Author Archives: Abalieno

Mensis Cage

“The School of Mensis controls the Unseen Village.

This hexagonal iron cage suggests their strange ways. The cage is a device that restrains the will of the self, allowing one to see the profane world for what it is.

It also serves as an antenna that facilitates contact with the Great Ones of the dream.

But to an observer, the iron cage appears to be precisely what delivered them to their harrowing nightmare.”

“No, we shall not abandon the dream.”
“Ah hah hah ha! Ooh! Majestic! A hunter is a hunter, even in a dream. But, alas, not too fast! The nightmare swirls and churns unending!”
“As you once did for the vacuous Rom, grant us eyes, grant us eyes. Plant eyes on our brains, to cleanse our beastly idiocy.”
“The cosmos, of course!”
“Let us sit about, and speak feverishly. Chatting into the wee hours of…”
“New ideas, of the higher plane!”
“Now I’m waking up, I’ll forget everything…”

This is an item in the Bloodborne game, but more than trying to figure out the game’s mythology I’m more curious about how you can relate the symbolism to the ideas that actually precede Bloodborne and inspired it.

Without speculating, there are a few aspects that are explicit in the game. One is the idea of a dream, being trapped within without an awareness of the real world. So the dream is like a cage that you can’t escape. If you awake you only find yourself in the same dream, in a circular way without escape (false awakenings). At the same time there’s an idea of transcendence linked to the Great Ones, the Lovecraftian gods of Bloodborne. To escape the cage of a dream one has to transcend the limits of human vision. “Grow more eyes” in the mind, and so being able to see an hidden dimension that was already fused with the normal one.

So, this actual cage around the head is an explicit symbol of the dream as a cage, a consciousness that is trapped within a mind. It is hexagonal because that’s a feature that in the game defines the stuff that pertains the gods, and the existence of the dream/cage depends on the gods, on that hidden layer that is made opaque by the dream itself, the courtain. The gods are the hidden something beyond a veil, an unknown to the current level of experience, which is the dream. The description implies that in order to see the “profane world” one has to surrender the will of the self. But the profane world means the common world, the tangible existence that in this context is represented by “this side” of the dream. That means that the “life in a cage” represented by this symbol only reveals the nature of human-like existence: that of being trapped, with no real will.

It’s interesting because this angle is the same of the stuff I write about, even if it’s nothing in common with Bloodborne. Why the link? Because Bloodborne is inspired by certain structures and mythos, that feed on the basic “truths”.

Yet the description doesn’t end here, it also creates a separation. On one side it reveals the horror of existence: “to an observer, the iron cage appears to be precisely what delivered them to their harrowing nightmare.” Yet, it also represents a “door”, a passage to what’s behind the veil: “it facilitates contact with the Great Ones of the dream”. As if the awareness of an existential cage also offers a gift of transcendence.

Malazan done better: Bloodborne

Despite loving Malazan and thinking it has no challengers for what it does within its genre, I also do think it’s weak on certain aspects.

I tried to explain as a mix of aesthetic joined with depth and meaningfulness. The same as you’d get when looking at densely decorated architecture, but where each single decoration isn’t meant to be merely beautiful to stare at, but also with a dense symbolism and meaning.

Games, books, movies or whatever else, if there’s support for deep mythology and where no detail is left to chance. This myth comes from Tolkien. It’s not just in service of “realism”, and so immersion, but also as a way to reward digging and discovering what’s hidden in that depth. It means engaging with the medium, being part of it, enjoying revelations and epiphanies in those rare occasions when everything locks perfectly together, or perfectly realigns to show a new perspective.

Looking for hints, have your mind making the connections, slowly getting closer to find a solution, or a compelling interpretation. This is all about complexity and detail worth having. A medium that matures and takes itself seriously.

A lot of what I tried to describe in abstraction is already possible in the Malazan we have. It part of what makes it really good. And it is also what Malazan has in common with the approach to the lore and storytelling in the “Souls” game, including and in particular with the latest: Bloodborne.

Bloodborne is that aspect of Malazan turned into game. That aspect of active entertainment. Where the medium demands and requires that you engage actively. The problem is: Bloodborne does it even better.

If you know very little or nothing about Bloodborne then here’s an article that will tell you about story and mythology:
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/04/09/whats-really-going-on-in-bloodborne

I couldn’t avoid thinking that the whole of Bloodborne not only would fit perfectly in Malazan, but it would be exactly what “Night of Knives” could have been if it was pushed to its full potential. Night of Knives is that same story, only missing that particular “heft” that is instead fully realized within Bloodborne.

The basic structure of the town turned into hunting grounds and dream dimensions bleeding into reality during a special night (and the moon), is not only the common link between the book and the game, but also the manga “Berserk” by Kentaro Miura, that we know for sure has been a major source of inspiration for Hidetaka Miyazaki, the designer of Bloodborne. These three, Berserk, Bloodborne and Malazan go hand in hand (and of course heavily influencing all three is Lovecraft). The only difference is that Malazan swallows them in a much bigger picture. Yet the other two seize aesthetic and mythology, that smaller slice, and realize them even better.

Not to say Night of Knives is a bad book, but it falls shorts (very short) of that potential that was there. And I’m thinking of a potential that not even Erikson could realize.

So this is what I’m trying to point out: some of the ingredients that make Malazan great are ingredients that went into Bloodborne. Those aspects that come out even more clearly in Bloodborne. And what Malazan lacks when compared not to similar works, but when compared to its own ideal potential, is what instead a game like Bloodborne fully delivers.

Truth and Subjectivity: the coma patient

What if Truth and Subjectivity are separated? Usually one would think that Truth includes Subjectivity, and so that Subjectivity is just a slice that goes to merge into a Big Picture we call Truth.

This was part of a number of comments I wrote over at Bakker blog to explore the idea of lesser, relative truths. Like a kind of dualism of Ontology. But trying to explain that without resorting to abstraction or philosophy.

—
Let’s say I put you to sleep. In a definitive way. So you’re like a coma patient on a bed, forever, with no possibility of waking up again. You know nothing of this new condition because you lost all memory of what happened or of your previous history.

Then you start dreaming.

Without any perception of the outside, this new dream reality, Thomas Covenant-like, is all that exists for you. A Reality. A fantasy world you’re trapped in, as detailed and complex as the real one.

This is the error. Your partial information and Subjectivity, a perspectival closure.

But instead *for me*, since I’m out and looking at you, you are effectively in error because I know the truth of your condition. I know you are dreaming, that your Reality is imagined.

Now let’s say we have a way of communicating (BBT). So I can tell you some of the truths. I can demonstrate and persuade you that you are indeed just in a coma, and dreaming. That what you perceive, see and live is just an illusion.

Yet, this knowledge doesn’t awaken you. You’re still trapped in subjectivity and the fantasy world. That world is still your Reality. Your truth. That is your ultimate truth as long it’s true that you can’t awake anymore. As soon you understand you cannot return, the Reality becomes absolute.

Hierarchies of Ontology

Saving messages from over there to here. Context not needed? This is still about Free Will and a follow up to the previous post.

—
It literally bogs down to this:

We live in a world of absolute illusion, but the illusion is recognized as illusory only when you are able cross the boundary and look back. Same as when you wake from a dream and declare you had a dream, but couldn’t tell it was so while dreaming. If the boundary cannot be crossed, then the illusion becomes truth.

This because a truth is relative to a context, and we have an Absolute Truth only as a theoretical, metaphysical abstraction.

—
Pulling the ladder up after ye. How do you know you’re dealing with an illusion then, if the only way to see such is to cross the boundary and look back? Especially when it’s an absolute illusion, as you say?

…There is such a thing as agnosticism?

I postulated the illusion to show you it makes no difference. But we cannot know if it’s an illusion or not. YOU DON’T KNOW.

It both IS an illusion, but don’t question it because you can’t question it because you can only see an illusion from the outside.

Not it’s NOT an illusion. It MIGHT be one, but you don’t know. Alright?

You can question it, but you cannot have an answer (for the link: scroll to point 36).

And so the result is one of relative truth. A truth that is true as long its context is valid. And being THIS context permanent, I say, the relative truth is all we have, since we cannot achieve a deeper one, EVEN if it MIGHT exist.

So, this MIGHT all be illusory, but since we’ll never know, for us the relative truth becomes an absolute one.

For some god-like entity that has crossed the boundary and looks back to us, we would look like zombies living an illusory life, but as long you don’t believe we GET TO BECOME god-like then this higher existence is only an abstract possibility, not something that is part of our life, and so part of our relative truth.

Postmodern Maximalism and Immoral Nihilism

Whoa, look at that title. The concept I wanted to describe is fairly simple, though. Here we go.

This spawns from a discussion over at Bakker’s blog. I wrote there a lot and about many different things, but the bottom line is that it’s about different facets that belong to the same cluster. Specifically about what I wanted to write here, it seems to me that from whatever angle you look at this you’ll always end in the same place/conclusion. The yarn untangles pretty easily just as long you keep pulling.

The discussion was mostly about ontology, epistemology and Truth. All essentially the same thing, since they imply a way to judge things objectively, and how we can reach an agreement about what can or cannot be known.

Postmodern Maximalism is essentially a writing style, the wikipedia entry about it doesn’t help since it underlines “excess” and “redundancy”, where both of these are completely wrong at describing why Maximalism offers an interesting perspective. Maximalism is a method that makes things appear as if they slow down until they are frozen in time. The observing eye goes through everything on the scene, leaving out nothing. It’s an utopian attempt at seizing a moment for what it is, stop time and analyze everything. It basically defines the failure at observing everything and it also reveals that in order to seize the moment, you need pages and pages and pages. More time, endlessly. A single moment whose description requires a dilatation of time much, much greater.

The epistemological uncertainty is a solid point, arguing what is authentic and what isn’t, is not. Maximalist description is a desire for a truer form. It tests the boundary of what can be done, it underlines the limit. But it’s not a way to include everything because you can’t decide what’s important. What’s inauthentic is the idea that certain things are not needed, that they do not play a role. (The ideal of) Maximalism doesn’t dull the world with excess and redundancy, but it ENRICHES it, makes it flourish and bloom with meaning, flowing in all directions. Every word is important and has purpose.

The important point is to understand that the purpose of Maximalism is to defy a boundary and FAIL. Showing what is not possible to achieve. That you cannot fully grasp a single moment. And that to possibly do it you’d always need more time, exponentially. Formally it means that to analyze information you always use a greater amount of it. In a similar way Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory explains consciousness as founded on a series of heuristics whose purpose is to remove the majority of information. If consciousness had a full access to the activity of the brain then it would be COMPLETELY PARALYZED. Analysis paralysis, that for example David Foster Wallace often binds with Maximalism. They are the same thing. Time frozen because you are lost in the process. Every single instant exploding out in a myriad of states, all fundamental, all unavoidable.

We started from ontology and truth. I use a scheme because it is powerful and reveals the real contradiction that we live in. The dichotomy is BEING / KNOWING. If you are on one side you cannot achieve the other. Mutually exclusive. With the theme of ontology we always fall back in the contradiction where to state something you need to rely on some bigger picture. If you say that everything one can say is just a cartoon, than to say it you rely on another cartoon. Recursively. And we observe this similar recursion and paradox everywhere. Why is it so? Because it’s a reproduction of the observation itself. We merely see echoes, infinite reflections, mise en abyme, of the same original state. This original state is self-observation, as I write often. In order to observe yourself you need to exit yourself and see yourself as if from the outside, object of observation. This is the original split, the first separation between observing system and observed system. It creates a double, and so the original dichotomy that we can then shape in the various ways, like body/soul, or being/knowing I used above. A threshold, a boundary. Ontology reproduces a similar problem because it can never unify a truth. You are always separated from a concept and its unity, from a middle state and a pure, ontological truer one. Which means you cannot cross from a state of knowing to a state of being, because knowing builds up the barrier.

(The Blind Brain Theory says consciousness doesn’t have any idea of the actual processes in the brain, since it can only access a very small amount of information. In the same way we know the writer’s mind, so this consciousness, creates a story by removing all detail. Creating meaning, linearity and purpose where there’s actually none. A place of the mind, not of the world. Writing is always a process of FALSIFICATION of reality. That’s why maximalism is instead an inversion. It isn’t about excess of superfluousness but an attempt to reach a more fundamental truth and escape from the falsehood that otherwise binds all. Though, it is granted, you can’t expect literary critics to be smart enough to understand this…)

If you are really radical about epistemology and ontology, then you reach a point where you cannot say anything. It’s as if knowing you cannot know, and so a deeply nihilistic stance. You know the impossibility of things. But I see this as a profoundly IMMORAL, UNHOLY position to take. Because it’s extremely partial and not at all radical as it wants to be. In order to define nihilism you need to rely on absolutes. Like having endless time. Like the hypothesis of true knowledge that lies always deeper. But the point is that in order to enable nihilism as a legitimate stance, you have to rely on cartoons that are far more abstract compared to everything else. Nihilism doesn’t rely on crude realism, but on idealism. The idea of unachievable perfect dimension, and so sorrow because you can’t go there. It’s a failure to reach and to be, but justified by this distance from truth. Truth being the most abstract and most stupid cartoon. As if the will to avoid speculation just threw you toward the wildest speculation possible. In order to know you have no Free Will, you imagine a place where Free Will truly is. And so a lack.

Nihilism relies on a idealistic and false idea of reality. It relies on cartoon abstractions that it wanted proved wrong in the first place. How do you come out of all this? You come out because the world doesn’t give you a choice. Free Will is a possibility because you are negated a choice, if you accept the paradox. Do we know how the world really works? No, science will lead us there. How long will it take? We don’t know. But then we realistically and pragmatically know that “many” of us will be dead by then. Timelessness is not a thing that belongs to life. We are bound in time. Life imposes on us choices now. You don’t have unlimited amount of borrowed time. You can’t delay a choice until you have all the elements to make a wiser one. In the same way you cannot wait forever so you know better what kind of true role you have in this world. Time is limited. And, in the same way, the brain works with heuristic because full access to information would paralyze all activity.

The same as epistemology, there’s the hypothesis of an ultimate truth that will invalidate the one we have now. The same as in science a new theory replaces an old one. On the horizon there’s always an ideal elsewhere that is more true and more complete. But are we there? No. Will we be there? No, because we’ll be dead. Time binds us again. It’s a boundary that is imposed on. A limit that creates a partiality. A slice.

I say this limit creates Free Will, and limited knowledge creates choice. Same as a character in a book cannot stop on his tracks and think he’s a character in a book. Any less we can do that too. It’s part of a different reality we don’t belong to. It’s knowledge that is possible only if a boundary is crossed, but we don’t get to cross it, and we won’t later on. As single individuals, as well as a species, we are limited by time (and knowledge). Idealistic absolutes like a “science” that explains all, or the ultimate “Truth”, these are the real false gods. The real cartoons in this picture. They speak to us from the other side of a reality that binds us.

And so this is why I say this creates the possibility of relative truth compared to an ultimate one. Or Relative Free Will. A point of view that is bound by time. That becomes true because we don’t have the choice of reaching out and defy the limit of time. This is honest and moral because it makes us equal and empowers us. It makes us human instead of super-human, or compared to super-humans as nihilism or other forms of false realism would pretend.

Spinning the windmills

After I finished reading “The Magus” by John Fowles, and while in the process of wrapping up my review of it, I found out two things that I knew would eventually lead to this follow-up. The first is that I compared a few key passages of the book, between the original version and the revision, and I decided that not only the revision is much worse, but that Fowles must have HATED the book, somehow, as if belonging to a young self he now despised and and decided to reject, to the point of defacing it through the revision.

I have the feel that “whoever” wrote The Magus wrote it in a moment of inspiration and enlightenment. My thought is that the older Fowles lost some of that clarity and so, in reading again his own book, found himself as separate from it. Like a foreigner. All the changes I found in the parts I compared are for the worse, and in some cases so bad that they utterly destroy the strong points of the book.

But on the positive side I also found out that Fowles, two years before the publication of The Magus, published another really interesting book titled “The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas”, and this is particularly important to put in the light of The Magus since the two books are directly connected. The Aristos is like the last episode of Evangelion, it reveals the very naked structure of The Magus, stripping away from it characters and story. This happens SO RARELY and, because so, it’s like finding a diamond. Writers never fully reveal their tricks, they never remove the curtain. You are not allowed to see how they work, how the creation comes alive. And for the kind of reader I am, this is the hidden aspect my attention is actually always on, the rest being a distraction. So I’m always excited when the CIPHER to a book is offered so plainly, and generously I guess.

The Aristos is like finding The Magus’ spellbook. And feeling like you’re reading a forbidden text that should have been kept secret. Something only for initiates.

In my review of The Magus you could see that one of the quotes doesn’t come from the book, because it comes from The Aristos, just a little trick on my part. The book is actually not that easy to find nowadays, but I have a copy. Horribly, the preface reveals it’s a goddamned revision. AGAIN. Fowles decided to rewrite this too. The big problem is that I searched all over the internet, but couldn’t find the original version. On the other hand the revision is only two years older than The Magus itself, so there’s always hope Fowles did not yet lost that clarity I’m after. Though his own words in the preface sound ominous:

This edition contains new material, but it is shorter than its predecessor and, I sincerely hope, much clearer. One other criticism of the first edition I fully deserve. There was an irritating swarm of new-coined words. These I have almost completely abolished.

I WANT THE IRRITATING SWARM OF NEW-COINED WORDS. Damn you, Fowles, I’m after your enlightened self that you lost on the way! So here I am with a book I have now the feel has been emptied of its full power and inspiration… I’m convinced that the unrevised version would be so much more important for me, but I’ll have to do with what I have.

Regardless of “what it might have been”, the book is indeed amazing. The Aristos is basically a philosophical book that lays out plainly Fowles’ mythology. Literally a godsend:

The book you are about to begin is written in the form of notes. This is not laziness on my part, but an attempt to suppress all rhetoric, all persuasion through style.

And the actual beginning is one of the Best Ever:

1. Where are we? What is this situation? Has it a master?

It proceeds from there, with very simple inferences. In some ways it reminds me, more than Wittgenstein (to which this is often compared), of geometry. Setting a few basic rules and then use them to build a system.

The trick is to at least remove the illusion of ambiguity.

Still in the introduction, there’s this passage:

I believe this is one of the great heresies – and tyrannies – of our time. I reject totally the view that in manners of general concern (such as the meaning of life, the nature of the good society, the limitations of the human condition) only the specialist has the right to have opinions – and then only in his own subject. Trespassers will be prosecuted.

In my opinion, this reads like a declaration of Post-modernism. To cross barriers and contaminate. To shift the focus. Only this way, for example, you begin to see that some mythology patterns have common roots in different religions. Not simply because of cultural relations, but also because they still originate from the human condition, and so they also all lead back there.

So even in reading The Aristos I go through Fowles’ philosophical points and trying to validate them using my system of reference. In the end the pieces of the puzzle (of the human condition and Reality) are not endlessly wiped and rewritten as it may seem, but they are repositioned on the bigger blackboard.

3. All that exists has, by existing and not by not being the only thing that exists, individuality.

5. The forms of matter are finite, but matter is infinite.

This is again similar to the foundation of the last episode of Evangelion, but also the root of the Law of Form of Spencer-Brown that I often quote. More importantly, the common “pattern” Fowles describes is coherent with the true nature of man. The starting point: the Big Bang that is the origin of the human condition, and that so precedes the Big Bang of physical reality (since we assume the world preceded the human life, but here there’s an obvious contradiction to what I just said that was deliberate, let it not distract you).

A bit like the basic “I think, therefore I am”, often used as a starting point for philosophy for kids because it’s intuitive. Individuality on its own doesn’t exist. It exists when it is observed, and so it requires self-observation. Meaning: only an individuality can recognize itself.

This is intuitive because “we are”, and “we feel”. It’s a basic point because individuality as an abstract concept starts as our own individuality. The fact we are alive. The fact we fear death. The fact we have a beginning an an end, that separates us from everything else (and so creates our individuality).

So we perceive ourselves because we observe a basic distinction between us and the rest, a dividing line. That dividing line is the human condition, or its Big Bang.

Yet we must know that while our individuality is finite, the world and Reality are whole and infinite (as Fowles says at point 5). And we mis-perceive the world and ourselves because we are part of that continuous, infinite thing. We perceive individuality, but we are a continuity.

(form The Magus)
I had the sense this was the fundamental reality and that reality had a universal mouth to tell me so; no sense of divinity, of communion, of the brotherhood of man, of anything I expected before I became suggestible. No pantheism, no humanism. But something much wider, cooler and more abstruse. That reality was endless inter-action. No good, no evil; no beauty, no ugliness. No sympathy, no antipathy. But simply interaction. The endless solitude of the one, its total enislement from all else, seemed the same thing as the total inter-relationship of the all. All opposites seemed one, because each was indispensable to each. The indifference and the indispensability of all seemed one. I suddenly knew, but in a new hitherto unexperienced sense of knowing, that all else exists.
There was no meaning, only being.

Fowles proceeds explaining that the upper world follow rules that are indifferent to the individual. And Good and Bad, Pleasure and Pain, exist because our individuality creates them. We become the measure and balance of what otherwise is neutral and unconcerned. In the relation to us things become good or bad, pains or pleasures.

The Kabbalah’s spiritual “physics” (and Evangelion in its own way) says men come to be from God’s light as separate entities because they were divided by a barrier called “egoism”. It’s the exact same idea. We are driven by desire, because it is created by individuality. Egoism is self. If you want to see this in a more creative literary form you can try read some David Foster Wallace’s short stories titled “The Devil is a Busy Man”, on the technical impossibility of true altruism. In Kabbalah’s physics the egoism is literally the human condition, you can’t avoid it because doing so would undo you as a “man”. So the truth of the condition isn’t obscured as a mere attempt to persuade people to well behave.

17. Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently indifference to individual things.

14. Man is a seeker of the agent. We seek an agent for this being in a blind wind, this being on a raft; the mysterious power, the causator, the god, the face behind the mysterious mask of being and not being.

I inverted here Fowles’ order because the second is consequence of the first. You can find a positive or negative cause. The positive, like in Kabbalah, says that even in happiness a man feels some lack, the need for a greater purpose that gives his life meaning, spirituality. Desire can never be fulfilled, or the fulfillment is always momentary. The negative cause instead comes from pain. Man wonder “why” all the pain, what it is all for. Something that may justify, and maybe excuse, it all.

33. We build towards nothing; we build.

34. Our universe is the best possible because it can contain no Promised Land; no point where we could have all we imagine. We are designed to want: with nothing to want, we are like windmills in a world without wind.

But again, the immediacy that we feel about these thoughts still origins from our nature as individual. An original separation that in religion is “from god”, or from Eden or whatever literal manifestation of the abstraction. But we know that even from a “scientific” or logical point of view that separation does exist, and it happens the moment we observe (and feel) individuality.

So Fowles’ image of a raft (individuality) in a blind wind and endless ocean (the continuity of the world) preserves the truth of the human condition. And so life as a “passage” from an Eden and toward some promised land. They are just separation from the world as it actually always is. The flux of a process.

Then he continues stating this is the best of possible worlds, or: The necessity of hazard.

24. I am is I was not, I might not have been, I may not be, I shall not be.

25. In order that we should have meaning, purpose and pleasure it has been, is, and always will be necessary that we live in a whole that is indifferent to every individual thing in it; and the precise form of its indifference is that the duration of being and the fortune during being of each individual thing are fundamentally but not unconditionally in hazard.

26. What we call suffering, death, disaster, misfortune, tragedy, we should call the price of freedom. The only alternative to this suffering freedom is an unsuffering unfreedom.

22. A god who revealed his will, who ‘heard’ us, who answered our prayers, who was propitiable, the kind of god simple people like to imagine would be desirable: such a god would destroy our hazard, all our purpose and all our happiness.

These few points unify two important concepts. One I was discussing here, quoting another passage from the Kabbalah (scroll to the second quote block), and about the necessity of partiality (individuality) and pain to be able to also partake with freedom. The other is about my discussion on free will. Or the problem of free will in a deterministic world.

The description I made is very similar to Fowles’ necessity of hazard and his hypothetical mythology that comes next, that I quoted partially in my The Magus review (go to see it). “If there had been a creator, his second act would have been to disappear.”

The same basic trick of the act of writing a story. The writer disappears, creates a fictional world, characters can only be believable as long they don’t know the world is fictional and act on their own will and individuality.

More importantly, this is abstraction and metaphysical and even religious SPECULATION (and the reason why no one is usually interested in this I’m writing), but the personal position of an actual scientist, guess what? It’s identical!

Here’s Sean Carroll, who I follow on internet because he’s one of the pioneers of modern science with also a role in helping the explanation of very complex new theories to the general public.

The search for certainty in empirical knowledge is a chimera. I could always be a brain in a vat, or teased by an evil demon, or simply an AI program running on somebody else’s computer — fed consistently misleading “sense data” that led me to incorrect conclusions about the true nature of reality. Or, to put a more modern spin on things, I could be a Boltzmann Brain — a thermal fluctuation, born spontaneously out of a thermal bath with convincing (but thoroughly incorrect) memories of the past. But — here is the punchline — it makes no sense to act as if any of those is the case.

Maybe you are a brain in a vat. What are you going to do about it? You could try to live your life in a state of rigorous epistemological skepticism, but I guarantee that you will fail. You have to believe something, and you have to act in some way, even if your belief is that we have no reliable empirical knowledge about the world and your action is to never climb out of bed. On the other hand, putting aside the various solipsistic scenarios and deciding to take the evidence of our senses (more or less) at face value does lead somewhere; we can make sense of the world, act within it and see it respond in accordance with our understanding.

Now compare that quote from Carroll to this back from Fowles:

36. We are in the best possible situation because everywhere, blow the surface, we do not know; we shall never know why; we shall never know tomorrow; we shall never know a god or if there is a god; we shall never even know ourselves. This mysterious wall round our world and our perception of it is not there to frustrate us but to train us back to the now, to life, to our time being.

74. I do not consider myself an atheist, yet this concept of ‘God’ and our necessary masterlessness obliges me to behave in all public matters as if I were.

The first part of point 36 reads like the title Carrol gave to his blog post: “What I Believe But Cannot Prove”.

(I consider this explanation as radically different compared to the famous Pascal’s Wager. As that’s more like a selfish, pragmatic bet that doesn’t actually help understanding; where understanding is the goal, opposed to just convenience. And for sure we cannot infer what is to gain or lose.)

We are, as human beings, in a transition, but this essence is ETERNAL. We do not have a place to reach. We will never have it. The origin and end, like birth and death, make the transition possible as a place, defining it, but then they stay outside experience. Our essence is about staying in this transition (process). And accept it for what it is.

42. Look out of the window: everything you see is frozen fire in transit between fire and fire. Cities, equations, lovers, landscapes: all are hurtling towards the hydrogen crucible.

The consequence of this, both for Carroll and Fowles, is that we are forced to use our free will, like I say in my post. We are forced to think as if we are atheists, in Fowles’ words, with our attention focused on our time being. The now. Our actual responsibility on this world, the effect our actions have on other people. Our own responsibility, our own free will, our own limited judgement, given that “we shall never know why; we shall never know tomorrow.” It’s entirely on us.

The driver of a lorry carrying high explosives drives more carefully than the driver of one loaded with bricks; and the driver of a high-explosive lorry who does not believe in a life after death drives more carefully than one who does. We are all in this nitroglycerine truck.

And the last point (of this section) Fowles writes is a thing of poetry and absolute beauty that almost unifies Lovecraft with the movie “2001: A Space Odissey”:

76. I live in hazard and infinity. The cosmos stretches around me, meadow on meadow of galaxies, reach on reach of dark space, steppes of stars, oceanic darkness and light. There is no amenable god in it, no particular concern or particular mercy. Yet everywhere I see a living balance, a rippling tension, an enormous yet mysterious simplicity, an endless breathing of light. And I comprehend that being is understanding that I must exist in hazard but that the whole is not in hazard.
Seeing and knowing this is being conscious; accepting it is being human.

Epically long & outlandish

I was going through some old bookmarks I didn’t have the time to read properly and found another of those things that a couple of hours later leave me with too many browser tabs open as I follow the various branches. Here’s the two links:

– http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-mahabharata-recollection-and-q-with.html
– http://aidanmoher.com/blog/2013/04/articles/broader-fantasy-foundations-part-three-mahabharata-by-max-gladstone/

I actually still have to read the first, as it lead directly to the second. So another Classic Epic, to put next to the other Chinese Epics. A few corrections, though. The article says:

we’re only talking about a single book a little less than half the length of the entire Wheel of Time series.

Well, not quite. The Jordan’s WoT is “merely” 3M 300k words. If you add up Sanderson you get 4M 279k, for an average of 10.700 pages. The Mahabharata is also quite huge: 2M 539k, for an average of 6.347 pages. So it’s a bit MORE than half of WoT, and only if you add up the million words that Sanderson added to it.

But that’s why I tried to look up on the wiki how “The Mahabharata” is connected to the rest. Because the whole Hindu mythology is huge. I got lost in the wikipedia within minutes. And I guess it can also count as one story, as the many “characters” cross over between these different “series”.

At some point I was really wondering “what’s the point”. Here’s just something at random:

To continue with the process of creation, Brahma gave birth to a man and a woman from his own body. The man was named Svayambhuva Manu and the woman was named Shatarupa. Humans are descended from Manu. That is the reason they are known as manava. Manu and Shatarupa had three sons named Vira, Priyavarata and Uttanapada.

Uttanapada’s son was the great Dhruva, Dhruva performed very difficult meditation (tapasya) for three thousand divine years.

So, let’s look up how long is a divine year?

In the explanations of the measurements of time, one cycle of the four yugas together is 12.000 years of the demigods, called divine years. Each of these years is composed of 365 days, and each of their days is equal to one human year.

So a divine year is the sum of 365 human years. And so the guy in the story above meditated for 3.000 * 365 = 1.068.000 human years!

Stuff that boggles the mind.

The Hindu cosmology and timeline is the closest to modern scientific timelines and even more which might indicate that the Big Bang is not the beginning of everything, but just the start of the present cycle preceded by an infinite number of universes and to be followed by another infinite number of universes.

And I thought religion was a way to translate things into relatable terms.

Beside the boggling nature of this mythology, the English translation of The Mahabharata is here (in 12 nice .pdf):

– http://www.holybooks.com/mahabharata-all-volumes-in-12-pdf-files/

Since this is an ancient version, I’ve looked around for newer/better translations (non-abridged, of course). It seems there are only two that are now complete. One done by Chicago University, the other by Bibek Debroy, but both are rater hugely expensive for the casual reader. In particular there are a few samples of the Chicago University version, so I could compare it to the one available for free.

And I’m pleased. In the sense that the Chicago University version is full with notes and commentary, but the actual text is very, very close to the free version. It flows better overall, but the older flavor of the ancient translation is actually fancier and more pleasant. So even the free version seems rather good.

Fun fact: notice how the end of the first paragraph on this page points to “a” Wheel of Time.