Left on Read: When We Cease to Understand the World

Hey November and Riley. First time, long time. You mentioned you're interested in talking with some authors, so I thought I'd put my hand up. I wrote Repo Virtual, which came out in 2020 and is about the personhood of AI, told as a sort of 'cyberpunk of the now' novel. If that sounds interesting, I'm happy to send the ebook - just email me at contact at coreyjwhite dot com. Otherwise, keep up the great work.

Mathematics is an interesting addition to this because I'm a maths student with most interest pointed in the pure direction, which i do think is a fundamentally different way of contending with the problem of not knowing, which is sort of a different way of blinding oneself. In doing physics you allow for certain pieces of information to be fundamentally unknowable, or in the case of the uncertainty principle certain pieces of information to be fundamentally in conflict, and you accept that lack of knowledge and you move on, hoping to get more of a shred of it, but maths does something entirely other In maths you, in a sense, blind yourself on the way in. Instead of looking at the real world you construct for yourself a seperate reality, one that does not and cannot truly exist, but that resembles the reality you percieve, provided you don't look to closely at both at the same time. In maths we call this construction of reality "axioms", the things we accept without proof. I think its better to call this axiomatic rather than "dogmatic" as some people do, because dogma has a sense of being believed totally, even in the face of possibly being false, but axiom is more like a construction. We construct a mathematical space to do our thing, where we say for example "Some natural number, called 0, exists" and the point is less that we believe it to be true regardless of context, but more that we don't care about a world in which it isn't, that world isn't of concern to us. By doing this you construct for yourself a world of nice round numbers, perfectly smooth curves, lines without width, a world of abstraction. While you make that world, as best you can you attempt to recreate the real one, but any attempt to drag you away from that world of paper is scoffed at. Mathematics in a sense is a way to achieve perfect knowledge, absolute certainty that what you're saying is unimpeachably correct to the last analysis. And in return you accept that you have created a perfect map of a land that does not and cannot exist. Incidentally if you want more proof of how much god plays dice, in group theory, the study of symmetry in mathematics, a group is a collection of things that you can do to some object while having it maintain symmetry (im eliding some detail but thats broadly right, shut up about group actions), and for a group of finite size, they can each be said to be in a sense the same as a product of "simple groups" sort of like how all intergers greater than 1 can be reproduced as a product of prime numbers. After decades of work, 100,000s of man hours, 10,000s of pages of paper after paper, we categorised every single simple group. Its 18 infinite families of groups, followed by 26 unrelated groups called the "sporadic groups", where one is called the monster group, which has 8x10^56 elements, along with 19 subgroups of that monster group, collectively called the "happy family" (it was the 70s, lots of acid), and then the 6 remaining groups are called the pariahs. The fact that this taxonomy describes the fundamental objects of the study of symmetry is such a beautiful demonstration of the pointlessness of existence, like seeing the true face of god and hes pissing himself laughing at you.

Please read anything by Roberto Unger — Brazilian legal thought represent!!

If we’re allowed to pitch authors: Cory Doctorow has a new book coming out at the end of february.

Please read Embassytown by China Mieville already. I wanna know where it rests on the Blindsight scale. I think it will be over .5 but not .8

Haven't read the book, but the characterisation of Grothendieck described here does a great disservice to him. Grothendieck didn't leave academia for some vague sense of doom, he left because he couldn't escape the scourge of military funding of academia, and its ties to the oppression of Vietnam, a country whose people he had strong ties to. Ironically, by trying to make a political point with Grothendieck, it ends up stripping him of his actual anticolonial and pacifist politics.

Interesting parallels to the recent Death is Just Around the Corner episode

i love the 20th century historical fictions, hope you cover europe central eventually!!

The Blindsight Scale - hardcore band names generators have nothing on me

Not to make everything about my special interest but a few of the concepts relating the physics sound a lot like the deep pale lore in Disco Elysium and A Sacred And Terrible Air, people having no idea how they got their breakthrough idea (cause it’s being …transmitted to them from the future vis disorganized time) to the idea that if a critical mass of people think the same thing it will be (Infamaterialism) etc etc Also the man who was Thursday was one of my favorite books as a teen so I am excited to get to it

Anhelo

Very much reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s final companion novels, Stella Maris & The Passenger

if you found this interesting it sounds like you might enjoy Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, which I highly recommend (though i can't speak to how accurate his presentation of the science is)

I wrote my honours thesis about the maths of quantum mechanics, and boy do I have Some Thoughts about this one. The uncertainty principle isn't just about resolution, it's primarily about incompatible information. It says that there are types of measurements that cannot be done together (any physicist reading this is going to have said 'non-commuting observables') because what they measure is somehow fundamentally incompatible. We represent this by saying that doing one measurement then the other is not the same as doing them in the reverse order. If you speak matrices, in the maths the observations are represented as non-commuting matrices (with potentially infinite dimension) and to do two together is to multiply the matrices. If you have commuting matrices, that behaves like a classical measurement and you don't see what we think of as quantum effects. The classic example is position and momentum, but it isn't the only thing. One of the recent physics Nobel prizes was related to more recent developments around the consequences of this stuff based on what's called Wigner's Friend. This thought experiment was cooked up by a guy who was absolutely certain that it's something about human consciousness making an observation that leads to the weirdness. Spoiler: he was wrong about that bit, but the people who came after him and expanded on his ideas weren't wrong about the consequences. If you expand Wigner's Friend to a pair of them, what you see is two observers who can fundamentally disagree about a thing that happened because they are measuring incompatible information. Because it's my jam this is the most exciting end of the research at the moment. Quantum mechanics is one of the most tested theories we have and it just keeps fucking working, baffling us in the process. Our understanding of it is incomplete, and there's still work to be done on the maths side of things to understand and represent interactions with an environment - open quantum systems as they're known. Good fun to think about on a lot of acid. The good news is that like other quantum effects, and the scale we live everything is interacting too much for quantum effects to come up anyway, so you can still have your real measurements and observer independent events. Unless you're in social science and then stuff starts behaving much more like quantum mechanics again...

I truly loved this book and his gorgeously brutal writing. THE MANIAC is similarly excellent.

I recently finished Labatut's most recent novel, "The MANIAC", which is mostly about the mathematician and physicist John Von Neumann (apparently often referred to as one of the most intelligent persons of the 20th C) and the things he helped invent - the nuclear bomb, the structure of the modern computer, the framework of "AI". A terrifying work about what exactly is going on inside an intelligence, especially one so vast as to seem like a different, alien species.

critically Schrödinger's cat *can't* be observed by any other means. it can't even become possible without collapsing the probability distribution function.

This book annoys me as a mathematician, it invokes Grothendieck where I think it should go for Cantor, and basically I think it's version of the Copenhagen interpretation is overly cute, far too literary and wrong.

Love this series!

I've been loving this series for providing me with fascinating new stuff to read - I'm at the point where I see the notification, grab the book without knowing anything about it, read it, then listen to the pod - so it's going to be an exciting change of pace to have the next two be both Books That I Have Read and Books That I Love Deeply And Personally. Really looking forward to it, thank you!

Things should be compared to Blindsight only on a logarithmic scale.

Recently finished the manga Biomega by Tsutomu Nihei. Highly recommend if you wanna see something akin to Fritz Haber's fears of what may come from his nitrogen synthesis conceptualized in art form. Cheers!