A Detail And Democracy

A Detail

Only by closely studying the text of Poul Anderson's intricately constructed "Hiding Place" have I discovered what might be a minor discrepancy that could if necessary be explained as an error by one of the characters. The chief engineer says that the tentacle centaurs live at "'...triple gravity...'" (The Van Rijn Method, p. 579) whereas the captain later says that they "'...live under...about half again Earth's gravity.'" (p. 596) In this second conversation, it is the caterpiggles that live "'...under three Gs...'" (ibid.) and their high gravity environment is a reason for eliminating them as the zoo keepers. See previous post.

Democracy
Nicholas van Rijn treats his employees only according to their merits. Fighting Captain Torrance over a woman, he knocks out one of Torrance's teeth but then cradles the head of the fallen captain, offering brandy, and says that "'...we get [the tooth] fixed...'" (p. 602) at the next port. Shortly afterwards, he whispers:

"'Don't tell anyone or I have too many fights, but I like a brass-bound nerve like you got. When we get home, I think you transfer off this yacht to command of a training squadron. How you like that, ha?'" (pp. 602-603)

Say what you want, do what you want, punch him in the stomach (there is muscle under the fat) but, as long as you work right, you get promoted. Captain Bahadur Torrance of the planet Ramanujan is yet another character whose later career we would have followed with interest.

Eliminations

How a process of elimination identified the zoo keepers (see recent posts and here):

Eliminated
The gorilloids (tested with a specially devised instrument):
color blind;
unable to focus on the ship's instruments;
brain small;
most brain activity controlling animal functions;
canine intelligence level.

The lone elephantoid (this and the rest considered logically):
too big;
one individual not enough to pilot and land the ship, then collect and care for specimens etc.

The tiger apes:
reverting to quadrupedalism;
not specialized enough.

The caterpiggles:
the emergency acceleration switch fell too easily, thus not suitable in high gravity;
such light shelves would not be built in high gravity.

The tentacle centaurs...
...breathe hydrogen, therefore would not use copper oxide rectifiers exposed to their atmosphere.

The helmet beasts:
too small and slow;
not enough room for real brains.

Solution
The cabins have big and small cubbyholes. A zoo keeper is a helmet beast symbiotically attached to a gorilloid. Flandry informs us that the planet of the Togru-Kon-Tanakh came to be named "Vanrijn."

Brains III

"'...a relatively small brain, within limits, doesn't mean these creatures are not intelligent. Their neurones might well be more efficient than ours.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 582.

Here is the philosophical mind-body question again. See here. A hypothetical alien might have a smaller brain containing fewer neurons. However, his neurons, being more efficient, might exchange electrochemical signals of greater intensity and/or with greater rapidity than ours. Thus, he might be equally intelligent and therefore able to understand, e.g., the proof that there is no highest prime number. However, neuronic interactions on the one hand and conscious reflection on a mathematical proof on the other hand are not only different processes but even different kinds of processes although the former somehow causes the latter.

As John Searle suggested, we need to study psychology and study neurology and find out how they connect. Maybe this third inquiry is philosophy.

Alien Zoo Ship III

Nicholas van Rijn's current female companion tells Captain Torrance:

"'I'm coming to Earth with you...Freeman Van Rijn has promised me a very good job.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 567.

Torrance thinks, "He always does..." (ibid.)

Van Rijn would neither give a good job to anyone who was incompetent nor make a promise that he was unable to keep but would also be confident of his ability to resolve any contradiction that he had talked himself into. So how would he resolve this one? I do not know, not being van Rijn.

Some covers of Trader To The Stars incorrectly show an elephant. See recent posts. The organism in question is:

a quadruped;
the size of an elephant;
slenderer, indicating a lower gravity;
green and faintly scaled with hair along its back;
armed with a powerful trunk that ends in a ring of strong pseudodactyls but no horns.

Torrance speculates that a one-armed race could accomplish as much as humanity although not as easily. But the elephantoids are not the zoo keepers either...

And, of course, sf writers need to imagine alien animals that cannot be described as looking like Terrestrial organisms.

Alien Zoo Ship II

Occasionally, I comment on the fearsome appearance of some of Poul Anderson's aliens, even though his characters, like Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn, regularly do business with such exotic intelligences as readily as they would with fellow human beings.

Here is one of the species in the captured zoo ship:

restless black creatures in dim red light;
stumpy-legged;
quadrupedal;
faceless heads armored in bony material (!);
two sets of three thick, rope-like arms;
two of the arms ending in three boneless fingers/tentacles;
breathing hydrogen under high pressure in triple gravity at seventy below.

These "octopus horses" or "tentacle centaurs" turn out not to be intelligent but suppose they had done? Would you, wearing an armored, heated spacesuit, of course, walk up to such a creature, shake his hand and offer him a business deal? Well, you would not necessarily shake his hand. First, you would have to research which kind of gesture would be expected or appropriate and indeed safe...

The captain asks:

"'Are they the only ones who like that kind of weather?'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2011), p. 579 -

- to which the chief engineer, giving him "...a sharp look...," responds:

"'I see what you are getting at, skipper.'" (ibid.)

I do not see what he is getting at. Anderson's texts do not have many such moments when we have to guess or deduce what his characters are driving at. The chief engineer has found three other cubicles with the same kind of environment but their occupants are obvious animals like snakes. Van Rijn's current female companion suggests that the crew would not take animals from home with them but van Rijn replies that his yacht has a cat and parrots, also that many planets have similar conditions.

The plot thickens.

Alien Zoo Ship

Nicholas van Rijn's men have captured an alien zoo ship and want to communicate with its crew who, however, have destroyed all evidence of their identity and are hiding in plain sight among their exhibits. When it is realized that the ship synthesizes food even for the crew, van Rijn comments:

"'...maybe here we find a good new market. And until they learn the situation, we can charge them triple prices.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 578.

Are triple prices, even just temporary ones, ethical? I am not an expert in capitalist "morality." (Despite my sneer quotes, van Rijn, unlike some merchants of the Polesotechnic League, does have morality. He regards nuclear bombardment of a hostile planet as not only economically wasteful but also morally wrong, a guilt that would kill the League.)

Even more interesting are the technicalities of the zoo ship. The crew has emptied the ship of its air although, of course, each "cage" has an internal atmosphere. But is the air in the reserve tanks similar to that in any of the cages? There are no reserve tanks. Instead, an adjustable catalytic manifold renews air and chemosynthesizes losses from a store of inorganic matter. When, as the hiding zoo keepers must hope, van Rijn's men give up and depart, they will open their cage to let out some of its air so that the chemosynthesizer will then fill the ship with their preferred atmosphere. Pretty smart stuff.

Some of the exhibits are clearly just animals, incapable of building a spaceship. For the suspects, the chief engineer has constructed equipment to assess gravity, temperature, illumination, atmospheric composition and pressure etc in each cage but it takes time to translate dial readings into data. Each cage is metered but of course the meters are incomprehensible. Meanwhile, can pure detective work identify the zoo keepers? Van Rijn, who seems merely to eat, drink and idle, also thinks very hard.

Freya And Valhalla

Names of deities and hereafters in mythology and fantasy become names of planets in hard sf. See Ansa.

Freya, a colony planet on the fringe of human civilization, has no extra-planetary enterprises and no spatial traffic except a few merchants of the Polesotechnic League who visit the League base in a green Freyan valley but never stay long. The Solar Spice & Liquors factor sells pepper and nutmeg. A century ago, the Freyans expelled the "Adderkop" outlaws who then colonized a planet in unknown space beyond the League outpost, Valhalla.

Since then, the Adderkops have increased in numbers and built a bigger fleet of obsolete warships but remain too weak to attack Freya so instead they prey on defenseless planets, exact tribute and conduct overpriced trade. Knowing that the League wants to expand into this volume of space and will not tolerate banditry, the Adderkops harass League outposts in the hope that the merchants will back off. However, Nicholas van Rijn leads an expedition to Freya where he bribes, bluffs, interrogates prisoners, makes deductions, gets a clue to a previously uninvestigated region of space and, going there, follows a neutrino trail to a human colony planet that must be the Adderkops. Then, flying to Valhalla where he is to be met by a League patrol ship, he will be able to send a few Star class battleships against the Adderkops.

It would be good to read a series of stories about the crew of a League patrol ship or battleship. Not employed by the Solar government, they will not wage war against any other government and will use only enough force to keep the trade routes open so their adventures will to that extent differ from those of Dominic Flandry who, in a later period, has enlisted in the Space Navy of the Terran Empire.

Festina Lente

Monday 5 January was the beginning of the first full working week of 2015. Although we are retired, regular activities resume:

gym;
meditation group;
an Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Albert Docks, Liverpool;
Latin class next week.

(We have completed the Christmas season but meanwhile our neighbors are lighting their houses to celebrate the birth of the Prophet.)

The class reminds me that I found an unexpected and unexplained Latin phrase in the van Rijn story, "Hiding Place." An engineer examining a captured alien spaceship advises one of his men:

"'...remember, festina lente.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 588.

The captain asks, "'For fear of wrecking the ship?'" (ibid.)

- which may be booby-trapped.

But we are not told precisely what the phrase means, which is "make haste slowly." In other words, work as quickly and efficiently as possible but without rushing, cutting corners or taking risks. I happened to understand that one but might not have. English dialogue is occasionally peppered with such Latin phrases. Are they simply adopted unchanged by Anglic-speakers and for how long will they be preserved? By the end of the Technic History, Anglic itself is referred to as an ancient language. Poul Anderson's complete works display a vast panorama of the Roman Empire and several successor civilizations.

Brains II

"'...what's really to the point, the degree of brain activity more or less independent of the other nerve paths. That is, whether the animal is thinking.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 590.

Here is the philosophical mind-body problem in a nutshell. Someone is thinking. He is conscious of the subject-matter of his thoughts which could be anything, for example the novels of Poul Anderson. Someone else is observing the thinker, using scientific instruments. The scientific observer is conscious of detectable cerebral processes.

Thus, there is a single process of thinking. However, there are also two qualitatively distinct perspectives on this single process. My account of what I thought about Anderson's novels and a scientist's account of the neurological interactions detectable inside my brain seem to be accounts not only of different processes but even of qualitatively different kinds of processes.

There is a difference between the questions, "What did I think?" and "How did I think it?" However, the second question has two kinds of answers: certain neurons interacted and certain ideas interacted. Some terms like "data" bridge the gap but only partially. Sensory inputs, including, e.g., the sight of a printed page, are cerebrally processed and meanings are recognized. However, there remains a qualitative difference between the recognition of meaning, which we all experience whenever we read a familiar word, and a technologically detectable exchange of electrical or chemical impulses between neurons in a brain. I think that we have to say that the cerebral event causes the mental event.

Mental events involve or at least refer to consciousness - even though, paradoxically, there can be unconscious mental processes. "Meaning," "recognition" and "experience" assume consciousness whereas "electrical or chemical impulses" does not although the impulses seem to be the causes of consciousness. My best attempt to explain the emergence of consciousness is to suggest that naturally selected organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations quantitatively increased until it was quantitatively transformed into conscious sensation.

"Conscious sensation" is tautologous because "sensation" is another of those words that assume or imply consciousness. However, I write "conscious sensation" in order to differentiate this psychological process from organismic sensitivity which is not necessarily conscious. Consciousness, as soon as it did exist, was naturally selected because pleasure and pain have survival value. "Psychological" means "of consciousness." Any attempt to define consciousness either assumes it or leaves it out. Thus, I think that it is impossible to write, "X is ---," then to fill in the blank in such a way that readers of the sentence say, "X is consciousness," unless the blank is filled by one or more synonyms of "consciousness."

Causes and effects are neither identical nor interchangeable. A quantitative difference between wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation causes a qualitative difference between colors as perceived by sighted organisms whose eyes are sensitive to those particular wavelengths. For a longer discussion of "Minds and Brains," see here.

Brains

"'Suppose they got brains in their bellies...'
"'...that's hardly believable. Neural paths would get too long...Every animal I know of, if it has a central nervous system at all, keeps the brain close to the principal sense organs: which are usually located in the head.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 582.

If there is a head, of course. Are there animals, mobile organisms, without central nervous systems? Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers have a brain protected within the body with no head but an eye and a mouth/hand at the end of each neck/arm.

In one of Niven's Draco Tavern stories, a dialogue goes something like: "Do you have a central nervous system? Is it at the top?"

Science fiction writers need to be very imaginative about the shapes of alien bodies. See here.

Hiding Place

In Poul Anderson's "Hiding Place," the viewpoint character, Captain Bahadur Torrance, is a Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacemen whereas, in Anderson's earlier story, "Margin of Profit" (see here), Captain Rafael Torrens was a Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacefarers. However, no doubt "spaceman," "spacefarer" and "astronaut" are interchangeable English translations of a comparable Anglic word (or words). By the time of the Mirkheim crisis, the Brotherhood will have been merged or amalgamated into the United Technicians.

Torrance wears "...the Ship-and-Sunburst of the Polesotechnic League." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 558) I do not have a relevant passage to hand right now but it sounds as if the Terran Empire is going to adopt the symbol of the League?

Torrance is from Ramanujan as, in a later period, is Dominic Flandry's friend, Chunderban Desai. Ramanujan is one of the planetary battlefields in the Solar Commonwealth's first civil war. Torrance is captain of Nicholas van Rijn (see here and here)'s space yacht, the Hebe G.B. The next few posts might focus on some aspects of their singular journey which has already been partly discussed here and here.

For example, in the Technic History version of hyperspace, astronauts attached to the hull of a ship are enclosed in its force-field and therefore are carried along through hyperspace although:

"Without compensating electronic viewscreens, the sky was weirdly distorted by aberration and Doppler effect, as if the men were already dead and beating through the other existence toward Judgment." (p. 571)

If there is a postmortem Judgment (which I doubt), then we are beating toward it right now, even before entering "...the other existence..." I think that Anderson's words imply this. He writes "...as if..." (this is hard sf) but leaves us with the image of men under a strange sky bound for their final Judgment. To read a fantasy in which a magician entering the City of Dis comments that he and his colleagues have been making this journey all their lives, see James Blish's The Day After Judgment.

Antares

Antares, also known by its Bayer designation Alpha Scorpii (abbreviated to α Scorpii or α Sco), is the seventeenth brightest star in the nighttime sky^[a] and the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, and is often referred to as "the heart of the scorpion". Along with Aldebaran, Regulus, and Fomalhaut, Antares comprises the group known as the 'Royal stars of Persia'. It is one of the four brightest stars near the ecliptic.
-from Wikipedia.

Nicholas van Rijn gives Sandra Tamarin a lift in his private spaceship from Antares to Earth. Before that, the imperialist Borthudians had attacked and boarded any ship that passed through the volume of space claimed by them, thus making it barely profitable for League companies to trade along the route between Earth and Antares.

Since Antares had appeared at least twice in the van Rijn series, I considered it appropriate to google both for an image and for astronomical data.

Two Unusual Planets Early In The Van Rijn Series

"Diomedes' poles are in the ecliptic plane. Each spends half the year in winter and night. Intelligent Diomedeans are winged migrators."
-copied from "Unusual Heavenly Bodies" (see here). 

For more information on Diomedes, see here and here. 

In the second installment of the Nicholas van Rijn series (see attached image), Old Nick is stranded on Diomedes. The third installment, "Hiding Place," briefly mentions yet another unusual planet:

"'They're under three Gs...Even so, their planet has oxygen and nitrogen rather than hydrogen, under a dozen Earth-atmosphere's pressure. The temperature is rather high, fifty degrees. I imagine their world, though of nearly Jovian mass, is so close to its sun that the hydrogen was boiled off, leaving a clear field for evolution similar to Earth's.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 596.

Large planets made habitable by cosmic accidents are among those listed in "Unusual Heavenly Bodies." Although they begin to sound familiar, each is a unique creation of Anderson's scientifically informed imagination. I may be posting more about events on Diomedes. 

(It has been a struggle to publish this post with the old, borrowed laptop. Normal service might slow down or cease for an indefinite period.)

Alien Animals

Nicholas van Rijn and his crew, including one Ramanujan and one Altaian, explore an alien zoo ship. They find:

a giant tendrilled shark;

tiny, flying, scaled, glittering reptiles;

tiger-striped, bear-sized, clawed, carnivorous mammals (tiger apes);

red, six-legged, otter-like creatures;

black, faceless, hydrogen-breathing quadrupeds with six ropy arms, two ending in boneless fingers, living under high pressure in triple gravity at seventy below (tentacle centaurs);

snakes living in the same conditions as the tentacle centaurs;

a green, scaled, elephant-sized quadruped with a trunk ending in psuedodactyls (the elephantoid);

large, oxygen-breathing bipeds with sphincters in their necks (gorilloids);

small, helmet-like quadrupeds with tentacles ending in cilia and human-like eyes (helmet beasts);

dark blue, silver-spotted, man-sized, oxygen-breathing caterpillars with two arms and hands, each with no thumbs but six opposable fingers, from a high gravity planet (catterpiggles).

This shows the difficulty of imagining alien animals without comparing them to Terrestrial animals. Superman had an extra-terrestrial zoo in his Fortress of Solitude. As described by Alan Moore, this contained "neonmoths" that shrieked with human voices and sentient puddles that evaporated when overexcited.

This comparison of a Nicholas van Rijn story with a Superman story is not frivolous. Although Superman initiated the new genre of "superheroes," he himself is an sf character who, while flying through space, can encounter interstellar traders like van Rijn or pirates like van Rijn's enemies in this story, the Adderkops.

(How can the Adderkops, having colonized a planet in unknown space a century ago, have increased the number of their warships since then?)