Well stated if (and!) densely packed.
Your conception of F vs SF and invocation of Deutsch's "hard to vary"
are the sorts of ideas I was trying to get to with the idea of emergent
coherence vs literal consistency.
I like the idea of broad coverage without giving up coherence... "if
everything is possible, then nothing is interesting"? I was part of an
early internet fiction writing group hosted by Orson Scott Card back in
the 90s (Hatrack River) which meant that in exchange for having lots of
possible first-readers of my own work, I was blessed/burdened with
reading a lot of amateur fiction. The biggest flaw *I* encountered in
the heavily-weighted-toward-fantasy milieu of submissions was this
one... it felt like these inexperienced writers simply enjoyed (and
abused) the license to "coin a new bit of magic" anytime their
protaganist got cornered... that was not very interesting (to me). On
the other hand, I might be too biased toward always trying to "figure
out the hidden logics" which makes (for me) a good fantastical tale.
I'm not big on murder-mysteries, but that is what seems to carry them to
the extent they are carried for me... the sense that no matter how
tangled the evidence may be, I know/trust that the author (or more to
the point, the story itself) has a hidden logic which will be revealed
and it is up to me to tease it out as best I can. If it is too easy, it
isn't interesting, if it is too hard, it isn't interesting... the best
ones usually have me untangling any number of the tangles but having at
least a few left obscured to me such that I learn something (about
getting away with murder? human nature?) as a consequence. I may well
still be looking (too much) for (too much) consistency by your measure.
A departure from the Gouldian binary pitting F vs SF might be David
Brin's "Practice Effect
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_Effect>" where "everything
is possible, but you still have to put in the work!". Zelazny's
"Hellriding" felt to be his version of "putting in the work". When I
first read Brin's book I was a little put off in the way I implied above
but I was impressed by what I called Zelazny's work of "Hard
Fantasy". Probably another word for "hidden logics".
Speaking of consistency and the adjacent possible. Your talk of "cone
of possibilities" reminds me of HashLife (Gosper
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0167278984902513>)
and the value of memoization. I never followed through on a project
with Susan Stepney and one of her Grad students to try to use
memoization efficiency as a rough measure of entropy and therefore
"interestingness" in hashlife... One of the unexplored hypotheses I
held was that there were likely finer structure in Class IV (Wolfram
<https://content.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/34/2020/07/universality-complexity-cellular-automata.pdf>)
CA which could be found by mining the metadata from memoization and
back-propogating of complex end-states. I think Kauffman's Boolean Node
Automata
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0167278984902574>(from
whence ultimately came his "adjacent possible"?) were a bit more apt in
not imposing the a-priori structure that CA do.
On 2/4/22 8:59 AM, glen wrote:
Exactly. While I maintain hope that EricS will not think my question
about CliFi and the possibility of progressive life without freezing
out prior forms is simply the affections of a hopelessly ignorant,
albeit hopefully lovable dog, I can't help but reject the idea that
it's anthropocentric. And you're spot on in calling back to the
hegemony of *consistency* in such conversations. I think that hegemony
is inappropriate. Completeness is the more important factor in, at
least, fantasy. The more sedate, linear, SciFi you (or Gould) identify
as changing 1 thing and iterating the consequences does seem focused
on consistency. But I'm reminded of Deutsch's "hard to vary" criterion
for a good scientific theory. The impetus there is an upper bound to
Twitch, I think. How big can we puff up the cone of possibilities so
that it covers the most interesting "adjacent possible"? Or, perhaps
the question would be what types of metrics can we define such that
"adjacent" is maximized? A radius of 1 in some metrics may be larger
than a radius of 1 in other metrics. And Twitch is the generative
impulse, the (pseudo)RNG that takes us from here to there. Coverage is
more important than consistency in fantasy.
On 2/4/22 07:44, Steve Smith wrote:
I like the refinement you are gesturing at here, if I'm following. I
think that is what Zelazny did with his Amber stuff and the ideation
of this whole (infinite?) milieu of parallel worlds being held in
the tension of Logos and Chaos.
I haven't read any of this work in decades so I expect my
understanding of all that would be different today, but at the time I
think I held that as the spectrum/gradient of entropy between the
low-information of perfect order and low information of random order
with "the interesting stuff" happening somewhere in between. The
specific quantization of coherent "worlds" that individuals can
participate in more or less in the way *we* experience our world (or
think we do?) is fascinating to me. There is a variant of the
anthropic principle at-work here perhaps?
What you say about alternate logics is more obvious in it's coherent
quantization... and the world of whack-a-doodle "alternative facts"
is obviously seductive to those who indulge in it, but the
requirement of internal consistency seems to be what yields
quantization or at least concentrations of clusters of factoids (like
virtual particles?)?
On 2/4/22 8:03 AM, glen wrote:
I think one of the reasons I *want* to believe in parallel worlds
and a fully embellished conception of counterfactuals is *because*
of my preference for stories with such variation in what can be
tweaked and then iterated forward to watch the consequences. It's
also why I'm gobsmacked by alternative logics, despite my
incompetence therein. What we call "absurd" almost never really
feels absurd to me. It's fine! Just play along.
On 2/3/22 13:15, Steve Smith wrote:
Stephen C Gould, the difference between SF and Fantasy is that in
SF, one singular known fact is changed (faster than light travel,
time travel, wormhole, infinite cheap energy, etc.) and everything
else ensues from that, while in Fantasy, *everything* is up for
grabs (e.g. Magic) and everything ensues from that!
Zelazny's Amber-schtick seems to follow *somewhat* from that
idea... in some sense, it seems as if everything Magical he invoked
was somehow a natural consequence of the schmear of physical laws
across the schmear of parallel worlds suspended between the
antipodes of Logos and Chaos (my interpretation of his deal)...
.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:
5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
