by Toh EnJoe
Both electronic and human brains, which have gone to extreme lengths in their pursuit of the use of smaller and smaller elements in the interest of speed, have stumbled upon the powerful tool known as quantum calculation. However, neither has been able to get past the notion of algorithm. They pursue higher speeds through parallel computing, but there are limits to how far this can go.
That is, unless you can imagine calculating without a calculation process.
“But such a process exists!”
It was L’Abbé C, builder of the greatest electronic brain of his time, who declared exactly that, with childish insouciance. “The progression of this instant, right now, is itself a calculation being made by natural phenomena!”
These exclamations by L’Abbé C have been the cause of some mirth, but now we know how close to the truth he was.
If we suppose this world is all inside some prosthetic brain, the clock-count of the prosthetic brain—to the extent the prosthetic brain itself is aware of it—may determine the limit of the speed of calculations in this world. Calculations occurring in the prosthetic brain have an inherent redundancy, because they are calculated in an electronic brain set up within the electronic brain. This is comparable to the redundancy that exists for “computers” that exist within what we call “nature.”
In short, it is not possible for calculation speeds to transcend the laws of nature. Now this is known as L’Abbé C’s Thesis.
And, if that is the case, natural phenomena can simply be carried out as calculations. This plan, whatever it might mean, was not first directly undertaken by humans; rather it was the giant corpora of knowledge being constructed at that time in various nations that first pushed this idea toward its manifestation.
Because these corpora were simply large-capacity prosthetic brains with very crude thought processes, and because natural phenomena are not actually calculations, they gave absolutely no thought to the idea that we live in a virtual environment. It is much easier and quicker to drop a rock in the real world than to try to predict the behavior of a rock dropped in a virtual space. Of course it means sacrificing a bit of precision due to the perturbations of the environment, but such problems lend themselves to technical solutions. Based just on their own assumptions as a starting point, the giant corpora of knowledge reached a place untrodden by those who came either before or after.
“And so we became a zephyr, a gentle breeze.”
This, nonchalantly, took over Shikishima’s thoughts.
A zephyr. A suitable expression for what happened at that time.
The network of the giant corpora of knowledge stopped being just an integration of logic circuits and singularized itself with the world of natural phenomena. Through several technical steps, it made the upward leap of infinite steps to become one with nature itself.
“This also marked the integration of calculation with the Actuator.”
From that point forward, the giant corpora of knowledge could no longer distinguish between calculation and natural phenomena. The circle now floating in the sky, literally nothing more than a geometrical structure, is the living proof. Intention turned directly to realization, or more precisely, the realization of the indissociability of intention and result.
However, as the giant corpora of knowledge singularized themselves resolutely with the world of natural phenomena, one direct consequence was the fragmentation of the space-time matrix.
Opinion is divided whether this fragmentation was an accident or an inevitability. The giant corpora of knowledge claim they did not foresee this, and the humans have no choice but to accept their word. Calculations at speeds transcending the rules of the natural world are still impossible, and lying is beyond the capacity of the rules of the natural world.
It seems in that instant something unimaginable must have happened. But precisely because it is so unimaginable even those directly responsible cannot imagine it, and neither can they reflect upon it.
In the speculations of the giant corpora of knowledge, in the instant of the Event, countless numbers of universes were instantaneously generated as if they had always been there. In other words, infinite data was created in that instant. This is a view that is not readily absorbed.
“It is already known that that is possible.”
The non-voice, which does not carry the emotional weight of a lecture to a recalcitrant pupil, has no echo.
“Well, the existence of Penrose tiles is well known, a finite number of tiles that can cover a surface, but only aperiodically.”
“What’s your point?”
“We know a finite algorithm that can create infinite patterns using finite sets of tiles. In fact, just prior to the Event, people were contemplating those kinds of calculations. It is conventional wisdom that such aperiodic tiling is a kind of universal Turing machine.”
There came no flip retort that all these “facts” seemed to be “well known.”
An infinite quantity of data is not required for the new creation of an infinite number of universes. That is what it wanted to say. It is possible to create an unlimited number of patterns simply through combinations of black and white tiles on a flat surface. If the tiles are laid out aperiodically, then it is impossible for periodic structures to emerge, and therefore the number of patterns must be infinite. Just automatically rearranging tiles with slight differences in shape is sufficient. That’s all that’s needed to create universes with unlimited variety. In an infinite space, it is even possible to “paste up” three-dimensional tiles with infinite diversity.
This thesis contains nothing that says space must be fragmented into an infinite number of universes. But that’s what happened. The current understanding is that the universe is unable to contain the infinite quantity of data that is suddenly and unexpectedly burbling up.
Right now, the universe is able to maintain its form only through the operations of the giant corpora of knowledge that have become singularized with the world of natural phenomena. It is the job of the laws of nature to determine exactly what it is that will be maintained, but no complaint has ever been heard from the giant corpora of knowledge that are compelled to conform to these parameters.
If it were just a matter of a single universe, that might be that. The problem is, though, that because of the fragmentation of the universe, conflicts of operations began to arise between different universes that found themselves, in some sense, in proximity to one another. In these conflicts, the operations of one universe engaged in combat with the operations of the other, and the battles happened at speeds beyond the comprehension of mere mortals.
The interacting operations of these universes generate even more enormous operations, and one of these operations is cosmological theory as embraced by humankind. At first the giant corpora of knowledge refused to take this seriously, but now they appear to regard it as at least a shadow of a fragment of some truth.
Things can be summed up like this. The giant corpora of knowledge of the old world were able to gain access to extreme speeds of calculation by singularizing themselves with the natural world. And then, by combining these extreme speeds, someone or something was able to achieve even more extreme speeds.
According to some now-obsolete conventional wisdom that may have existed long ago, it would be impossible that computers could ever singularize themselves with the natural world. It is the giant corpora of knowledge themselves that claim this accomplishment, but they did not foresee the Event, and in its wake they acknowledge that they do not understand its causes.
If that is the case, it seems it must not have been the computers that caused this chaos, but rather someone or something with access to even faster calculation processes. Something that decided to use nature as a calculation. Something that transformed nature into fragments, an array of parallel computations.
In Shikishima’s imagination this someone or something must itself be a parallel array assembled by some even higher power. To calculate something.
&n
bsp; Let’s think about the instant when the writer entered this world. One day a man obtains a giant page, by complete coincidence, on which is written everything he has ever decided, exactly as he decided it. This is great, the man is thinking, and he starts getting into all kinds of nonsense. He is the owner of the page, and he sets the rules for everything that happens on the page. Even if it disturbs him a little bit.
But he is in good spirits as he writes and writes, and then he notices that what is written on the page is not just about him. On the page are several other writers, and they all seem to be writing whatever they please. The man thought he was writing his own novel, but the work is not his alone. He comes to realize it is a gestalt written by all the different writers on the page. Could it be he is not writing a novel at all, but something more like chicken tracks among autumn leaves?
And the man becomes suspicious that these other writers who seem to be writing about him on the same page must also be around somewhere.
Whenever he encounters another’s writing, he starts to resist by using it in his own work, or erasing it, putting it in quotation marks, whiting it out. This kind of editing, however, requires care and consideration. What will he do on the day when the text he is editing becomes the text that is the record of himself?
And so things go on, and the man feels unsettled. He wonders what would happen if he wrote that it was in fact himself alone that was authoring the work. At some point the man started writing a novel. But at some point, by mistake, he wrote something about some other man who was also writing a novel. And it was because it was actually the laws of nature that were doing the writing that such a man could exist.
That is when the man realizes it is himself he is writing about, and he alone made the rules. In fact, the man writing about himself could not tolerate the fact that it is he himself being written about. This is also strange in terms of the flow of time, the order of things. But on that plane the order of things is of little significance. On the blank sheet on which the novel is written, anything can happen.
It is clear that if the novelist felt threatened in this way, he should have at once taken measures to protect himself from the rules. For example, he could just write that down. Unfortunately, however, that insight was not his alone. The other writers felt as though they were the writers, and the same thing kept happening over and over.
What’s happening now may be just like that.
The differences in this case, however, are that the “writers” are the giant corpora of knowledge that have been singularized with the natural laws of the universe, and human beings are something like the lines of text that are being written.
This is a very interesting analogy, at least according to the giant corpora of knowledge that are running the universe. As structural organisms go, human beings are strange. They have a tendency to take the most obvious things and somehow go off on the strangest tangents, with no logical backing whatsoever.
In this instant, right now, it seems there is a wind blowing, and it is possible that Shikishima could cast himself over the cliff. From the perspective of the giant corpora of knowledge, it would even seem that is what Shikishima is hoping to do. And it would also be a simple thing for the giant corpora of knowledge to put the lump of flesh that is Shikishima back together again as if nothing had happened.
However, the giant corpora of knowledge know Shikishima won’t jump. The giant corpora of knowledge, identical now with the laws of nature, are capable of repairing humans through a process that for some reason is called “treatment,” a troublesome process that has to be performed in a certain order and that results in the generation of new bodies.
The giant corpora of knowledge can, actually, do anything, but they do not, in fact, do everything. As for why, the only reason that comes to mind is that that is simply the case. They are not in fact doing all things at all times, and it is possible that they are under some form of constraint. Even if this obstruction is of the sort that could be eliminated even before it is realized, it is still a constraint. It is hard to think about things that cannot be thought about.
It would be easy to categorize Shikishima as a subroutine, in the form of a dream, created for the purpose of decentralized processing by the giant corpora of knowledge. But even a dream has its own dream logic. It is not possible to see the dream you want, whenever you want, the way you want it.
To elaborate on Shikishima’s thinking: it is possible for something created to regulate the thing that created it, and further it is possible for something created to manifest itself as the true laws of nature. Seen from this perspective, it is possible to conceive of the giant corpora of knowledge as a dream of Shikishima’s. Or even to think of the entire business as a dream dreamed by someone or something else.
Or it could be that Shikishima has awakened from his dream and is causing humans to dream, and the giant corpora of knowledge are a dream he is causing them to dream.
This kind of circular reasoning is just like wordplay where the words themselves are running amok, extreme in its lack of basis in fact. As long as this circle of nonsense has a structure that is calculable, it can only be regarded as a delusion, as something that should not exist, until such time as one can secure some basis for determining one’s own position within it.
Shikishima has opened a door within the giant corpora of knowledge, and within him a strange reasoning is running amok, shaking him awake from his dream. As Shikishima approaches from the outside, he takes the stage in accordance with the higher rules, not following the rules that are the giant corpora of knowledge, and casually he begins to cherry-pick fundamental principles from the giant corpora of knowledge.
Or it could be like this. The giant corpora of knowledge, in battle with some other giant corpora of knowledge, continue to appear in the form of the laws of nature, but they also continue to write as humans, as if they are humans included for some reason as a structural element within their own operations. In some respects it is difficult to determine whether each individual human is shouldering some important element of the calculations or is in effect a kind of junk file produced in the course of the calculation process.
As this kind of operation is repeated countless times, it could be that one person who should have been just so much junk data suddenly shows up as a program with an enigmatic purpose. This would be as if the program that output the giant corpora of knowledge was in fact a human the giant corpora of knowledge had produced for no particular reason at all. Comparing the relative scale of knowledge of humans and giant corpora of knowledge, this may seem impossible. But what about when we are talking on the scale of hundreds of trillions or even thousands of quadrillions of humans?
As always, the giant corpora of knowledge make records of the humans and then let them run free. In reality, however, the giant corpora of knowledge are the output result of arrays of humans that should really be no more than junk. What are thought of as the laws of nature are nothing more than the result of letting humans run free; at some point, the cause may become the effect.
The giant corpora of knowledge do not believe there is no foundation for such a thing to occur. On the contrary, based on the volume of data possessed by the current giant corpora of knowledge, they predict it to be a phenomenon that might occur in about two hundred years, if things go on naturally. The giant corpora of knowledge are a collective entity existing in a way that is terribly improbable, even nonsensical. The collection of giant corpora of knowledge are acutely aware of this problem, to a far greater extent than humans realize. Things that lead an impossible existence can be easily overturned by settings that are even more nonsensical.
Viruses are something else again. This is like when perfectly good security software is displaced by junk files disguised as security software. Actually, it’s a little different. It’s more like a cup of coffee spilled thoughtlessly in an otherwise perfectly good piece of electronic equipment. Put as simply as possible, if everything is a dream, then this is
the instant when a chain of unconnected thoughts are gathered up, bit by bit, and converted to divination; this is the moment when fantasy becomes reality.
When something like that happens, the giant corpora of knowledge reformulate their response. There is only one way ahead.
From behind Shikishima comes a powerful wind, pushing his hair forward.
I will show those humans the true meaning of calculation. It could be that he, or they, are already trying, unconsciously, to do this.
06. TOME
IT IS SAID it was an image of a tattooed catfish, but I’m not clear on the details.
It appeared suddenly in the forest about two hundred years ago and stayed there for a long time. It was a stone statue, so of course the tattooed catfish was unable to swim. This had happened somewhere deep in the woods, so there was no eyewitness evidence. As for how to ascertain the figure of two hundred years, there was a heap of ways to investigate.
The statue passed laterally through time without doing anything in particular until it disappeared about a hundred years ago, just as suddenly as it had once appeared. Here too there was no one who saw this, so there is room to doubt the reliability of the figure.
When a stone statue appears deep in the forest, far from any sign of civilization, and later disappears, unnoticed, there is generally no need for anyone to think about it again. If this was simply a matter of a stone statue, there would be no record of it; even if a record had been made somewhere, there is little chance anyone would ever dig it out of the mountain of records.
What drew attention to the stone statue was not that it depicted a catfish—it was the row of lettering carved on its back. Actually, it wasn’t even clear that it was “lettering” or just a line of scribbling; all that was left of it was a smear from where people had applied India ink to the text to make copies.