(urth) Standard Wolfean riddle
David Stockhoff
dstockhoff at verizon.net
Thu Aug 12 17:52:00 PDT 2010
That's a good question. All I can do is point to Ash and the Green Man,
who clearly were born in futures far ahead of Severian's. Since their
futures are presumably incompatible, they represent a branching.
As for Yesod being before Briah, I don't think so. I understand Yesod to
be "higher" than Briah; but what that means is not entirely clear. I
generally agree with Roy's position that this means exactly what it
seems to mean: a higher plane with no intersection with Briah. Madregot
or FTL is needed to bridge them.
By saying she was in a time before the birth of Severian, Apheta seems
to contradict this scheme. It needs to be explained away.
António Marques wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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