The n-Category Café

I completely agree with John too. SF has imagined a lot of such future societies, as you say, Jonathan; but Egan’s citizens go further in their ‘quest for impossible knowledge’ than those of almost any other science-fictional society I can remember reading about. (Though I suppose Asimov’s, in The Last Question, achieve even more, in the end…) Here’s a quote from Incandescence that I like. It shows us one thing that’s worth doing, when you have the freedom to do anything:

‘Interesting Truths’ referred to a kind of theorem which captured subtle unifying insights between broad classes of mathematical structures. In between strict isomorphism — where the same structure recurred exactly in different guises — and the loosest of poetic analogies, Interesting Truths gathered together a panoply of apparently disparate systems by showing them all to be reflections of each other, albeit in a suitably warped mirror. Knowing, for example, that multiplying two positive integers was really the same as adding their logarithms revealed an exact correspondence between two algebraic systems that was useful, but not very deep. Seeing how a more sophisticated version of the same could be established for a vast array of more complex systems — from rotations in space to the symmetries of subatomic particles — unified great tracts of physics and mathematics, without collapsing them all into mere copies of a single example.

P.S. Some of you, I’m sure, have read Norman Kagan’s short story The Mathenauts (described very briefly, with a few quotes, here). I would love to see Egan rewrite this with a more “convincing” justification. Perhaps setting it in the universe of his short stories Luminous and Dark Integers?

At the risk of wandering completely beyond the subject matter of this blog, I suspect by far the best way to “put a human face on transhumanism” would be to abandon the awful term “transhumanism”. While it’s probably not a universal human aspiration to wish for the kind of peace, prosperity and longevity that would enable people (among many other things) to sit around thinking about mathematics for a few millennia, adopting a word that suggests that to achieve such goals is to “transcend” humanity is probably the dumbest PR move in history. It seems to have been very effective at attracting crackpots, but for encouraging normal, sane people to view potentially beneficial alterations to their body, let alone their computational substrate, with anything other than suspicion, it’s an incredibly stupid and counter-productive word.

While it doesn’t quite fit into the main line of chat on this blog, I certainly don’t mind if on this particular blog entry people talk about ‘transhumanism’ — or other topics relevant to Incandescence, or Greg’s fiction more generally. We’re allowed to have a little fun now and then.