Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Arsibalt returned to the kitchen. “Paphlagon doesn’t want me. He wants you.”

  “Why would he want me?” I asked.

  “I can’t be sure,” Arsibalt said, “but I was chatting with him yesterday and mentioned some of the conversations you had with Orolo.”

  “Oh. Thanks a lot!”

  “So pick the shrapnel out of your teeth and get in there!”

  And that was how I came to spend the entire main course recounting my two Ecba dialogs with Orolo: the first about how, according to him, consciousness was all about the the rapid and fluent creation of counterfactual worlds inside the brain, and the second in which he argued that this was not merely possible, not merely plausible, but in fact easy, if one thought of consciousness as spanning an ensemble of slightly different versions of the brain, each keeping track of a slightly different cosmos. Paphlagon ended up saying it better: “If Hemn space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness is a spot of light moving, like a searchlight beam, over that landscape—brightly illuminating a set of points—of cosmi—that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges. In the bright center of the beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain. Fewer contributions come in from the half-lit periphery, and none from the shadows beyond.”

  I gratefully stepped back against the wall, trying to fade into some shadows myself.

  “I am indebted to Fraa Erasmas for allowing us to sit and eat, when so often we must interrupt our comestion with actual talk,” Lodoghir finally said. “Perhaps we ought to trade places and allow the servitors to sit and eat in silence while they are lectured by doyns!”

  Barb cackled. He had lately been showing more and more relish for Lodoghir’s wit, furnishing me with the disturbing insight that perhaps Lodoghir was just a Barb who had become old. But after a moment’s reflection I rejected such a miserable idea.

  Lodoghir continued, “I’d like you to know that I fully took up Paphlagon’s earlier point about using consciousness as the laboratory for observing the so-called Hylaean Flow. But is this the best we can do? It is nothing more than a regurgitation of Evenedrician datonomy in its most primitive form!”

  “I spent two years at Baritoe writing a treatise on Evenedrician datonomy,” mentioned Ignetha Foral, sounding more amused than angry.

  I got out of the room, which seemed more politic than laughing out loud. Back in the kitchen, I poured myself a drink and braced my arms on a counter, taking a load off my feet.

  “Are you all right?” Karvall asked. She and I were the only servitors in the room.

  “Just tired—that took a lot out of me.”

  “Well, I thought you spoke really well—for what that’s worth.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “it’s worth a lot, actually.”

  “Grandsuur Moyra says we are doing something now.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She believes that the messal is on the verge of coming up with new ideas instead of just talking about old ones.”

  “Well, that’s really something, from such a distinguished Lorite!”

  “It’s all because of the PAQD, she says. If they hadn’t come and brought new givens, it might never have happened.”

  “Well, my friend Jesry will be pleased to hear it,” I said. “He’s wanted it all his life.”

  “What have you wanted all your life?” Karvall asked.

  “Me? I don’t know. To be as smart as Jesry, I guess.”

  “Tonight, you were as smart as anyone,” she said.

  “Thanks!” I said. “If that’s true, it’s all because of Orolo.”

  “And because you were brave.”

  “Some would call it stupid.”

  If I hadn’t had that conversation with Ala at breakfast, I’d probably be falling in love with Karvall about now. But I was pretty sure Karvall wasn’t in love with me—just stating facts as she saw them. To stand here and receive compliments from an attractive young woman was quite pleasant, but it was of a whole lesser order of experience from the continuous finger-in-an-electrical-socket buzz that I experienced during even brief interactions with Ala.

  I ought to have volleyed some compliments back, but I was not brave in that moment. The Lorites had a kind of grandeur that intimidated. Their elaborate style—shaving the head, performing hours of knotwork just to get dressed—was, I knew, a way of showing respect for those who had gone before, of reminding themselves, every day, just how much work one had to do to get up to speed and be competent to sift new ideas from old. But my knowing that symbolism didn’t make Karvall any more approachable.

  We were distracted by Zh’vaern’s strangely inflected voice on the speaker: “Because of the way we Matarrhites keep to ourselves, not even Suur Moyra might have heard of him we honor as Saunt Atamant.”

  “I don’t recognize the name,” Moyra said.

  “He was, to us, the most gifted and meticulous introspectionist who ever lived.”

  “Introspectionist? Is that some sort of a job title within your Order?” Lodoghir asked, not unkindly.

  “It might as well be,” Zh’vaern returned. “He devoted the last thirty years of his life to looking at a copper bowl.”

  “What was so special about this bowl?” asked Ignetha Foral.

  “Nothing. But he wrote, or rather dictated, ten treatises explaining all that went on in his mind as he gazed on it. Much of it has the same flavor as Orolo’s meditations on counterfactuals: how Atamant’s mind filled in the unseen back surface of the bowl with suppositions as to what it must look like. From such thoughts he developed a metatheorics of counterfactuals and compossibility that, to make a long story short, is perfectly compatible with all that was said during our first messal about Hemn space and worldtracks. He made the assertion that all possible worlds really existed and were every bit as real as our own. This caused many to dismiss him as a lunatic.”

  “But that is precisely what the polycosmic interpretation is positing,” said Suur Asquin.

  “Indeed.”

  “What of our second evening’s discussion? Has Saunt Atamant anything to say about that?”

  “I have been thinking about that very hard. You see, nine of his treatises are mostly about space. Only one is about time, but it is considered harder to read than the other nine put together! But if there is applicability of his work to the Hylaean Flow, it is hidden somewhere in the Tenth Treatise. I re-read it last night; this was my Lucub.”

  “And what did Atamant’s copper bowl tell him of time?” Lodoghir asked.

  “I should tell you first that he was knowledgeable about theorics. He knew that the laws of theorics were time-reversible, and that the only way to determine the direction of time’s arrow was to measure the amount of disorder in a system. The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue—records that tell a consistent story.”

  “We have heard of these records before,” Ignetha Foral pointed out. “They are essential to the Hemn space picture.”

  “Yes, Madame Secretary, but now let me add something new. It is rather well encapsulated by the thought experiment of the flies, bats, and worms. We don’t give our consciousness sufficient credit for its ability to take in noisy, ambiguous, contradictory givens from the senses, and sort it out: to say ‘this pattern of givens equals the copper bowl that is in front of me now and that was in front of me a moment ago,’ to confer thisness on what we perceive. I know you may feel uncomfortable with religious language, but it seems miraculous that our consciousness can do this.”

  “But absolutely necessary from an evolutionary standpoint,” Lodoghir pointed out.

  “To be sure! But none the less remarkable for that. Th
e ability of our consciousness to see—not just as a speelycaptor sees (by taking in and recording givens) but identifying things—copper bowls, melodies, faces, beauty, ideas—and making these things available to cognition—that ability, Atamant said, is the ultimate basis of all rational thought. And if consciousness can identify copper-bowlness, why can’t it identify isosceles-triangleness, or Adrakhonic-theoremness?”

  “What you are describing is nothing more than pattern recognition, and then assigning names to patterns,” Lodoghir said.

  “So the Syntactics would say,” replied Zh’vaern. “But I would say that you have it backwards. You Procians have a theory—a model—of what consciousness is, and you make all else subordinate to it. Your theory becomes the ground of all possible assertions, and the processes of consciousness are seen as mere phenomena to be explained in the terms of that theory. Atamant says that you have fallen into the error of circular reasoning. You cannot develop your grounding theory of consciousness without making use of the power consciousness has of seizing on and conferring thisness on givens, and so it is incoherent and circular for you to then employ that theory to explain the fundamental workings of consciousness.”

  “I understand Atamant’s point,” Lodoghir said, “but by making such a move, does he not exile himself from rational theoric discourse? This power of consciousness takes on a sort of mystical status—it can’t be challenged or examined, it just is.”

  “On the contrary, nothing could be more rational than to begin with what is given, with what we observe, and ask ourselves how we come to observe it, and investigate it in a thorough and meticulous style.”

  “Let me ask it this way, then: what results was Atamant able to deliver by following this program?”

  “Once he made the decision to proceed in this way, he made a few false starts, went up some blind alleys. But the nub of it is this: consciousness is enacted in the physical world, on physical equipment—”

  “Equipment?” Ignetha Foral asked sharply.

  “Nerve tissue, or perhaps some artificial device of similar powers. The point being that it has what the Ita would call hardware. Yet Atamant’s premise is that consciousness itself, not the equipment, is the primary reality. The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time. The story is long and winding, but eventually he found a fruitful line of inquiry rooted in the polycosmic interpretation of quantum mechanics. He quite reasonably applied this premise to his favorite topic—”

  “The copper bowl?” Lodoghir asked.

  “The complex of consciousness-phenomena that amounted to his perception of a copper bowl,” Zh’vaern corrected him, “and proceeded to explain it within that framework.” And Zh’vaern—uncharacteristically talkative this evening—proceeded to give us a calca summarizing Atamant’s findings on the copper bowl. As he’d warned us, this had much in common with the dialogs I’d been reporting on a few minutes earlier, and led to the same basic conclusion. As a matter of fact, it was so repetitive that I wondered, at first, why he bothered with it, unless it was just to show off what a smart fellow Atamant was, and score one for the Matarrhite team. As a servitor, I was free to come and go. Zh’vaern eventually worked his way around to the assertion, which we’d heard before, that crosstalk among different cosmi around the time that their worldtracks diverged was routinely exploited by consciousness-bearing systems.

  Lodoghir said, “Please explain something to me. I was under the impression that the kind of crosstalk you are speaking of could only occur between two cosmi that were exactly the same except for a difference in the quantum state of one particle.”

  “We can testify to that much,” said Moyra, “because the situation you’ve just described is just the sort of thing that is studied in laboratory experiments. It is relatively easy to build an apparatus that embodies that kind of scenario—‘does the particle have spin up or spin down,’ ‘does the photon pass through the left slit or the right slit,’ and so on.”

  “Well, that’s a relief!” Lodoghir said. “I was afraid you were about to claim that this crosstalk was the same thing as the Hylaean Flow.”

  “I believe that it is,” Zh’vaern said. “It has to be.”

  Lodoghir looked affronted. “But Suur Moyra has just finished explaining that the only form of inter-cosmic crosstalk for which we have experimental evidence is that in which the two cosmi are the same except for the state of one particle. The Hylaean Flow, according to its devotees, joins cosmi that are altogether different!”

  “If you look at the world through a straw, you will only see a tiny bit of it,” Paphlagon said. “The kinds of experiments that Moyra spoke of are all perfectly sound—better than that, they are magnificent, in their way—but they only tell us of single-particle systems. If we could devise better experiments, we could presumably observe new phenomena.”

  Fraa Jad threw his napkin on the table and said: “Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.”

  Silence except for the sound of Arsibalt chalking that one down on the wall. I slipped into the messallan.

  “Would you be so kind as to unpack that statement?” Suur Asquin finally said. Glancing at Arsibalt’s handiwork, she said, “To begin with, what do you mean by amplifying weak signals?”

  Fraa Jad looked as if he hardly knew where to begin, and couldn’t be bothered, but Moyra was game: “The ‘signals’ are the interactions between cosmi that account for quantum effects. If you don’t agree with the polycosmic interpretation, you must find some other explanation for those effects. But if you do agree with it, then, to make it compatible with what we have long known about quantum mechanics, you must buy into the premise that cosmi interfere with each other when their worldtracks are close together. If you restrict yourself to one particular cosmos, this crosstalk may be interpreted as a signal—a rather weak one, since it only concerns a few particles. If those particles are in an asteroid out in the middle of nowhere, it hardly matters. But when those particles happen to be at certain critical locations in the brain, why, then, the ‘signals’ can end up altering the behavior of the organism that is animated by that brain. That organism, all by itself, is vastly larger than anything that could normally be influenced by quantum interference. When one considers societies of such organisms that endure across long spans of time and in some cases develop world-altering technologies, one sees the meaning of Fraa Jad’s assertion that consciousness amplifies the weak signals that web cosmi together.”

  Zh’vaern had been nodding vigorously: “This tallies with some Atamant that I was reading yesterday evening. Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings—something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies. This is how we get from a solipsistic world—one that is perceived by, and real to, only one subject—to the intersubjective world—the one where I can be certain that you see the copper bowl and that the thisness you attach to it harmonizes with mine.”

  “Thank you, Suur Moyra and Fraa Zh’vaern,” said Ignetha Foral. “Assuming that Fraa Jad will maintain his gnomic ways, would you or anyone else care to take a crack at the second part of what he said?”

  “I should be delighted to,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “since Fraa Jad is sounding more and more Procian every time he opens his mouth!” This earned Lodoghir a lot of attention, which he reveled in for a few moments before going on: “By selective amplification, I believe Fraa Jad is saying that not all inter-cosmic crosstalk gets amplified—only some of it. To cite Suur Moyra’s example, crosstalk affecting elementary particles in a rock in deep space has no effect.”

  “No extraordinary ef
fect,” Paphlagon corrected him, “no unpredictable effect. But, mind you, it accounts for everything about that rock: how it absorbs and re-radiates light, how its nuclei decay, and so on.”

  “But it all sort of averages out statistically, and you can’t really tell one rock from another,” Lodoghir said.

  “Yes.”

  “The point being that the only crosstalk capable of being amplified by consciousness is that affecting nerve tissue.”

  “Or any other consciousness-bearing system,” Paphlagon said.

  “So there is a highly exclusive selection process at work to begin with in that, of all the crosstalk going on in a given instant between our cosmos and all the other cosmi that are sufficiently close to it to render such crosstalk possible, the stupefyingly enormous preponderance of it is only affecting rocks and other stuff that is not complex enough to respond to that crosstalk in a way we’d consider interesting.”

  “Yes,” Paphlagon said.

  “Let us then confine our discussion to the infinitesimally small fraction of the crosstalk that happens to impinge on nerve tissue. As I’ve just finished saying, this already gives us selectivity.” Lodoghir nodded at the slate. “But, whether or not Fraa Jad intended to, he has opened the door to another kind of selection procedure that may be at work here. Our brains receive these ‘signals,’ yes. But they are more than passive receivers. They are not merely crystal radios! They compute. They cogitate. The outcomes of those cogitations can by no means be easily predicted from their inputs. And those outcomes are the conscious thoughts that we have, the decisions we put into effect, our social interactions with other conscious beings, and the behavior of societies down through the ages.”

  “Thank you, Fraa Lodoghir,” said Ignetha Foral, and turned to scan the slate again. “And would anyone care to tackle ‘feedback loops’?”