Words&Dirt

“Alone again, in a pocket of silence as the wind dropped and all went still, Cossont paused for a moment.  She looked up into the blue-black sky with its tinily pointed spray of stars and sat-light, and wondered what it would really be like to be Sublimed, to have gone through with it, to be living on this reputedly fabulously and unarguably real Other Side.

The Gzilt had been living with the idea of Subliming for centuries, generations.  At first only a few people had thought it would be a good idea; then, gradually, over time, more and more had.  Eventually you had the sort of numbers that would make the whole thing work, because to do it properly required serious numbers––preferably a whole civilisation.

In theory an individual could Sublime, but in practice only solitary AIs ever did, successfully.  It took something as complex and self-referentially perfect as a high-level AI to have the cohesion to stand up to the Sublime alone; no normal biological individual could––you just evaporated in there.  It was not utter annihilation––all the information you brought with you remained––but the persona, the individual as a functioning, identifiable and distinctive entity––that was gone.  Civilisations, and the individuals within those civilisations, survived and flourished in the Sublime over galactically significant periods of time, though they gradually changed beyond comprehension.

That, though, would have happened anyway, had those societies stayed in the Real, and all the research and comparisons and experts and statistics agreed that there was orders-of-magnitude more stability in the Sublime than in the realm of mere matter and energy.

Cossont sighed.  She had no idea why she was staring up at the sky to think about all this.  The Sublime, like some ideas of God or whatever, was all around.  She inspected the end of one of her upper-arm fingers.  The tip was callused with wear from trying to control the strings of the elevenstring.  The Sublime might as well be in the ridges of hardened skin on the end of her finger as up in the sky.

Parcelled, rolled, compressed and enfolded into the dimensions beyond the dimensions beyond the ones you could see and understand; that was where the Sublime was, and it was a maze-like series of right angle turns away from this, from normal, three-dimensional reality where she stood on a high platform at sunset, thinking about it.

Cossont had a hard enough time really comprehending hyperspace, the fourth dimension, let alone the next three or four that somehow encompassed the Reality and allowed for nested universes to climb away from the universe-creating singularity at the center of things and either circle back round some immense cosmic doughnut to be re-compacted and born again, or radiate away into whatever it was that surrounded this mind-boggling ultra-universe.

The the Sublimed lay in dimensions beyond even that; unutterably microscopic, unassailably far away but at the same time everywhere, shot through the fabric of space-time not so much like the individual fibres of this metaphorical weave, or their tiniest filaments or their molecules or their atoms or their sub-atomic particles but––pointedly––like the infinitesimal strings that made up those, that made up everything.  In dimensions seven to eleven; that was where the Sublimed lay.

And that, of course, was why the elevenstring had eleven strings.”

––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 16-7

“Some scholars have pointed to the epistemic structure of Western science, particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was organized both intellectually and institutionally around ‘disciplines’ in which specialists developed a high level of expertise in a small area of inquiry.  This ‘reductionist’ approach, sometimes credited to the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes but not fully developed until the late nineteenth century, was believed to give intellectual power and vigor to investigations by focusing on singular elements of complex problems.  ‘Tractability’ was a guiding ideal of the time: problems that were too large or complex to be solved in their totality were divided into smaller, more manageable elements.  While reductionism proved powerful in many domains, particularly quantum physics and medical diagnostics, it impeded investigations of complex systems.  Reductionism also made it difficult for scientists to articulate the threat posed by climate change, since many experts did not actually know very much about aspects of the problem beyond their expertise.  (Other environmental problems faced similar challenges.  For example, for years, scientists did not understand the role of polar stratospheric clouds in severe ozone depletion in the still-glaciated Antarctic region because ‘chemists’ working on the chemical reactions did not even know that there were clouds in the polar stratosphere!)  Even scientists who had a broad view of climate change often felt it would be inappropriate for them to articulate it, because that would require them to speak beyond their expertise, and seem to be taking credit for other people’s work.

Responding to this, scientists and political leaders created the IPCC to bring together the diverse specialists needed to speak to the whole problem.  Yet, perhaps because of the diversity of specialist views represented, perhaps because of pressures from governmental sponsors, or perhaps because of the constraints of scientific culture already mentioned, the IPCC had trouble speaking in a clear voice.  Other scientists promoted the ideas of systems science, complexity science, and most pertinent to our purposes here, earth systems science, but these so-called holistic approaches still focused almost entirely on natural systems, omitting from consideration the social components.  Yet in many cases, the social components were the dominant system drivers.  It was often said, for example, that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.   Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings––deforestation and fossil fuel combustion––yet they rarely said that the cause was people, and their patterns of conspicuous consumption.

Other scholars have looked to the roots of Western natural science in religious institutions.  Just as religious orders of prior centuries had demonstrated moral rigor through extreme practices of asceticism in dress, lodging, behavior, and food––in essence, practices of physical self-denial––so, too, did physical scientists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries attempt to demonstrate their intellectual rigor through practices of intellectual self-denial.  These practices led scientists to demand an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind, even those involving imminent threats.  In an almost childlike attempt to demarcate their practices from those of older explanatory traditions, scientists felt it necessary to prove to themselves and the world how strict they were in their intellectual standards.  Thus, they placed the burden of proof on novel claims––even empirical claims about phenomena that their theories predicted.  This included claims about changes in the climate.”

––The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, pg. 14-6