Starfarers and Holont

How much does Poul Anderson tell us about the Holont in Starfarers? Not enough, really. They are quasi-stable quantum states in the virtual particles of the vacuum in the changeable space-time near a black hole, bearing information, therefore alive, and communicating linguistically, therefore intelligent. But we do not read any conversations with them as we do with the organic intelligences encountered by the starfarers. Instead, a human character summarizes communications for her colleagues and thus for the reader. Before that, the narrator had summarized holontic evolution.

Forms of quantum states appeared, linked, multiplied and became an intricate set of codes, mutated by the uncertainty principle, until some were a thinking mind differentiating itself into individually living waves or avatars that re-coalesce and redivide at will, experiencing lives and histories that resemble memes in organic minds, but also, like organic minds, acting to change their states and those around them, their actions detectable as photonic, electronic and nuclear events, then as dialogue with organic beings when the latter approach the black hole in spacecraft.

Anderson's account is extremely condensed. I found it difficult to paraphrase but otherwise would have understood little and would have retained even less of what he had written. I hope that my account is interesting and informative for other readers.

Comments:

 Thought requires symbols which require language which is social so I suggest that holontic differentiation preceded thought.

The Holont have two obvious unrealised potentialities. I am sure that there are more but I do not know enough science to draw them out.

First Potentiality

A sympathetic human character, Jean Kilbirnie, dies in the accretion disk of the black hole. Or does she? In fiction, and particularly in fantastic fiction, when no body has been found, the author might reverse the death. Two of Jean's colleagues later suspect that holontic configurations are not transitory but permanent, imposing a trace on the vacuum, a direction on randomness, a change in the metric, thus lasting and surviving death, implying that organic patterns and processes might last also.

So could the Holont rescue Jean's consciousness from the death of her body? This is my speculation, no one else's, but it is implied by passages that otherwise are left undeveloped. Anderson's intention is to show us that there is always more to be learned so there will at any stage be still unanswered questions.

Starfarers, a long novel that had already incorporated the Kith series, could, like other Anderson works, have had a sequel. Jean had not returned by the end of this novel but -

To be continued.

The Holont: Second Potentiality

A common human-Holont language is established swiftly and surely because the contemporary Holont have received a message from the future Holont telling them that human beings would arrive and how they would try to communicate: trans-temporal communication and circular causality paradox. Unfortunately, we are told this but are not otherwise told very much about what passes between the two kinds of beings.

It is suggested that thousands or millions of years must pass before galactic civilisation flowers as a result of interactions between organic and holontic cultures. Meanwhile, human beings, exploring, colonising and trading in interstellar space, hope to build holontic time communicators which, like James Blish's Dirac transmitters, will not only receive messages from the future but will also operate instantaneously in the present, making the universe one.

A sequel to Starfarers could have shown a utopia like that in Blish's "Beep" and The Quincunx Of Time, where starfarers, receiving messages describing themselves preventing disasters and presiding over a peaceful, expanding culture, then did prevent disasters and preside over a peaceful, expanding culture: cosmic circular causality.

Human-Tahirian-Holont Communication

Starfarers, 41.

The visual code becomes 4D: changing figures seen from different angles. Solid geometry would have become non-Euclidean, then incomprehensible, if the computers had not developed the relevant equations. The Holont inhabit and directly experience phase spaces and Riemannian spaces and might perceive sets of tensors as objects.

The Tahirian, Simon, adapted to chaotic environments and able to sense single photons and electron transitions, has instincts that enable him to intuit Holontic meanings whereas human beings, better than Tahirians at abstract thought and mathematics, usually reply or ask questions. The Holont quickly learn to reply sonically even though they do not experience sound. They make no mistakes in communication and the reason for this will later be communicated. The hybrid human-Tahirian code is both mathematical and graphical, not easily translated into spoken language.

Virtual Reality And More On The Holont

Starfarers.

Nansen adventures in virtual reality and wishes he hadn't because his companion in the adventure is the dead Jean Kilbirnie. We also notice that:

"Two condors wheeled on high." (41, pp. 396-397)

See Birds Of Prey.

The Holont receive a message from their future selves.

Hawking thought that, since contradictions are impossible, time travel must also be impossible. However, although a time traveler cannot change the past, his "'...actions can be part of what did happen.'" (42, p. 398)

Kerr, Thorne and Tipler described time machines consistent with relativity but physically impossible, e.g.:

a torus as massive as a giant star with an impossibly large electric charge and magnetic field, rotating at near light speed;

an infinitely long cylinder denser than a nuclear particle, spinning at near light speed.

The Holont:

form massive but stable nuclei;

use electromagnetic forces to spin such nuclei at a required speed, density and field strength;

with this miniature Kerr smoke ring or Tipler cylinder or whatever it is, generate a space-time warp;

send energetic gamma-ray photons through the warp;

modulate the photons to bear information;

instruct their earlier selves in how to communicate with human beings;

know how to communicate with human beings because they remember the instruction that they received.

Tahirians And Holont

I am rereading Starfarers by Poul Anderson. In this novel, human beings interact with Tahirians and Holont. Since I summarized information about these two kinds of beings nearly three years ago, it is convenient to link to those posts now.

Other relevant posts are:

Starfarers and Time Travelers
Starfarers And Yonderfolk
Starfarers And Seladorians
Starfarers And Kith
Contra Von Neumann
Starfarer Economics
STL And Social Change

I think that there is a post summarizing information about the planet that the Tahirians are transforming but I cannot find that one right now. However, some blog readers might also like to search the blog?

Two Further Discoveries From The Holont

Starfarers, 42.

It is possible that both holontic and organic life impose a permanent pattern on the vacuum, thus that consciousness lasts, but this is extremely vague. Zeyd thinks that such questions "'...will always be matters of faith." (p. 403) But surely he means that they will remain matters of faith until after death. However, the idea that, immediately after death, it will become evident that Islam or Catholicism or Evangelical Protestantism or Spiritualism or something else is a matter of fact strikes me as highly unlikely.

Secondly, the zero-zero drive does not threaten but strengthens cosmic stability. Transfers of virtual particles created the forces that hold the atoms together. Similarly, the zero-zero energy transfer makes a bond that moves the universe away from metastability toward permanent stability. The Holont:

"'...has had word from the future about what this can mean to the future.'" (p. 404)

Interstellar travel should continue. And Holontic communication is like James Blish's Dirac transmitter.

The Future in The Present II

See The Future In The Present.

Most sf characters, like all real people, do not know the future although there are a few exceptions:

the Time Traveler has seen the end of life on Earth;

James Blish's Service agents cause the intergalactic future from which they receive messages;

Poul Anderson's human-Holont civilization receives messages from its future (see The Holont: Second Potentiality and Forever);

in Anderson's There Will Be Time, Jack Havig knows, having seen it, that he is building a multi-species interstellar civilization with either FTL or STL + time travel;

in Anderson's The Corridors Of Time, Malcolm Lockridge winds up at the beginning of the Bronze Age but already knows that there will be a peaceful interstellar civilization after the time war between Wardens and Rangers;

Anderson's Time Patrol agents live, work and die knowing the future of mankind in their timeline although, since their work involves preserving events like the Holocaust, I have become morally uncomfortable with this series.

In Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, the mutant immortals, having lived through human history and into an indefinite future, agree to meet again in another million years although they know no more of the future than anyone else and are optimistic to assume that they will continue to live for that long.

In The Future On Titan: More

See In The Future On Titan and combox.

For more on the black hole vacuum beings (Holont), see The Holont: Second Potentiality.

For "In Memoriam," see here and also Cosmic Perspectives.

For "Kyrie," see here.

For Earth affected by the expanding sun in Poul Anderson's Genesis, see  Future Geography.

Intertemporal Communication? II

In Poul Anderson's Starfarers, a holont time communicator spins a massive particle and thus opens a time warp through which information can be sent into the past.

In James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, a Dirac transmitter controls waves generated by a positron, thus causing an electron to appear in other apparatuses and thus sending messages to anyone who can receive them in any part of space-time.

Anderson's holonts (quantum intelligences) communicate quickly and easily with newly arrived human explorers because their future selves are able to tell them how to do it because they remember having been told how to do it.

An organization called the Service monopolizes the Dirac transmitter. The founders of the Service decided not to meddle with foreseen events but to ensure that every such event occurs on schedule. Anything else would be hubris. This policy has increasingly Utopian outcomes but why?

My argument (not Blish's):

(i) the Service receives a message describing an event, X, only if such a message is transmitted;

(ii) such a message is transmitted only if X occurs;

(iii) X occurs only if the Service causes X to occur;

(iv) the Service causes X only if (a) the Service has received a message describing X and (b) to cause X would not be morally repugnant to the Service (e.g., they would draw the line at committing a massacre);

(v) therefore, the Service receives a message describing X only if (a) the Service receives a message describing X and (b) if to cause X is morally acceptable to the Service.

(a) is tautologous and can be deleted which leaves:

(vi) the Service receives a message describing X only if to cause X is morally acceptable to the Service.

The Merseians would use a Dirac transmitter to conquer the galaxy. A sequel to Starfarers might have drawn similar conclusions about applications of holont time communicators.

Quantum Life

Starfarers, 41-42.

A holont:

is embodied in a quasi-stable quantum state;

is a differentiation of an original unity;

lives individually but also re-merges and re-emerges, altered;

thus, gives its experiences to the underlying whole;

interacts with other individual quantum states;

acts on its own and other states by controlling, moving or altering electrons, photons and nuclei;

perceives the universe outside itself as a concrete environment, not as a set of abstractions;

detects and responds to communications from organic beings;

receives messages from its future selves.

Holontic evolution and history resemble memes in organic minds.

Discoveries

Starfarers, 42.

The pattern and process of life might impose:

its trace on the vacuum;

direction on randomness;

change in the metric -

- and thus continue after death.

The zero-zero drive does not destabilize but stabilizes the universe because the energy transfer makes a bond like transfers of virtual particles creating forces holding atoms together. The Holont has received messages from the future confirming this.

Fourteen hundred Tahirian years of demolition, weather and growth have erased not only the human base but also its site. Instead of forest surrounding a stream flowing through a meadow, sparse darker gnarled trees grow near a brown river flowing across turf. Wildlife is different and climate is warming. Future history is summarized.

Sundaram says that a "'...secret Eastern spiritual technology...'" is "'...a myth.'" (p. 487)

- but Dayan replies that:

"'Self-command, perception - there are right ways and wrong ways to try for them, aren't there? The same as with anything else. You know at least some of the right ways. Now everybody needs your counsel.'" (ibid.)

Nothing inner is a "technology." Any spiritual practice is only as good as its practitioners. We need the first two steps on the Buddhist Eightfold Path: right understanding and right effort - understanding that practice is necessary and perseverance in practice.

"The means of training are thousandfold but pure meditation must be done."

-Dogen's Rules for Meditation, recited in our Zen group.

"Means of training" are techniques whereas "pure meditation" is "just sitting with no deliberate thought." In the absence of deliberate thought, undeliberate thoughts arise and pass and we gradually lessen their hold on the mind.

Future Interstellar Civilization

 

Starfarers, 52.

Starships have been improved thanks to new knowledge brought by Envoy.

Kithfolk from Fleetwing will advise, instruct and lead.

Kith and any others who want to will travel.

Two habitable planets already discovered by Fleetwing will be colonized.

More will be found.

New planetary engineering systems will make colonization easier than before.

Venture League investment will make starfaring profitable for everyone.

More nonhuman races will be contacted and some will also travel.

According to new quantum theory, millions of years during which many starships fly will weave universe and substrate together, making reality more enduring.

With holont time communicators, messages will be received from the future and will also traverse the universe.

Survival

Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), Chapter XXIX, pp. 223-224.

The characters discuss the nature and survival of the soul, a big subject of which we will scratch the surface. I will return to Operation Chaos after surveying some comparable fictional treatments of the subject. Here is an incomplete list:

The Land Of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle;
Immortality Inc. by Robert Sheckley;
The Palace Of Eternity by Bob Shaw;
Inferno and Escape From Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle;
What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson;
The Great Divorce by CS Lewis;
"The Man Who Traveled In Elephants" by Robert Heinlein;
Why Call Them Back From Heaven? by Clifford Simak;
The Triumph of Time by James Blish;
The Day After Judgment by James Blish;
Midsummer Century by James Blish;
Starfarers by Poul Anderson.

I cannot treat all of these works equally:

I have not read The Land Of Mist;

decades ago, I saw a TV dramatization of Immortality Inc. and remember that survival was not automatic but could be attained either yogically or technologically;

The Palace Of Eternity has electromagnetic "egons" in interstellar space disrupted by the wakes of Bussard ramjets;

Niven and Pournelle follow Dante's account;

Matheson follows spiritualist accounts;

Lewis presents an allegory;

the surprise ending of Heinlein's story is that the viewpoint character is dead;

Simak's novel states that there is a hereafter but does not describe it;

in The Triumph Of Time, one theoretical possibility is the continued existence of isolated consciousnesses with memories but without bodies, environments or sensory impressions but no one wants this;

characters in The Day After Judgment speculate that eternal life is stable negative entropy;

in Midsummer Century, a personality is a semistable electromagnetic field which remains integrated as long as it has the supplementary computing apparatus of a brain and the energy source of a body but then fades away unless it is picked up by a suitable receiver;

in Starfarers -

A sympathetic human character, Jean Kilbirnie, dies in the black hole. Or does she? In fiction, and particularly in fantastic fiction, when no body has been found, the author might reverse the death. Two of Jean's colleagues later suspect that holontic configurations are not transitory but permanent, imposing a trace on the vacuum, a direction on randomness, a change in the metric, thus lasting and surviving death, implying that organic patterns and processes might last also.

So could the Holont rescue Jean's consciousness from the death of her body? This is my speculation, no one else's, but it is implied by passages that otherwise are left undeveloped. Anderson's intention is to show us that there is always more to be learned so there will at any stage be still unanswered questions.
-copied from here.

Non-Biological Intelligence II

See Non-Biological Intelligence. 

I missed two other Andersonian kinds of non-biological intelligences:

The Holont

"star dwellers" on a pulsar

For the latter, see the 4th jump, here.

(It is convenient to be able to summarize a lot of information merely by linking to previous posts.)

Intelligence But Not As We Know It

Might intelligent beings be able to fly in terrestroid conditions?

Maybe, if they have the Ythrian supercharger.

 

Might sea-dwelling beings become intelligent?

Maybe, if atmospheric pressure is high enough to dissolve enough oxygen in sea water to support active metabolisms and brains and a high level of biological competition, as on Starkad.

 

Might there be intelligence on a neutron star?

See the 4th Jump, here.

Can there be intelligence near a black hole?

See Starfarers And Holont.

Can there be intelligent energy being? 

See Kyrie.

The Tahirian Field Drive

Starfarers.

The full name of the zero-zero drive is the quantum field gate drive. However, this is not the Tahirian field drive.

A Tahirian spacecraft approaches Envoy:

"'N-n-no jets.' His crew had never before heard Nansen stammer. 'Dios todopoderoso, how does it boost?'

"'We'll learn,' Kilbirnie called once more." (22, p. 209)

 

"'What about those jetless flyers here?'

"'That may be an application of principles we know in ways we have not thought of.'" (23, p. 222)

 

"On its drive that [Nansen] did not understand, the boat glided up toward his vessel." (24, p. 227)

 

"Eventually [Ruszek] might accumulate such a stack of information that Yu could make something of it, maybe even figure out how the jetless drive worked. He suspected the principle was quantum mechanical, and a starship's engineer was necessarily a jackleg quantum physicist." (27, p. 251)

 

"'I think once I have analyzed these readings, with Esther's help, I will know how the field drive operates.'

"'You don't? I mean, uh, you told me before, you're sure it's a push against the vacuum.'

"Yu sighed. 'An interaction with the virtual particles of the vacuum,' she corrected. 'Energy and momentum are conserved, but, loosely speaking, the reaction is against the mass of the entire universe, and approximately uniform. What I referred to was understanding the exact, not the general, principle.'

"'Uniform? Don't they adjust the field inside a hull? Weight's the same during any boost.'

"'In quantum increments, obviously.' Yu paused. 'Compared to this drive, jets are as wasteful as ...as burning petroleum, chemical feedstock, for fuel once was on Earth.'

"'What I like is the handling qualities. How soon can you and your computer design a motor for us, Wenji?'

"'Not at all, I fear, until we're home. Besides, we couldn't possibly do so radical a retrofit on Envoy, or even her boats.' Yu's voice lilted. 'However, I think with Hanny's help when she gets back, we can devise a unit that will compensate for linear acceleration and keep the vector in the wheels constant.'

"'Do you mean, when the ship's under boost, we won't have to cram like swine onto those manhater-designed gimbal decks?' Ruszek waved clasped hands above his shining pate. 'Huzzah!' he bellowed." (28, p. 262)

"'You've found out enough about the field drive that you can build one for us -'

"'No, no, please. I have explained that we can't retrofit Envoy and her boats. They are too integrated with their existing systems. I do think that we can add a unit that will make us more comfortable under acceleration, but any real shipbuilding must await our return to Earth.

"'Where they may already long have had such craft.'" (29, p. 272)

 

Back at Earth:

 

"They had never heard of a field drive here, or apparently anywhere in the space known to man. Was that historical accident, or did the invention require a Tahirian kind of quantum mechanical insight, guided perhaps by hints the Holont gave those visitors before they fled from it and withdrew from the stars?'" (48, p. 449)

 

On Harbor:

 

"...Our first starships are ready, ships better than any known before, thanks to the union of human technology with the new knowledge brought from afar." (52, p. 492)  

Knowing The Future II

See Knowing The Future, The Holont: Second Potentiality and Past And Future.

Thus, we have reviewed inter-temporal communicators in works by Blish, Anderson and Benford. (Blish has four interstellar communicators: the FTL ultraphone, the instantaneous Circon radio and two versions of the Dirac transmitter although only the Dirac-with-beep is intertemporal:

Circon, reaching around the continuum, detects and replies to radio waves currently transmitted light years away whereas the Dirac communicator controls the placement of an electron in the circuits of another Dirac communicator by controlling the frequency and path of a positron moving through a crystal lattice accompanied by de Broglie waves which are transforms of the waves of the electron so that a message is received by amplifying the bursts and reading the signal.

Thus:

Dirac is not radio;
its effect is simultaneous, not wave-like;
CirCon and Dirac are not two names for the same device.
-copied from here.)

Now, from interstellar and inter-temporal communicators to time travel:

HG Wells' Time Traveler learns the ultimate fates of man and life on Earth;

Poul Anderson's Jack Havig learns that there will be a nuclear war, then lives after it;

although Havig flees back downtime from his first sight of the later Star Masters civilization, he then learns that he and his companions build that civilization;

in a different kind of timeline, Time Patrolman Carl Farness learns that a harrowing experience in his personal future is already part of the historical past which he can, but must not, change;

to Time Patrollers, all times are past or simultaneous but they must still experience those that they visit in a subjective order;

after any futureward time journey, Patrollers might arrive in an altered timeline where they do not know what is happening.

The Intelligent Beings Near The Black Hole

Starfarers, 38.

(Most of tomorrow will be spent in the company of the previously mentioned Buddhist friend from Birmingham so posts will be few.)

The Envoy crew begin to learn the nature of the beings that will later be called Holont:

the vacuum is a sea of virtual particles;

space-time is convoluted and changeable near the black hole;

life is information;

quantum states, like matter, can bear information;

the intelligences are not molecular, atomic, nuclear or material;

the quantum states of the plasma in the accretion disk are neither structured nor complex enough to bear information;

by a process of elimination, the beings are quantum states in the vacuum near the black hole.