Communication, leading to “collaboration,” to the rise of a local coalition of new Players, could still take place even in an expanding Universe, if the latter did not also have a built-in barrier for the speed of actions at a distance. Let us imagine a Universe with a Physics that permits an increase in the speed of action propagation in direct proportion to the energy invested. In such a Universe he who has at his command five times the energy of all the others can inform himself five times as rapidly of the state of the others and, with that advantage, deal them decisive blows. In such a Universe the possibility exists to monopolize control over its Physics and over all the other partners of the Game. Such a Universe might be said to encourage rivalry, energy competition, the acquisition of power. Now, in the real Universe, in order to exceed the speed of light one needs energy that is infinitely great: in other words, it is altogether impossible to break that barrier.
And therefore in the real Universe the stockpiling of energy does not pay. The reason behind the asymmetry in the flow of time is similar. If time were reversible and if the reversing of its course could be realized by dint of sufficient investment of resources and power, again it would be possible to dominate one’s partners, in this case through the annulment of their every move. And so, a Universe that does not expand, as well as a Universe without a barrier of speed, and finally a Universe with reversible time, do not allow a full stabilization of the Game. Whereas the whole object was to stabilize it, and stabilize it normatively: to this end do the moves of the Players tend, incorporated into the structure of matter. It is clear, surely, that the preventing of all perturbation and all aggression by an established Physics is a measure far more certain and far more radical than any other means of prophylaxis (for example, the use of laws imposed, of threats, surveillance, coercion, restriction, punishment).
The result is that the Universe constitutes an absorption screen against all who attain that level of the Game where they can become full-fledged participants in it. For they meet with rules to which they must submit. The Players have rendered impossible for themselves semantic communication; they make themselves understood by methods that preclude the breaking of the rules of the Game. The established unity of physics in itself testifies to their mutual agreement. The Players have rendered impossible any effective semantic communication by creating and preserving between themselves such distances that the time taken to acquire strategically operative information about the state of the other Players is always greater than the time of the operativeness of the present tactic of the Game. If, then, one of the Partners were actually to “converse” with his neighbors, he would obtain news invariably out of date, out of date from the moment of its obtainment. Thus, in the Universe there is no opportunity for the formation of antagonistic groupings, for conspiracy, for the establishment of centers of local power, coalitions, collusions, etc. For this reason the Players do not speak to one another; they themselves have prevented it; it was one of the canons of the stabilization of the Game, and therefore of the Cosmogony. This is the explanation of part of the mystery of the Silentium Universi. We cannot listen in on the conversations of the Players because they are silent, silent in keeping with their strategy.
Acheropoulos’s guess was correct. His thoroughness may be seen, in the pages of A New Cosmogony, in his anticipation of objections to this image of the Game. These boil down to pointing out the monstrous disproportion between the billion-year labor that went into the restructuring of the entire Cosmos and the purpose of that restructuring, which is the pacification of the Universe—by means of the Physics built into it. What?—says his imaginary critic—You mean to say that billions of years of cultural development still are insufficient for societies so inconceivably long-lived to renounce, of their own accord, all forms of aggression, and that, therefore, the Pax Cosmica must be guaranteed by Laws of Nature remodeled for that express purpose? You mean to say that an endeavor that is measured in energies exceeding many millions of Galaxies at once has as its goal nothing but the institution of barriers and restrictions to military activity? To this Acheropoulos answered: This type of Physics, which pacified the Universe, was at the time of the birth of the Game a necessity, for there was only one strategy that could make the Universe physically homogeneous; in the opposite case its expanses would have been engulfed in a chaos of blind cataclysms. Conditions of existence were, in the Protouniverse, much harsher than today; life could arise in it only as “the exception to the rule,” and, randomly conceived, it came to random ends. The expanding Metagalaxy; its asymmetrical flow of time; its hierarchical structure—all this had to be determined to begin with; it was the minimum order required to lay the ground for the next operations.
Acheropoulos realized that if that stage of transformations constituted the history of existence, the Players should have before them now some new, far-reaching objectives, and he tried to arrive at these. In this, unfortunately, he had no success. And here we touch upon the hidden lapse in his system. For Acheropoulos strove to grasp the Game not through the reconstruction of its formal structure—i.e., logically—but by putting himself in the shoes of the Players—i.e., psychologically. A man, however, cannot come to know the Players’ psychology, or any more understand their code of ethics; he lacks the data. We cannot picture to ourselves what the Players think, what they feel, what they desire, just as one cannot build a Physics by picturing to oneself what it means for something “to have existence as an electron.”
The existential immanence of a Player is, for us, as much beyond knowing as an electron’s existential immanence. The fact that the electron is a lifeless particle of the processes of matter, and that the Player is an intelligent being, hence—presumably—such as we, has no real significance. I speak of a lapse in Acheropoulos’s system, because at one point in A New Cosmogony Acheropoulos states quite clearly that the motives of the Players cannot be reproduced on the basis of introspection. He knew this, yet still succumbed to the style of thinking that had shaped him, because philosophers attempt first to understand, and then to generalize; for me, however, it was obvious from the start that to create a model of the Game in this way was inadmissible. The “understanding” approach presupposes a view of the whole of the Game from without, that is, from an observation point that does not exist and never will. Intentional action should not be equated with psychological motivation. The ethics of the Players should not be taken into consideration by an analyst of the Game, just as the personal ethics of military leaders need not be considered by the battle historian who studies the strategic logic of front-line moves during a war. The model of the Game is a decisional structure conditioned by the state of the Game and the state of the environment; it is not the resultant vector of the individual codes, values, wants, whims, or norms held by the separate Players. That they play the same Game does not in the least mean that in any other respect they must be similar! They could be no more similar than a man is to a machine when both play chess. Thus, it is entirely possible that there exist Players who are not alive in the biological sense, having arisen in the course of some nonbiological development, and Players, too, who are the synthetic product of an artificially engendered evolution. But considerations of this sort have no rightful place in the theory of the Players.
Acheropoulos’s most troublesome dilemma was the Silentium Universi. His two rules are generally known. The first says that no civilization of a lower order can find the Players, not only because they are silent, but also because their behavior in no way stands out against the cosmic background, and this because it is that very background.
The second rule of Acheropoulos says that the Players do not approach the younger civilizations with communications of a solicitous or advisory nature, because they cannot specifically address such communications, and without an address they do not wish to broadcast. In order to send information to a particular address, one first must know the state in which the addressee finds himself; but this very thing is prevented by the fi
rst principle of the Game, which establishes a barrier to action in time and space. As we know, any information that is acquired—about the state of another civilization—must be a total anachronism at the moment of its reception. In establishing their barriers, the Players thereby made it impossible for themselves to learn the states of other civilizations. On the other hand, the sending of communications without an address, a directionless broadcast, invariably produces more harm than good. Acheropoulos demonstrated this with an experiment. He took two rows of cards; on one he wrote down the latest scientific discoveries of the sixties, on the other, dates of the historical calendar in a hundred-year range (1860–1960). Next, he drew pairs of cards. Pure chance matched up the discoveries with the dates: this was to simulate the directionless sending of information. In truth, such a transmission hardly ever is of positive value to the receiver. In most cases, the arriving communication is either unintelligible (the theory of relativity in 1860), or unusable (the theory of lasers in 1878), or outright harmful (the theory of atomic energy in 1939). Therefore, the Players maintain their silence, because—according to Acheropoulos—they wish the younger civilizations well.
Such a line of reasoning brings in ethics and is therefore no longer sound. The assertion that a civilization must become more perfect ethically the more developed it is instrumentally and scientifically, immediately is introduced into the theory of the Game from the outside. But the theory of the Cosmogonic Game cannot be so constructed. Either the Silentium Universi follows inescapably from the structure of the Game, or the very existence of the Game must be called into question. Ad hoc hypotheses cannot save its credibility.
Acheropoulos was well aware of this. The problem vexed him far more than the total neglect that he had suffered. He adds, to the “moral hypothesis,” others, but no number of weak hypotheses can substitute for one that is strong. At this point I must speak about myself. What did I contribute as a continuator of Acheropoulos? My theory derives from Physics and ends in Physics, but does not itself belong to Physics. Obviously, had it resulted only in the Physics from which I derived it, it would have been a worthless exercise in tautology.
The physicist, to date, has conducted himself like a man observing moves on a chessboard who knows already how each piece works but does not think that the moves of the pieces are tending toward any goal. The Cosmogonic Game proceeds differently from that of chess, for in it the rules change—that is, the manner of the moves, and the pieces themselves, and the board. This is why my theory is not a reconstruction of the entire Game as it has transpired since its inception, but only of its final part. My theory is but a fragment of the whole, and therefore something like a re-creation, based on an observation of chess, of the principle of a gambit. He who has acquainted himself with the principle of a gambit knows that a valuable piece is sacrificed in order that something yet more valuable be gained later on, but he may not necessarily know that the highest gain of all is mate. From the Physics we have at our disposal it is impossible to educe a coherent structure of the Game—or of even a part of it. It was only when I had followed Acheropoulos’s intuition of genius and made the assumption that our present Physics needed to be “completed” that I was able to reconstruct the general lines of the play in progress. My procedure was heretical in the extreme, because science’s first premise is the thesis that the world comes “ready-made” and “finished” in its laws, whereas I was assuming that our present Physics represented a transitional stage on the way to particular transformations.
The so-called universal constants are not constant. Boltzmann’s constant, specifically, is not invariable. This means that although the end state of every initial order in the Universe must be disorder, the rate of increase in chaos may nevertheless be subject to changes brought about by the Players. It would appear (this is merely a supposition, not a deduction from the theory!) that the Players produced the asymmetry of time by a fairly brutal measure, as if they had been “in a hurry” (on the cosmic scale, of course). The brutality lies in their having made the gradient of increasing entropy extremely steep. They used the strong tendency of disorder to increase to institute in the Universe a single order. If, since that time, everything goes from harmony to disharmony, the model as a whole proves to be unified, subject to a common principle and thereby brought into general accord.
That the processes of the microworld are in principle reversible has been known for some time. Now follows a most remarkable thing: theoretically, if the energy that Earth’s science invests in elementary-particle research were to be multiplied 1019 times, that research as a discovering of the state of things would turn into a changing of that state! Instead of examining the laws of Nature we would be imperceptibly altering them.
This is a sore point, an Achilles heel in the Physics of the present Universum. The microworld currently is the main arena of the Players’ construction activity. They have rendered it unstable and control it in a certain way. It seems to me that a certain portion of Physics, already stabilized, they have to some extent loosened again from its moorings. They are making revisions, they are putting laws now moribund back into service. This is the reason they maintain their silence, which is a “strategic quiet.” They inform none of the “outsiders” of what they are doing, or even of the very fact of the Game. A knowledge of the existence of the Game, after all, places all of Physics in an altogether different light. The Players say nothing so as to avoid unwanted disturbances and interventions, and no doubt they will persevere in this silence until the conclusion of their labors. How long will the Silentium Universi last? This we do not know; I would guess at least a hundred million years.
And so the Universe finds itself at a crossroads. Toward what do the Players aim with this monumental reconstruction? We do not know this, either. Our theory shows only that Boltzmann’s constant will diminish, along with other constants, until it acquires a certain specific value that is necessary to the Players—but necessary for what, we do not know. We are like one who, understanding at last the principle of a gambit, fails to grasp the purpose served by such an operation in the entirety of the chess game. What I am going to say next goes quite beyond the frontier of our knowledge. We have a true embarrassment of riches in the wide variety of hypotheses that have been put forth over the last few years. The Brooklyn group of Professor Bowman holds that the Players wish to close up the “rift of the reversibility of phenomena” which yet “remains” within the pale of matter, in the domain of the elementary particles. Some contend that the weakening of the entropy gradients has as its goal the Universe’s improved adaptedness for the phenomena of life, and even that the Players are working for the “psychozoicization” of the entire Cosmos. These are, in my opinion, hypotheses bold to an excess, particularly in their resemblance to certain anthropocentric ideas.
The notion that the whole Universe is evolving so as to become “one great Intelligence,” so as to “imbue itself with mind,” is a leitmotif of many different philosophies, and of many religious faiths of the past. Professor Ben-Nour has expressed the opinion, in his Intentional Cosmogony, that several of the Players nearest Earth (one of which may be located in the Andromeda Nebula) have not coordinated their moves optimally, and hence Earth remains in a sector of “physics oscillation”; this would mean that the theory of the Game does not at all reflect the tactics of the Players at the present stage, but only a local, rather random recess of it. A certain popularizer has claimed that the Earth finds itself in a region of “conflict”: two neighboring Players have undertaken a form of “guerrilla warfare” through the “Covert Alteration of the Laws of Physics,” and this accounts for the changes in Boltzmann’s constant.
The thesis that the Players are “weakening” the Second Law of Thermodynamics is currently very much in vogue. In connection with this, I consider interesting the view of Academician A. Slysz, who in his paper “Logic and the New Cosmogony” (“Logika i Novaya Kosmogoniya”) draws attention to the ambiguity of the interrelati
on between Physics and Logic. It is quite possible—says Slysz—that the Universe with a weakened tendency to entropy would give rise to very large information systems that would turn out to be very stupid. It seems likely, in the light of the work of several young mathematicians, that the changes in Physics already carried out by the Players have led to changes in mathematics, or—more precisely—to a transformation in the constructibility of noncontradictory systems in the formal sciences. From such a standpoint it is not far to the thesis that Godel’s famous proof, contained in his essay “Uber die unentscheidbaren Sätze der formalen Systeme,” showing the limits of perfection attainable in system mathematics, is not valid universally—i.e., “for all possible Universes”—but holds only for the Universe in its present state. (And even that once upon a time, say, half a billion years ago, Godel’s proof could not have been drawn, because then the laws governing the constructibility of mathematical systems were different from what they are today.)
I must confess that, much as I understand the motivation of those who now are coming forward with their various suppositions concerning the goals of the Game, the intentions of the Players, the main values supposedly adhered to by Them, and so forth, still I am at the same time made rather uneasy by the inaccuracy or even the misleading nature of a good many such (often frivolous) suppositions. Some people now see the Universe in the likeness of an apartment, which may have its furniture rearranged in a moment or two, to suit the tenants. Such a cavalier attitude to the laws of Physics, to the laws of Nature, cannot be taken seriously. The tempo of the actual transformations is, within the scope of our lives, incredibly slow. From which follows, I hasten to add, not a blessed thing relating to the nature of the Players themselves, such as their alleged longevity or outright immortality. On this head, too, nothing is known. Perhaps, as has been written, the Players are not actually living beings, that is, of biological origin; perhaps the members of the First Civilizations in general (and this, from time immemorial) do not attend to the Game themselves but have instead handed it over to enormous automata of some sort—the helmsmen of the Cosmogony. Perhaps a great many of the Protocivilizations that initiated the Game are no longer, and their role is being carried out by self-acting systems, and these make up a percentage of the Partners of the Game. All this may be, but to such questions we will obtain an answer neither in a year nor, I believe, in a hundred.
A Perfect Vacuum Page 23