The Center Of The Cloud Universe

Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 709-794. 

The "Cloud Universe" in Poul Anderson's "Starfog" is simultaneously both a globular cluster and a gaseous nebula. I have tried to convey the richness of Anderson's imagination by summarizing his accounts of this spatial environment but there is always more. The accounts permeate the narrative rather than being confined to an introductory passage.

At the center:

nebular gas and dust are so dense that they present "...a nearly featureless glow..." (p. 772);

the glow is pearl-colored, with rainbows;

the stars are so close that thousands are visible despite the "starfog";

the plasma is actively energetic;

denser clouds conceal hazards - drifts of dust, rogue planets and dead stars;

the hazards, "...more than fog...," are compared to "...shoals, reefs, and riptides" (ibid.);

the two exploratory spacecraft are compared to "...frigates on unknown seas of ancient Earth..." (ibid.), but this sea is not flat and has no horizon;

gas and dust are so gravitationally concentrated that there is an unbelievable rate of star-production;

every time the cluster gathers material from the clouds of the galactic center, there are several supernovae per century for at least a million years;

radiation has sterilized every planet within a fifty light year radius;

atoms have been through a dozen supernova explosions, far more than elsewhere;

giant planets do not have shells of frozen water and smaller ones do not have silicate crusts;

iron, gold, mercury, tungsten, bismuth, uranium and transuranics abound;

some planets will have to be explored only by heavily armored robots;

the planets will be intensively mined for heavy elements rare elsewhere but abundant here;

the discoverers, drawing royalties on millions of the richest mines in the galaxy, will "'...command more resources than many civilizations...'" (p. 791)

Wealth beyond the dreams of Nicholas van Rijn: Satan and Mirkheim were each only one planet. An entire new phase of interstellar history, now spread across several spiral arms, is about to begin as the series ends.

The Gwydiona Experience

"'...it's impossible that you don't feel it! God is here already, everywhere. I can see [Him] shining from you...'"
- Poul Anderson, "The Night Face" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT p. 637.

"God" should mean a supra-rational transcendent experience, not the irrationality of temporary madness, which is what it turns out to mean here. See the previous post about Ken Wilber.

CS Lewis makes the same point as Wilber:

"...a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment, and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as 'So you think you're going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there'll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye'll have a grand time of it!' when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, 'Oh, don't you see, you ass, that there's a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?' That, of course, directed McPhee's fire at him. What emerged was that in Ransom's opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were as he said 'engulfed'. He used the word 'trans-sexual', and began to hunt around for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting 'trans-gastronomic'), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels."
- CS Lewis, Voyage To Venus (London, 1978), pp. 27-28.

Comments on Lewis
(i) I do not see why the Christian Heaven cannot include eating. It is described in the New Testament as a banquet.
(ii) "Trans-sexual" has come to mean something else.
(iii) I do not subscribe to Christian doctrine but Lewis might be describing a possible future development of humanity.

Is the eternal atemporal or trans-temporal and what might that mean? Is the Absolute impersonal or trans-personal and again what might that mean? (I think that the Absolute, that which exists independently of any external relationships, can only be everything, the totality.)

Lewis wrote a work of Christian apologetics called Beyond Personality. If three parallel straight lines symbolize three personal beings, might a triangle symbolize one tri-personal being, the Trinity? (However, I think that the Trinity doctrine arose not because philosophers speculated about trans-personality but because the Fourth Evangelist deified the Son and personified the Spirit while remaining monotheist.)

If the supernatural exists, then by definition it transcends the natural. Secularists deny the supernatural but not, unless they are also reductionists, transcendence, which means going beyond:

consciousness transcends unconsciousness;
human consciousness transcends animal consciousness;
civilization transcends primitive society etc.

As ever, I am grateful to Poul Anderson for implicitly raising such issues in fiction. The third installment of his History of the Technic Civilization is "The Problem of Pain" and the third last is "The Night Face." The former dramatizes a theological problem addressed by CS Lewis and the latter involves the unfortunate identification of "God," the transcendent, with insanity.

The Pre/Trans Fallacy

Pre/trans fallacy

Wilber believes that many claims about non-rational states make a mistake he calls the pre/trans fallacy. According to Wilber, the non-rational stages of consciousness (what Wilber calls "pre-rational" and "trans-rational" stages) can be easily confused with one another. In Wilber's view, one can reduce trans-rational spiritual realization to pre-rational regression, or one can elevate pre-rational states to the trans-rational domain.^[30] For example, Wilber claims that Freud and Jung commit this fallacy. Freud considered mystical realization to be a regression to infantile oceanic states. Wilber alleges that Freud thus commits a fallacy of reduction. Wilber thinks that Jung commits the converse form of the same mistake by considering pre-rational myths to reflect divine realizations. Likewise, pre-rational states may be misidentified as post-rational states.^[31] Wilber characterizes himself as having fallen victim to the pre/trans fallacy in his early work.<sup>[32]

To Poul Anderson fans:

The above extract from the Wikipedia article on the philosopher Ken Wilber is here for a reason. Please bear with me. Now see here.</sup>

Interlude

I have been diverted into other activities and into other reading, to be discussed on another blog. For most of next week, I will be away from a computer. I have not yet got around to ordering a copy of Multiverse - although I expect to hear about it?

Why does Daven Laurie ask his computer "'...about coherent radiation from natural sources...'"?
- Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 761.

"Coherent" is a scientific term that does not mean artificial or information-bearing but I do not find it easy to understand either what it does mean or why it matters. I have yet to finish rereading "Starfog", the story about Laure. This story is packed with hard sf background material about the Cloud Universe and I will continue to analyze this information before deciding what to read or reread next.

In Space

In much sf, space is a mere void to be crossed to reach a planet whereas, in several of Poul Anderson's works, space is an environment that his characters spend time in:

a spaceship attracts spores as they spread through asteroidal space (see here);

one spaceship tracks another through interstellar space (see here);

a Bussard ramjet accelerates at relativistic speeds through intergalactic space (see here);

Commonalty Ranger Daven Laure's self-aware spaceship, Jaccavrie, explores the opaque space of a globular cluster where glowing gas and dust conceal over a quarter of a million stars mere light-weeks or light-months apart.

I am still studying the "Cloud Universe" of Anderson's story, "Starfog." The crowded and clouded cluster is called "the Cloud Universe" because, when human beings who had been isolated for millennia within the cluster finally re-emerged into dark space, the difference between the two spatial environments was so complete that they thought that they had traveled between universes.

The cluster on its eccentric orbit has passed through the dense clouds near the galactic center twenty or thirty times, each time scooping up vast quantities of matter which then condense into several generations of giant stars.

It is impossible to navigate because:

the clouds of gas and dust absorb and diffuse the light even of supergiant stars;
the supergiants emit detectable neutrinos but so do many other sources;
the stellar proximity produces many magnetic effects;
many of the stars are doubles, triples or quadruples which revolve rapidly, thus twisting the force lines;
radiation keeps much of the interstellar medium in plasma form;
there is every kind of electromagnetic activity, synchrotron and betatron radiation and nuclear collision;
these and other unstated factors generate too much noise for any theoretically possible instrumentation;
inertial navigation would work at kinetic velocities but hyperdrive is necessary to cross parsecs and too rapid a change of gravitational potential between stars so close moving on such complicated paths would cause uncontollable perturbations;
the high cosmic ray background implies a high rate of nova and super-nova production which in turn indicates large numbers of navigational hazards like neutron stars, rogue planets, large meteoroids and thick dust banks.

Another Unusual Planet

In Poul Anderson's "Starfog," a subjovian planet had had:

a cloudy hydrohelium and methane atmosphere;
a core surrounded by ice and frozen gases;
an orbit a billion and a half kilometers from its primary, which:

received an abnormal infall of matter;
swelled and cooled;
consumed its inner planets;
blew away atmospheres, boiled oceans, melted ice and unleashed tectonic forces on the outer planets.

Consequently, the former subjovian is now an Earth-sized ball of metal and rock with mountains, cratered plains and an immense blue-red sun. However, a newly formed star, as bright as a thousand Sols, passes close while at the same time the glowing cluster of red, golden, emerald and sapphire stars rises behind the expanded sun.

Events on uninhabited planets become as fascinating as activities on inhabited planets.

Inside The Cloud Universe

Space is never completely empty. In "Starfog," Poul Anderson imagines a volume of space full of gas and dust illuminated by hundreds of thousands of closely packed stars at every stage from condensation to explosion. Gas, condensing into stars, is enriched by novas and renewed when the cluster's eccentric orbit approaches the galactic center.

Standing on the bridge of his spaceship, Daven Laure sees clouds and colors glowing, streaming, eddying, piling into cliffs and darkening into grottoes. He traverses not apparent emptiness but landless cloudscapes, hears sounds, feels vibrations and remembers fire and ice meeting in the Void of Norse mythology.

His computer remarks that the external view is an illusion:

the interstellar medium is not as dense as a planetary atmosphere but appears so because absorption and reflection effects are cumulative over light years;
the swirling appears accelerated because the ship is under hyperdrive;
space does not shine - excited atoms fluoresce;
the sounds heard are from instruments within the ship;
quantum micro-jumping across variable magnetic fields, the ship interacts with them and thus seems to be buffeted by tangible currents.

Jaccavrie II

"Quite a few Rangers were eremetic types... It was normal for them to think of their ships as elaborate tools. Daven Laure, who was young and outgoing, naturally thought of his as a friend."
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 714.

The Rangers should know whether their ships are tools or friends. Later, the computer, robot or cybernetic brain controlling Laure's spaceship, Jaccavrie, chuckles. When an artifact chuckles, there are two possibilities:

the artifact has been programmed to simulate human responses including, when appropriate, amusement;

the artifact is conscious and is spontaneously expressing amusement.

If the Rangers have programmed an artifact to simulate human responses, then they know that that artifact is not conscious whereas, if they have constructed an artifact that duplicates brain functions, then they have the same reason to call that artifact conscious as they have to call the possessor of an organic brain conscious so there should be no mystery or ambiguity here.

Anderson projects our questions about artificial intelligence forward to a time when those questions should have been answered.

Jaccavrie

"The [computer's] tone was anxious. Laure didn't believe that emotion was put on. He refrained from anthropomorphizing his computer, just as he did those nonhuman sophonts he encountered. At the same time, he didn't go along with the school of thought which claimed that human-sensibility terms were absolutely meaningless in such connections. An alien brain, or a cybernetic one like Jaccavrie's, could think; it was aware; it had conation. Therefore it had analogies to his."
-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 709-794 AT p. 714.

Analogies to his sensibility terms? I have just googled "conation" and have realized that I had not understood it. I had thought that it was "cognition."

Brains, whether human or non-human, generate consciousness. Computers, including the one on which I am typing and the one on which you are reading, do not generate consciousness. They manipulate symbols according to rules without understanding the meanings of the symbols. Conceivably, some future artifact will not only manipulate symbols but will also generate consciousness and will even be intelligent enough to recognize meanings and understand symbols. Such an artifact might interchangeably be called a "computer" or a "cybernetic brain" in recognition of its different functions.

If, in Laure's time, cybernetic brains are known to be aware, then there should be no school of thought claiming that human-sensibility terms are meaningless. So does Anderson mean that it is only Laure's opinion that cybernetic brains are aware? Laure's conversations with Jaccavrie imply that such brains pass the Turing Test. If any entity passed that test and was then shown to have been merely manipulating symbols, as a modern computer does, then I would have a major philosophical problem.

To pass the Turing Test, i.e., to converse in a way indistinguishable from that of an intelligent being, any entity told a racist joke would have to:

laugh or
not get the joke or
understand the joke but not think that it was funny or
groan at a bad joke or
tell another joke in return or
say, "I don't think that's very funny!" or
say, "That's offensive!" or
threaten legal action or
change the subject or
say nothing or
end the conversation or
respond in some other unpredictable way.

Spaceship Stories

How many science fiction (sf) stories begin as a spaceship approaches, or has just reached, an unknown planet? Many entire series have existed on this basis, most obviously Star Trek. James Blish not only adapted Star Trek episodes as short stories but also, more importantly, wrote several original "spaceship stories," including the Cities In Flight Tetralogy, described by Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber, speaking at a Memorial Evening for James Blish, as "...in many ways, a higher and greater Star Trek."

Poul Anderson wrote every kind of sf, including "spaceship stories." I am currently contemplating the "bookends" of his History of Technic Civilization, i.e., the first four and last four works in the series:

"The Saturn Game"
"Wings of Victory"
"The Problem of Pain"
"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson"

"A Tragedy of Errors"
The Night Face
"The Sharing of Flesh"
"Starfog"

Seven spaceship stories and one, "How To be Ethnic...," about a young man still on Earth just beginning spacefarer training. These stories:

either precede or succeed the major historical processes of the series;

present space travelers' adventures in widely different spatial volumes and historical periods.

"The Saturn Game" takes place about 2055 in the outer Solar System whereas "Starfog" begins five thousand years later near the northern verge of another spiral arm and its action then moves to beyond the Dragon's Head Nebula where no one, except the mysterious Kirkasanters, has been before.

That, unfortunately, is as far as the Technic History takes us.