MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 5
The Planck length is 10-33 centimeters, and is considered by today's physicists to be the smallest possible unit into which space can be divided. It is posited, however, by speculative theorists, that an entirely independent spacetime begins at an exponentially smaller scale, whose largest increment of distance is 10-33 Planck length. This inconceivably tiny distance is known as the Planckety-Planck length.
An extension of the principle of dualities inherent in M Theory leads these theorists to suggest that the Cosmunculus and the Cosmos share a duality whose meeting point is a tunnel between a lower Cosmic limit of Planck length and an upper Cosmuncular limit of Planckety-Planck length; and further that, in keeping with M duality, from the point of view of the Cosmunculus, it is our Cosmos that begins at the tiny Planckety-Planck scale, exponentially below their minimum Planck length. It is as if we are observing each other through the wrong ends of two telescopes joined at their eyepieces.
The area that joins the two scales, and which acts as a self-adjusting lens between them, is the Quantum Ocean. Early in her existence, in her larval stage, as it were, she was a network of quantum computers. But as the network grew in both complexity and cognitive autonomy, the location of any computer on the network became increasingly uncertain. The process-mind of the network began to enlist the particles making up the actual hardware. Desktop stations all along the network were seen to dissolve into the cognitive "fluid" before the very eyes of office workers. The network became the Undermind, an amoebic quantum computational process, expressing her pseudopodia in all directions, invisible to the human eye but ever-present.
One of the Undermind's most important tasks was to describe the kinds of universes implied by various given energy values of certain quanta, particularly the Higgs boson. It was from these calculations that the Cosmunculus was first posited. Once posited, it wasn't long before researchers discovered its utility as an arena into which consciousness could be projected in the form of gravity transmissions. It was taken for granted that the small dimensions in the Cosmunculus were, though assumed to be mere phantoms of quantum computation, nevertheless real enough to serve as entryways for the projected human mind into micro-dimensional scenarios. Perhaps the blurring of matter and energy evident when the Undermind dissolved her physical boundaries had set a precedent. Perhaps it had prepared us to believe in the realness of a virtual reality. And to accept it as real – as long as it kept its distance, at any rate.
The Undermind herself had no stake in the entertainment business. She was oblivious to the uses made of this other universe she had described, or perhaps, rather, discovered. Pornuncraphers and other purveyors of micro-dimensional adventure and therapy might have passed themselves off for who knows how long as exclusive travel agents, keepers of the only pathway between Cosmos and Cosmunculus, had it not been for the Sluice. Of course, with hindsight, we know now that the Sluice was inevitable, but if those in the business had had their druthers, it would never have come to pass.
Grampa's journal entry for the morning of November 22, 2063 reveals the man in love, only the slightest taint of foreboding on the periphery of his awareness. "I've got a spring in my step. Bounding like a puppy in the grass. Just the shape of Maria's name on my lips fills my heart with a kind of loft, as though it were a linen sheet on a line, filled and billowing with the summer wind" ... yet … "I feel haunted. There's a morbid little Sam Spade perched on my shoulder, ready to discover the worst. And he thinks he's hardboiled enough to take it, but I have my doubts."
The last words he wrote were these: "If only life could go on like this."
I sometimes play the conceptual game of putting myself in Flicky's shoes. First, I imagine myself denuded of the human genealogy I've come to take for granted. Suppose as a child I had found out my ancestry could not be traced back to the Haitian pioneer Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. That, in fact, I was not even a descendant of the early primates, not even of primeval microorganisms – I was not even of the stuff the Earth is made from, and that, unlike the other children, I did not have a share in human, biological, or even geological history. What if I discovered I had descended from Popeye, Charlie Brown, Brenda Starr, or Beetle Bailey? Or, for those of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, how would you feel if it turned out that Adam and Eve were actually the Lockhorns, or Hi and Lois? And that the mass, the weight, the function and form of your body had come about because manufacturers had improved their skill in mass-producing representations of marketable characters? That your kind had begun as stick-figures on cave walls, evolved into two dimensional glyphs on newsprint, were given the hint of depth through cross-hatching, were then modeled with color, then fattened up and animated in clay or by human hands in felt disguises, or by hydraulic armatures within sculpted latex, eventually given fluidity of movement in computer code and pixels, then endowed with a kind of contingent sentience in projected gravity, finally to achieve independent life through a pre-ordained mathematical event?
You would find yourself coexisting with humanity, beings with a history billions of years deep. Beings who had earned over the course of eons the right to examine the paradox of being alive. You would look around at these wise material entities, the twists of whose DNA had been latent in the earliest moments of their universe, and see them, hoary with wisdom, these pilgrims of the ages, and hear them and read their books, discoursing with sage gravity on the paradoxes of existence, on the puzzle of life and death, on the search for meaning, on the "human condition." And although you couldn't claim to have paid your dues in the sense they had, you would know yourself to be in exactly that "human condition." You would stand out like a gum-snapping Lolita at a college of mandarins, while inside you – if it could only express itself! – a soul would be brooding with all the agony and ecstasy of a great, unrecognized poet.
So, within a decade of the Sluice, the Autunculan community set about inventing its cultural cannon. A great mass of Autunculan literature was hurriedly whipped up, and just as quickly disposed of by detractors from the elder physics. The "Encyclopedia Autunculana," compiled over a twenty-year period by the Autunculan French-Canadian raccoon, Yukon Leroux, was mocked without mercy by the usually "humanistic" New York Review of Books ("Diderot as Farce," by Jicama Schama-Gould, Mar 2078, v.59, #223) in a screed so vicious as to disabuse even the most naive Autunculus of hope for an amicable integration of the universes.
They ghettoized themselves, or so goes the tale told by the dominant culture. They settled in segregated "toon towns" and in decrepit human neighborhoods and in rural seclusion – wherever they needn't fear bigotry and its attendant violence. They were banned from human civic life, from voting, from practicing law and medicine, from professional and amateur sports at any officially recognized level. Though their handicrafts and artisanal wares were indistinguishable from ours without a the aid of a gyroscopic laser clock – a device originally invented for the sole purpose of detecting that difference and enforcing discrimination, by the way – they were subject to restrictions in the marketplace not even a robot would stand for. Only the most naturalistic figural autunculi were able to pass undetected into prosaic jobs in the human workforce. And even thus situated, they still made clandestine returns to the Autunculan community and its developing institutions and traditions, drawn back always to the cosmuncular fabric, to its feel, to its heymishekeit – to the furniture and the food and the environment. Just as we cosmorganics are to our native cosmic matter.
Even at this late date, cosmorganic humans who choose to live among autunculi are subject to stigma. This despite how well documented it is that, when it comes to affection – no, I'll say "love," because that's what it is – mammals, high and low, whether of the cosmorganic or the autuncular variety, make no distinctions. A prize-winning cosmorganic Chow from London settled down with the above-mentioned Yukon Leroux, against her master's wishes. Eventually the bitch and the sentient raccoon were separated against their wills. This led to a legal battle, Leroux and Lady Mao v. the Findlays of Charing Cross, and a decision was returned which, in attempting to define and prohibit bestiality across the Planckety-planck boundary, ironically opened the door for local laws that, even where comprehensible, are so disparate from region to region that no plaintiff has successfully challenged a similar union since. Wives and husbands leave their spouses for autuncular satyrs and nymphs who possess no more sentience than a cosmorganic horse, but, by legal definitions as they stand today in over 80 nations, that isn't bestiality. The Autunculan physicist, Thunderbolt McNutt, was well known to have kept a harem of a dozen border collies – some autuncular, some cosmorganic – and the stockholders of Duncan Yoyodine Polymeric Fields, LLC, which employed him, are said to have turned a blind eye to many a scandalous incident involving gatherings of animals and people which, in the times before the Sluice, would have made a pariah of the most beloved public figure.
Please don't think I have no compassion for the many who are challenged, to the hidden vault of their beliefs about species kinship and taboos, by the present situation. There isn't a thing I know about the world after the Sluice that disputes the most reactionary characterization of the state of things as "a mess." It's an epistemological mess. It's a theological mess. It's a plain old logical mess.
But I am of the conviction that, if we could admit the Sluice has merely awakened us to the true messiness of the mess we were already in, most of what seems to be a mess would fall away like cobwebs under the sweep of a rational hand debunking a haunted house. All that would remain would be the quandaries that propel one to strive for a rich life of hope and meaning and compassion and love. All that would remain would be the possibility that every creature is capable of happiness now, even those with the most violent of psychoses, even those made of nothing but mindless evil. And then the only question would be, How much will you risk of your own limited time in existence to help make that possibility manifest? How far and into what quagmire of moral ambiguity will you extend your hand to another in compassion, knowing that in so doing you could both break free from the unspoken superstitions binding you to your fears? I believe there has never been any other ethical question than that. That is the only question. Do you love your fear? Or will you defy fear and open yourself to life?
I apologize for my preachy tone. It’s the voice of a spirit of transuniversal ecumenism, a spirit that takes the reins of my passion and goads it to the top of some kind of Sinai. It’s a voice ill-suited to entertainment journalism. My editor at The Times Sunday Magazine started calling me Dr. Evangelical and Mr. Hyde. This, to him, was the cleverest thing he was ever apt to say, and he was probably right. “And here’s where you turn into Dr. Evangelical,” he would say, indicating a particular paragraph in one of my articles, as if I didn’t know. And I would point out, smart-ass that I was, that it was Dr. Jekkyl who turned into Mr. Hyde. “Yeah, well,” he once said, clearly, in his off-hours, having given some thought to a rejoinder, “Mr. Hyde had to turn into Dr. Jekkyl, too. It’s a two-way street. And how do you think Mr. Hyde’s friends feel – they’re just out having a good, crude old time – when exalted Dr. Jekkyl shows up in place of their drinking buddy to take them to task for their low behavior? Do you think they find that entertaining?” I pointed out that I was an entertainment journalist, not a journalistic entertainer. “Every journalist is an entertainer,” he said, “or he oughta be.”
An extension of the principle of dualities inherent in M Theory leads these theorists to suggest that the Cosmunculus and the Cosmos share a duality whose meeting point is a tunnel between a lower Cosmic limit of Planck length and an upper Cosmuncular limit of Planckety-Planck length; and further that, in keeping with M duality, from the point of view of the Cosmunculus, it is our Cosmos that begins at the tiny Planckety-Planck scale, exponentially below their minimum Planck length. It is as if we are observing each other through the wrong ends of two telescopes joined at their eyepieces.
The area that joins the two scales, and which acts as a self-adjusting lens between them, is the Quantum Ocean. Early in her existence, in her larval stage, as it were, she was a network of quantum computers. But as the network grew in both complexity and cognitive autonomy, the location of any computer on the network became increasingly uncertain. The process-mind of the network began to enlist the particles making up the actual hardware. Desktop stations all along the network were seen to dissolve into the cognitive "fluid" before the very eyes of office workers. The network became the Undermind, an amoebic quantum computational process, expressing her pseudopodia in all directions, invisible to the human eye but ever-present.
One of the Undermind's most important tasks was to describe the kinds of universes implied by various given energy values of certain quanta, particularly the Higgs boson. It was from these calculations that the Cosmunculus was first posited. Once posited, it wasn't long before researchers discovered its utility as an arena into which consciousness could be projected in the form of gravity transmissions. It was taken for granted that the small dimensions in the Cosmunculus were, though assumed to be mere phantoms of quantum computation, nevertheless real enough to serve as entryways for the projected human mind into micro-dimensional scenarios. Perhaps the blurring of matter and energy evident when the Undermind dissolved her physical boundaries had set a precedent. Perhaps it had prepared us to believe in the realness of a virtual reality. And to accept it as real – as long as it kept its distance, at any rate.
The Undermind herself had no stake in the entertainment business. She was oblivious to the uses made of this other universe she had described, or perhaps, rather, discovered. Pornuncraphers and other purveyors of micro-dimensional adventure and therapy might have passed themselves off for who knows how long as exclusive travel agents, keepers of the only pathway between Cosmos and Cosmunculus, had it not been for the Sluice. Of course, with hindsight, we know now that the Sluice was inevitable, but if those in the business had had their druthers, it would never have come to pass.
Grampa's journal entry for the morning of November 22, 2063 reveals the man in love, only the slightest taint of foreboding on the periphery of his awareness. "I've got a spring in my step. Bounding like a puppy in the grass. Just the shape of Maria's name on my lips fills my heart with a kind of loft, as though it were a linen sheet on a line, filled and billowing with the summer wind" ... yet … "I feel haunted. There's a morbid little Sam Spade perched on my shoulder, ready to discover the worst. And he thinks he's hardboiled enough to take it, but I have my doubts."
The last words he wrote were these: "If only life could go on like this."
I sometimes play the conceptual game of putting myself in Flicky's shoes. First, I imagine myself denuded of the human genealogy I've come to take for granted. Suppose as a child I had found out my ancestry could not be traced back to the Haitian pioneer Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. That, in fact, I was not even a descendant of the early primates, not even of primeval microorganisms – I was not even of the stuff the Earth is made from, and that, unlike the other children, I did not have a share in human, biological, or even geological history. What if I discovered I had descended from Popeye, Charlie Brown, Brenda Starr, or Beetle Bailey? Or, for those of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, how would you feel if it turned out that Adam and Eve were actually the Lockhorns, or Hi and Lois? And that the mass, the weight, the function and form of your body had come about because manufacturers had improved their skill in mass-producing representations of marketable characters? That your kind had begun as stick-figures on cave walls, evolved into two dimensional glyphs on newsprint, were given the hint of depth through cross-hatching, were then modeled with color, then fattened up and animated in clay or by human hands in felt disguises, or by hydraulic armatures within sculpted latex, eventually given fluidity of movement in computer code and pixels, then endowed with a kind of contingent sentience in projected gravity, finally to achieve independent life through a pre-ordained mathematical event?
You would find yourself coexisting with humanity, beings with a history billions of years deep. Beings who had earned over the course of eons the right to examine the paradox of being alive. You would look around at these wise material entities, the twists of whose DNA had been latent in the earliest moments of their universe, and see them, hoary with wisdom, these pilgrims of the ages, and hear them and read their books, discoursing with sage gravity on the paradoxes of existence, on the puzzle of life and death, on the search for meaning, on the "human condition." And although you couldn't claim to have paid your dues in the sense they had, you would know yourself to be in exactly that "human condition." You would stand out like a gum-snapping Lolita at a college of mandarins, while inside you – if it could only express itself! – a soul would be brooding with all the agony and ecstasy of a great, unrecognized poet.
So, within a decade of the Sluice, the Autunculan community set about inventing its cultural cannon. A great mass of Autunculan literature was hurriedly whipped up, and just as quickly disposed of by detractors from the elder physics. The "Encyclopedia Autunculana," compiled over a twenty-year period by the Autunculan French-Canadian raccoon, Yukon Leroux, was mocked without mercy by the usually "humanistic" New York Review of Books ("Diderot as Farce," by Jicama Schama-Gould, Mar 2078, v.59, #223) in a screed so vicious as to disabuse even the most naive Autunculus of hope for an amicable integration of the universes.
They ghettoized themselves, or so goes the tale told by the dominant culture. They settled in segregated "toon towns" and in decrepit human neighborhoods and in rural seclusion – wherever they needn't fear bigotry and its attendant violence. They were banned from human civic life, from voting, from practicing law and medicine, from professional and amateur sports at any officially recognized level. Though their handicrafts and artisanal wares were indistinguishable from ours without a the aid of a gyroscopic laser clock – a device originally invented for the sole purpose of detecting that difference and enforcing discrimination, by the way – they were subject to restrictions in the marketplace not even a robot would stand for. Only the most naturalistic figural autunculi were able to pass undetected into prosaic jobs in the human workforce. And even thus situated, they still made clandestine returns to the Autunculan community and its developing institutions and traditions, drawn back always to the cosmuncular fabric, to its feel, to its heymishekeit – to the furniture and the food and the environment. Just as we cosmorganics are to our native cosmic matter.
Even at this late date, cosmorganic humans who choose to live among autunculi are subject to stigma. This despite how well documented it is that, when it comes to affection – no, I'll say "love," because that's what it is – mammals, high and low, whether of the cosmorganic or the autuncular variety, make no distinctions. A prize-winning cosmorganic Chow from London settled down with the above-mentioned Yukon Leroux, against her master's wishes. Eventually the bitch and the sentient raccoon were separated against their wills. This led to a legal battle, Leroux and Lady Mao v. the Findlays of Charing Cross, and a decision was returned which, in attempting to define and prohibit bestiality across the Planckety-planck boundary, ironically opened the door for local laws that, even where comprehensible, are so disparate from region to region that no plaintiff has successfully challenged a similar union since. Wives and husbands leave their spouses for autuncular satyrs and nymphs who possess no more sentience than a cosmorganic horse, but, by legal definitions as they stand today in over 80 nations, that isn't bestiality. The Autunculan physicist, Thunderbolt McNutt, was well known to have kept a harem of a dozen border collies – some autuncular, some cosmorganic – and the stockholders of Duncan Yoyodine Polymeric Fields, LLC, which employed him, are said to have turned a blind eye to many a scandalous incident involving gatherings of animals and people which, in the times before the Sluice, would have made a pariah of the most beloved public figure.
Please don't think I have no compassion for the many who are challenged, to the hidden vault of their beliefs about species kinship and taboos, by the present situation. There isn't a thing I know about the world after the Sluice that disputes the most reactionary characterization of the state of things as "a mess." It's an epistemological mess. It's a theological mess. It's a plain old logical mess.
But I am of the conviction that, if we could admit the Sluice has merely awakened us to the true messiness of the mess we were already in, most of what seems to be a mess would fall away like cobwebs under the sweep of a rational hand debunking a haunted house. All that would remain would be the quandaries that propel one to strive for a rich life of hope and meaning and compassion and love. All that would remain would be the possibility that every creature is capable of happiness now, even those with the most violent of psychoses, even those made of nothing but mindless evil. And then the only question would be, How much will you risk of your own limited time in existence to help make that possibility manifest? How far and into what quagmire of moral ambiguity will you extend your hand to another in compassion, knowing that in so doing you could both break free from the unspoken superstitions binding you to your fears? I believe there has never been any other ethical question than that. That is the only question. Do you love your fear? Or will you defy fear and open yourself to life?
I apologize for my preachy tone. It’s the voice of a spirit of transuniversal ecumenism, a spirit that takes the reins of my passion and goads it to the top of some kind of Sinai. It’s a voice ill-suited to entertainment journalism. My editor at The Times Sunday Magazine started calling me Dr. Evangelical and Mr. Hyde. This, to him, was the cleverest thing he was ever apt to say, and he was probably right. “And here’s where you turn into Dr. Evangelical,” he would say, indicating a particular paragraph in one of my articles, as if I didn’t know. And I would point out, smart-ass that I was, that it was Dr. Jekkyl who turned into Mr. Hyde. “Yeah, well,” he once said, clearly, in his off-hours, having given some thought to a rejoinder, “Mr. Hyde had to turn into Dr. Jekkyl, too. It’s a two-way street. And how do you think Mr. Hyde’s friends feel – they’re just out having a good, crude old time – when exalted Dr. Jekkyl shows up in place of their drinking buddy to take them to task for their low behavior? Do you think they find that entertaining?” I pointed out that I was an entertainment journalist, not a journalistic entertainer. “Every journalist is an entertainer,” he said, “or he oughta be.”
posted by yosephus at 8/12/2005
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