TOWARD THE POSTHUMAN

…the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

–Thomas Hobbes

Our earthly existence, since it in itself has a very doubtful meaning, can only be a means towards a goal of another existence.

–Kurt Godel

Cogito, ergo sum.

–Rene Descartes

Here are some informal reflections on my critically acclaimed novel, Heaven Engine.

PART ONE: GENRE

(Estimated Reading Time: 15 Minutes.)

I was born in Charleston,West Virginia, educated at Gilmour Academy and Santa Clara University, worked in the US Defense Industry on arms control and on artificial intelligence applications, started a consulting company in A.I. in Silicon Valley, and have been writing seriously since the 1970s, eventually writing three books: two novels and a nonfiction book on new information technology and its potential value to strategic analysis in the national security arena.

Literary Background. On the basis of my second novel, Heaven Engine (2004), I have been selected by a Barnes & Noble panel as one of thirty-six featured authors who have written novels of Other Science Fiction (a hybrid genre blending traditional novels and science fiction novels) ranging from the Medieval period to 2099. Among these thirty-six featured authors are Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Mark Twain, E. M. Forster, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, G. K. Chesterton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Bram Stoker and Ray Bradbury. Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), with its early version of the time travel plot device, is exemplary here. (Heaven Engine has also been listed as a best-selling science fiction novel by various booksellers such as Amazon UK; I am also one of Barnes & Noble’s Fifty Featured Authors, Science Fiction and Fantasy, High-Tech/Hard Science Fiction, Nineteenth Century to Present [see below].) The judges selecting the Other Science Fiction list have evidently considered Heaven Engine to be a signature book in 2000-2099.

Barnes & Noble’s perspective on Heaven Engine includes these points:

The novel is recognized for its imaginative world-building and unique premise.
Critics praise Clarkson’s character development and emotional depth.
The narrative is noted for its engaging pacing and suspenseful plot twists.
Barnes & Noble highlights the book’s appeal to fans of speculative fiction and fantasy genres.
The writing style is described as both lyrical and accessible, attracting a broad readership.
Overall, the novel is positioned as a compelling addition to contemporary literature.

Cloud 9 Booksellers has priced a first edition of Heaven Engine as a collectible at $1,000 and a British bookseller has priced a first edition as a collectible at over 1,100 pounds.

In addition to my books, I have authored a blog with over two hundred and sixty book and movie reviews; the blog has a viewership of over twenty thousand by readers from one hundred and fourteen countries. Regarding my review of Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, Bill Krohn, American author (Hitchcock at Work [1999]), critic, and since 1988 the Hollywood reporter for the seminal French movie magazine, Cahiers du Cinema (“…the most prestigious and influential film journal ever published”–Goodreads), wrote: “(It) captures better than any I have read the essence of the film.” John Updike commented on my review of his novel, Terrorist (2006): “Dear Mr. Clarkson–Thank you indeed for your kind and shrewd review of Terrorist; I think you read the novel very well…. I was cheered and encouraged….” For the book, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump (2020), co-written by former Secretary of Defense, William J. Perry, and Tom Z. Collina, Director of Policy at the Ploughshares Fund, Amazon Books has chosen my review, “The Most Authoritative Treatment of THE Existential Threat,” as the Top Review out of a total of one hundred and twenty-three reviews of this book from readers. An amended version of the Amazon review is contained in my blog. William J. Perry has written of this latter review, “This is the definitive review of our book.” William A. Hogan, author of Physics for Artists and Poets and You (2024), has written, “I am pleased to announce that my book has been reviewed by the internationally known author and critic, Albert Clarkson. Mr. Clarkson has had thousands of readers worldwide, and his blog reviewing books, movies and other media is followed globally.”

Here is the Barnes & Noble list of thirty-six featured authors in Other Science Fiction:

Featured Barnes & Noble Authors in Other Science Fiction Categories

Other Science Fiction Categories
          Science Fiction & Fantasy * General
Science Fiction & Fantasy * Comic Books
          Science Fiction * Space Opera
          Science Fiction Classics
          Science Fiction Short Stories

Related Books in Other Subjects
          Fiction Subjects
          Historical Fiction
          Horror
          Mystery & Crime
          Peoples & Cultures – Fiction
          Romance
          Science Fiction & Fantasy
          Thrillers
          War & Military Fiction
          Westerns
          Women’s Fiction
          World Literature

Featured Authors
          Austen, Jane
          Barbusse, Henri
          Biggers, Earl Derr
          Bradbury, Ray
          Bradley, Marion Zimmer
          Burroughs, Edgar Rice
          Campbell, John Wood
          Chesterton, G. K.
          Clarkson, Albert
          Conrad, Joseph
          Doyle, Arthur Conan
          Eliot, George
          England, George Allan
          Evans, E. Everett
          Fforde, Jasper
          Forster, E. M.
          Garrett, Gordon Randall
          Grahame, Kenneth
          Greg, Percy
          Grey, Zane
          Jenkins, William Fitzgerald
          Joyce, James
          Leinster, Murray
          Lincoln, Natalie Sumner
          Merritt, Abraham
          Porter, Eleanor H.
          Pyle, Howard
          Raine, William MacLeod
          Robb, J. D.
          Sandford, John
          Stoker, Bram
          Tracy, Louis
          Twain, Mark
          Verne, Jules
          Voynich, E. L.
          Wells, H. G.

Locations
          Africa
          Americas
          Europe
          Major Cities of the World
          Major U.S. Cities
          United States of America

Time Periods
          British Historical Periods
          Middle Ages (400 – 1499 C.E.)
          The Eighteenth Century (1700 – 1799)
          The Nineteenth Century (1800 – 1899)
          The Twentieth Century (1900 – 1999)
          The Twenty – First Century (2000 – 2099)

COMMENT

Regarding my being included among the thirty-six Featured Authors in Barnes & Noble’s Other Science Fiction Categories, spanning the Middle Ages to 2099:

Over sixty thousand science fiction and fantasy novels and story collections appear to be in print. The classification, Other Science Fiction, applies to a swath of writers of traditional literary fiction who in one or another pioneering work blend that venerable tradition with elements of science fiction and fantasy. The designation is essentially interchangeable with Other Speculative Fiction and Speculative Fiction, earlier terms which gained usage as many writers resisted being constrained to “pure” science fiction–admittedly a genre proven hard to define precisely–since their work showed a blend of various forms.

As in literary categories in general, two related ideas derived from religious writings–imprimatur and canon–have served in appraising Other Science Fiction. In this category of works of hybrid fiction, what merits an imprimatur, a rare mark of approval and distinction? In sum: Original experimental writing within a classic framework as judged by literary experts. A canon is a grouping of works by such writers chosen on the basis of their innovative, complex language and style; superior storytelling on its own merits as well as measured against earlier stories; drama transcendent of time and place; and authenticity based on a body of observed experience over time. In Other Science Fiction, authors such as Jane Austen, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, E.M. Forster, H. G. Wells, James Joyce and Mark Twain are featured. Scholars have especially analyzed forms of fantasy in the works of Austen, Chesterton, Conan Doyle (for example, The Lost World) and Conrad. But others listed here have been read in similar perspectives. In his revolutionary, modernist novel, Ulysses, playing out over a day in early twentieth century Dublin, James Joyce allegorically stretches Time to parallel eerily the adventures of his main character, Leopold Bloom, with those of Homer’s Odysseus in the ancient epic. E. M. Forster’s bizarre, echoing Marabar Caves in A Passage to India might well be called “otherworldly.” And Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee who visits King Arthur’s court is, after all, a time traveler. Other examples abound.

Other innovative stylistic blends displayed by the featured authors include the contemporary British writer Jasper Fforde’s interleaving of detective and science fiction/fantasy forms (along with stylistic flourishes typical in metafiction such as self-conscious playfulness and paradox); Gordon Randall Garrett’s science fiction detective stories in his Lord Darcy books; Eleanor Porter’s influential mix of realism and fantasy in Pollyanna; and Kenneth Graham’s enormously successful adventure-fantasy, The Wind in the Willows.

The fully acknowledged science fiction and fantasy masters on the list–chosen from the rich niche of thousands of books authored in that genre and ranging from the most prominent novelists such as Ray Bradbury, J.D. Robb (AKA Nora Roberts), John Sandford, Bram Stoker, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to the genre-famous such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Campbell, George Allen England, Gordon Randall Garrett, Greg Percy, and Murray Leinster–have all invented and dramatized seminal science fiction and fantasy devices, creatures and forms to leaven their storylines, innovations such as Wells’s time-travel machine, Stoker’s vampires, Percy’s sword-and-planet genre, Verne’s submarine, Leinster’s Universal Translator, and Bradley’s classic fantasy novels about mythical courtly times such as The Mists of Avalon. Here too, examples are many.

Most of the featured authors have passed, and most lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those writing today are John Sandford, Jasper Fforde, J. D. Robb and myself.

All the authors have written extensively; sold substantial numbers of novels and in some cases (J.D. Robb, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Sandford, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey and Jane Austen) huge numbers; published with traditional publishers; been researched, studied and analyzed widely; and are introduced on the Internet through their own Wikipedia pages.

I am the exception here:

The newest author on the list, I have written one traditional novel framed as a science fantasy epic–Heaven Engine (2004); self-published the novel with a print-on-demand technology through Penguin Books and its subdivision, Author Solutions; had marginal sales early (though for brief periods the novel has ranked in the top ten bestsellers in science fiction, science fantasy, and science novels on Amazon UK and Barnes & Noble and is now showing increased readership owing to burgeoning subscription services); and forgone a Wikipedia page. In fact, the novel has several times gained a five-digit Best Selling Rank on Amazon.com which with its enormous access to saleable books typically shows for a book a high six-digit Best Selling Rank or a seven-digit rank, often at the multimillion level.

As noted above, among the featured thirty-six authors in Other Science Fiction and their works in that genre from Medieval times through ensuing centuries, Heaven Engine is judged to be a drama for the distant future. Perhaps one way of looking at the novel is to see it as a work of literary fiction, a Quest Story, dramatizing a pivotal future in which the progress of technology, together with a supremely ironic suicidal disillusionment over the advanced human longevity of the times in an even more blatant entrapping biology and inscrutable vast universe, have led some humans to seek a transnatural secular heaven against enormous odds, an indefinite experience of suspenseful mathological “creatovery” in Ideality by newly formed posthuman beings of great mindfulness, beings made not in the image of any deity and whose story departs from both the literary tradition of “cathartic” tragedies in the Vale of Tears and the more recent tradition of epics of heroic defiance by heroes trapped in bloody mortality, victims of “natural selection”: which in the former case is to say, the tragic King Lear and ilk; and in the latter case, the furious Captain Ahab and ilk.

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With respect to the shift which has occurred in the readership of Heaven Engine, readers have been obtaining the book through the growing number of media-streaming subscription-based services offering access to millions of books. An example service is Zeusfun which has some 80,000 subscribers. The company first uploaded Heaven Engine in mid 2019 and as of late 2021 there have been over 700 reviews averaging a rating of 4.5/5.0 stars. Certainly many more readers on Zeusfun than the number of reviewers have obtained the book.

Here is similar data from aother typical subscription web site:

Maseke: after the novel was uploaded in May 2019, 588 subscribers rated Heaven Engine 4.6/5.0:

HEAVEN ENGINE ALBERT CLARKSON

File Name: heaven engine albert clarkson.pdf
Size: 1617 KB
Type: PDF, ePub, eBook

Category: Book
Uploaded: 10 May 2019, 21:17 PM
Rating: 4.6/5 from 588 votes.

In essence, Heaven Engine is meant to be a new literary experience, one written in the spirit of the unprecedented personal and transformative revolutions in technology–aka “artificial life”–emerging in our time. Its style and form are composed to dramatize in themselves–through the experience they create–the plausibility of the premise.

I am also one of Barnes & Noble’s Fifty Featured Authors, Science Fiction and Fantasy, High-Tech/Hard Science Fiction, Nineteenth Century to Present. Here is a recently published Barnes & Noble short list, selected from the full list of fifty authors, of eight of the current writers; in some versions of this short list, the earlier novelists Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells are also included.

Barnes & Noble

High Tech and Hard Science Fiction

Related Books in Other Subjects

Featured Authors

In a further sign of the increasing interest in Heaven Engine, Leapfrog Press, a widely respected book publisher focused on publishing and promoting experimental literary fiction, recently “scouted” Heaven Engine as showing a potential appeal to readers beyond its present interest largely to writers and literary workers.

____________________________

Heaven Engine has in places departed from some traditional thinking about the forms of narrative, for example, Aristotle’s “Unities.” The novel has multiple points of view, lengthy time spans, many settings, a panorama of actions, and other stylistic features not traditionally considered standard in fiction. For example, Heaven Engine contains numerous frames of reference, even and most notably aspects of theoretical mathematics.

I refer to the narrative structure of Heaven Engine as multiform. There appear to be various definitions of this designation. I have my own definition: In the Age of the Internet we are becoming at ease with, if not generally preferring, the extremely diverse formats, considerably differing depths of treatment, enormous ranges of subjects and knowledge, and, in sum, the exploratory and fascinating reading journeys, often differing considerably from one another, available to us in but seconds as in merely one sitting of an hour or two we “surf” the Net. Credit the protean electronic-communication phenomena of our times. It is a new condition, one I believe to be natural and certainly to be growing, in our sudden and exploding time of access to what I’ll call The Known. It is a radically new reading experience. It is a new narrative aesthetic. And by “multiform” I mean everything but the “shallows” observers like Nicholas Carr warn about as a corruption of the mind brought on by habitually searching the Net for trivia and the resultant and ironic conditioning of the mind to conduct trivial pursuit, a conditioning that of course fundamentally involves brain chemistry and hence can be addictive.

Multiform narratives need not obviate sound storytelling.

Displaying this narrative style, Heaven Engine, adventurous in theme, form and style, and within the Republic of Letters perhaps what F.R. Leavis called “a highbrow novel,” dramatizes a distant pivotal future: In their new, hard-won longevity, technologically advanced but radically dwindled and disillusioned humans–they have largely left Preventive Earth to live on six massive space stations: Republic, Princedom, Utopia, Leviathan, Demostar and Nirvana–ironically have become psychologically exhausted in their long lives, stymied by the ensuing demise of novelty–“the dreadful sameness of human experience,” “the curse of familiarity”–as they strain against the chains of their very “design” as severely constrained creatures of natural selection and as they despair over their “home,” the brutally impersonal, violently meaningless, inscrutably vast Cosmos. A growing plague of suicide ravages. The operative term in Heaven Engine for this future existential threat is “Disnovelling.”

Apropos, the late John Updike, with whom I had an occasional snail-mail correspondence while I was composing Heaven Engine and who described the novel as conveying “fascinating prospects,” early posed the fundamental dramatic question about the Longevitites with whom I was populating the story: “How do they keep from being infernally bored, as human consciousnesses would become in any indefinitely prolonged situation?” In Heaven Engine a defiant band of Homo sapiens, confronting Disnovelling, dares an immortality project to escape to an infinite, engrossing life in Ideality, an eternal experience of mindful creating, a Mathematica Dramatica. To be or not to be turns on whether these intrepids can “save human psychology from Accident.” Two immense questions arise: Might there be an Ideality both endless and endlessly engrossing? Can the human, since its beginning and for centuries restrained in the smothering embrace of the poet’s Heavy Bear, that Darwinian beast, transform itself to gain such a happy realm? (As Marvin Minsky once said, such would be a case of “non-natural selection.”) Herewith a two-front battle against the despairing Tedium of Disnovelling, the battle whose outcome shapes the story. (In an Epilog currently being written for a later edition of Heaven Engine, the barest glimpse of the experience of a Mathematica Dramatica is offered as a compressed drama about discovering infinities from countable to uncountable, the latter revealed through Cantor’s Diagonal Argument; Cantor is unnamed but the dawning of his beautiful insight is likened to “a graceful cantering.”)

The drama is experienced in tailored forms both by humans of that time and, thanks to protean technology, by resurrected humans and fictionals from earlier periods (“tourists of the future”). Heaven Engine is a version tailored to a twentieth century archetype, Centwen. The novel displays a form and prosody that lyrically compress a vast sweep of future history using poetic overviews of crucial periods (“Cogspells”) done in a style of multiform narration in which are mingled elements of versification–intonation, stress, tone and rhythm–meant to stamp the reader vividly (“The Twilight Zone at last in highlight shown”). The chief features of the style include “rollercoasting” in rapidly coursing and impelling passages and “obstopart,” a blending of passive observation with active participation in the situations of the future. The story is told through a blend of first-, second-, and third-person narration, confessional to objective; a style of the postmodern, it allows the various points of view to add their own outlooks to what precedes them in the narrative and intensifies the force of the presentation. The characters speak in different fonts to help capture their voices and reflect their personalities. Wordplay, poetic devices, punning, jokes and other familiar stylistic touches pervade. After all, if traditional literary forms would lose power in a new history, they still would serve as forms suitable for a prelude–a transition–to a radically new adventure in Ideality. It would be their Final Act, and their preservation in those last moments of the Old World brings a precious nostalgia which heightens the drama of reaching the New World.

In Heaven Engine suspense begins in the style itself, from the musicality of sentences and passages to variations in narrative form. And like other challenging, innovative literature–“strange” works in the view of Harold Bloom–Heaven Engine must itself create its own frame of reference, hopefully as the times come to resonate with its ideas. In the words and spirit of that discoverer, Virginia Woolf: “I have made up my mind…to write what I like (and critics are) to say what they like.” As to confirmation, George Eliot put it well when she said, “O may I join the choir invisible/ Of those immortal… who live/ again/ In minds made better by their/ presence….” And I hold the late Marvin Minsky’s invitation to Heaven Engine in his cover endorsement of the novel to be far more elegant than any reflection I might offer: “A vast, important and radical vision.”

PART TWO: THEMATIC

(Estimated Reading Time: 15 Minutes.)

Put essentially, Heaven Engine, written in our Age of Technology, is finally a drama about the emergence of a posthuman future.

It is useful to comment briefly on “posthuman,” “transhuman,” and “transnatural.”

I must confess at once to equating “posthuman” with a being that to the maximum extent possible transcends materiality. I think this sense of the term, presently controversial in some cases, will become a prevailing theme.

I do not think modes of ethics, matters of justice, and communiations between or among species–often the objectives in considerations of the “posthuman”–will be of lasting concern.

Obviously we have yet to create a posthuman who in my sense by definition transcends the material world, including the biological world; but as either human or transhuman (i.e., having “superhuman” abilities) inventors of such beings in the future, we would doubtless design and create these posthumans with some reliance on our human design, e.g., employ in some form some of our strategies of thinking.

As to “transnatural,” the classic definition of that state is one of “being above or beyond nature.”

However, despite these distinctions, it should go without saying–but I will say it anyway–that human life itself is of immense value. The ideals and values of the Enlightenment, that Glorious Light in the general Darkness of tyrannical and genocidal History, a Light to serve the noble hope of creating a society that promotes happiness for the individual human, must be esteemed and pursued. The posthuman impetus must in no way devalue human life but triumphantly enhance it.

Accordingly, the basic questions raised in Heaven Engine:

1. Is there a mindful, dynamic, progressive, secular heaven beyond the natural human life?
2. If so, can humans transform and transcend themselves–become posthumans–to experience it?

Of course, the idea of Heaven appears throughout most of human history. Of the many examples, two of the more prominent literary ones are Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The 1988 book by Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven–A History, addresses many aspects of the idea from early to modern times, including Hellinistic concepts through the depictions of an afterlife in various religions to Swedenborgian notions and beyond.

In our own time, examples of scientific and technological ideas of creating a secular indefinite mindful experience have been advanced respectively by the late polymath, Freeman Dyson, and by the futurist, Ray Kurzweil (see below).

That said, and leading from Marvin Minsky’s cover endorsement of Heaven Engine:

A vast, important, and radical vision:

All that follows here and in the novel itself dramatizes the vast entrapment of natural selection, important historical and speculative attempts to escape, and the radical solution of a posthuman enthralling experience.

Before going further, I should highlight two words here: conjecture and plausibility.

I am going to present several instances in which I conjecture that there could be signs of both the existence of, and the gaining of, such a secular heaven. And I am going to qualify that thinking by recalling the problem of plausibility, especially turning on the limits of the remarkable human intelligence, no matter how innovative, over and against the sheer time needed to create a posthuman, time that might be granted by History.

There is currently an early, stirring, multi-disciplinary, far-reaching and international “Transhuman Movement” with various complex viewpoints. There is productive contention–ethical, technical and otherwise–about what its aims should be, including whether achieving some form of posthuman immortality should even be pursued. Some participants such as Nick Bostrum raise important questions about both the favorable and the adverse possibilities of the endeavor. Science fiction writers such as Neal Stephenson in his novel, Fall (2019), have dramatized possible ironies of the transhuman enterprise.

Beyond the transhuman is the posthuman.

I must plead guilty to the central idea in Heaven Engine–an idea some might call “narcissistic”–of a transcending of the human being and of the natural life to a posthuman life in what has been called “a quest for more exquisite ways of being,” namely, in my novel, a Mathematica Dramatica in Ideality.

In that light, my primary interest has been the vision of such principals of artificial intelligence as Marvin Minsky and Douglas B. Lenat, the robotics pioneer and futurist Hans Moravec, and the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, dramatized by the technology infused idea of “the singularity,” a term perhaps suitably defined as that possible future when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence.

There are various ideas of the problems and prospects of a transition to forms of posthumans. Heaven Engine dramatizes a manysided scenario. To elaborate on the above description of that story:

A distant future of smart machines and protean technology. Our radically dwindled descendants, exiled by a global authoritarian government to large space stations after the Eco War, visit Cleansed Earth occasionally for gravity- and sensory-deprivation therapy. Human longevity, at last attained, has ironically created a Great Plague of Suicidal Despair, Disnovelling, an infernal, growing ennui and weariness born of the intruding longer personal prospects of the dead ends of bloody Nature and of the impersonal, unreachable, inscrutable, hurtling cosmic vastitudes. Various attempts to create sophisticated pursuits and distractions for the Longevitites, such entertainments and activities as tours of Jupiter’s moons, “Knowledgian” Hiking Gear, enhanced sexuality, the ability to enter into the enlivened worlds of famous paintings, and others are fashioned to offset Disnovelling but soon fail. In short, the limitations of Disnovelled Homo sapiens (including the authorities)-–especially the sense of baffled entrapment—not the event horizon but the mental horizon—have become increasingly unbearable, leading to times of widespread suicide. Centwen, a technologically resurrected twentieth century archetype joined by similarly resurrected archetypes, including elites, from his and other earlier centuries–all now become time travelers–and who are not yet suffering Disnovelling, and all chosen by the superbot, Prodigy, and its outlaw human creator, the great polymath, Psychodor, hater of natural selection, tour the disheartening future after their earlier deaths, ultimately learning about a final hope beyond Disnovelling, namely, a last-chance project founded and managed by Psychodor himself to create not a mythical but a secular, dynamic, intelligent, posthuman Heaven–a Mathematica Dramatica; and, if it succeeds, whether or not these resurrected humans, together with the Remnant Humanity from that suicidal future, can themselves be transformed, and/or their intelligent machines, and escape to it as posthumans.

Put otherwise:

The infernal downfall, the impending extinction, of newly long-lived Homo sapiens might well lie in their becoming increasingly wearied not only of being lost in the Vastitudes but in any imaginable state in which they remain at least partially human.

Existential threats abound, could bring abrupt doom for humanity, and seemingly are growing in number. But the inevitable, irredeemable upper limit of the human demise is psychological.

However, one more general and immensely sobering question concerns what might be called “the Darwinian Meridian”: A grim “high point” in evolution, natural selection, survival of the fittest–call it what you will. To wit: Is there any reason to suppose that in the dynamics of evolution there is anything that does not suggest the eventual extinction of humans? Is an awful trend here dawning? For example, physicists do what physicists do: were nuclear weapons inevitable? It would seem that knowledgeable observers would have to say, Yes.

Creating posthumans who can thrive in Ideality: Surely a race against Time.

And indeed, below are listed some of the more plausible existential threats to the survival of Homo sapiens, threats which seem to be growing greatly in our time, and some of which seem to have a frightening momentum.

* * *

For many people, no doubt, such subjects are foolish or hapless. Apropos: The Chiliean writer, Benjamin Labatut, in his popular books falling back faintly on old-time remedies for an ironically dooming (e.g., the Manhattan Project) scientific and technological opening of Pandoras’ Box by what I choose to call his version of Mad Scientists of these times in their relentless search for understanding, When We Cease to Understand the World and Maniac, in my view (and that of others) serves up a stew of fact and fiction which may throw some of his veracity into doubt: again, he posits too many “Mad Scientists” (e.g., his characterizations of von Neumann and Heisenberg), and raises the nonsensical question: How can humans cease to understand what they haven’t (and likely won’t) understand in the first place? Yet there is no doubt that scientific discoveries and the resultant technologies, personified by Labatut’s powerful description of the effects of thermonuclear weapons, may pose grave and ironic threats (see below).

* * *

As to a plausible secular heaven, I think the thrilling, engrossing, beautiful discoveries of mathematics are a guidepost. Call the state, Ideality. Crucial is the idea of infinity.

I call the posthuman in this state a Mathite.

Of the second question, the transformation of humans into Mathites far beyond the human, I believe there is today no confident, although a hopeful, answer.

But to frame that hope, we must paradoxically set it aside for a moment and think about the all-too-real existential threats to the human species mythically galloping across the skies toward us in our day, threats acknowledged above in general, and consider that advanced projects of transformation do not yet exist and that accordingly there may not be enough time to create Mathites.

Consider this surely partial if dreadful list:

-Nuclear War

-Environmental Disaster

-Massive Cyberattacks, Out-Of-Control Hostile Technology, Other Catastrophic Technology Ironies

-Orwellian Dystopia (Authoritarianism, etc)

-Pandemic (Natural)

-Pandemic (Man Made)

-Asteroid Collision

-Super Volcano

-Solar Storm or Gamma-Ray Burst

-Threat X

Yet we are entering what seems likely to become an age of would-be transformational science and technology. Not simply a posthuman movement per se but a transformational reality. Clues appear: Artificial intelligence. Artificial reality. Augmented human intelligence. Anti-aging research. And so on. A trend here, however precarious, toward the transnatural for Homo sapiens seems clear.

Certainly Minsky and colleagues are right to think about “the singularity.”

But for the transformation question, obviously many considerations arise. It can hardly be forgotten that we are creatures of natural selection. Or perhaps better said, we are captives of natural selection. We might even be likened to drunkards of natural selection. It is almost impossible, it sometimes seems, for us ever to look at, to imagine, our situation as other than natural selectees. We perhaps seldom realize we are thus constrained. After all, as the saying goes, we’re almost always merely “doing and thinking what comes naturally.” No surprise here, for in the Darwinian context commonly described in general as “the survival of the fittest” it is obvious that the mortal human condition–rife with painful struggles–greatly complicates–inherently interrupts–a focus on the technologically rendered posthuman.

Here is one example, perhaps a cruel one: the human social question: Would attaining Ideality mean leaving your family and friends forever? The answer, complex and explored in Heaven Engine, is most probably, Yes.

Immediately, the sense is sadness, perhaps bitterness. This is instinctual, i.e., natural. In the longer term, perhaps the sense will arise that new mindful creatures need not be social.

PART THREE: HERALDIC ART

(Estimated Reading Time: 40 Minutes.)

Today where do we see clues of a possible human transformation? As admitted, there are yet no fulsome technological projects. But we can feel the yearning.

We can see hints of it in some works of art. It whispers and sometimes, if very rarely, shouts from the arts.

The arts can be the earliest heralds.

Art scholars historically have liked to show that some art dramatizes at once both an established spirit of times and an aborning spirit of times.

I wrote Heaven Engine with the wish to pursue literary art to contribute in the moment to a change, or at least an intimation of one, in the history of consciousness; namely, the possible appearance of a truly transcendent technology, a posthuman state, and its resultant heavenly experience.

I emphasize “contribute.”

Yes, by my reading, there are dramatic clues in art of that outcome possibly on its way. Indeed, I analyze below the last epic one–the last such epic in my view, anyway–and one which anticipates our own times–embodied in Herman Melville’s usually and massively misunderstood Moby-Dick. The pivotal Melville both transcends and demolishes a long previous era and literally clears the decks for our own, often subtly yearning, era. Moby-Dick is indeed one of the handful of epochal books.

Here are nine art examples from many, including and starting with Melville, and all of the chosen nine showing at least intimations of the human urge, the persistent yearning, often nearly buried, for escape from natural selection and the gaining of a heavenly Ideality. Accordingly Melville serves as a foundation for the eight other, much-less-grand works, upon which I reflect for clues–poetry, novels, artful nonfiction, and movies among these works–which may bring in you a kind of dawning in dramatizing that human urge, clandestine as it still is.

Yes, that whispering in art is a way the urge manifests itself in our preoccupied human consciousnesses.

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1. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. I was afraid to reread Moby-Dick (1851) because it had seemed so overwhelming when I first read it years ago. Melville seemed intent on characterizing the whaling enterprise of his day in seemingly its every facet; was there not a narrative tension between the pure whaling-adventure scenes and the interruptions of that adventure by all those chapters effectively presenting the full technical and cultural magnitude of the hunting of whales–the massive job descriptions, new technologies of the day, and especially the broad cultural and historical context which Melville gives to the Whaling Story? If anything, Melville would supplant previous grand myths with the Whaling Story, insisting at every point that it is a novel and realistic way to render the human condition.

Yet over the years I had often thought about–indeed, been haunted by–Melville’s epic of the sea–the greatest story of the sea ever written according to such as D.H. Lawrence and John Masefield. And because of those and a few other late discoveries, the obscure and forgotten Melville’s sublime book was redeemed from oblivion in the 1920s. Of course, like most of the handful of truly great epoch-making stories which move storytelling in new directions to dramatize new spirits of place and pivotal times, Moby-Dick is nothing if not strange on first reading. The style and premise are shaped by new compositional challenges arising out of new times. The natural enemies of serious literature–tradition-bound English Departments and distracted “schools” of literary critics stand out here–will seldom recognize truths in such crucial strangeness: poor Melville could not rely on “the shock of recognition.”

But I surprised myself. I devoured Moby-Dick on my second reading. The best I can say here is that looking back from our present day it has become inevitable that Melville’s classic now emerges in all its simple profundity.

Yes, simple profundity.

The wonderful Emily Dickinson wanted to “unname” the male-dominated poetic tradition and reconfigure experience in new ways. Fellow New Worlder Melville wrote Moby-Dick as an interruption of a vast, hoary cultural outlook whose literary paragon is, of course, Shakespeare. Yes, Melville turns away from earlier versions and explanations of the human condition, a vast body of drama epitomized by the Bard. Apropos, there is no hero in all of high literature who is like Ahab. Nor, I would wager, is there one who has been misunderstood more consistently.

Thinking of Melville’s state of mind–really, his inspiration–as he writes Moby-Dick is the key. Such genius eludes us in its wonderful moment-to-moment soaring and diving and just plain staying-the-course, but I think there are three roads which lead to the heart of Moby-Dick: First, a reflection on the final paragraph of the novel; Second, Ahab and the Theodicy Problem; Third, the malevolent beauty of the natural world.

(1) The End of Moby-Dick. Here it is in all its terrible, poetic beauty. The Pequod is sunk by Moby-Dick; all ends thusly:

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf: a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Melville tries to fit the absolute essence of human experience as he knew it–the Human Condition–into the story of the White Whale. There is adventure, there are thrills, there is the surface beauty of Nature (though monsters swim below the sun-dappled surface of the sea on a balmy tropical afternoon as noted for an enraptured sailer manning the Crows Nest who forgets the brute physics still holding during his idyllic vista in which in his seductive reverie he loses his footing and plunges to his death). In other words, after the whole stirring and brutal adventure in which EveryHero Ahab, calling himself “Adam, staggering beyond the piled centuries since Paradise” just to make sure we Get It about his enormous symbolic stature, diverts the Pequod and its carefully depicted global crew–Here Comes Everyone–from the lamp-oil mission to a new Story of stories to “strike through the mask” of an “inscrutable malice” in a Nature, the monstrous agent of which is the White Whale, that has it out for us. If Moby-Dick is Melville’s version of the whole world and the essence of human experience–a vast take–humanity ends up sailing on a journey which is–no other words seem as fitting–a Defiant Hero’s (not a Pilgrim’s) progress through a deadly enshrouded Nature: “…the great shroud of the sea.” We must, says Ahab, defy our circumstances. This is our supreme integrity.

(2) Ahab and the Theodicy problem. Theodicy is a centuries-old intellectual pursuit of some explanation of why God permits evil, and a mindful quest finally focussed on the mystery of human suffering. Again, Moby-Dick is the irreligious Melville’s agent of savage nature, and the pursuing Ahab, scarred from nape to sole by the horrific whale in earlier encounters, says that he’d even strike the sun if it offended him. Ahab is “monomaniacal” in his determination to defy Nature; indeed, to punish Nature. (And I imagine Melville to be snickering on those few times he allowed that old psychological term into the narrative in characterizing Ahab). Now, what are the traditional “answers” to the Problem of Evil? Here are some: We humans are guilty sinners and deserve our suffering in this Vale of Tears. We humans show darkness of the intellect and cannot fathom why actually All Is Well: God has things right but we aren’t smart enough to realize it. And further, and even though suffering, we humans can through mysticism transcend that grief. Zen and Theresa of Avila.

And Ahab’s entering into this Great Question? We could review much of his conduct, but the marvelous Melville says it profoundly and simply in one moment in the drama: In a South American church on one of his voyages made before the novel opens, we are told, Ahab is shown a “Holy Chalice of Communion”: Ahab spits in it.

Ahab rejects an entire and pervasive tradition.

So, of course, does Melville himself. Melville’s prophetic Elijah, encountered by Ishmael and Queequeg on the pre-voyage docks, foretells of doom, unlike the Elijah of the bible. Melville here is going about Emily Dickinson’s “unnaming” of things traditional. And here, perhaps, better said: “renaming.”

Another of the many signs of Melville’s anger about Theodicy: Father Mapple’s sermon early in the novel on the Old Testament story of Jonah in the belly of the whale is the inverse of Melville’s vision of reality, Mapple’s harangue being a silly myth from the previous (Biblical) Story of stories before Moby-Dick appears (make no mistake, the “renaming” Melville is supremely ambitious!) and the Jonah story having no referents to the realities of Moby-Dick. In that wintry church in which early in the novel Mapple climbs his little play ladder up to his little play ship of a pulpit, the abiding impression of the scene is those cold marble tombstones mounted on the church walls and listing whalers killed in that endeavor. That imagery complements the mysterious murky painting hanging in the Spouter Inn where Ishmael stays before the voyage and which Ishmael sees, as he studies the canvas, that it gradually (as in the manner of an optical illusion–ah, Herman, what a symbolist are you!) resolves into the image of a huge whale emerging from the waves and leaping high to fall upon and crush a whaling ship. (Recall those lectures in English class about “foreshadowing.”)

The worst oversight in reading Melville’s epic is the all-too-frequent diminishing of Ahab as somehow an obsessive who merely wants vengeance on a dumb brute. Perhaps the right explanation here to show why there are such forlorn views by readers is Emerson’s warning about foolish consistency: I’m certain Melville would shrug and admit that the Old Testament Habits of Thought are in many invincible. Of course, he gives wonderful dramatic evidence to the contrary. First, Ahab is no forerunner of Hitler, etc. Ahab is Right About Things in the world of Moby-Dick (and, soon, the Darwinian world), and he rouses the crew to abandon the conventional major business of whaling–obtaining whale oil for lighting lamps–for an epochal quest. Yes, rouses. Stirred, they (even practical-Quaker Starbuck at The End) resoundingly follow Ahab. We see in Moby-Dick that Ahab’s harpooner, Queequeg, former member of the royalty on a South Sea paradise island, forsakes that indolent life for the dangerous, avid whaling adventure as a master harpooner ever ready to strike through the [malevolent] mask. And as the novel opens, Melville pictures Manhattanites gazing out to sea as humans are wont to do when encountering from a coast the inscrutable and vast oceans, the great shroud. Something pulling about it, eh?

3) The Savage Beauty of the Natural World. The symbolist Melville loves life both beautiful and painful and describes it sublimely:

Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless herds of ripe and golden wheat. (Right Whales) with open jaws sluggishly swam through the brit…. As moving mowers who, side by side, slowly and soothingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of the marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind the endless swaths blue on the yellow sea.

But finally Melville speaks through Ahab about the malevolent force behind the “mask” of the natural world, a mask we must strike through to attack that “inscrutable malice” savaging us. And indeed Melville leaves us with little else but a shocking, stunning heroism: fierce Ahab, turning his back on an enormous tradition of human thought, becomes a would-be punisher of our omnipresent foe, Nature herself.

Ahab: The Defiant Hero.

Of course, Ahab is a larger-than-life hero. He embodies Melville’s Grand Take. And it is New. After all, the marvelous Herman is of the New World. And for Ahab, and eventually for the others in the global crew, reality, just as depicted in that murky painting hanging in the inn, resolves to the shrouded malevolence of a punishing monstrous whale.

This is not catharsis, not little stories about emotional problems, not metaphysical, not mystical, etc. It is instead a truly grand and pivotal and strange book, and as the great literary theorist Harold Bloom says, the Canon is comprised of strange books.

At the end, after all that magnificent adventure, we honestly do not know much, saith Melville. But we must be heroic in defiance. It seems right. And so: Ahab leaves his young wife and child and the warmth of home and hearth and takes to the sea and finally and fatally sinks his knife into the immortal flesh of the inimical White Whale.

And so here is Moby-Dick, in between the Old World and our new and most dangerous one of sensational and amazing technology. Melville did not know then where we might be now.

But to say it again, he cleared the decks (grimly appropriate in talking about the Pequod) for our period. He would demolish the Mysterian Tradition.

And now there is indeed our period. And herein another enormous story opens up to us, a redemptive one that may offer little hope of success given all the obstacles. Yet: Consider discoveries like Cantor’s Diagonal Argument (an inkling of an edificial Beautiful)–the sheer wonder and thrill of it–Cantor’s great glimpse of varieties of Ever. Recall that in Moby-Dick Melville speaks of the “infinite series of waves” that encircle the Earth: here is not Cantor but an Escher-like sense of being confined to a circling infinity bound to a globe: ultimately a hellish infinity of ennui. But that is not the presumptive direction of our present and future technology: I am presuming that technology portends the ultimate meaning of a transformation into post-biological life in which the New World becomes Ideality and there is a boundlessly happy infinity of a grand Mathematica Dramatica far beyond the impenetrable mask.

Strangeness….

2. A Single Line from Noel Coward’s The Vortex (1924)

“How can we help ourselves? We swirl around in a vortex of beastliness.”

3. The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me, by Delmore Schwartz

“the withness of the body”

The heavy bear who goes with me,

A manifold honey to smear his face,

Clumsy and lumbering here and there,

The central ton of every place,

The hungry beating brutish one

In love with candy, anger, and sleep,

Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,

Climbs the building, kicks the football,

Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,

That heavy bear who sleeps with me,

Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,

A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,

Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope

Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.

—The strutting show-off is terrified,

Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,

Trembles to think that his quivering meat

Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,

Has followed me since the black womb held,

Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,

A caricature, a swollen shadow,

A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,

Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,

The secret life of belly and bone,

Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,

Stretches to embrace the very dear

With whom I would walk without him near,

Touches her grossly, although a word

Would bare my heart and make me clear,

Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed

Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,

Amid the hundred million of his kind,

The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

________________________

Schwartz’s fine poem is a complaint: “A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive…. That inescapable animal (who) walks with me.”
The plight of the natural selectee. After all, for these times, we are animals.

4. Black Swan, A Film by Darren Aronofsky

Black Swan (2010) is a most artful modern retelling of an old story, the conflict in each of us between the angelic and the primordial leading to the distinguishing human transcendent yearning for a perfect state, namely one perfectly beautiful. The movie is in the general tradition of Jekyll and Hyde, Metamorphosis, Equus, Beauty and the Beast, The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the guardian angel versus the devil, the ego and the id, the civilized primate and the naked ape, and many others.

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), the ballerina of a famous New York company, is selected to play both the White and Black Swan in a radically revised Swan Lake stripped down to its essential conflict in these tumultuous times so far from Tchaikovsky’s day. The original score, story and choreography are shaped for our era.

The mistaken interpretation of this intense and haunting movie, one growing in the critics’ echo chamber, can be summed up by Voltaire’s famous observation, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Not here.

The real question is, which “perfect” is Black Swan about? The perfectly beautiful discoveries of mathematics as a human transcendence seem consonant with dreams of the ultimate engrossment of Strong Artificial Intelligence and its presently vague idea of a new consciousness, a next-stage sentience, “silicon consciousness.” But though Black Swan is contemporary with a vengeance, the “perfection” sought in it is the traditional one which assumes humans are ever to be of natural selection and that to be “perfect” is to war with one’s evolved natural self to sublimate the natural and break free to be supernatural. In that psychological war within Nina, the White Swan must vanquish the Black Swan. The Black Swan is primal, swampish, insistent, unrepressed and irremovable. So, Nina’s balletic vanquishing is strictly sublime suicide.

Yes, to attain the old ideal of human perfection, a most fleeting refuge for these unscriptural and irreligious times, and in the most sublime secular artistic expression of it, the ballet, is to live a grim paradox. To say it again, Nina Sayers must become suicidal for her White Swan to overcome her Black Swan, and crucially she must bravely confront and do in her Black Swan–do in her primal self and, because she is not purely angelic and cannot be, ultimately do in herself wholly, to bring in that very act her dancing to the perfection she supremely consciously wants to reach and may well at most achieve in performance as barely more than an intimation if indeed one which her audience thunderously understands and appreciates in a mysterious recognition that seems most human, happily so.

Black Swan is as deeply paradoxical a movie as you may see for some time.

Its art is superb. Darren Aronofsky, a youngster-director with a short resume, creates a Hitchcockian aura of dark, eerie, canny suspense. The camera stays as close to Nina most of the time as the mythical guardian angel is said to have shadowed Medieval man. Nina is all, everything, finally, in this remarkable movie–in the deepest sense there really isn’t anyone else in the story (nor, given the drama here, does there need to be)–and the most serious things about the human creature take up the story of Nina as we too follow her. (Here Comes Everyone).

Aronofsky adapts several horror movie motifs gracefully and for artistic purposes never imagined by the schlockmeisters who contrived them. For instance, Nina’s ballet-trained legs morph for a horrifying instant into equine legs; and her toes, in another such moment, become webbed after which, horrified, she quickly slips on her long, square-toed ballerina shoes. How’s that for a central metaphor? It’s even better than another one: Nina cuts herself deliberately at times in the manner of the old self-flagellating monks: Beat the Devil, as they say. Here, though, we can and should be modern and substitute “Black Swan.”

5. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film by Steven Spielberg

I think a case can be made that Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is Spielberg’s finest. The story, a modern fairy tale about benign and superior visitors to Earth from Somewhere in the universe, shows a Hitchcockian awareness of preserving classes and culture (e.g., the Master’s wonderful movie of the 1940s capturing for history twentieth century British aristocratic ways and means, The Paradine Case). Likewise, Spielberg focuses on the speech, houses, clothes, food, fears, settings and other components of American middle class life in the 1970’s: they are magnificently preserved with an exactness that is remarkable and bespeaks an intense observation and dramatization. And in our fast-moving culture, the world of Encounters has already largely passed into its only remaining reality, memory.

Most importantly, this movie has an interesting small place in what some have called “The History of Consciousness.” The hero, Indiana power company field worker, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfus), one of the few humans called to a rendezvous by the friendly aliens with their stunningly advanced technology, is far from the usual Hollywood central figure. Why? Because he wants to get Out of Here! He wants to leave the Vale of Tears of human earthly existence, escape the final fate of all its mortal human characters, and all this on an irresistible dare, a faith that simply by departing to another and much advanced world–walking up the ramp of that huge mysterious ship and entering it–you might discover that Hobbes and his observation that human life is poor, nasty, brutish and, above all, short, might be escaped! Indeed, at one point Neary explains that in view of his Close Encounters, “I want to know what is going on!” Neary is pure wonderment!

Yes, few heroes of our art-stories would put down human life. How many of them would do as Roy Neary does, forsake wife and kids without so much as a backward glance?

I’m more than prepared to believe that such was not foremost in the minds of the principals as they created Encounters. It may have been a dawning irony post mortem. My daughter, who worked in production in Hollywood, says word has it that there was indeed a later regret over the chance of emerging disapproving implications to some movie-going sensibilities of wonder-struck Neary’s intense decision to leave his family: What sacrilege have we wrought?

But Roy Neary sees irresistible evidence of a greater technology right in front of him, in the ships and behaviors of the “Alien” Visitors. And he especially senses it when the happy outsiders do a little mind-control on him: especially as shown in his nagging, mysterious urge to sculpt what turns out to be a scale model of Devil’s Tower, the rendezvous point for the event that will change history.

Roy Neary is acting on what in a sense we might call an inhuman faith when he leaves Trauffaut, Balaban and the others behind and boards the Mother Ship. Lots of unknowns before him, welcomed unknowns.

After all, he is turning his back on…well, his Earthly existence.

6. The Children Act, a novel by Ian McEwan

What exactly had troubled her? –Narrator’s Question about Fiona Maye in The Children Act

This question–the Question of questions in McEwan’s novel–is answered most dramatically for his heroine, Fiona Maye, a still-fetching middle-aged High Court judge in today’s London and ruling on child welfare cases, that answer revealed through a superbly understated and controlled narrative which is intended to carry you unerringly and with a dismaying sense to accepting a traditional, brutal literary naturalism updated for our times. McEwan, as always, dramatizes Bad News: we are futile actors of a darkened intellect and a weakness of the flesh whose floundering lives dramatize ironic futility in the face of forces, often invisible, against which actually we have no chance of prevalence. The old saying that we are our own worst enemies is a half-truth: we’re self-defeating but it’s nothing to become egotistical about: we’re merely in a happenstance situation “rigged” against us and in which our behavior itself is ultimately a dooming joke we don’t really get. “Rigged” rather than rigged because, when you get down to it, the forces are impersonal. There is no one beyond us to care about us.

Philosophical and literary Naturalism, pure and simple.

So: The Trouble with Fiona is the trouble with us all. It’s the Trouble with the World. In it redemption is no more real than unicorns. Biology, anthropology and cosmology are all secular and impersonal latter day components of a Grand Surround: by definition, there is no way around it.

The artistic response of McEwan is to fashion beautiful, masterful narratives in which his revenge is a superbly accurate rendering of our hopelessly Bad Fortune: if we can’t overturn the forces, at least we can expose them; we can be aware; we can thus be tragic rather than merely innocent, let alone stumbling around ever as Blind Fools. Says McEwan and out of a demanding, triumphant art created to make us Knowing: Damned if we must be fools!

McEwan’s literary skill is a joy to behold. See how he dramatizes “What exactly had troubled (Fiona)?”

First, he makes her an exemplar, an estimable exponent of the essence of the Enlightenment, that promising miracle of civilization, that brave fortress in savage history. Specifically, the moral and expert Fiona is at home in the world of great jurists of the past who formed principles to rule favorably in cases of child welfare. The problem of child welfare–what could be more central and engaging in Enlightened thinking, especially given modern humanistic ideas about children? And so, now a prominent judge, she must decide the most urgent cases, for example, concerning separation of Siamese twins (named “Matthew” and “Mark” by the artful and rather nasty Ironic, McEwan) in which one will survive and without which both will die, the latter outcome favored by the traditionally religious parents and their community. Here we trade off the custody of children in which wealthy care in a traditionally stifling culture must be compared with somewhat precarious upbringing in which the child nevertheless enjoys greater freedom in a rapidly changing world, a world promoting saving medical operations for otherwise terminally ill children of parents who are Jehova’s Witnesses determined to allow their children to die.

Second, the childless Fiona will be troubled when we first meet her. Something about her Child Welfare cases has begun to disturb her. She is losing her sense of physicality. Her husband, Jack, a fifty-nine-year-old “professor of Ancient History” (mark that well as McEwan’s Naturalistic-theme-reinforcing assignment of a profession), is threatening an extramarital affair with a young stenographer because Fiona seems to have lost interest in sex. Jack is pretty much an ordinary chap. He stays in good shape with daily hoisting of light weights in his office. He likes to ski. Although he and Fiona are childless, he’s great with their visiting neices and nephews–he delights them by goofing off with them without a thought about their psychology and mental stages of growth: he’s a natural.

McEwan is a great compressor of complexities. Here, in a passage that beautifully sends up a poetic Naturalism and goes far in making us feel the Why and What of Fiona’s Trouble, is a superb example similar to several others in The Children Act:

At nights her thoughts returned to that photograph of the (Siamese) twins and the dozens of others she had studied, and to the detailed technical information she had heard from medical specialists on all that was wrong with the babies, on the cutting and breaking, splicing and folding of infant flesh they must perform to give Mark a normal life, reconstructing internal organs, rotating his legs, his genitals and bowels through ninety degrees. In the bedroom darkness, while Jack at her side quietly snored, she seemed to peer over a cliff edge. She saw in the remembered pictures of Matthew and Mark a blind and purposeless nullity. A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transformed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.

Blind luck.

The Children Act culminates in Fiona’s intervening in a judicial case to save a seventeen-year-old boy, Henry, from death owing to the denial of medical treatment by the parents, Jehova’s Witnesses, Henry’s certain death being tragically favored as well by the obedient boy. Fiona’s is a triumph of humanistic civilization, an Enlightened response to superstition. She eminently does The Right Thing.

But….After masterfully instilling that sense of Fiona as an Eminent Civilized, McEwan stages his crushing final act, the Prevalence of Naturalism over even the Enlightenment. After Fiona imparts to Henry the virtues of Enlightened ideas of the individual–The End in many stories–a dreadful final chapter plays out in which Henry is neither saved nor Fiona allowed to triumph in a cause of the Rational. Neither is at fault. Fiona will, you are certain, be haunted by her awful lesson in the Naturalistic Vale of Tears.

Hence McEwan’s story is honest if not defiant.

7. Dreams of Earth and Sky, by Freeman Dyson

I’m here a little early in the evening at Club Paradise. I’m relaxing in a booth. Place is quiet. Paddy has brought over my first Bombay Sapphire martini. I’m expecting a couple of little known poets and a hermit writer to join me soon for drinks. A few days ago I asked this trio to help me look into some possible implications of Freeman Dyson’s latest collection of book reviews. The books he reviews are mainly vehicles for his own dreams and observations. These always seem worthwhile reading. Dyson looks into the heart of things.

My guests and I have read many of polymath Dyson’s wide-ranging, well-regarded and popular reviews in The New York Review. Now 92, Dyson has been a most prominent professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for many years, and he has known and worked with many of the seminal physicists and other scientists and technologists of the times, notably Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. He writes in a clear, declarative style especially friendly to a public audience and surely welcome to specialists used to strenuous divining of tangled texts.

Dyson is what is sometimes called a “free thinker,” in his case especially signifying someone who (a) can look at both (or many) sides of an ongoing scientific and/or philosophical matter for a broad rather than parochial outlook; and (b) imagine how further related discoveries will take place, discoveries often made in a dialectical process such as a period of brilliant theorizing followed by a period of inspired experimentation. Einstein and Eddington.

Dyson is full of wonder and unquenchable delight in the variety of worldly and unworldly scientific and artistic adventures in History and instinctively seeks to weave them together as Grand Drama. His latest and the subject of our bar meeting is Dreams of Earth and Sky, a conference of invited books which conduct among themselves a sub-conversation about which Freeman the Eavesdropper is not only a Commentator but an awakened Visionary, to include speculations and reflections on: our likely move from the present period of information technology to one of biotech; theory and mathematics versus empirical measurement in the progress of physics and cosmology; “Rocket Man” Wernher von Braun driven at bottom by dreams of interplanetary space travel; Dyson’s sense of insufficient evidence of global warming; the question of whether elegant physics–for example, the idea of processes “accomplished with the least action”–shows ours to be “the best of all possible worlds”; the traditional, Baconian idea that progress in the sciences must benefit humankind, this pondered by Dyson against his youthful work in World War 2 as a strategic designer of the RAF bombing campaign against Germany; the true Oppenheimer; and Churchill’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.The scope of his curiosity shows in the books reviewed in these pieces, including: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman; Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything, by Margaret Wertheim; The Fellowship (on The Royal Society of London), by John Gribbin; The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes; and Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, by Ray Monk.

Dyson ultimately thinks and writes in a cheerful tone. He is not unrealistic about the shadows in History and the plights of the Human Condition. But death, war, pestilence, folly, farce–in the olden encapsulations “the darkness of the intellect” and “the weakness of the flesh”–are left outside on the stormy heath of History. And as to our Future: After reading Dyson’s Dreams of Earth and Sky, we must say: Dystopia, we hardly knew ye.

In looking for a definitive statement and accompanying major assumptions in Dreams, there are these stirring words:

The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists.

Apropos: My friend Marvin Minsky, who passed away a few years ago, told me that over his theorizing years he had posed the question of personal immortality to fellow scientists and thinkers and that they had almost all longed for it primarily so they could keep working indefinitely on grand mysteries.

About that I’ve always thought, “Humm.”

Dyson sees for artists and writers and ordinary people, “people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture,” a darker sense of the Human Condition in an “information-dominated universe,” citing Borges’s famous short story, “The Library of Babel” in which, as critic James Gleick says, humans “walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence….” Borges wrote his story in 1941; since then, notably Thomas Pynchon in an epic series of novels has massively dramatized the confused epistemology of Homo sapiens.

But here I’m sure Dyson is just being evenhanded. Elsewhere in Dreams of Earth and Sky I discover a passage with which he seems most sympathetic. It is this timeless definition by Francis Bacon:

The true and lawful goal of the sciences is simply this, that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.

Bacon’s words, together with Dyson’s in that earlier passage on the vision of the future as an infinite playground, create the general impression that Dyson is essentially cheerfully brave–a stiff upper lip–on the rim of what Pynchon calls “the vortex of history.”

I’ve invited the poets and the hermit writer for drinks because they tend not to be generally cheerful. That’s putting it mildly.

Perhaps a Mercilessly Negative Person could think of a Grand Take on Things as Nightmares of Earth and Sky.

Looked at in a dark way, what are we learning from cosmology? The vastitude, the unimaginably violent scale of which has exceeded our minds except perhaps through colorless and dispiriting probability, seems a less and less inspiring field of discovery. Not so much a matter of the event horizon as of a human mind horizon. If string theory is itself beautiful (and wildly assuming that beauty must equal truth), what it portrays seems Bad News. Meanwhile, natural selection, whatever its “engineering” merits, grips us as per another timeless idea of the Human Condition, Bloody Nature, a realm wherein perhaps not the speed of light but the certainty of Death is the great constant.

Some present mathematicians such as Thomas Harris and Reuben Hersch can make you think of pure mathematics as the Great Refuge. They’re hard to argue with. All that forlorn “philosophy of mathematics”–“foundations” and “existence” and elegant mathematics reflecting a “deity’s mind”–caused by a most understandable confusion of the Natural (including Theology) with Mathematics…we’re getting over it. And notice that you can’t really observe infinity but it’s real. Mathematics is ultimately unto itself.

And apropos new mathematics, here’s a profound cited passage in Dreams of Earth and Sky by the contemporary Noble physicist, Frank Wilczek, which has a telltale duplicity about it, a sense of a fundamental idea on the verge of escaping the Natural for the Pure:

Through patchy clouds, off in the distance, we seem to glimpse a mathematical Paradise, where the elements that build reality shed their dross. Correcting for the distortion of our everyday vision, we create in our minds a vision of what they might really be: pure, ideal, symmetric, equal and perfect.

So: Roy Neary and Nina Sayers and Delmore Schwrtz grasped by his Heavy Bear, and furious Captain Ahab, may not have this vision, just variously a felt need: But for you and yours truly: Imagining the shedding of dross and the correcting for our everyday vision–the two enormous processes must be profoundly related–we may come to consider an outlook of escaping to an endlessly suspenseful Ideal of Mathematics–dynamic and progressive edificial discoveries ever the inverse of a Static Heaven aka the Beatific Vision aka Nirvana–through a non-natural selection in which we re-engineer ourselves into Indefinites. It’s far too soon to analyze this glimpse of a new human history, one surely of a fragile plausibility owing to perhaps an insufficient time to create it not to mention the weaknesses of human intelligence. Best now just to raise it. But the timing doesn’t seem bad.

Yes, the raising of it seems fitting. A duty? Perhaps a fitting intimation?

So, on second thought in my excitement, I’m leaving before those sober poets and the “realistic” hermit writer show up. Knowing them, they’ll imagine they know less than we really already do about all this.

I’ll leave a hundred at the bar as their tab. (I have a trust fund.) Text them after I leave.

Maybe talk to them sometime later.

PS. Here it is the next day and one of the poets, an elderly traditionalist, posted for me a few verses–she won’t call them poetry–about a couple of the many problems in rising to Math Heaven.

I. On Rebuilding Ourselves

I see inward beyond the Natural
A human heaven I might capture all,
A Mathematica Dramatica,
A suspenseful silent sinfonia,
Rising not from physical reality
But only from my own mentality.

I’ve long known this Ideal place
Distractedly, within the Natural place,
Hence interrupting mathematics
To eat, sleep, weep and procreate–basics,
So that I can never see math heaven,
And die dramatizing cruel Ulam:

Unable to build, hold and extend an
Edificial math alive within my ken.
In my natural life, that would bring quick death,
No doubt by accident–yes, my last breath.
Hence Natural Me does not see math heaven,
Though the idea of it does regret deaden.

To escape from my mortal Determine,
To reach my mathematical Heaven,
My psyche saved from accident,
My mental beyond the Natural sent,
I need not superstitious redemption
But immortal non-natural reinvention.

II. On The Endless (?) Engrossment of Mathematics

Now I ask: Math by super numerists
Eventually bores those numerists?
Infinity, basic to the Ideal,
Fosters familiarity too real,
Stealing, say, fun in coin-flipping,
All suspense in supermath then slipping!

But design of superhuman mathite,
And endless drama in infinite flight,
Hopefully sum in happy ratio
For heavenly suspense ever neo
Thrilling: not static but intelligent:
No beatific vision but ascendent.

Mathite’s design aside for the moment,
What in math could make mathlife descendent?
Perhaps math collapsing of its own weight?
Or might internal flooding be math’s fate?
But most profoundly there’s Infinity,
Unobserved in math sublimity.

Yes, a simple example: the coin flip–
Heads or tails? “Chance” in the natural grip,
Those occasional instants of suspense
But with which Infinity will dispense,
By eliminating uncertainty
In unimaginable certainty.

Two issues for designers of Mathite:
Redesigning humans for Ideal flight?
The Infinite as infinite dramas?
The first, Redesign, eschews pajamas.
But the Great Infinite must be unknown;
Could Big Sleep befall us in that unknown?

8. Night Train, by Martin Amis

Night Train, a parodic but nevertheless lacerating 1997 novel by the accomplished Martin Amis, son of British novelist Kingsley Amis and a writer who takes on the dread of our time such as the Nazis and Stalin, is an unusual mystery novel turning on our inevitable and human delving into the nature of the Cosmos and which echoes Pascal’s terror at the vastitude of the universe(s).

Night Train seems a mystery novel with growing relevance to the spirit of the current times nearly three decades since its publication. The narrative is from the viewpoint of a tough female detective, Mike Hoolihan, whose afflicted presence might make you wrongly think her the chief actor in a drama that is truly and, near its end, suddenly and shockingly profound.

Hoolihan, a homicide detective in an unnamed city, is a recovering alcoholic who was sexually molested as a child and, as the story begins, demoted to lesser police work as she battles her past and her addiction.

But she is asked by a former boss and friend, Tom Rockwell, to gather herself and regain her homicide-solving skills to try to answer the question, why did Rockwell’s daughter, the young, beautiful, well-off and notable astrophysicist, Jennifer Rockwell, apparently commit suicide by shooting herself, seemingly multiple times, in the head? Emphatically, Rockwell cannot believe his daughter took her own life.

Rockwell suspects Jennifer’s colleague, Trader Faulkner, but Hoolihan, taking on the investigation, finds Rockwell’s suspicion implausible. Faulkner proves guiltless.

Hoolihan sees that Jennifer’s suicide is the reality.

Here, then, is a fundamental dramatic resolution to which one is drawn by Amis’s characteristically complex but finally sobering narrative:

Amis opens up a vast and radical vision: Hoolihan discovers that before Jennifer’s suicide the renowned astrophysicist had suddenly begun to act in ways previously unlikely for her, making errors in her work, linking-up in a hotel with a philandering salesman, and taking lithium. Hoolihan suspects that Jennifer, imagining her father would seek an investigation, was conducting misdirection! And now Jennifer was also doing so quite carelessly in the deepest sense.

Hoolihan’s search finally and unerringly leads to Jennifer’s advanced study of the Cosmos, a study bringing Jennifer increasingly to reflect on its inhumanly vast scale and seemingly ultimate inscrutability, with this growing and ultimately terrifying revelation ending her natural search, now seemingly pointless, for meaning in human life.

And most salient here, Amis crafts these searing words from one of Jennifer’s scientific colleagues when he, famous from a popular TV show he conducts, is questioned by Hoolihan and reveals memories centering on Jennifer’s despair:

But there are holes in our knowledge bigger than the Bootes Void (in far distant space and familiarly known as The Great Nothing)…(which is) …a cavity 300 million light years deep. …the truth is that human beings are not sufficiently evolved to understand the place they’re living in. We’re all retards. Einstein’s a retard. …We live on a planet of retards. …Newton, Isaac Newton, used to stare at the sun…. He’d blind himself for days, for weeks, staring at the sun. Trying to figure the sun out. …Then (Jennifer) quoted some aphorism. ….Went something like: “No man can stare at the sun or at death with …an unshielded eye.” …(Jennifer further) said: “Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.“

As Night Train closes, Hoolihan, recovering alcoholic, despairingly heads for a bar to take the forbidden, fatal drink.

Here “Night Train” is far from an old jazz standard. It is a metaphor for a destructive, dark vision of the Cosmos itself.

For the question asked is: What is the promise of mortal human life lost in the overwhelming, impersonal, finally inscrutable vastitudes of the natural order?

9. Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon

If you want to experience a literary version of our bewildering human experience, Thomas Pynchon delivers.

Now in his seventies, Pynchon has written these novels: V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity’s Rainbow; Vineland; Mason and Dixon; Against the Day; and, most recently, Inherent Vice.

I’ve known/know some novelists who admit they have tried hard but never finished Pynchon’s masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow (1974), and, variously, some of Pynchon’s others. I’ve had better luck with four of his others, including Inherent Vice.

I’ve only come close on Gravity’s Rainbow which refers in its title to the flight arc of the V-2 rockets launched by the Nazis against Great Britain, a time in which much of the story is set. As always, Pynchon’s research is superb, brightly illuminating Gravity’s Rainbow. He is not a dilettante but an encyclopedic genius who spent time reviewing and soaking up information from V-2 rocket archives held by Boeing as well as learning about missiles when early on he did technical editing of manuals for Boeing on its surface-t0-air military missile Bomarc (Boeing-Michigan Aeronautical Research Center). Gravity’s Rainbow is a formidable read because it contains hundreds of characters, several themes which recur in Pynchon, great shifts in viewpoint and place, and several literary styles. You might well become lost. Perhaps you become fearful in some or other sense and escape the fastest way–by closing the book. Like A Brief History of Time, Gravity’s Rainbow, I’d imagine, has sold a fair number of unread copies.

Pynchon is greatly admired by some critics and scholars of high literature. Harold Bloom, who has fought The Good Fight against today’s “English Departments” who seem too often peopled with poseurs who hate literature, thinks Gravity’s Rainbow a great novel. I think Bloom is right. (But I’m not sure Bloom is a trustworthy judge, for he thinks Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a great novel, too. Bloom to me is a non-commissioned officer going down to noble defeat in an aged academic army whose generals have all been killed or gone missing in action. Someday, I hope, there will be a turn of events and he’ll be decorated posthumously, hopefully too grandly.)

Pynchon’s seven novels call to my mind the Angkor Wat temple complex. You can see that Angkor Wat is a great monument, a work of art, before you enter it: the beautiful architecture, the massive grandeur, imposes as you approach the splendor.

How much time will you be able to spend in Angkor Wat, especially in contemplating its many bas-reliefs? You could spend untold hours. Did the artists imagine you would? I would guess they did not think much about it. They thought about time, creation, and preservation: time being short and creation being painfully implausible in fullness because of there being so much of those artists’ worlds, real and imagined and mythical, that they loved; preservation, including of themselves, was entirely dependent on their art. Is there anything as powerful as preservation to bring forth enormous ambition in storytelling?

So go all large artworks and their creators.

Pynchon most definitely included.

He is called “postmodern” and said to have written “metafiction.” Beware of Lit 101 categories. It’s better to talk specifically about what Pynchon loves and what he observes about the human condition and what he would draw as wisdom.

Here Inherent Vice may be thought of as a streamlined drama of Pynchon’s thinking. It’s a Southern California Private Investigator novel set in the late 1960s in LA near the beach. PI Larry “Doc” Sportello, like his predecessors, knows that things are never as they seem. Doc is a hippie, does drugs, says “groovy,” is casual about matters of the heart (and has many such matters), and, despite his laid-back style, is a dogged, hardworking sleuth. I think Inherent Vice, besides being a fond look back at the late 1960s reminiscent of The Endless Summer and the surfer world with its sex-rock ‘n’ roll-drugs, is a helpful epilog to Pynchon’s other, much more formidable novels. There are many more bas-reliefs in the earlier novels, but Inherent Vice provides some key ones. It’s a sort of Abstract Summary of Pynchonian outlooks.

The first theme is epistemology. Pynchon dramatizes in Inherent Vice and in his other novels the lament among some philosophers and historians about how poorly we humans can know the present world, previous worlds–there are many allusions in Inherent Vice to Atlantis and Lemuria–and speculative worlds, whether alternate histories (“If only we’d done this, that might have happened”) or distant future ones. The psychedelic theme of the 1960s–turning on and tuning out to take “inner trips” to drug-induced worlds–is portrayed as futile, although it is presented as one of the inevitable human responses to the Grand Confusion in our bewildering experience: mysticism and mysterian perspectives get us nowhere but infect all, or nearly all, of us. As to recovery of our past: If Trevor-Roper says deep history is impossible because it eludes narration, Pynchon takes this lament much, much further and fashions narratives like Inherent Vice in which, to cite but one of dozens and dozens of examples throughout the Pynchon I’ve managed to read in which you encounter unforgettable signs of the darkness of the intellect in inscrutable human experience, a fabled ship is introduced called The Golden Fang but whose original name was Preserved and which is seen at different times to be a pirate ship, a drug-smuggling ship, a pleasure craft central to a legal tax write-off scheme by a group of dentists, and other wildly disparate identities. What, really, is the ship?

Not surprisingly, then, Pynchon contemplates “the vortex of history.” One of his novels, Against the Day, is partly about the onset of the First World War; it’s not so much that he disagrees with, say, Barbara Tuchman; he laments as a novelist and, I’d say, more profoundly, if far less accessibly, than she and like-minded historians do about the almost farcical lead-up to the Great War: what we might call the Great Helpless Drift. Even worse: how are we to know in this and in other passages of dire History what actually is taking place?

The second Pynchon theme or set of bas-reliefs, ensuing strongly from the first, is paranoia. What more is there to say than that many characters in Pynchon’s inscrutable, overwhelming world are dramatically and understandably paranoid?

The third theme, in concert with the other two, is the prevalence of hallucination. Much of it occurs among Pynchon’s grasping, bewildered characters: he dramatizes “hippie metaphysics.”

Pynchon’s final grand theme is that of power. His is a dark take on Homo sapiens with overtones of Social Darwinism. Tyranny is variously predominant. Some powers he especially does not like: Republicans, the CIA, the Government in general, the police. But though he is sympathetic to the Love Generation, he is far too realistic to do other than stand outside that generation (and Romantics in general).

Nature as our Designer? With Inherent Vice there is the title itself, read in one of its several imports as an assessment not of the sins of the fathers being visited upon us but of the mysteriously diabolical ways of Nature in Her fashioning of us. We are a manifestly imperfect creature; if not a misfit, then barely fit.

Pynchon has fashioned an overwhelming, enveloping, confusing and masterful prose that brings dazzling bursts of big patches of reality, leaves us stunned and even dumbfounded, and above all makes us experience his themes and understand his idea of the overmatched individual in the baffling, sinister world. We can sense the besieged epistemology, the paranoia, the hallucinations, and the intimation of hostile power in this passage from Inherent Vice, a passage similar to countless others throughout his novels:

Doc stood for a while gazing at a velvet painting from one of the Mexican families who set up their weekend pitches along the boulevards through the green flatland where people still rode horses, between Gordita and the freeway. Out of the vans and into the calm early mornings would come sofa-width Crucifixions and Last Suppers, outlaw bikers on elaborately detailed Harleys, superhero badasses in Special Forces gear packing M16s and so forth. This picture of Doc’s showed a Southern California beach that never was–palms, bikini babes, surfboards, the works. He thought of it as a window to look out of when he couldn’t deal with looking out of the traditional glass-type one in the other room. Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the Contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.

But Pynchon is a wonderfully funny writer, too. Perhaps no one could beat him at a playful game in Elysium of Big-Time Trivial Pursuit, especially if, Mr. Gabriel, he’ll go for $1,000 on American culture in the twentieth century. You’ll find yourself laughing at his darkly comic allusions, wordplay, and names of people and places. In Inherent Vice, a police chief of a precinct at the beach calls his station in Southern California surferland “The Endless Bummer.” Another police station is called “The Glass House.” There is a secret DARPA diabolical place at TRW and we’re told Ramo didn’t tell Wooldridge about it. (It’s crazy, yes; but who’d ever clear and badge Pynchon again?) Here are names of some characters: Burt Stodger; Aunt Reet (a real estate [ergo, “Reet”] sales star); Dr. Buddy Tubeside; Jason Velveeta; Bigfoot Bjornsen (a policeman); Sauncho Similax; and Crocker Fenway.

And Pynchon is a writer who surprises you with beautiful new versions of experiences which spring from the glorious past of storytelling: The Crying of Lot 49 is a marvelous modern take on the quest story, the adventures of knights and Samurai warriors and private detectives; Mason and Dixon is a tour de force in its recovery of older English writing styles and their beauties; V. emerges from the eerie mists into which history has disappeared.

Yet Pynchon is finally a most serious writer who knows the basic story myths, the journey, the mission. He knows that the Story of stories is the drama of the discovery of the Self.

But in Pynchon the Human Self–each one of us–is lost in a great Puzzle.

That is the abiding truth of our experience.

Hence:

In the relentless confusion, what can really be known of the Self? Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective Marlowe is a realist about greed and envy and hatred; I guess you could say that he is a veteran at taking on the criminality that inevitably arises from inherited vice; and Marlowe gains street-tough contentment from exposing the dark doings brought about by the playing out of the vices. But Doc Sportello, also sallying forth in a world of inherited vice, would hope for more. Indeed, for deliverance. And so, if forlornly, Doc Sportello concludes Inherent Vice by wanting the impossible: “For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.”

The ultimate human longing.

An Outrageous Summary of Sorts

Now, in this essay on Heaven Engine and its theme of a life in Ideality, and specifically following the examples of heraldic art, I’m in the mood for an outrageous summary of Art History. At least I can burden the reader with only a brief summary (recalling that we pay little mind to art scholars and professors of literature); and indeed, my insolently outrageous art history–what a satisfaction for me!–can be said simply.

Apropos, psychologists say that a list of three items fits our human minds well; more items might defeat the attention. So: I shall divide Art History into three phases.

Shakespeare heads up the first, his span extending before and after his time. We’ll call this phase Traditional. We might call it Hopeless, too. The Bard superbly accepts life in the Vale of Tears. The premise? That’s just the way it is. Every mortal loses at last. There is something alien about the place in which we live. The most an artist can do is create “catharsis”: by facing pain and suffering–“tragedy”–supposedly “catharsis” soothes us and somehow we calm down about our undeniable prospect, The End.

Just about every artist in history and globally lives finally in or near Shakespeare’s creative world and under the Bard’s assumptions. Lear is archetypal as he grows old and destroys the very things he most loves because he is ground under by aging, circumstance, and the rest of it. Moreover, his stormy heath is the place in which symbolically we first and last find ourselves. It’s wise to accept it. Best we can do.

But in our day such seems less and less acceptable. “Catharsis”? Who says big ideas don’t get old and embarrassing?

As we have seen, the second phase–Heroic Defiance–has a lonely but noble champion, one for whom we have been waiting. Captain Ahab hasn’t any metaphysical answers, and he conducts Heroic Defiance against all those malevolent forces, those diseases and those storms and winds and floods and stormy, forsaken heaths and, really, the even worse demons such as the leviathan Moby-Dick (an agent of inimical Nature to top all such agents) which prey seemingly inscrutably on us. Again: scarred from nape to sole by the monster, Ahab goes with exhilaration to his death in the futile, desperately angry attack on Moby-Dick.

It’s the most heroic thing that can be done then, at that historical point.

The marvelous Melville creates his evil swell, the “infinite series of waves” over “the great shroud of the sea,” seas that Escher-like (in the eventual nightmare sense) endlessly circle the globe, a hellishly boring Infinity. Ergo:

Heroic Defiance

Most importantly: Heroic Defiance is the plausibility for Ahab and crew. There was no technology then to rival today’s. No such hope, however tenuous. Longevity, enhanced intelligence, modern cosmology–largely not present. Barely hinted.

So: What is the third phase of Art in this admittedly glib account? What would be an escape from ours and Ahab’s malevolent world? Well, here’s a conjecture:

Quest for the Transcendent. Personal Technological Quest.

Imagine the intent of a new posthuman experience is uninterrupted mathological wonder–a transnatural Mathematica Dramatica. It is a Quest of quests! Imagine an indefinite life in which there are mindful beings, shorn of Natural Selection and its cruel, irresistible and impersonal grip on each of us in a mindless experimentation to find the “fittest,” with us instead no longer corporeal humans but Mathites–new beings who live in a Forever typified by such glories as the beautiful Cantorian discoveries of a variety of infinities.

In short, the mindful Beautiful.

If shorn of Natural Selection, the postbiological Mathite has no cares about reproduction, self-defense, nourishment and those imperatives of naturally selected Homo sapiens. Now it is one narrative of ecstatic discovery.

That beauty won in the suspense of discoveries in the Platonic mindscape of the Mathematica Dramatica–and always entailing wondrous “tricks” such as the Great Diagonal in Cantor’s exposing of varieties of infinity–does not go away. It does not vanish in a maelstrom of competing new imperfect models. It prevails. It portends. It leads to new discoveries.

After all, can you blame Roy Neary for taking a chance and walking up the ramp into that unprecedented ship? He is on a quest. We might want to keep a look-out for him.

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However, and as a reminder, we should not forget the following: In the short form–the long form might take tomes: Darwin may well be the most important thinker. Might there be something in the mechanics of Natural Selection that prohibits an indefinite triumph of the ideals of the Enlightenment? After all, “mutation” is a key concept here. Put even more drastically, what in the natural evolution gives any assurance against human extinction? As but one example, quantum physicists do what they do. Nuclear weapons were inevitable. (I’ve received a “yes” from several Prominents I’ve consulted here.) What an irony! Indeed, I’d like to hear leading post-Darwinists hold forth on indefinite human survival–its prospects. Let alone those for liberal social orders. And as to kind characterizations of our “noble” human behavior that emphasizes idealism, Twain and ilk would counter (as he has) with “the damned human race.” We’re capable of enshrining the autocrats of the world. We succumb to dictators “who make the trains run on time.” And this is not to gainsay the possible natural disasters–climate change, meteorite impacts on the Earth, and so forth.

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So: In sum:

THE ARGUMENT

…the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

–Thomas Hobbes

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.

–Blaise Pascal

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

–James Joyce

And after many a summer dies the swan.

–Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Given what physicists and other scientists have discovered about the universe(s?), namely, that invoked here is a humanly unimaginable and overwhelming scale and violence whose time is measured in billions of years and within which the “Goldilocks” happenstance of humanity–each pained and mortal Homo sapiens–on the mere pebble of Earth is but a blink of temporality; and further given that the natural order of human existence–the Darwinian strife–whose rectifying would only bring the grand irony–Updike’s “infernally bored” human immortals and/or Disnovelling, my prevailing Plague of Suicidal Boredom for Human Longevitites in Heaven Engine–this question arises:

What superintelligence, what far advanced post-singularity mind, aided by such presently incomprehensible power as distant future quantum computing and other advancements, would think it intelligent to remake mindful life strictly according to the natural order of things, that is, engulfed in physical reality?

THE APOLOGY

As Homo sapiens, we cannot begin fully to imagine, let alone experience, the sublime mindful life of the Mathites I am postulating. But in the epiphanies we sometimes do experience through our human psychology, especially in advanced mathematics, such an experience can be sensed, glimpsed, intimated. Suffice to make an apology now and note that in the course of this essay, especially what follows below, hopefully the sustained and edificial nature of what ideally Mathites may experience will become more imaginable.

PART FOUR: IDEALITY

(Estimated Reading Time: 30 Minutes.)

(Through his revolutionary incompleteness theorems) Godel proved that mathematics is inexhaustible.

-Freeman Dyson

(The goal of mathematics is) the symbolic comprehension of the infinite with human, that is finite, means.

–Hermann Weyl

I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our “creations,” are simply the notes of our observations.

–G. H. Hardy

But what accounts for this limbic-mediated thrill (of elegant mathematics in Euler’s e)? I think it springs from a combination of things, including Euhler’s equation’s seriousness, generality, depth, unexpectedness, inevitability and economy–qualities that prominent twentieth-century English mathematician G. H. Hardy singled out as key ingredients of mathematical beauty.

-David Stipp

…there is nothing more abstract than infinity….It’s sort of the ultimate in drawing away from actual experience. Take the single most ubiquitous and oppressive feature of the concrete world–namely that everything ends, is limited, passes away–and then conceive, abstractly, of something without this feature. Analogies to certain ideas of God are obvious; abstraction from all limitation is one way to account for the religious impulse in secular terms. …the exact same sort of explanation can be given for where we get the concept of infinity and what we ultimately mean by all forms of the word ‘infinite’ we toss around.

–David Foster Wallace

… the mysterious and fantastic world of infinity and beyond…. (You can) revel in the power of mathematics…and head toward the horizon of human thinking without that horizon ever getting any closer.

–Eugenia Cheng

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The Mathites, living in Ideality, would experience an endless adventure in the Beautiful.

It is impossible to think about Ideality without also considering the Mathites I’m imagining to be the mindful posthumans who themselves think and discover there. After all, the imagined vision of Ideality at present is entirely a human one. The Ideality of a presumptive Mathite would, of course, be the advanced Ideality available to Mathites to know. But certainly a Mathite’s mindful heavenly experience would mean discovery. A process. A story. Pursuit. Suspense. Epiphany.

Or as I prefer to call it, “Creatovery.” For example, Cantor creatively uses a matrix format and its diagonal to help discover that there are varieties of infinity (see below).

Yes, the presumption here is that knowing Ideality, discovering it, would be happily eternal. Infinite.

Not some static Heaven. Not the “Beatific Vision.”

An endless story.

But first, let us consider how we humans have depicted infinity in, well, a very human way:

We can see from various developments in pure mathematics a deep desire to grasp a true, robust, even torrential infinity coursing onward endlessly. But our constrained psychology as creatures of natural selection–as personally confronting an experience of Beginnings and Endings–has led us psychologically to an ironic paradox. The capturing of infinity by us finite humans has sometimes led us–unwittingly?–to a remarkably provincial symbology of hellish infinity. The basic symbol of infinity in our mathematics, the lemniscate, depicts a graceful form reminiscent of the famous “lazy figure eight.”

As Rudy Rucker notes about the lemniscate in Infinity and the Mind:

The appropriateness of the symbol ∞ for infinity lies in the fact that one can travel endlessly around such a curve…. Endlessness is, after all, a principal component of one’s concept of infinity.

But imagine an intolerable eternity of traveling that closed track! Rita Mae Bown, the novelist, once defined insanity, certainly a hellish state, as doing the same thing over and over. Is the lemniscate not an ironic symbol? Is it not surpassingly human?

Three dots, more prosaic, seem immensely more visionary, humbler, and certainly more hopeful.

Similarly, in his epochal Moby-Dick, Melville writes of the Pequod sailing “the infinite waves”: In Ahab’s heroically defiant rousing of his crew to pursue globally, in all the oceans if needed, the White Whale and destroy it as the agent of that inscrutable, malevolent, affronting force of Nature which has it in for each and every one of us suffering naturals and hence mortals, not sinners in Melville’s modernity but undeserving innocents, Melville appropriately dramatizes in the 1800s the great watery grandeur of the Earth, its infinity of waves, in encircling it in pursuit of the Whale; but not too many decades after Ahab and his crew are lost we have images of the Blue Planet taken from space in which, given that Earth is a mere pebble lost in the inscrutable vastitudes which terrified Pascal, one can see that to ride the infinite waves of the oceans endlessly in circling that flighty Goldilocks speck known as Earth, poetically if not plausibly, and most perfectly by combining sailing routes with airline routes that cross both land and water, would be to embark forever on what then might be called an evil swell of Melville’s: yet another hellish experience of infinity. And to what end? Indeed, as Melville’s magnificent novel ends: “…and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

A further example, if ironic, of the infernal human conception of infinity can be seen in M. C. Escher’s lauded depiction, Ascending and Descending:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascending_and_Descending

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If I can hardly exhaust the theme of the human pursuit of infinity in these pages, perhaps it is possible to convey in an exemplary way something of the ecstatic discovery of aspects of infinity by some of the great mathematicians. After all, as David Foster Wallace points out, infinity is the ultimate counter to the brief experience of us humans, natural selectees all.

Following a few historical examples of mathematicians successfully gaining views of aspects of infinity, I will continue to seek to intimate the Mathite’s experience of ideality by a few excerpts from Heaven Engine.

____________________________

The inspired finding of ingenious mathematical ways to grasp and use the beauties of infinity is a telltale story in the long, progressive history of mathematicians’ determined excursions into what I’m calling, Ideality.

Creatovery, creatovery, creatovery!

The dynamic of creatovery: We humans invent and use the symbolic (numbers, multiplication signs, geometric shapes, etc.–a pathfinding language) as a representation needed for discovery.

Let us start with a simple example. An example simple with a vengeance. A starting point.

And again, call it, together with a few other simple examples below, at best a mere glimmering of the Mathite’s grand and edificial experience. To provide here an intimation of a Mathite’s experience it is, I think, best to stay simple.

So: First: Early in mathematics, it became evident that the Number Line–the natural, familiar and fundamental line employed throughout history for linearly counting from left to right the natural numbers 1, 2, 3 …–helps solve certain kinds of problems in dealing with magnitudes.

Now pause and actually form a picture of that same Number Line displaying natural numbers. But note the gaps, the inevitable spaces on the Line, between the natural numbers. The significance of these gaps? It is stupendous. For obviously the Line itself is larger than any row of natural numbers on it, no matter how long that row. The Line is continuous. Of course, each natural number on the Line can always have yet another natural number added to it–1 + 2 + 3 …–and hence the natural numbers themselves are infinite. Yet between the gapped natural numbers the Number Line itself evokes infinity. Indeed, the Number Line is longer than just the natural numbers.

* * *

And second: We deeply wish and need to appreciate infinity robustly, and even if indirectly to grasp it better, in its ongoing and endless magnificence. And even though infinity “radiates” from our finite settings, we can nevertheless discover new ways to aid us here.

And from mathematics we’ll use yet another well-formed example; specifically, we’ll use what is called Euler’s Number.

Euler’s number is symbolized by the notation, e.

Certainly e is one of various mathematical dramas serving our vision of pursuing infinity.

However, though e is simple it is not an example that is simple with a vengence.

Herewith, in a great case of finite humans searching infinity, we’ll dramatize the very earthly role of e in representing no less than compound interest in finance, an old and most human form of magic dating all the way back to the 1600s.

Lets start by noting that the symbol, e, is a mathematical constant that paradoxically serves to represent change. Yes, a paradox.

It turns out that the value of the mathematical constant, e, is about 2.7.

In his wonderful book on the appreciation of Euler and his bearing on the pursuit of infinity, A Most Elegant Equation, Charles Stipp reminds us that e “is uniquely valuable for mathematically representing growth or shrinkage” and is “one of math’s most versatile superheroes.”

Stipp proceeds as follows to exemplify:

Imagine a (fantastical!) bank offers 100% annual interest on savings accounts for a year. An idle billionaire in a jocular mood invests $1. In a year she would have $2. She would have doubled her money in her amusing investment. This total is calculated by multiplying her original deposit times “1+ r,” where r stands as the interest rate expressed as a decimal number. (That is, 1 = her principal and r = the interest she’ll add to the principal.)

Next, a sharp but arrogant Harvard graduate, a finance major and new hire at the bank and whose grandfather is bank president, is promoted to Head of Investments and insists on attracting new customers by splitting the 100% into two 50% pieces to be paid respectively after the first and second six months of the year. The billionaire, just for fun, again deposits $1. Doing the math, we can see that she now realizes an annual ROI of $2.25.

So: When compounding periods are added within the twelve months, there is repeated multiplication by 1 + r. Let’s say that the whiz kid from Harvard wants to buy a yacht, his grandfather has suffered amnesia, and the kid, unchallenged heir apparent and usurping power, demands that the bank should divide its 100% annual interest into many equal interest payments.

Wow, eh?

If we make the number of compoundings extremely large, won’t it be possible to cash in with only a modest investment? If she got serious, couldn’t even our jocular billionaire truly enrich herself!

Right?

Wrong!

As they say, there’s no free lunch.

Let’s start with the surprising facts:

Apropos, here are some annual ROIs for those tiny investments by our billionaire:

100% brings a return of $2.00

50% and 50% brings a return of $2.25

Quarterly brings a return of $2.37

Weekly brings a return of $2.44

Daily brings a return of $2.69

Disappointinigly, as compoundings grow in size toward the infinite, our investor’s twelve-month total will move ever nearer to a number that is merely 2.7.

Which is to say, the maximum investment amounts to the approximate value of Euler’s e described as the number that is approached as n gets bigger on its way to reaching the infinite.

Indeed: if e is rounded to the nearest hundred-billionth, its value becomes only 2.71828182846.

In A Most Elegant Equation, David Stipp reacts to this seeming oddity:

I find all this lovely and unexpected. Pondering the value of a ridiculously tiny bank account leads directly to one of the grandest conundrums of all time: how to conceptualize infinity without making the brain explode. (Or, as twentieth century mathematician Hermann Weyl put it with greater gravitas, the goal of mathematics is ‘the symbolic comprehension of the infinite with human, that is, finite, means.’)

Elsewhere, Stipp exclaims, “e effectively encapsulates the infinite.”

Yes, encapsulates!

Again: Why?

Here is a profound lesson about finite humans comprehending the infinite: the imposing of limits is crucial. In the bank example, it is a twelve-month period in which the compounding occurs, whether that compounding is once yearly or effectively boundless yearly, so that as the compounding increases, the compounding periods within the twelve-month period shrink. The torrents of wondrous infinity, its unimaginable scale, are channeled on the occasion into increasingly constrained situations and hence intriguingly and beautifully revealed.

Encapsulated.

As Stipp implies, here is a lovely and enormous magic.

Another similar case cited by Stipp is the well-known scenario in mathematics of the hat-check problem. Each male guest at a posh party wears a top hat. When the guests depart at the end of the party, a butler who covertly helped himself to the Rothschild champagne during the party ignores the owner-identification notes he’d carefully placed on each hat and, now tipsy, randomly hands the hats out to the departing guests. Stipp writes:

“What’s the chance that not a single guest gets the right hat? ….It turns out that this probability gets ever closer to 1 divided by e as the number of guests gets ever larger. Using 2.718 as an approximation for e, my calculator shows that 1/e equals roughly 0.37, which means there’s about a 37% chance that every guest walks out with the wrong hat. ….Strangely, the probability is about 37% regardless of whether there are 50 or 50,000 guests. ….I don’t know about you, but this isn’t what I expected when I first encountered the problem.”

Here the imposed limit that “encapsulates” infinity is our single focus of looking solely for a percentage, a proportionality, no matter how large the number of entities, i.e.,the number of guests wearing hats: 50, 50,000, much larger, boundless.

* * *

And third: A more astonishing and thrillingly beautiful capture of infinity by a great but finite human mind was accomplished by the German mathematician, Georg Cantor (1845-1918) even as he battled serious emotional problems. (He was, after all, a mortal in the painful natural realm!)

Let’s begin with a common perception: Infinity is simply infinity, right? There is infinity and it is endless. Isn’t that ordinary knowledge? Doesn’t everyone know this? Well, Cantor showed that there are multiple sizes (or “levels”) of infinity, a stunning breakthrough discovery which took a long time in human history to appear, given that early thinkers including Greek and Roman philosophers, wrestling with the idea of infinity, had nevertheless not fathomed it. Cantor showed that besides the natural or counting numbers (1, 2, 3, 4…), which as we’ve seen above are infinite, there are actually many sizes of infinity, and that some infinite sets are immensely larger than others.

For Cantor, set theory became crucial. You can think of a set as a collection of many (e.g. the natural numbers) that can be seen as one thing; moreover, sets are fundamental in allowing tractability in exploring the complexities of infinity.

Thus intellectually armed with the idea of sets, Cantor showed how to recognize the differing sizes of infinities. In doing so, a simple, profound and revolutionary discovery is that some infinite sets (i) can be countable and (ii) are also of the same size if a one-to-one correspondence or pairing up can be established between two such sets. In mathematics, such a pairing is known as a “bijection.” As it has turned out, there are many countable infinite sets. Here is an example showing the correspondence between integers and the natural numbers; note that a common impression might well be that the naturals are the smaller infinity. But:

Integers: 0 1 -1 2 -2 3 -3 …

Naturals: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 …

Cantor also determined the countability or lack of it of other infinite sets. For example, he considered the countability of real numbers: a collection of numbers that can be written out with some form of decimal expansion, for example, 1/3 = 0.3333 (with the decimal 3’s going on infinitely). And there are indeed far more real numbers than natural numbers.

To explore whether the infinite real numbers are countable, Cantor brilliantly developed what is called the Diagonal Proof. It proves the inability to set up the needed one-to-one correspondence between real numbers and natural numbers.

However, as was done by Cantor himself, one should begin by imagining that the real numbers in the real number set can in fact be counted. As a test case, assume we would be able to list all real numbers whose decimals are 0’s and 1’s.

Remembering that although we could not actually count an infinity of all real numbers whose decimals are 0’s and 1’s, we can imagine (falsely) that the matrix below shows in principle that there is a form in which the requirements to show countability are met: first, the matrix format might appear to allow a systematic listing of all the numbers; and second, the S1, S2 … progression would seemingly enable the necessary one-to-one correlation (bijection) with the counting numbers.

S1 = 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

S2 = 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

S3 = 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1

S4 = 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0

S5 = 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1

S6 = 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0

S7 = 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 00

S8 = 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 00

S9 = 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0

S10=1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0

S11=0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0

But look at what Cantor has done! Look at the diagonal numbers which appear in a heavier font. Cutting through the matrix diagonally, Cantor shows that valid real numbers could be generated beyond those from the careful listing, thereby invalidating any possibility of bijection.

Here is the proof: Using the diagonal cut, simply construct a new number by taking the first decimal of S (see immediately below) to be the complement of the first decimal of the first number on the list; and proceed to do so for the rest of the diagonal:

S = 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1

In short: If the first number in S1 is 0, it will in the diagonal cut be a 1; and so on. Clearly S, which is a valid real number!, cannot be on the original list, for it cannot be the first number since it would differ in the first decimal. Indeed, in the fullest sense, Cantor’s demonstration of the uncountability of real numbers would hold endlessly.

And so: For the infinity of real numbers, no bijection can be established and countability is impossible.

___________________________

Let us now push further and more generally with a few excerpts from Heaven Engine.

To begin with: Obviously there are far beyond our historical examples large questions about the presumed grand, edificial experience of Mathites.

Heaven Engine asks: Given that envisioning infinity is central to it, can there be for Mathites (i) an endless and (ii) an endlessly engrossing Mathematica Dramatica? An important thinker on both questions is Logician-Philosopher Kurt Godel, rightly considered among the giants of human thought owing to his profound breakthroughs about mathematics in his incompleteness theorems. In Heaven Engine I am not so interested in rendering a scrupulously academic treatment of his important but complex ideas bearing on both questions as I am in conveying a dramatic, essentially true, one. In short: An entertaining one in which I take some fictional liberties but hopefully not serious technical ones. So I invite readers to look into the official, formal details of Godel’s thought for themselves.

I will, however, note here, and primarily as a framing comment, two points in a piece on Godel by the physicist, Mark Buchanan, that are especially salient as well as reassuring. Buchanan points out that the polymath, Freeman Dyson, writing about Godel’s incompleteness theorems and echoing other observers, informs: “Godel proved that the world of mathematics is inexhaustible.” And Buchanan goes on to cite the prominent British mathematician, John Barrow, who has written: “Godel suggested…that the loss of logical foundations (as entailed by his incompleteness theorems) might actually be liberating…that mathematical intuition will one day be restored as a reliable means for finding truth….”

Dyson’s observation applies to the issue of mathematics as endlessly engrossing. Barrow’s hints at aspects of the general design questions concerning what the mind of a Mathite might entail.

To reinforce the point about the criticality of mathematical intuition, Rudy Rucker writes in a late chapter in his Infinity and the Mind that centers on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems the following:

(The prominent mathematicion, David Hilbert) thought it was possible to find a complete formal system for mathematics, and that mathematics could then be viewed as a finitary symbol game based on this complete system. And in this he was wrong. No finitely given system can exhaust the riches of the actual infinite. The practicing mathematician’s direct intuitions of infinite sets cannot be dispensed with.

For it is by way of this direct perception of the infinite that mathematicians discover new axioms to be added to the old formal system. The working out of the logical consequences of given axioms can be viewed as a wholly finitary process. But deciding which axioms to work out consequences from is a creative, infinitary process that cannot be mechanically accounted for.

Those points noted, I take the following representation directly from Heaven Engine. Toward the end of the narrative, well into the future, the polymath, Psychodor, the all-time greatest of human geniuses, is explaining the increasing relevance of Godel’s insights to our stand-in for ourselves, a character named Centwen who has been resurrected to learn in that far future, so far dismayingly, whether humans might be transformed to become happy Mathites in a heaven of a Mathematica Dramatica. Centwen is one of a small number of resurrected humans, elites and ordinary folks, from all eras and who simultaneously but individually (thanks to advanced technology) tour the distant future in the company of Psychodor and his created, superintelligent bot, Prodigy, well beyond the human tourists’ natural deaths (Centwen’s at the end of the twentieth century) to learn of future wars, technology, and many other historical developments bearing on the quest for Ideality. In fact, the drama may also be thought of as the attempt to discover whether there is an escape from the terminal boredom arising from the advanced longevity medicine of the era, the ironic plague known as Disnovelling. At the narrative point in question, Centwen is visiting the distant future time of Wylan “Why” Bell, human mathematician extraordinaire and a true visionary, a genuine and lonely exponent of the possibility of a heavenly math in Ideality.

As a brief preface to Psychodor’s explanations, we will consider the following.

In very simple terms, note that Godel used a version and refinement of the Liar’s Paradox in proving grave and fundamental and eternal limitations in mathematics, limitations happily (!) bearing on both questions above.

The Liar’s Paradox: A notorious Liar declares: “I am lying (about such and such).” If the liar is in fact lying, the liar is in fact telling the truth. If the liar is in fact telling the truth, the liar is in fact lying.

Lets versify a la Heaven Engine for a while.

Well, it (the Liar’s Paradox) is a Benign Destroyer!

Just ask Bertie Russell, Dapper Dave Hilbert & Math Friends,

and by this time maybe even Roy Neary and Freeman Dyson,

now awakened in a

Haggard Dawn.

It means that the Mathematical Edifice-System itself must essentially be contradictory!

(Or call it incomplete.)

I.e., there can certainly be ONE statement in the Mathematical Edifice-System (and that’s enough), this true-if-false and false-if-true paradox,

which perversely can’t be proved within the maxims of the Edifice-System!

This unprovable will ever dangle at a weird angle!

Making the whole Edifice messily asymmetrical!

Simply said:

the axioms of the Edifice can never be assumed entirely self-sufficient, i.e., complete!

Which brings us to some irrelevant, mistaken fun:

Whereupon “Why” Bell, smiling broadly and sipping champagne, at once

cheerfully chuckles:

Even though it isn’t really apt, Godel makes me want to declare:

“This is not a sentence!”

Whereupon Why further cackles:

In the spirit of Godel

I cannot resist adding the following

dubiously apt

but indubitably suitable

ruefully unsubtle

clever non sequitur:

“Don’t read this sentence.”

But now back to Kurt: Godel’s news is truly great news!

Godel’s shown there must ever be

not stasis but dynamism:

ever more to explore.

Godel, a Hardy Hurdler,

ran and ran the hurdles out to the horizon and then observed,

the hurdles are an incomplete test.

So please listen closely: For according to Why, sated Hurdler Godel now does a second great thing!

For Why then declares that few recall versatile Godel, that Hardy Hurdler, likewise ran the only other running contest known then: the Mile!

(Now, Dear Reader, play along here with Professor Bell and his damned metaphors and pretend that in Godel’s day and despite the sweaty history of the Olympiad, we humans didn’t yet know about the other events Track and Field routinely had.) Bell goes on to say: Our Hardy Hurdler/Smiling Miler made another portentously important declaration; i.e., Mr. Incompleteness, once he had added to the Hurdles the Mile, championed in a different sense a new and higher (to use the popular misnomer) Completeness;

viz:

the Hurdles and the Mile are fundamentally consistent

with each other as belonging to some larger class of

foot-race tests, and so we must presume they’re valid

single tests within a larger test collection!

Yes, dear reader, they are little members

of a great collection!

My, my–how Platonic.

And how exciting, eh?

That’s right, Dear Reader, we’re pretending here about a postulated big structure–that super test collection–we haven’t even yet fully creatovered, containing fundamentally similar (“noncontradictory”) foot-race tests and other such physical tests (only two which in this hypothetical case, I stress again, we’re pretending we know at the moment–“Mile” and “Hurdles”).

In short, the conclusion is:

There’s an unseen edifice–in this case (and as we “later” name it),“Track and Field”–which in a special sense is already in existence!

Without resistance, please envision it to have a sort of avid availability.

________________________

Now let us join the Heaven Engine narrative at a point both late and hopeful in the future history dramatized in the novel. It is the twenty-fifth century, the time of mathematician Wylan “Why” Bell, the pioneer cited above who is crucially wrestling with the issue of a mathematical secular heaven. In his time, Bell referred to the problem as “The Narrative Conjecture.”

Bell’s life is dramatically telescoped to Centwen by his two tour guides. In sum there are three main characters in the excerpt.

Great Psychodor, Prodigy, and Centwen.

Great Psychodor is an overbearing, shouting genius, the greatest polymath in human history.

Prodigy is a super intelligent bot created by Great Psychodor and who has returned after being sent forth to search out the conjoined questions about Ideality and Mathites.

Centwen is a stand-in for us humans. He is being guided suspensefully on a tour of the future leading up to discovering the answers already sought by Prodigy.

____________________________

Centwen: Hold it!

Prodigy: What is it, Centwen?

Psychodor: You’re confused, aren’t you, Centwen?

Hey, Prodigy?

Yes, Centwen.

What the hell is this mathematics all about?

Well–

Don’t get it, huh Centwen?

Psychodor, I told you not–

Well, Centwen, it’s pretty simple stuff!

Really?

Sure! Godel did a couple of crucial things Old Why absolutely loves. First, he identified a confounding paradox that appears to keep mathematics from ever becoming a purely self-contained system able to prove everything within its own axioms! In other words, he cast doubt on it ever becoming a Stand-Alone Realm. Think of this as meaning mathematics is never going to be complete! Never closed. Never perfect unto itself. Never rooted securely in its own unshakeable foundation of truths. It’s analogous to saying: there is not now and never will be some veritable Rock of Ages for mathematics! No! It will always eventually confront an unresolvable contradiction, a dilemma in Logic it can’t take care of by its own powers! And hooray! For then mathematics may never finally stratify but always newly ratify. And all this thanks to Godel’s paradox! A paradox in which true is true when it’s false and false when it’s true! Yes, a Diabolical but Fruitful Trap of Logic! The Long Subversive Serpent all along twisting and turning finally to swallow its own tail! Or if you prefer, Centwen, think of this not as a riddler snake’s sarcastic hiss but as the scary Begotten Sense of a Mathematics Acrobat forced ever to dare jumps and leaps and somersaults over a Bottomless Abyss. And obviously for all the Anal-Retentive Mathematicians with Fearfully Blinking Sphincters, this trapeze unease becomes the ultimate disease. But to Why, it is all Great News! He goes wee-wee all over himself, because he thinks of this as support for suspecting you don’t ever have to worry about a mathematical deadend! He takes it as a clue that mathematics will never (to use one of your quaint sayings) die on the soil-ensnared vine, which is to say, it’ll never reach dry, arid stasis but always be alive, adrift, happily unsatisfied, and suspensefully floating along in search of the new! And this, if you think about it, is what makes Bell want someone–the great me, it turns out to be!–to engineer a new, dynamic psychology of Mathematica! See, Centwen, you have to understand that Old Why thinks we’re not standing still in the Garden of Beatific Eden but forever soaring through a Space of Creatific Bein’! In short, according to Why we’ve arrived at quite a radical shift in how we need to think, because now the seductive knowledge-serpent’s become the hero! Yes, that’s the way Old Why sees it all. He’s a true new mathematician, one who thinks, “Bless this mess!” Since he’s chasing after The Narrative Conjecture, the Never-Ending Story, he mightily wants mathematics never to become closed! Right? Of course! Happily we don’t even hazard the slightest thought of mathematical stasis leading to collapses! For that calamity would be Why’s Hades!

(Silence.)

But that’s only the half of it, Centwen. The second thing that Godel does which Old Why salivates over–

Psychodor, I’m your Prodigy but I’m certainly glad you were never an official professor!

–is to get us to the logical reality–the actual necessity!–of Mathematical Edifices which we have yet to construct! Or discover. Actually a little of both. Because Old Why not only wants edifices to be open-ended. He wants more than that. In fact, he wants something which precedes that! He wants assurances that coherent Edifices not yet creatovered are in some sense out there! Awaiting us! In short, Godel wants those Edifices to be inherently plausible! If you will, he wants them to be ever-pending.

Hence all this metaphorical Track-and-Field stuff where we eventually create the pending marathon and dashes and sprints and add them to the already known hurdles and miles, perhaps someday ending up even with the Decathlon and then even more thrillingly entire Olympiads and who knows what wonderful else beyond, and which has been there for the creatovering all along! Orbit Billiards, maybe.

(Silence.)

One tried-and-true way to glimpse the point, Centwen, is to imagine that you, the New Immortal Intrepid Creatoverer happily wandering the Forever, are setting sail for unmapped new worlds. Lets say you’re pacing the decks of your ship in a state of high anxiety as you sail uncertainly across a great expanse. Imagine, however, that one day in the Doldrums you realize something Absolutely Saving, Supremely Vital: you come to see that you can be confident that those New Worlds are out there in the first place! They are there, awaiting you! About their sheer existence you no longer need have any terrible doubts! You are not sailing across a temporary Flatness in which sea monsters lurk, a measurable plane whose edge you will eventually tumble off! Instead, you are always going somewhere novel and beautiful! The voyage is eternally valid!

(Silence.)

But now we’re talking about a New New World, Ideality. And when you refer to Ideality, you must start thinking a little differently. As I’ve implied, mainly you have to start thinking neither solely of discovery nor solely of construction. Think both! Think of “creatovery”! Think of yourself not as a mere Explorer but as a Creatoverer. And then, to borrow from your own culture of Century Twenty, go buy yourself a stiff drink because you’re encountering the insights of mystical mathematicians. Hunchful ontologists. Which all the great ones have been anyway.

(Silence.)

Saavy?

I think so. And yes, you’re right, Psychodor–I definitely could use a Bombay Sapphire martini straight up with two olives!

Coming right up!

Prodigy, why are you simply acting the bartender, while letting Psychodor explain things?

They call him Great, don’t they? Besides, I appreciate natural humor even more than you humans do! Here’s your Marty.

Just ignore him, Centwen! Who cares what smart-ass Prodigy is thinking? Besides, before you start chomping on those skewered olives, you should realize that Old Why has now gotten himself into a couple of even worse messes! Lets see if he continues to like messes!

What do you mean? (Chomp, chomp.)

Obviously, the present weak-minded Homo sapiens–that’s you!–isn’t up to the task of attaining Ideality. And of course Old Why knows this better than anyone in human history. Yes, as you Centwens used to say, Old Why’s learned about this human failing the hard way! And, oh, does he take it personally! Indeed! As if the earlier two challenges I just described–the ones Godel helped resolve–weren’t enough, poor Why now sees that he’s got to worry about two enormous further problems. And he hasn’t got Godel to help him!

(Silence.)

First, he has to worry about whether this endless Edifice he’s trying to creatover can be accommodated by a new, more powerful mental creature–either an organic extension of Homo sapiens–a transformation of the original Accident into a self-made new superhuman (you should hope!)–or some separate intelligent creature–not Homo sapiens–which has to be engineered from the ground up and which somebody, some great psyengineer–namely and to say it again, me!, as it turns out to be–must find a way to build, and which creature you now see embodied in bartender Prodigy!

(Silence.)

And as if that anxiety weren’t enough, Old Why must now worry about this second problem: No matter which form of the new, improved creature comes onto the scene and succeeds, including the grand possibility they both do, Why still must continue to worry as to whether the endlessly engrossing experience the creature or creatures would creatover would indeed remain endlessly engrossing! I mean, with all due respect to Godel, we’re not absolutely sure about this eternal edifice! Seeing is believing!

* * *

This brings us to the experience. Obviously we are able now only to intimate an experience by a Mathite in Ideality. We have to draw an analogy to a human experience. This is obviously fraught. Accordingly, the following, taken verbatim from Heaven Engine, is simply a metaphor–and only a metaphor–drawing on one of a variety of prospective archetypal human experiences, a variety because they must be individually tailored to be suitable for giving a sense of Ideality respectively for ancient, recent, or contemporary humans, in this case for my character, Centwen, from the twentieth century, and which indirectly perhaps suggest some design issues for a Mathite’s experiences in Ideality. In the narrative of Heaven Engine, the author of the following drastically metaphorical account of an epiphanic discovery–a sudden bright burst of a grand discovery and not the exciting sleuthing that led to it–by a Mathite, is composed by that great future mathematician, Wylan “Why” Bell, who is desperately trying to conjure a sense of Ideality for humans–here Centwen–who have little knowledge or experience of advanced mathematics.

Prefatory:

One design question in early thinking about the experiencing of ideality and the possible engineering of such is intensity. Another is suspense, this latter raising the design issue of creating searches by mindful posthuman Mathites which necessitate delayed (but still happy) gratification–explorations leading up to the truth–and similar problems in the ever narrative experience of discovery in Ideality. But there is, after all, in mindful searches for understanding by such earthly heroes as PI’s the exhilaration of the hard cognitive and other work to uncover truths. As cloistered, theistic/mystic Theresa of Avila said: Heaven is getting to heaven.

There are, of course, many other stupendous considerations to be dealt with by the designers of the psychology of the Mathites questing after epiphanies. (More below.)

Two notes:

First, the New Testament has four Gospels and Heaven Engine has (as Bell refers to them below) eight Cogspells, most of the latter being rather formalized, brief histories of important future Historical changes.

Second, Bell also refers to “Disnovelling,” that ironic, terminal boredom of the longevitites in the future as opposed to the “Novelling” Bell’s “Noveltyhumans” (Bell hasn’t heard of “Mathites”) would archieve in Ideality.

So: herewith Bell’s metaphorical foray for Centwen, one that became memorialized and spoken by others as well:

HEAVEN — VERSION C-20

When (and if!) You, Dear Friend Centwen, Become Noveltyhuman, You will thus become ever the lucky creature who in its multiselved uniself sits at once in sweetly anxious anticipation in many gaily decorated trestle cars which slowly climb in unison up and up in the pull of clanking chains to position for The (Latest) Greatest Coherence Rollercoaster Ride, all the cars reaching zenith all at once to pause momentarily on the many towering trestle tops of the Current Edifice, there to let the myriad representations of you view from all these cars the Grand Surround and integrate all versions in your Meta Mind,

then simultaneously rush,

swooping,

darting,

soaring,

banking,

and roaring,

in ubiquitous-yet-integrated thrilling joy around the structure of the Edifice in complex uncolliding schedules, a Scintillating Grand Scenario of Near Misses, this living Edificial Structure reshaping Itself in real time, everywhere throughout The (Latest) Greatest Coherence Rollercoaster Ride the multiple selves of you, Lucky Noveltyhuman, speeding down living serpentine sidewinding rails which sever themselves into shorter lengths leaving gaps, empty space no less! and always just in front of the whirring wheels of the speeding trestle cars!!!, yet always managing just in time!!! to reconnect anew to other disconnected rails springing forward in precise strikes to connect in nanosecond perfection to reroute exactly correctly in the perfect precision of massively coordinated myriad inferential consequences, all summing to an elegantly lovely formation of an

entailed

yes entailed

oh yes gloriously entailed

new architecture of the Entire Grand Structure of Rails,

each new thrill ride an unprecedented episode of beautiful gripping surprises-cum-inevitabilities unfolding gracefully!

Yet each ride as it ends instantly becomes Jaded Thrills, Old News, Faded Beauty, Punched Coupons, Used Tickets,

thereby raising new questions!

uncovering newly seen contradictions !

revealing subtle omissions!

impugning illusory unity!

rediscovering unfailing fallibility!

Yes! Get ready, Noveltyhuman, for your next and

even greater ride!

For:

Apparent Coherence not only was, is, and always

will be the illusory absence of contrariance;

but:

Apparent Coherence is ever dispelled in disillusion

at the Latest Ride’s conclusion,

followed by delicious crisis meetings to resolve

anew a new, and this time perfect (hah!), Rollercoaster architecture.

Edificial Renewal.

Which in turn initiates new rides.

New suspense!

And then,

Onward to the next newly novel rollercoaster ride

on the self-transforming trestled Edifice!

Thereby rounding out Soclar’s Fifth Cogspell,

and also fulfilling all the linked transcendent

prophecies of the First, Second and Third

Cogspells:

while transcending dread Disnovelling

as rendered in the Fourth Cogspell.

Yes, indeed!

This is 6C!

This is This novelling.

Not Disnovelling

but

This novelling!

Our Prodigious Child’s new game of

Heavenly Passage:

Ready!

Go!

* * *

“Yes,” Why thinks to himself: “Even if some parts of the Meta-Ediface — whole specialties — do not change, or change very seldom, no matter!: for in the act of extending the overall Edifice into truly novel areas, the heightening contextual value of these re-used parts, their function as dependable and mobile connecting bridges, will only create for them a renewed importance, which means our sense of their value and beauty even as we traverse those bridges again and again will with each new-purposed crossing spring forth anew and bring new joy, and hence not be a psychological drag on the meantime purely novel extensions of the Edifice, all of which is downright: “Novelling.“

Indeed, Eternally Novelling!”

Why tells himself: “Hence Endless Novelling, not Disnovelling, now becomes the rule.

“Yes!

“Grand Novelty: new problems to solve and ensuing new thrill rides created in the very act of solving those new problems:

“which is to say:

“suspenseful new problems throughout the newly disturbed (torn) web followed after their exciting solutions (repairs to the web) by (hopefully) web-wide thrill rides (appreciations of the new wholeness of the web) to experience the thrilling new coherence in the Meta-Edifice:

“which is to say:

“The two major, linked varieties of:

“Eternal Novelling!

“The greatest possible ride?

“The Ride of Rides? It would always be penultimate!

“It would ever ensue from the penultimate New Problem of All New Problems/the Newest Solution of All New Solutions which would ramify back to change the whole Meta-Edifice, testimony to its Grand Coherence, in turn raising new Edifice-Wide questions.

“And why not forever!”

Postscript Concerning Edifices in the Ideality inhabited by Mathites: The above example is, of course, necessarily broadly metaphorical. Imagining the possible structures of the actual linked, and as well perhaps sometimes independent, edifices Mathites would creatover and behold: these edifices would consist of mathematical representations (mathematical “language”)–structures comprised of lines, graphs, numbers, etc.–and as they grew to represent various aspects of infinities might be considerably complex. Here is a simple example which the reader can enlarge on his or her terms: Consider a Number Line used to convey Zeno’s Paradox: Assume you are traveling from Point A to Point B and that these points are marked on the Number Line. Assume further that there are marked stages in the journey: 0 to 1; 1 to 2; etc. In Zeno’s paradox, the distance travelled from Point A to Point B must always be half of the remaining distance to Point B, the theoretical result being that the point is never reached. The edifice to illustrate this paradox could show a certain distance along the Number Line between 0 and 1; then show half that distance to be travelled between 1 and 2; then half that distance to be travelled between 2 and 3; then half that distance to be travelled between 3 and 4; followed by the notation, “… ,” signifying that the journey is infinite, for this is a case of infinite regress. Point B is never reached. Other Number Lines, or other mathematical forms, could be stacked above or below this first line to construct an imposing edifice showing connections among variations of infinities. One such example of the latter is the matrix presented above to show Cantor’s famous Diagonal Argument.

Given the presumed sublime minds of Mathites, much grander edifices, including clusters, would be readily envisioned.

PART FIVE: MATHITES

(Estimated Reading Time: 10 Minutes.)

Elsewhere in Heaven Engine, there comes this question: Will we…
become an arrested population of Immortal Idealists?

Free at last of imperatives of “natural selection” such as
—Social Organization,
—Defense,
—Nutrition,
—and especially Reproduction,
—so as each to start Living Anew in Beatific Privacy.

Hence ever to be:
—Joyous Isolates,
—Happy Solitaires,
—Nananium Craniums,
—Space Drifters,
—Engrossed Asocials,
—Gravityless Ageless,
—Uncaged Angels,
—Exhalted Loners!

In short:
—Independent Superminds
—in a Psycho (and Physiological) Anarchy!
—An Aesthetic State of Self
(ves).

But only to be Lonely?
—No way!
—For each of you Self-Sufficient will be eternally self-entertaining, happily vaudevillian-knacked, topping yourselves with each new personal “godthrilling” act, on your private stage in your personal theater.

Because:
—If so:
—You’ll not unravel in the Plague of Disnovel.
—You’ll not opt for Oblivion over Living.
—No!
—Instead of going extinct, you’ll have fled in soloing instinct!

______________________________

But (I jest but most seriously) there are just a few minor design problems suggested by the above! I don’t imagine I have thought of anything like most of them; nor do I imagine I might. However, by weak light:

1. The Mathites will be material in pursuit of infinity and other abstractions. I think Minsky is right that biology and immortality are mutually opposed. (And I certainly don’t want to raise here the long, long dialog in Philosophy about Being and Epistemology, i.e., about how “To be or not to be” and “How do we know things?” are pondered there, e.g., How does a unicorn “Be”?) But the Mathite, that mindful creature, will need to be a “machine” that is not corporeal in our human sense and yet ever Cosmically survives.

As Prodigy puts it:

“Getting Out Of Here, i.e., far away from doomed Earth, each of you (Mathites) separately to lift and drift through perilous hurtling Vastitude in safe navigational shift…. Specifically, you’ll be a newfangled nananium psyche, hungering only for an Abstract Inspired Condition, your innovative idealizing form (perhaps) designed to live inside a tiny floating space capsule, not Noah’s crude wooden-roofed “flood Ark” but your own minuscule Cosmos-proofed “rainy-day cart,” suffering not Rene Descartes’ Unfactual Duplicity but enjoying an actual beneficial duality: a truly new psychology: a split personality: a pair of two mutually unaware kin: a pair of fly-in-ease twins….

“Namely, you will now be: (1) An Inner Creator (I. C.) innovating freely in the beautifully engaging Eternal Higher Ideal; and at the same time (2) an Outer Navigator (O. N.) safekeeping this lucky I. C. in the stupidly dangerous External Dire Real. …In short: no longer will your life be Dust to Dust! And neither, either, must you rust! Instead for the new happily divorced you, AKA the benignly schizoid you, two old adages will now ensue: (1) Never again the twain shall meet; (2) Age before beauty.”

2. Stephen Hawking has written the following:

There is no time to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent…. (For) we are now entering a new phase of what might be called self-designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA, which means we have read ‘the book of life’, so we can start writing in corrections. …some people won’t be able to resist the temptation to improve human characteristics, such as size of memory…and length of life.

3. Obviously the Mathites must have immense minds. Enormous Vision plus enormous Power. As the robotics pioneer and futurist Hans Moravec instructs, a being able to think beyond even human thinking must at least accomplish trillions of calculations every second. The physicist, entrepreneur and art-painter, William Hogan, early and long involved in development of supercomputers, has educated me on the tremendous progress and remarkable promise of quantum computing; and apropos, the science writer, Stephen Witt, has written: “A quantum computer could open new frontiers in mathematics, revolutionizing our idea of what it means to compute.”

Indeed, profound design questions arise. Would a Mathite be able to consider multiple ideas simultaneously? In some sense, might a Mathite enter more than one location at once or view a problem from many sides simultaneously? Should massive abilities to generate and very rapidly compare in fine detail alternative hypotheses be part of the Mathite mind? Would a Mathite possess an enormous “working memory” which dwarfs the human version? In various ways, shouldn’t the Mathite have some profoundly different awarenesses of Time than do humans? Will other senses than that of sight be required? Would the Mathite’s mathscape include dense edifices of discovered math and empty vistas for new creation. Should very large and virtually instantaneous induction and deduction be at the call of the Mathite? Might the Mathite have huge abilities at imagining coherent possibilities generated from single or small groups of clues?

Given the glaringly evident momentum today toward ever more immense computing power and the power of other emerging factors, we must expect increasingly rapid and broad progress in design and development.

And certainly the design issues–the many more than intimated here–are spellbinding to imagine.

Consider as a prime example the difficult problem of the nature and dynamic of consciousness.

In his book, The Singularity is Nearer, Ray Kurzweil writes:

…Science could never tell the difference between zombies and normal humans…. One way of highlighting the difference in our ideas about functional versus subjective consciousness is to consider a dog versus a hypothetical artificial human if we could be certain that it had no subjective experience (i.e., a “zombie”). Even though the zombie could demonstrate much more complex cognition than the dog, most people would probably say that hurting the dog–which we assume to have subjective consciousness–is worse than hurting the zombie…. The trouble is that in real life, even in principle, there is no way to scientifically determine whether another being has subjective consciousness.

Indeed, this issue may well persist indefinitely in remaining elusive to science. And yet the discovery in some actionable form of fundamental aspects of consciousness certainly would be central to the design of the Mathite. And indeed, achieving the Singularity might enable us to obtain a better practical grasp of consciousness. So too might the design evolution of that posthuman mind being accomplished through simply proceeding on an engineering project by beginning with the traditional human mind and progressing through increasingly transnatural versions leading up to the Mathite: in short, by preserving consciousness itself as the project progresses, learning in each engineered improved version of mind more about the dynamics of consciousness for ensuing successful designs of enhanced consciousness, no matter that there is a continuing scientific inexplicability. But regardless of the design strategy, this requirement of a workable insight must be met in any creation of a posthuman mind. Fortunately, robust explorations in our day by Daniel C. Dennett, David Chalmers and others have gained us perspective and momentum. Certainly we must anticipate further explorations.

Granted the challenges, I continue to keep the faith in progress leading to the creation of Mathites, given we have sufficient Time.

4. Speaking of clues on a possible road to Mathites: The likely nascent technological enablers, here a few familiar examples out of the many imagined these days–not all necessarily promising suitability for the premise of Heaven Engine–include: simulated reality, mind uploading, strong artificial intelligence, digital life, and superintelligence. For certain the experience intimated in the novel must be mathological and take place in Ideality, and so Mathites must spring from a technology allowing them to access that world, not our present natural one or some mirrored version thereof, and must reach beyond humanity with its attendant limitations, the pain and suffering and confinements afflicting natural selectees. It is, simply and profoundly enough, and among many other things, a staggering new design problem.

5. Continuing to imagine very superficially: Such issues as these must be worked out in the design of the posthuman Mathite: visual sense; language; memory; consciousness; inferencing; emotions (e.g., epiphanic, joys of searching, and others [but these emotions not sourced in bio/chem]); and social (possibly). And a key question: Will any and all willing humans be able to become Mathites?

6. It is presumed that there will be a continuing mathematical edificial splendor to be creatovered; and that the Mathite will be pleased in the pursuit of same just as in the actual epiphanic discoveries themselves.

In short, the Mathite will be designed and engineered to be happy.

Repeat.

The Mathite will be designed and engineered to be happy.

What will be the aesthetic of mathematical edificial grandeur? (Hopefully no latterday comedian will be able to ask, “Are there only a finite number of infinities?”) How would Mathite memory be configured and operate? Perhaps the Mathite design would need to be right “the first time.” For it may be doubtful a Mathite Enterprise would carry on over many years. Further, would there be one Master Mind for all individual Mathites or would there be individual minds?

And obviously many more issues! To say the least!

7. Alexander Grothendieck, the mathematician some call the greatest of the second half of the twentieth century, is for me an exemplar. He lends optimism to me about my theme in Heaven Engine through his ingenious use of abstraction to lay the foundations for new vistas in mathematics. Among other things, he was a revolutionary in algebraic geometry by (in the words of the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica) “generalizing varieties (of algebraic geometry) to schemas and extending the Riemann-Roch theorem.” His work was also fundamentally valuable in the legendary solving of Fermat’s Last Theorem. I’ve no doubt he embodies the spirit of mathological discovery in his delving into the essence of mathematics, although in his later “mystical” years he embraced what some might consider an eccentric lifestyle and left the mathematical community at large.

8. In his superb and indispensable book, Infinity and the Mind, science fiction novelist, mathematician and university professor, Rudy Rucker, illuminates key attributes of these four most salient factors: physical infinities, mathematical infinity, consciousness, and irrational numbers:

There are various sorts of physical infinities that could actually exist: infinite time, infinitely large space, infinite dimensional space, infinitely continuous space, and infinitely divisible matter…. (And) if we feel that the things that mathematicians discuss are real, then we can conclude that actually infinite things exist. …Attempts to analyze…consciousness and self-awareness rationally appear to lead to infinite regresses. This seems to indicate that consciousness is essentially infinite. …(Moreover, there is) the familiar real number system with its infinity of irrational numbers. Once one has accepted irrational numbers, there is really no reason not to accept infinitely large or transfinite numbers.

9. In very simplified terms, I note that the late phycisist, Freeman Dyson, has hypothesized about eternal life for intelligent beings who would obtain enough energy to think infinitely and survive extinction from eventual increased heat generated by dynamics of the cosmos. Apparently recent discoveries about the Universe may signal that his particular vision is perhaps problematic if not doubtful. Notwithstanding, for me the vision itself is important, for it shows the quite understandable inclination–here not mythical but infused with science and technology–toward endless and enthralling posthuman experience by us natural selectees, presently mere mortals all, who now experience a painful Hobbesian existence.

It is similarly noteworthy that the futurist Ray Kurzweil has likewise speculated about infinite mindful experience. Kurzweil imagines myriad blood cell-sized robots (“nanobots”) preserving our youth indefinitely by serving the human psychophysiology through sustaining healthy bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Genetic coding to enhance us would be downloaded from the Internet.

10. It seems appropriate here to cite excerpts from a query on March 15, 2024, to the Bing Search Engine AI System known as Copilot:

“Albert Clarkson’s novel Heaven Engine is a captivating addition to the science fiction genre. In this highly creative and experimental work, Clarkson delves into humanity’s life away from Earth and the ambitious lengths characters go to in order to alleviate suffering and reveal new discoveries….

“…Clarkson’s novel delves into the depth of individual souls and the boundless possibilities that arise when necessity calls for invention. The cover of Heaven Engine even features an endorsement by renowned scientist Marvin Minsky, often referred to as the ‘founding father of artificial intelligence’ and praised by Isaac Asimov as ‘the smartest person I know.'”

11. Finally, as s a science fiction writer, albeit Other Science Fiction (that inevitable hybrid with Traditional Fiction), it’s best for me to stop here. I confront the pessimism-optimism problem in Heaven Engine and even confidently leave the miraculous realization up to those Princes and Princesses of the human mind, the mathematicians, scientists and technologists. May they prevail. And if they do–if in this Age of Technology they eventually create a transformation even though being embattled “drunkards” of natural selection and its Darwinian mind control–perhaps the best characterization of their feat is:

A narrow escape to an infinite beatific.

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