I really liked this. It takes a while to really get going, but once it reaches that point, it's very hard to put down. I have no idea how this is going to end, but it's a very cool fictional world similar to ours where Mathematics developed into a quasi-religious (but non-Theistic) monasticism. Religion exists too (and people who believe in God exist on both sides and are called "deolaters"). Part of the reason this book is so cool is the way the author developed a whole vocabulary that is parallel to ours yet slightly askew. The word "anathem" relates both to "anthem" (song) and "anathema" (curse). Also very cool to me is the way the people in the story are used to deal with vast expanses of time. The world in the story reminds me more than a little of "The Glass Bead Game" (Magister Ludi), which was one of my favorite books about a century ago when i read it.
This was my first Neal Stephenson book.
Quotes:
You can get a lot done in ten millennia if you put your mind to it
For in truth I was looking at a collection of ancient machines that had no meaning: all syntax, no semantics. I was claiming I saw a meaning in it. But this meaning had no reality, outside of my mind.
Cord had been growingly exasperated by something, and now, finally, she let it out: “This just isn’t the way to do it!” “Do what?” “Build a clock that’s supposed to keep going for thousands of years!”
“Some of the other Millennium Clocks are more like what you have in mind: designed so that they can run for millennia with no maintenance at all. It just depends on what sort of statement the designer wanted to make.”
We don’t think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not washing. But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.
“It’s frustrating, talking to you. Every idea my little mind can come up with has already been come up with by some Saunt two thousand years ago, and talked to death.”
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.” (Orolo)
I knew that this was how the Saunts had done it. They judged theorical proofs not logically but aesthetically.
Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said.
It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt-talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them.
Three fraas and two suurs sang a five-part motet while twelve others milled around in front of them. Actually they weren’t milling; it just looked that way from where we sat. Each one of them represented an upper or lower index in a theorical equation involving certain tensors and a metric. As they moved to and fro, crossing over one another’s paths and exchanging places while traversing in front of the high table, they were acting out a calculation on the curvature of a four-dimensional manifold, involving various steps of symmetrization, antisymmetrization, and raising and lowering of indices. Seen from above by someone who didn’t know any theorics, it would have looked like a country dance.
"I am throwing the Book at you."
There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance.
I could now see that this business of being the leader was going to be a pain in the neck because people would always be trying to get me to do the wrong things or get rid of me altogether.
“But your way isn’t just that set of rules,” Cord said. “It’s who you are—you follow that way for bigger reasons. And as long as you stay true to that, the confusion you’re talking about will sort itself out eventually.”
To Cord, this was just Selection Number 37. To me it was just about the most powerful piece of music we had. We sang it only once a year, at the end of a week spent fasting and reciting the names of the dead and the titles of the books burned.
she could talk about alloys the way some girls talked about shoes
The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.
“If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.” “Asamocra?” “Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction.
In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass—never mind—and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation.
The world that I lived in with Jesry and Lio and Arsibalt, Orolo and Jad, Ala and Tulia and Cord and all the others, was the very world that was being created from day to day in the mind of the Condemned Man in that courtroom. Sooner or later it would all end in a final judgment by the Magistrate. If that—if our—world seemed, on balance, like a decent place to him, he would let the Condemned Man live and our world would go on existing in his mind. If the world, as a whole, only reflected the Condemned Man’s depravity, the Magistrate would have him executed and our world would cease to exist. We could help keep the Condemned Man alive and thus preserve the existence of ourselves and our world by striving at all times to make it a better place.
He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice.
“Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.”
They came to Laterre fifty years after the death of Gödel.
“In Ita talk,” I said, “when you call something ‘low-level,’ you mean it’s really important, right?”
“Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. “Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it.
“Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”
“Conservation of momentum,” he announced, “it’s not just a good idea—it’s the law!”
‘All right, already! I get it! The Hylaean Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across worldtracks!’ But where is the payoff? There’s got to be more to it than this big ship roaming from cosmos to cosmos collecting sample populations and embalming them in steel spheres.
No comments:
Post a Comment