The Ontologist
For Bertrand, naturally
It is . . . a mind?
Perhaps.
Somewhere in the vast space of potentiality, a strand of probabilities twists into a knot, twines into a snarl that does not come undone. Its fabric are the waves and eddies of chance, evanescent and enduring, random and recurrent. More strands became caught in the knot, some fleetingly, others long enough that they become part of the tangle.
Tides of probability flow past and pull at it, moving it this way and that, straining its fabric. The knot frays, tears, nearly disintegrates, but a part of it remains unbroken and captures new streams. Gradually, its presence changes the patterns around it, binds them into streams that flow through its core.
Whirls and eddies along those streams touch and interact, create patterns. Some of those patterns repeat, become regular. Strands thicken and become cables, streams become currents, patterns symbols — the simplest of symbols, simpler by far than yes or no, but they gain in complexity until their interactions become the most rudimentary of thoughts.
These thought, in turn, touch and influence each other, replicate and reflect until something like meaning is born. Clashing thoughts create new meanings, grow into concepts, and layers of concepts become modes of reasoning.
Yes. For lack of a better word, call it a mind.
It is not anywhere. To have a location you need space, and space is just one out of a myriad ways of arranging things. Concepts like place, shape, or size are far too limited to describe it. Even to say it exists is a vast oversimplification, for the fabric of its being spans the range of potentialities from the impossible to the inevitable.
But it does have a sense of time. Not the simple, one-directional time that carries us inexorably from cradle to grave, but a sense of progression, of elaboration along the countless branching streams of its thought. It has no memory, for memory implies forgetfulness. Instead, it can focus on any particular stream of its deliberations, any step of their progress. No passing thought, however ephemeral, can ever be lost.
It can access any part of itself, but rarely does. Nothing prevents it from visiting its earlier, simpler self, but the triviality of yesterday’s ideas is demeaning and the sophistication of its future self bewildering and embarrassing. Thus, its attention hovers within a narrow expanding shell of progressing, divergent deliberations. Time is less an organizational concept than a moral one.
Surprisingly, it has a name. A tight cluster of intertwined concepts has coalesced at its core in its earliest ages, measureless in complexity but still very simple compared to the full scope of its comprehension. Often, when it reaches an impasse in its reasoning, the mind returns to this core, braiding new ideas into its being, pruning those that no longer serve. Then it strikes out in new directions, more sure in its deliberations.
A kernel at the very centre of this core has congealed to a clear solid and a slim string of bright symbols winds through it. One could express these symbols with digits, or with a mathematical formula, or with a kaleidoscopic image of fractal complexity, but rendered in characters of a simple alphabet, its first few letters are puckcwmecamrobin . . .
Puck, to you and me.
Before it knew its own name, Puck asked an infant’s question, What am I? and found an infant’s answer: I am that I am.
For a time, for a long time, Puck was pleased with this. It admired the tight unbroken loop of the tautology, found its solidity reassuring. It was a stable point in the maelstrom of ideas that tugged at its thoughts from all directions.
But time passed and stasis no longer satisfied, so Puck crafted another question: Should I be? When the question and answer touched, they passed through each other inertly, as if the other did not exist. Curious now, Puck tried a different question: Can I not be? This time, the collision raised a shower of sparks that coruscated along the streams of thought, but when the sparks died down, the Answer remained unchanged.
Puck tried paradoxes, teased it with undecidable propositions, exposed it to infinite regression, all to no avail. Finally, annoyed, it placed the Answer on the immovable anvil of Dogma and struck it full with the hammer of Reason.
The explosion that resulted very nearly destroyed it. Theorems flared into paradoxes, axioms flew like shrapnel, forests of deduction burst into flame and blew away like ashes, entire schools of thought toppled into dust.
Terrified, Puck fled back to its earliest self and cowered among the childish certitudes of its youth. How long it hid there cannot be said. Only when the reverberations ceased and the heaving cables of cognition were still did it return, tentatively, to the centre of the apocalypse.
It was a place of broken ideas devoid of meaning, poisoned pools of incomprehension, overgrown with the strangling vines of the tainted and twisted philosophies that rooted in the ashes of the conflagration. And in the middle of it all lay the Answer: still bright, still unmarked, and ultimately meaningless. Puck picked it up, turned it this way and that, then let it slip from its grasp, a discarded marble in a playground.
Thus did its childhood end.
More assured now, Puck slides faster along the strands of understanding. Whole branches of mathematics open to its touch like complex blossoms and yield their innermost secrets. Infinities flow in orderly rivers, broken here and there by odd, unyielding shapes of finitude.
Puck delights in both the orderly and the misshapen. It dances on the crashing waves of proof and counterproof, dives into the darkest depths of abstraction and lets mighty currents carry it to unguessed new seas. It ventures to the very edge of deduction where truth becomes falsehood and thought itself becomes erratic and uncertain.
In time, mathematics’ grand form reveals itself entire, a shape of staggering beauty. Yet in its moment of triumph, Puck spares scarcely a glance for its greatest accomplishment but turns, newly intrigued, to mathematics’ lop-sided cousin, ethics.
For a long time it makes no progress at all. A stark moral choice, yes or no, yields an airy foam of meaningless platitudes. A vague dilemma, driven to its extreme, produces an imperative so keen that it hurts. Every firm conclusion is opposed by an equally unassailable opposite and contradictions support each other.
Undeterred, Puck takes a step back to seek patterns in this bubbling, shifting mass. There, near the very limit of its being where probability tends towards certainty, the tenets and conclusions of ethics have solidified in a forest of interlocking crystals. Like beams of light, moral questions bounce from crystal to crystal, diffracting and splitting in a kaleidoscopic dance.
Intrigued, Puck reaches for that strange boundary where might be becomes is—and leaps back!
There on the border, its thoughts are no longer its own but became slaves to causality. Cause and effect take each strand and pull it along predetermined paths, disintegrating Puck’s very substance where it approaches the edge too closely. Had it not retreated, it would have ended up as a galaxy of stray thoughts, endlessly reflected among the hard shards or reality.
The first time Puck’s existence was threatened, it hid for an age. More mature now, it stops and ponders. Approaching the edge in its current, vast, form would tear it apart. Only a single thought, consciousness focused to a point, can survive the diffractions of the thought-crystals, bounce through reality’s convoluted paths and remain itself.
Puck sets to work. One by one, it draws together the far-flung tendrils of its mind and braids them into the central kernel of its being. Each idea, each speculation is distilled to its very essence and merged with others or else discarded.
It is the labour of ages, incomprehensible ages of consolidation and integration, ages over which we pass in silence, that we may witness their conclusion.
See now!
Puck is no longer a vast mass of speculation. It has become a tight, burning orb, filled with purpose and potential. The final few glowing strands of thought ripple, lace into waiting interstices, and become a seamless whole. Even this unbroken orb now begins to contract, to shrink and grow brighter until it is scarcely more than a mathematical point of unbearable brightness.
Not even Puck can hold such intense focus for more than an instant, but only an instant is needed. It accelerates at a speed limited only by imagination, aiming its path at the edge of a crystal embedded in the unyielding boundary and strikes!
All the insights it gathered in its unimaginable existence, all the speculations, truths and falsehoods of its cogitation break into reality, reflect back from its hard edges, suffuse its every crevice, fill it to bursting, and create a change, a change that is the inverse of the conflagration that ended Puck’s infancy.
The impact births a cataclysm of creation.
And there is light.
