Blood (or: The Convergence of Reality)
Disclaimer: Having written this, it seemed a shame not to post it. I've been little on the quiet side anyway. Welcome to the darker side of my mind.
They say that Blood runs thicker than water. I'm not entirely sure that it's going to have much to do with the rest of what I write this evening, but the saying is oddly stamped across my mind, and it's where the thoughts started.
Of course, I've never really been able to see the truth in the statement. The few times I've been in a position to test the literal truth, I've generally had more pressing thoughts on my mind 1 and have not exactly been of the mind to perform a proper analysis of the viscosity. My base knowledge and some logic tells me that it's likely to be the case - if nothing else, I know that it does congeal so, after being split, it must quickly become thinker than water2
The actual meaning, on the hand has never held any real weight with me: my otherwise exceptional memory3 has no record of a time when my parents were capable of civil conversation. As for the rest of the family...well, that'll be saying a bit too much to the whole world. What I will say is that my world started really falling apart when I picked the wrong interpretation of a sentence, aged 14. Or, until not that long ago, that's how I always perceived it.
The result of my interpretation was to make the decision to bring up a topic of conversation: two new family members. With someone who was on the other side of the family divide for this with regards to this issue. Things deteriorated 8 years later, little more than law ties me by my blood.
They also say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If there's one thing I have a lot of, it's little bits of knowledge - I've dabbled all over the place4, and that's the way my mind will always be, I hope5. I know lots of things: I comprehend why might be such large consequences when a butterfly flaps it's wings, I can interpret at core of the Mandelbrot Set as the strange attractor for the function x2 over the complex numbers. I have a basic grasp of some of the implications of quantum6. And the last 8 months have had a lot of involvement at looking at the evolution of multi-agent systems. Specifically, emergence.
It's interesting enough work, building on some economic theory that the research group I appear to have ended up attached to have, over the last couple of years,
axiomised the shit out of
Like most reductions to pure logic, what's left appears so simple that the human mind can't immediately understand it. There are only 8 axioms for defining the constraints for a stable institution, for example7. There again, there's only one for the Mandlebrot set. And this is about when I start to pull all of these thoughts together
I'd like to talk briefly about the nature of history. Regardless of whether anyone set it off in any particular direction, it's going somewhere. Quite possibly round and round in circles of marginally increasing technology. The question to my mind, now, is how much it'll heal. Nature nearly always does, excluding the marginally loss to entropy, on some scale or another. The human impact on the atmosphere, for example, will probably be little more than a slightly exaggerated blip on the graphs showing the cycles of the planet. Or, it might turn the entire place into a barren wasteland9. Now, clearly, which it is doesn't really matter - nor is it what I'm getting at. The fact is that, for the most part, the planet will either swing back towards where it was, or reach the scape velocity to become something new.
The image to the right shows this with utmost beauty. From almost identical initial conditions, two radically different patterns evolve. And yet, we can clearly see the underlying resemblance between them. Although it might require what we normally ascribe as consciousness in order to make the connection, it doesn't change the fact that the connection is there, and that the attractors for the line exist.
They also say that those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it. No, wait, that's not right. Good solid advice still, but not leading into insight on the nature of history. No, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. I would say that this is mainly because those who don't remember what happened in a situation before are likely to carry out actions that, to a certain level of significance, will be the same as the previous time around. What I wonder now is whether a person who forgets the past is also doomed to repeat it - whether the inertia of history is so great that humanity itself can not leave the attractor, whether we even have the true capability to destroy ourselves utterly?
Some of these ideas have been covered in the past. The convergence of reality has been discussed in a large number of speculative fiction works which feature time travel - Asimov's The Ugly Little Boy comes to mind, which puts some interesting ideas in - such as the fact that you can only move things through time if, in moving them, your present time is not changed; you can take something majorish from a long time ago, or something less important in a nearer time; there is a large celebration when they successfully transport a Medieval peasant to the 21st century. So, there we have a primarily convergent
Now, at this point, all that is really left is some guess at the boundaries. And, unless someone has got some parallel realities handy for me to mess with, they will be straight up guesses. I'll pick the examples primarily from the last 100 years to start with: there are a number of people who defined that period of time as it is remembered by, say, and English man: in a negative light Hitler, Lenin, Stalin; in a more positive light, maybe Chamberlin or Churchill. It doesn't really matter which I picked - they are all products of their environments: nothing more. Stalin is the easiest example - he arranged his rise to through slight of hand - the same tricks as making your boss thing you're the keen one through making sure your rivals accidentally misplace their post-it notes10. And, people of that kind of mind gravitate towards power.
Hitler could be seen as the kind of person who saw sheep, as steered them as he saw fit - he was sent as a spy to the German Workers Party on behalf of the army, and reportedly took his membership only with the backing of his superior officer. I suspect that most reader will know where that went. At least, they will for now.
I picked examples all within Europe in the last hundred years mainly because that's what everyone does in speculative fiction - I could probably find time travel stories involving the humiliation of Nebuchadnezzar by a time-travelling Daniel, but I would have to look hard for them. But, our minds focus on the more recent stories as being all of the atrocities11. Why, it was only last week that I realised that the 'War of 1812' actually meant nothing to me, and clearly means little to the politicians of Great Britain and the United States of America. We burned the public buildings of the capital to the ground. I don't really feel it gets much more...pointed than that, and yet somehow I also feel that most people would be surprised it ever happened. I'll admit my knowledge of colonial history is sketchy - the British school system skipped from 1500 to about 1900 without looking back.
But, already, in the here and now, did that war have any significant impact? Did anyone's decisions about not burning private residences allow good Anglo-American ties to exist two hundred years later? Did mentioning my brother and sister really cause my family to pull further apart, as was it going to happen anyway.
Will it even matter that I've written this?
Oh. I almost forgot:
Happy New Year xxx
- 1 ↑ "Where are the bandages? WHERE ARE THE BANDAGES?"
- 2 ↑ Although, water is also known to congeal in some places. Anhk-Morpork or Bristol are fine examples.
- 3 ↑ I feel able to phrase it as this, given that many people actually seem scared by the accuracy and range of my memory. There again, people often fail to notice me enter a room. At 6'1.5" and about 100kg, I have decided that these people are just...yes.
- 4 ↑ Unfortunately, no, not that way. You people and your dirty minds. Oh, wait...
- 5 ↑ Not helped by the fact that, quite by accident, I left my quantum mechanics primer at the family home for the second year running
- 6 ↑ I haven't been reading too much Pratchett, honest...
- 7 ↑ Ostrom 2008-ish
- 8 ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TwoLorenzOrbits.jpg Created by XaosBits using Mathematica and POV-Ray. The blue image is one trajectory of the Lorenz system with (σ, ρ, β) = (10, 28, 8/3) started from the initial point (0, 0, 1). The yellow image is for the same parameters but a different initial condition, (0, 0, 1+ε) where ε = 10-5. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
- 9 ↑ Unlikely, last time I looked at the findings of people much more intelligent than myself
- 10 ↑ No, really. He got major brownie points in party for turning up to a funeral which his rival missed. I can't remember if Stalin had it moved, or excellent how the play went down, but that's all it took.
- 11 ↑ Yes, 6 million dead. I'm aware. Population estimates give the pre-Columbian population of the Americas in the region of 50 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas). That gave us Pocahontas - history is written by the victors, naturally