Opposites

Goodmountain shook his head. "This is unholy stuff," he said. "No more meddling with it, understand?"

"I didn't think dwarfs were religious," said William.

"We're not," said Goodmountain. "But we know unholy when we see it, and I'm looking at it right now, I'm telling you."

Terry Pratchett, "The Truth"

"Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis.

"So I understand," said the Tyrant. "I imagine that fish have no word for water."

Terry Pratchett (again), "Small Gods"

Pratchett has a curious way of making very profound points. His books are undoubtedly funny, but often, they make you sit back for a moment and think.

About opposites, for instance.

It's an old adage that you can't have light without dark. How can you explain colours of light to a blind man? How can one explain the difference between birdsong and dogs howling to a deaf man? But is this true?

From a scientific point of view, analysis of light allows you to infer the existence of dark. You can say, "There are electromagnetic waves of a specific frequency that reflect off their surroundings and are absorbed by our eyes; there must be a state where these do not exist, and we shall call this 'darkness'." That's perfectly fine. But you couldn't look at pitch black and infer the existence of light. You might, at a stretch, say that there could be something. But you couldn't say anything about it. Just that, in an empty space, it is possible that there are spaces which are not empty. And even that is pretty debateable, if all you knew about was empty space.

Yes yes, if all you knew about was empty space, then what would you be? Let's leave the smartassery out of metaphysics, it spoils the fun of these thought experiments.

All right, Fen, I hear you say. So science can sometimes tell us about the opposite. But we won't know what it's like, will we? Of course not.

As part of the previously mentioned series on Quantum Physics and Relativity, the lecturer remarked in an early lecture on relativity that the only reason why it isn't obvious is that we live at too slow a speed, and in too little gravity to notice its effects. If we were some kind of being that regularly travelled near the speed of light, then it would be common sense. But because we don't, our common sense is misleading, and we find it hard to comprehend. It's even worse with quantum physics. If that minimum energy for photons were astromically higher, high enough to be noticeable, we'd live in a very bizarre world where quantum physics was common sense. But again, it's out of our experience, so it leaves us floundering.

Even smaller things, like trying to picture four-dimensional shapes; we can't do it from our 3D perspective. So just because we can infer the presence of an opposite in some cases doesn't mean we'll know what it's like.

So what about Pratchett's dwarfs and their concept of unholy? Are we simply getting drawn into a battle of linguistics? Clearly they know what 'holy' is, even if they don't believe in anything labelled as such. But do they have to? Pulling out a thesaurus and looking up 'unholy' provides profane, unhallowed, unsanctified, unblessed, sacriligious, godforsaken and accursed, so by dictionary definition, and by Goodmountain's remark, it is a psuedoreligious declaration. On the other hand, the omnipresence of gods in the Pratchett novels lends a slightly different atmosphere to the debate, so perhaps the whole debate is skewed.

So let's look at something else unscientific: good and evil. Can you have good without evil? Some philosophers, notably Kant and Bentham, would say yes. Although both argued very different things (Kant believed in absolute morals, Bentham in ones mutable according to the situation), there is a sense in both their ideas that there is a separate existence of good and evil.

"You know the thing about chaos? It's fair," the Joker says in 'The Dark Knight'. A better example of a truly amoral character is hard to conceive of. Not immoral, to do a little dictionary bashing; to be immoral, he would have to have a concept of good and evil that is fundamentally lacking. But is this true? Does he truly not understand?

I call upon another philosopher at this point, the cynical bastard AJ Ayer. His theory, Emotivism, essentially calls upon linguistics and looks at 'good' and 'evil' as personal judgements. They are what we make them. We can look at something and say 'yay', or 'boo' depending on our own feelings - that there is no objective good and evil.

The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, "You acted wrongly in stealing that money," I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, "You stole that money." In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, "You stole that money," in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. … If now I generalise my previous statement and say, "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence that has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false. … I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments.

AJ Ayer, "Language"

You can consider from this the point of view that it isn't possible to have good without evil, because we automatically know what is good and bad for us, from the animal, instinctive part of our minds. So in a sense, the debate is meaningless. Either there is no objective right and wrong, in which case it comes down to personal definitions, or there is an objective right and wrong.

I'll stop before I get too deeply into the philosophical debate - could be a good topic for another day. But I will posit this thought: if we go by Ayer's definition, what if we lived in a world that we only liked or disliked? If have no experience of something that does not provide us pleasure (or pain), could we conceive of the opposite?

'Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog', the short film by Joss Whedon, considers this in a throwaway fashion, with the nemesis of the protagonist feeling pain for the first time at the end, and ending up bawling to a therapist in horror at the experience. Certainly Captain Hammer behaved in a deeply unpleasant fashion that could be taken to mean that he had no concept of other peoples' suffering.

So... this brings us, in a roundabout way, to the Tyrant's line. If we only know one thing, would we conceive of it? If we only experience pleasure, never pain, would we have a word for pleasure? Would it not be erased from consciousness, as a simple state of being? If we knew only light, would we not forget the words 'light' and 'dark'? And in turn, does this actually matter?

I think my brain is in too low a gear, the engine's complaining.

I think the conclusion is that it is possible to have one thing without its opposite. You can apply that to just about any concept. But would we have a concept of this? Possibly not.

Hopefully this vague collection of ideas has brought insight into your day.

Until tomorrow (in theory)... I am the hate you try to hide.

Quantum Physics and You

As the child of a family of what could be justifiably called intellectual snobs, I've been watching a DVD series about quantum physics recently.

It was in the latest episode that I came to an interesting philosophical conclusion, one which has some bearing on fiction. In a smartass kind of way, true, but I thought I would share.

I'll try to explain this as simply as possible, because it's a really cool idea. One of the most basic principles of quantum physics is that there is a minimum amount of energy anything can have. This includes the humble photon, which is basically a unit of light energy. In the case of a photon, you can say with reasonable accuracy that this minimum amount depends on the colour of the light - red light has a low minimum energy, while blue light has a high minimum energy.

Now, this minimum amount is so small that in the everyday world, we don't notice it. It's unimportant. But at the subatomic scale, it's relatively quite large.

Now, say that you want to look at a very small object, like an electron. If you want to find its exact position, you need a highly focused photon, which means it has to be closer to the blue end of the spectrum. This means you know exactly where the photon is, and thus can work out exactly where the object it bounces off of is.

But because it's high energy, it'll make the object change direction. So you know where it is, but not where it's going.

On the other hand, if you want to know where it's going, you can use a low energy, red photon. This won't disturb the object, so you know where it's going. But because it's an unfocused photon, you don't know exactly where it is, so you can't say exactly where the object is!

I'm aware that I'm striking a horrible middle ground where physicists will sneer and lay people will go 'huh?', but hopefully at least some of you will understand. The bottom line is, you can't know both where something is, and where it's going with absolute certainty, because the light you use to see this will affect what you're trying to find out.

Thus, the interesting philosophical thought: certainty is only possible without knowledge. You can be certain that everything has an exact position and velocity, but only if you don't try to find them out.

Physics lesson over. That was kind of interesting, Fen, I hear you say, but what's it got to do with writing?

Science fiction is an interesting genre, because there's so many ways of doing it. At one end, you have 'The Forever War', an interesting and cynical take on the future, which is one of the few that includes relativistic effects (and even making them key plot points - the protagonist is promoted from Private to General in three missions due to the amount of 'real' time that he's been in the military). At the other, you have things like the Culture universe, of 'Consider Phlebas' and 'The Player of Games', where intergalactic travel is almost casual, people build mountains as a hobby and switch genders for a change of pace. In the middle you have the near-reality of (the reimagined) Battlestar Galactica, and the well known middle grounds of Star Wars and Star Trek.

So what's my point? My point is that when it comes to writing sci-fi, it is possible to get too hooked up on the exact details of how stuff works. The reader doesn't care. Sure it's fun to play around with principles - I've come up with half a dozen methods of FTL travel with some kind of logical basis, but you don't need to explain exactly why things work. It's science fiction.

People care about the story, and the cool spaceships, that's all. They don't need to know about screwdrivers.

Unless they're sonic.

With that thought to consider, I leave you...

Until tomorrow... he lives in my basement, I can hardly face it.