(urth) Standard Wolfean riddle

[António Marques]

DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
> Below.

It would be really nice if you'd get an e-mail client that understood 
quoting. (This is not a jab; I really think the world would be a better 
place if everyone followed the perfectly simple and understandable old 
standard.)

> --- On *Thu, 8/12/10, António Marques /<entonio at gmail.com>/* wrote:
>
>
>     From: António Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
>     Subject: Re: (urth) Standard Wolfean riddle
>     To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
>     Date: Thursday, August 12, 2010, 3:54 PM
>
>     DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:>
>      > Jeff mentioned (IIRC) that for narrative reasons Yesod's being
>      > before Severian was born in Briah doesn't mean that Yesod is before
>      > Briah. That's obviously true but it's not mechanically helpful in
>      > terms of how the multiverses are constructed.
>
>     The concepts of before and after are meaningless across universes. Time
>     is a property of each universe, like space. Any other universe isn't
>     in Briah's future any more than it is behind or west or south of it.
>     This much is axiomatic physics, not something someone like Wolfe
>     would not understand or leave aside.
>
>     ---Exactly. Apheta said Severian's friends were yet unborn. Why?

Doesn't really have to mean anything. Are you suggesting Yesod is the 
same universe as Briah?
(I think someone's suggesting that Yesod and Briah 'overlap in time' or 
something like that. That's just not tenable.)

>      > Possibly. Or, depending on exactly how the universes relate, maybe
>      > the Conciliator is in one possible future, along with Master Ash and
>      > so on with other sub-possibilities, and the Hieromakers are in
>      > another.
>
>      From the Yesod perspective, there is no future nor past Briah. Briah, a
>     4-dimensional universe, is somehow a blob open to the Hiero* for
>     observation and travel to and fro. But not necessarily all of Briah,
>     and that means time and space.
>
>      From such a perspective there aren't possible futures in Briah, there's
>     only Briah from east to west, north to south, back to forth, start
>     to end.
>
>     ---Right.
>
>     If you're in an unfamiliar building, you don't know what rooms and
>     corridors lie ahead. You can say there are 'possible' rooms and
>     corridors ahead. It doesn't mean the possible rooms are all really
>     possible. It just means you don't know them. Ditto for time. You
>     really need multiple universes to have alternate futures, not a
>     multiple-possibility one.
>
>     ---Um, somebody better explain that to Wolfe before he makes this
>     mistake again!
>
>     As I basically, said, if we already have multiple universes, they
>     may branch. They may be branching universes. Wolfe proposes such
>     branches. There must be other branches. They may not be important,
>     but they may be important.

Ok, so now explain to us what a branching universe is. This is a 
rhetorical demand, but an honest one.