I missed one telling detail. The aliens directing Terrestrial history plan to use Ulyanov to get Russia out of the War, then to replace him with the democrats, but it does not work out like that. Poul Anderson's points are that human affairs are unpredictable in detail and that the details matter.
Maybe the same points have been expressed more subtly more recently:
"Beyond a certain degree of complexity, systems go chaotic, inherently unpredictable and unfathomable even to themselves."
-Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire, 7, p. 91.
Hegel argued that, beyond a specific quantum, quantitative change becomes qualitative change. Anderson states that, beyond a certain degree, increasing complexity becomes unpredictable chaos.
Continuing his reflection, Kenmuir wonders whether even the Teramind has absolute insight, then:
"He thrust the question from him. It always gave him an inward shudder." (ibid.)
Refusal to consider a difficult question is mystification. Only by continuing to consider the question can we either advance understanding or at least discover any inherent limits to understanding. Maybe we can no more understand the mind-brain relationship than we can visualize a tesseract or a new color but the only way to find out is to keep trying.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Another way of making the point you were stressing about "Details" is that some of the aliens trying to manipulate human history kept UNDERESTIMATING the abilities of men like Lenin and Hitler. That too helps explain why the aliens kept getting wrong-footed by human politicians.
As for the last paragraph, the unnamed narrator of "The Problem of Pain" says almost the same thing. And commends Peter Berg because he persisted in staring into the abyss of these ultimate questions.
Sean
Post a Comment