The Institute for Simple Systems

This piece is the question of understanding the Octiverse and Zarathustranity’s place within it.

Neeplphut: welcome to the institute for simple systems.
Captain Arthur: its very impressive, Neeplphut. I’ve never seen such an enormous building and all this incredible equipment – its breath taking!
Neeplphu: yes, I am sorry about that. It is a sign of our ignorance.
Captain: Pardon?
Neeplphut [ignoring him]: tell me something, Captain. Several times you have talked of “Sherlock Holmes stories”. I am having considerable problems with this concept. What is a Sherlock Holme?
Captain: Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective.
Neeplphut: “detective” I understand, but the translator is having problems with “fictional”.
Stanley: fiction is stories that aren’t true, but could be.
Neeplphut: I believe my translator has gone on the blink.
Captain: Stanley is referring to a logically consistent sequences of events, compiled for purposes of entertainment.
Neeplphut: Ah. You mean history.
Captain: No – these are imaginary events. They did not really happen.
Neeplphut: how can a sequence of events be logically consistent if it did not happen?
Stanley: take “the Hound of the Baskervilles”. It is about an ancient curse on the Baskerville family ad the sudden death of Sir Charles. Nearby are found the foot prints of a gigantic hound, emerging from the great Grimpen Mire…
Neeplphut: that does sound exciting. I am very fond of mud – but I am sorry to hear of the untimely death of Sir Charles, his family must be most distressed.
Captain: Well – Neeplphut, you have to understand that there is no actual Baskerville family, and no real hound. Its all made up.
Neeplphut: Oh, you mean it is a lie! Lies, I understand, we use them for the instruction of the young.
Stanley: I’m sorry. Neeplphut, but you are way off the mark. Sherlock Holmes stories are not lies.
Neeplphut: do Terran records include this particular Baskerville family?
Captain: No, its imaginary.
Neeplphut: why not?
Stanley: nobody would be terribly upset about gerbil prints emerging from a bog.
Neeplphut: I am having serious problems here. Readers know the story is false but require it to be convincing. It must be realistic but it cannot be real. It seems to me that since all falsehoods are mathematically equivalent, any lie is logically consistent! It is consistently untrue so any lie makes a realistic story, and a story is just an extended lie.
Captain: No, No, No…..it’s just the internal logic of the story that has to be consistent. It does not have to agree totally with reality.
Neeplphut: Mmmmm, interesting, internal, we Zarathustrans do not really think along those lines. But surely, if it is a matter of internal logic, then there is no difficulty in envisaging a world in which everybody is terrified of gerbils. The conflict with reality is not part of the story.
Captain: No, but it’s part of the context.
Neeplphut: internal logic is part of the context? Are you sure?
Captain: No, I mean….well, every story involves a context employed by both writer and reader.
Neeplphut: but that context is not reality? Even though you say a story must be realistic?
Stanley: it’s a selected part of reality. The background must be realistic. You could not have Sherlock Holmes watching TV or flying in a jumbo jet, for instance. Wrong historical period. Reader and writer must tacitly agree on a context, before the story makes sense.
Neeplphut: Ah! I begin to see! It is like a restricted system of axioms, but never stated explicitly. That is a wonderful new thought! Very exciting! Complicity between content and context, each artificially limited to an arbitrary subset of reality….let me access my knowledge base….excellent. Am I right in thinking that “the Hound of the Fotheringay-snythes” would be a perfectly acceptable variant?
Captain: Yes, though perhaps without the resonance, just steer clear of gerbils.
Neeplphut: and about half way between “the hound of the Baskervilles” and “the Red-headed league” you would find “the Red-headed Hound”?
Stanley: yes, but that would be a very poor story – hounds cant copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Neeplphut [gets very excited]: Aha! So there is a geography of Sherlock Holmes story space, governed by the dynamic of logical consistency within the agreed context…. Stories must maximize their degree of conviction, so they sit at peaks in the landscape. But that is exactly like characters and species and paradigms and functions and ecological niches… and anthropic principles! Credible Sherlock Homes story space. Spread about between them are the stories that do not work, whose logic falls apart, such as “the Gerbil of the Baskervilles” and “the Red headed hound” – change anyone detail, and the entire structure collapses. In the same way just because a tiny change in Planck’s constant destroys the special features of carbon that make life as we know it possible, that does not imply that very similar kinds of life cannot occur in a universe with totally different laws! I must tell the librarian at once!
Captain: why?
Neeplphut: these analogies are a major simplification. We can amalgamate five wings of the library; pull down two buildings, and fire ten percent of the staff. Everybody will be pleased!
Captain: pleased? To lose their jobs?
Neeplphut: of course. That is the overriding aim of the institute for simple systems. To understand something is to simplify it. Theories destroy facts, meta-theories destroy theories, and so on. The culmination of all that the Institute stands for is to close itself down. What use is science if all it can do is complicate your view of the world?