting them to the same strange tortures. An e
ntire scape had been constructed to try her publicly. She had defended herself, which was considered an unorthodox move, but then there had never been a public trial in Lemuria before anyway. The first and only Lemurian law was passed, ensuring that no new selfsenses could be constructed, regardless of the purpose.
“Do we get to enter Lemuria properly now?” Argie said.
Lambert's pale face betrayed a hint of difficulty for a moment. “Normally there is a third test, a final puzzle involving statistics. On this occasion though time is not on our side.”
“Time?” The Navigator said. “You have all the time in the world here.”
“No, we don't.” The room dissolved and was replaced with an infinite scape of spirals and whirling vortices. In the distance was an unmissable pulsating black sphere, sat at the heart of the strange geometries. “You may consider this a sort of map of Lemuria,” Lambert said. She shot a glance at Argie. “I have simplified it for your extremely limited cognitive capabilities.”
