#multiple cosmi

It was one of those things where you have this flash of insight, and then it’s gone. Like a thunderstorm, or a tornado, or a tidal wave that comes through and changes the landscape, and then it’s past. The actual mental image itself was no longer really there, but it had set me up to feel certain ways about certain things. Things would come along that just smelled right, that would remind me of this pattern of activity. And for the rest of my career I’ve tried to follow that scent.

It’s also partly inspired by a principle of economy called Occam’s razor, after the fourteenth-century theologian and philosopher William of Occam. The idea is to cut out all the hypotheses that are unnecessary when it comes to explaining a situation, and go for a simple answer, since it’s more likely to be right than a complicated one. So why create an infinite number of barren universes just to have one that is conscious of its own existence?

    “Yes. This is how the universe protects herself—prevents violations of causality. If you attempt to do anything that would give you the power of  violating the laws of cause-and-effect—to go back in time and kill your grandfather—”     “You simply find yourself in a different and separate causal domain? How extraordinary!” said Lodoghir.     The Laterran nodded. “One is shunted into an altogether different Narrative,” he said, with a glance at Fraa Jad, “and thus causality is preserved.”

Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.

And that was how I came to spend the entire main course recounting my two Ecba dialogs with Orolo: the first about how, according to him, consciousness was all about the rapid and fluent creation of counterfactual worlds inside the brain, and the second in which he argued that this was not merely possible, not merely plausible, but in fact easy, if one thought of consciousness as spanning an ensemble of slightly different versions of the brain, each keeping track of a slightly different cosmos. Paphlagon ended up saying it better: “If hemn space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness is a spot of light moving, like a searchlight beam, over that landscape—brightly illuminating a set of points—of cosmi—that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges. In the bright center of the beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain. Fewer contributions come in from the half-lit periphery, and non e from the shadows beyond.”

I admit I am no theor,” Ignetha Foral was saying on the speaker, “but the more I hear of this, the less I understand your position, Fraa Lodoghir. Three is a prime number. It is prime today, was prime yesterday. A billion years ago, before there were brains to think about it, it was prime. And if all the brains were destroyed tomorrow, it would still be prime. Clearly its primeness has nothing to do with our brains.” “It has everything to do with our brains,” Lodoghir insisted, “because we supply the definition of what it is to be a prime number.” “No theor who attends to these matters can long escape the conclusion that the cnoöns exist independently of what may or may not be going on in peoples’ brains at any given moment,” Paphlagon said. “It is a simple application of the Steelyard. What is the simplest way of explaining the fact that theors working independently in different eras, different sub-disciplines, different cosmi even, time and time again prove the same results—results that do not contradict each other, even through reached by different proof-chains—results, some of which can be turned into theories that perfectly describe the behavior of the physical universe? The simplest answer is that the cnoöns really exist, and are not of this causal domain.

It’s not just that you can’t have a block of ice in a star, but that you can’t get it there, you can’t keep it there—there is no coherent history that can include it. See, it’s not just about what is possible—since anything is possible in Hemn space—but what is compossible, meaning all the other things that would have to be true in that universe, to have a block of ice in a star.