More On Unpredictability And Intelligence

Regarding unpredictability, Ninian Smart, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster, presented an elegant argument for the inherent unpredictability of scientific discoveries.

Anyone who had announced in advance that a man called Einstein was going to formulate a "Theory of Relativity" would have predicted merely the name, not the content, of the new theory. However, to announce instead the content of the theory would have been not to predict the discovery but to make the discovery. Therefore, discoveries cannot be predicted. I cite this here because it is relevant to the unpredictable technological innovations mentioned in the previous post and therefore also to their equally unpredictable effects on the economy.

The other problem with Technate civilization in Poul Anderson's The Long Way Home (St Albans, Herts, 1975) is its Ministers' attitude to their population:

"'It isn't possible to have equality...by definition, half the people always have below-average intelligence; and the average is not high.'" (p. 64)

"'Look around you - think these apes are fit to decide public policy?'" (p. 65)

I would say that they are at least as fit as their rulers who are heading towards more genocidal wars. These apes, human beings, built civilization in the first place. Their low intelligence is a self-fulfilling prophecy because their schooling comprises, "...a few years including hypnotic indoctrination...enough to teach the basic rudiments..." (p. 65), but not enough to teach anything about public policy.

Learning is life-long and includes neither hypnosis nor indoctrination. I think that a fully informed world population able both collectively and individually to control its own productive, creative and leisure activities is, with modern technology, a realistic educational goal.

Paramathematical Theory II

"...the Technate's founders...didn't think that such and such arrangements for production and distribution would work, they knew."
- Poul Anderson, The Long Way Home (St Albans, Herts, 1975), p. 58.

Is this possible? I will:

(i) summarize an understanding of economics;
(ii) summarize Anderson's account of the Technate;
(iii) see whether (ii) is consistent with (i).

(i) Economics:
incessant competition forces firms to increase productivity by periodically reinvesting in newer, more expensive technology;
as investment increases, the rate of profit decreases;
when the rate is judged too low to justify large expenditure, investment stops;
economic slump with stockpiled goods, unemployed labor and bankrupted firms;
when a sufficiently high rate of profit has been restored, investment resumes but with bigger firms tending towards monopolies;
trade requires an infrastructure and laws, thus a state;
monopolies merge with the state (see Anderson's excellent sf political novel, Mirkheim).

(ii) The Technate:
Technon-owned industries fund the state;
individual members of the Ministerial class own farms, mines, factories and at least one restaurant;
Commoners work mainly in cities, some self-employed;
trades have uniformed guilds with long apprenticeships;
Ministers "'...encourage free enterprise...'" among Commoners (p. 64);
"The Technon gives the orders on how to balance population and production, so that the economy runs a smooth course.'" (p. 61)

(iii) Consistency?
I think: it is predictable that decreased rate of profit will cause cessation of investment and that investment will later resume with bigger firms but not when either of these events will occur. Unpredictable individual decisions and technological innovations affect when. Thus, encouraging free enterprise while ordering balanced production looks contradictory? And knowing that arrangements for production and distribution will work looks impossible? (I think.)

The Paramathematical Theory Of Man

"The most important discovery since the superdrive was, he gathered, the paramathematical theory of man, both as individual and as society, which had made it possible to reorganize on a stable, predictable, logical basis. There had been no guesswork on the part of the Technate's founders: they didn't think that such and such arrangements for production and distribution would work, they knew. The science wasn't perfect, it couldn't be; such eventualities as the colonial revolts had arisen unforeseen; but the civilization was stable, with high negative feedback, it adjusted smoothly to new conditions."
- Poul Anderson, The Long Way Home (St Albans, Herts, 1975), p. 58.

Sf ideas include not only interstellar drives but also a science of society. Can a single mathematical theory cover both individual and society? Isaac Asimov involved himself in several confusions -

(i) Will a sufficiently large, galactic scale, population be mathematically predictable despite individual unpredictability just as planetary orbits are predictable despite the unpredictability of individual particles? An Economics student thought, and I am inclined to agree, that increasing the number of individuals merely increases the unpredictability.

(ii) Will "Second Foundationers" who apply mathematics to society also understand individual psychology? It suits Asimov's story purposes to assume so.

(iii) The Second Foundationers, despite their greater understanding, turn out to be as mutually suspicious and in conflict as anyone else.

(iv) Does mental understanding really just mean mental control over other people?

(v) Asimov forgets between volumes what the nature and range of the mental powers is supposed to be.

(vi) It turns out that the mental powers were discovered and developed separately, not as part of Seldon's psychohistory.

(vii) Asimov says both that the mental science of the Second Foundation differs fundamentally from the physical science of the First Foundation and that mental events must be based in physical events. Dualism versus reductionism is an old philosophical debate. However, although I am confident that I am paraphrasing Asimov accurately, I am doing so from memory. His text either reduces mental events to physical events or leaves open the possibility that a qualitatively new level of being, the psychological, emerges from, without being mechanically reducible to, a more basic level, the physical. I am confident that Asimov meant the former but, since this discussion of Asimov is an unplanned digression from a discussion of Anderson, I am not disposed right now to look through Second Foundation for a verbatim quotation. But, Asimov fans, please comment or disagree?

As always, I prefer Anderson's treatment of these themes to Asimov's but that will have to wait till a later post.

Technate Civilization

Poul Anderson's The Long Way Home (St Albans, Herts, 1975) presents a new combination of familiar elements.

(i) Politicians are now called "'...psychotechnical administrator[s]...'" (p. 41).

(ii) There are weapons that can completely disintegrate matter. (I have just encountered this idea in Anderson's story of the same era, "The Disintegrating Sky".)

(iii) The seven foot tall security men and bodyguards are cloned (chromosome duplicated), exogenetically grown slaves.

(iv) The Commercial Society has some similarities to the Polesotechnic League, the Kith and the Nomads:

the Society is recruited from all planets and races;
it conducts most interstellar trade, sometimes from planets unknown to the Technate;
it trades in luxuries but also in industrial materials as planets exhaust their resources;
Society personnel spend their lives in large spaceships;
they have distinctive laws, customs and language and no external allegiance;
their chief factor at Sol describes himself as "'...a lonely old man.'" (p. 44)

The astronauts from five thousand years earlier must find their way among the competing powers of the Technate, the Centaurians and the Society. I remember that the novel ends with a surprise revelation about the balance of power but do not remember what the surprise was.

Timeline And Technate

2047: Explorer departs; interstellar emigration begins.
Later: gravity control; genetic engineering; Mars,Venus and Jovian moons terraformed.
World War XXVIII: nearby colonies destroyed; Solar barbarism; lengthy reconstruction.
c. 5000: Technate unites Solar System, resumes colonization.
c. 6000: war of colonial independence; League of Alpha Centauri.
c. 7000: Explorer returns.

Before it was terraformed, Venus was a "...poisonous galling hell-hole..." (p. 9), thus closer to the mark than the "Fantastic Venuses" of other pre-space probe speculations.

The Technon, "'...a giant sociomathematical computer..'", making "'...basic policy decisions...is less fallible, less selfish, less bribeable than a man.'" (p. 31) Hereditary "Ministers" execute policies and make lesser decisions. "'Under them are the Commoners.'" (ibid.) Genetic engineering is said to counteract the chanciness of heredity.

Thus, The Long Way Home, originally published in 1955, was an early Anderson approach to human-computer interaction.

The Long Way Home

When we read about fictitious interstellar exploration, we want to know what the explorers find out there but two other important questions are how long are they away and what has happened back home in their absence?

After ten years, Dan Dare returns to find the Solar System ruled by the Mekon;

after a relativistic round trip to galactic center, Larry Niven's Corbell returns to a barely recognizable Solar System, with what might be Earth in orbit around what might be Jupiter;

in Poul Anderson's After Doomsday, astronauts return to a sterilized Earth;

in Anderson's The Long Way Home (St Albans, Herts, 1975), which I am just starting to reread, astronauts returning after thousands of years must cope with a changed sociopolitical system.

In both of the Anderson novels, an alien passenger accompanies the returning astronauts. When we start to read The Long Way Home, it might turn out to be an end of the world scenario because after:

"The spaceship flashed out of superdrive..." (p. 5),

the first question to be asked is:

"'Where's the sun?'" (ibid.)

- but this is because the malfunctioning ship has re-entered normal space a third of a light-year, instead of just one AU, away. The astronauts do not yet suspect how much time has elapsed. Their response to this has to be a major part of the novel.

Duel On Syrtis

I had resisted rereading Poul Anderson's "Duel on Syrtis" (Strangers From Earth, London, 1965) because of its horrific ending. Paralyzed but unsleeping, Riordan is hidden in a cave for a thousand years of hell and insanity.

Riordan had seemed to win his fight with Kreega, the Martian that he had hunted, but Kreega survived and we had been told how he would do it on the third page of the story.

I have lost count of Anderson's fictitious Martian races. Feathered and owl-like, Kreega sounds a bit like the "Martians" of Anderson's Technic Civilization History but the latter are extra-Solar colonists of Mars, not native Martians.

"Duel on Syrtis" was published in Planet Stories in 1951 yet a base on Mars is called Port Armstrong.

Riordan has hunted throughout the Solar System:

Mercurian firedrakes;
Plutonian ice crawlers;
Terrestrial lion, tiger, elephant, buffalo and sheep;
many-legged swamp monsters in Venerian rain forests (another "Fantastic Venus");
a huge blind thing in a Neptunian liquid-gas swamp.

Thus, an old-style much-inhabited Solar System.

The Disintegrating Sky

Poul Anderson's "The Disintegrating Sky" (Strangers From Earth, London, 1965), originally published in Fantastic Universe in 1953, sixty years ago, is a very minor work, a seven and a half page short story recounting a conversation between four characters. The title and the last three words are identical.

I frequently need a dictionary when reading Anderson. This time, I was sure that "...thunger..." (p. 149) was a misprint either for "hunger" or, more probably in this context, for "thunder." However, google informs me that "thunger" can mean "hunger roaring like thunder."

Like HG Wells' Time Traveler and his dinner guests, these characters discuss the nature of time. The options considered are:

according to relativity (and Wells' Time Traveler), "'...simply one dimension in a four-dimensional continuum. The past and the future...equally real and fixed...'" (p. 152);

but wave-mechanics and the uncertainty principle cast doubt on that theory;

seen as flowing because it "'...is the direction of increase of entropy...'" (ibid.);

"'...the Author is writing all the time. The movement of time is the movement...of his pen...The future has not yet been written. The present is what he is writing this instant. The past is what he has already written.'" (ibid.)

That last account is nonsense. Claiming to explain our experience of the passage of time, Anderson's character merely assumes a passage of time for the Author, thereby presupposing precisely the phenomenon that he is supposed to be explaining. "'...the Author is writing all the time...yet...this instant...already'" etc.

If we can separate the idea that we are being written from the notion that our being written explains time, what do we think of the idea? We are used to the thought that reality and appearance are not identical:

"'This table isn't less heavy because science has shown that it's built up of atoms which are mostly empty space.'" (p. 153)

So, if a superhuman "Author" were able to work in the medium not of paper and ink but of self-conscious organisms, then, yes, we might be characters in a novel of sorts. In the Animal Man graphic novel series by Grant Morrison, one character holds up an open comic book page to others and says, "If you could see our universe from the outside, that is what it would look like."

"'Earth's history reads like the magnum opus of a romantic fourteen-year-old.'" (p. 154)

Anderson's viewpoint character says that, if he had written an unsatisfactory novel in his teens, then, before ending it in a flaming conclusion, he would have expressed his disgust with his unrealistic characters by making some of them "'...realize what they were - characters in a poorly written novel...'" (p. 156)

No, he wouldn't. He would simply have stopped writing and destroyed the manuscript. But, in this case, if the characters are conscious, then maybe that is what they are experiencing right at the end when "'...the total-disintegration bomb...'" (p. 155) is being used.

More Latin

Blogging about Poul Anderson, I am free to dip in and out of his many works at any point. Exercising this freedom, I have just reread the 1957 short story, "For The Duration," immediately after the 1984 article, "The Discovery of the Past." In both, I found some Latin.

"...as Terence wrote in second-century Rome, 'Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.' I am a man; nothing human is alien to me."
- "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times, New York, 1984, pp. 182-206 AT p. 189.

Terence's exact wording means, "I think (puto) nothing human alien to me."

"'Primus inter pares.'"
- "For The Duration" IN Anderson, Strangers From Earth, London, 1965, pp. 69-90 AT p. 88.

"First among equals" - the motto of a school I worked in once.

I have mentioned Latin in Anderson before. The three examples that I remember are:

"Tene Mithra, etiam miles...";
"Es tu peregrinator temporis?";
an inscription on an Ysan boundary marker.

"For The Duration" is Andersonian political fiction. We recognize:

a post-nuclear world dictatorship called "the Protectorate";
a secret revolutionary Committee;
a force shield used as a weapon.

The title is also the punch line - always a neat touch. When one dictator, the self-proclaimed primus inter pares, replaces another, his parting shot is:

"'It's only for the duration of the emergency.'" (p. 90)

Elementary...

"Through a great, thundering mist, Alexander Jones heard THE WORDS.
"'Not at all. Elementary, my dear Watson!'"
- Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson, Earthman's Burden (New York, 1979), p. 121.

People say rightly that Holmes never said that. So why is it so widely (mis)quoted?

Holmes does say "Elementary" and does say "My dear Watson" and once says both in quick succession over three or four pages in the course of a single conversation. Thus, it is legitimate to infer that he would have said both together sometime offstage and it is also legitimate to put that phrase into his mouth in new Holmes stories and films.

"Elementary...my dear Watson!" would be a grammatically more accurate, if slightly clumsy, quotation.