Triton (Trouble on Triton) (49 page)

Some of the younger members of the Sygn (Haaviko had been transferred to another city by the sect) invited Slade to live in the Sygn co-op, an invitation which he accepted, remaining, with their consent, however, apart from their rituals and practices.

Eventually Slade resumed teaching. He seldom left his room, except at night, or on his monthly visit to the University to hold his seminar.

The only people Slade really associated with now were a few of the other elderly eccentrics who gathered in the all-night cafeterias of Lux’s u-1, among whose crabbed and, more often than not, complaining conversations, he would, from time to time, enter a comment. Most of these men and women never knew he was, not a bottom, nonrefusable credit-slotter like themselves, but one of the most respected minds in the Solar System.

Most of them died not knowing—among the five million.

IV

In issues six and seven/eight of
Foundation,
we published the extant fragment of
Shadows,
the first of the three Harbin-Y Lectures Ashima Slade was to deliver on the modular calculus—and our subscription order, never particularly large, tripled. This popular (if a jump from five to fifteen thousand can be taken as an emblem of popularity) interest has prompted the commentary in the issue at hand. A difficulty with
Shadows,
besides its incompleteness, is that Slade chose to present his ideas not as a continuous argument, but rather as a series of separate, numbered notes, each more or less a complete idea—the whole a galaxy of ideas that interrelate and interilluminate each other, not necessarily in linear form. Consider, however, these three statements from the last dozen notes Slade delivered: 42) There is no entrance to contemporary philosophical thought save at the twin gates of madness and obsession.

45) The problem of the modular calculus, again, is: How can one relational system model another?

This breaks down into two questions: (One) What must pass from system-B to system-A for us (system-C) to be able to say that system-A now contains some model of system-B? (Two) Granted the proper passage, what must the internal structure of system-A be for us (or it) to say it contains any model of system-B?

49) There is no class, race, nationality, or sex that it does not help to be only half. While none of these statements offers much difficulty in itself, it is still reasonable to ask what the three are domg in the same “galaxy.” A sympathetic critic
might
answer that together they suggest the range of Slade’s concerns. An unsympathetic one could hold that they
only
suggest; they certainly do
not

demonstrate; the fragmentary nature of the presentation precludes real profundity; to be significantly meaningful, the concerns should have been presented more deeply and with greater focus: At best, we have only a few, more or less interesting aphorisms. A third critic might simply dismiss many of the notes as examples of Slade’s notorious eccentricity and suggest we concern ourselves only with those notes, if any, that discuss the modular process head-on.

Our purpose in this article, however, is to explicate, not judge. And certainly the three threads from which the collection of remarks are braided, as these three notes suggest, are the psychological, the logical, and the political.

Slade took the title for his first lecture,
Shadows,
from a nonfiction piece written in the twentieth century by a writer of light, popular fictions; it employed the same galactic presentation and the term

“modular calculus” appears (once) in it. There is little resemblance beyond that, however, and it would be a grave mistake to take this older piece as a model for Slade’s. Once Slade paraphrases it, in his note seventeen, “... I distrust separating facts too far from the landscape that produced them ...”; but for Slade the concept of
landscape
is far more political than it was for the author of the older work. Consider Slade’s thirty-first note: “Our society in the Satellites extends to its Earth and Mars emigrants, at the same time it extends instruction on how to conform, the materials with which to destroy themselves, both psychologically and physically—all under the same label: Freedom. To the extent they will not conform to our ways, there is a subtle swing: the materials of instruction are pulled further away and the materials of destruction are pushed correspondingly closer. Since the ways of instruction and the ways of destruction are
not
the same, but only subtly and secretly tied by language, we have simply, here, over-determined yet another way for the rest of us to remain oblivious to other peoples’ pain. In a net of tiny worlds
like
ours, that professes an ideal of the primacy of the subjective reality of all its citizens, this is an appalling political crime. And, in this appalling war, we may well be destroyed for it, if not by it.”

Though Slade’s major concern was logic, and his major contributions were made through the explorations of the micro-theater of single logical connections, Slade valued the role of Philosopher as Social Critic. How do the two concerns, politics and logic, fit together? Because the lecture is incomplete, we have no real way to know if Slade would have given us some statement on his concept of the relation between the two. Perhaps, however, his idea of the relation is suggested by the warning he gives in note nine of the lecture:

Suppose we have a mold that produces faulty bricks, and the flaw in single bricks can be modeled with the words
tends to crumble on the left;
if we then build a wall with these flawed bricks, that wall may or may not be flawed; also, the flaw may or may not be modelable with the words
tends to crumble
on the left;
but even if it is, it is still not the
same
flaw as the flaw in any given brick; or the flaw in the mold. Keeping all these states clear and unentailed, despite the accidental redundancies of the language we can use to talk about them with, is the way out of most antinomies.

What Slade is suggesting, besides what he has to say of antinomies, is that even if we have discovered the form of a micro-flaw common to every element of our thinking, to think we have necessarily discovered the form of a macro-flaw in our larger mental structures—say our politics—is simply to fall victim to a micro-flaw again. This is not to say that macro-flaws may
not
relate to the micro-flaws—they usually do—but it is a mistake to assume that relation is direct and necessarily subsumed by the same verbal model.

Slade, as we have said, is also concerned
with psychology
—specifically the psychology of the philosopher. How does he relate this to his logical explorations? There
is little
in the extant text of
Shadows,
beyond the rather flamboyant note forty-two already cited, to tell us—though I might refer the interested reader to Chapter VI, Section 2 of Volume One of
Summa Metalogiae,
where Slade discusses mistakes in reasoning, under which he includes many that “... another generation would have simply called insanity.”

Note twenty-two would seem to be the most accessible and detailed statement of Slade’s modular concerns:

What must pass from system-B to system-A for system-A to model system-B? Turn to animate organisms and the senses. First we have what we can call
material models.
With the senses of Smell, Taste, and Touch, actual material must pass from one system to the other, or at least come into direct physical interface with it, for system-A to begin to construct a model of the situation from which the material came. In the case of the first two, nerve clusters respond to the actual shape of molecules to distinguish information about them; in the last, variations of pressure generate the information into the nervous system as to whether a surface that we run our hand across is smooth or rough, hard or soft. Next we have what we can call
reflected-wave models.
Sight is the prime example: a comparatively chaotic and undifferentiated wave-front originates in some relational system-Z (say the filament of a light bulb when current passes through it, or the fissioning gases near the surface of the sun) and scoots through the universe until it hits and interacts with relational system-B (say a collection of molecules that make up a hammer, a nail) and is then sent out, by this interaction, in other directions. The nature of this interaction is such that the wavefront has not only had its direction changed—or rather been scattered in precise directions by the surface of the molecule collection—, many of the undifferentiated frequencies have been completely absorbed. Others have been shunted up or down. Other changes have occurred as well. The distortion of the newly directed wavefront is so great, in fact, we can just as easily call the distortion at this point organization. As an extremely narrow section of this distorted/organized wavefront passes through the cornea, iris, and lens of the eye—part of relational system-A—it is distorted even more. At the retina, it is stopped completely; but the pattern it has been distorted/organized into, on the retina, excites the rods and cones there to emit chemo-electric impulses that pass up the million-odd fibers of the optic nerve toward the brain. Now the pattern on the retina was not
in
the wavefront expanding through the air. It resulted from a fraction of a second of an arc of that front bent further in such a way that ninety-nine percent of it canceled itself out all together, in much the way troughs and peaks rippling over the surface of still water will, when they meet, cancel one another even as they pass through. But once inside the optic nerve, well before we get to the brain (the central organizer of relational system-A), we are not even dealing with the original wavefront anymore. New photons are involved. And the frequency of the impules in the optic nerve fibers is hugely below the frequency of the light that was our original front, however distorted; these new frequencies are not even related as simple multiples of the original frequencies. At this point, even before we reach the brain, we must ask ourselves again: What has actually passed from system-B to system-A? If we are honest, we must be prepared to answer, “Very little.” Indeed no
thing
has passed from B to A ... certainly not in the sense that things (Le., molecules) would have passed if system-A were smelling system-B rather than seeing it. The waves did not come
from
system-B, they simply bounced off it, transformed by the encounter. What we can say, with reflected-wave models, is that the original wavefront is at one order of randomness; the distortions system-B superimposes on that wavefront are at another order of randomness so much lower that when there is any change in that second order of randomness at all (say system-A and system-B

should move in relation to one another; or they might both move in relation to the wave source) the panoramic change in the order of randomness can uniquely preserve the changes at the lower order through a series of simplifying operations that the eye and optic nerve (and eventually the brain) of system-A impose. In other words, visual order is a record of the
changes
in random order (as opposed to
either
the order
or
the randomness) of a series of wavefronts. Or, to become slightly metaphorical, all order is at least the fourth or fifth derivative of chaos. Now a third type of model can be called a
generated-wave model.
Sound is our primary example. Here we are also working with wavefronts, but these wavefronts have their origin
within
system-B, the system that system-A is attempting to model, and bear their distortion/organization with them from their inception. Notice: Once we pass the eardrum into the aural nerve, much less distortion occurs than, say, with light, once it has stimulated impulses in the optic nerve. The impulses in the aural nerve are pretty much the same frequency as the waves passing through the air. Still, it is the
changes
in the order that allow us to distinguish between, say, the three notes of a chord struck only for a second. In that second, what has been simplified into three singable pitches is in the realm of fifteen hunded bits of information. And it is the redundancy and the differences among those bits that give us, finally, a primary mental model (i.e., an experience) of, say, an A-minor triad. Even the single note A, sounded for a second, involves eight hundred and eighty changes of pressure on the eardrum. Two points should be made here: (One) When speaking of wavefront models, the only difference between distortion and organization—between noise and information—is the ability of the receiving system to interpret. In terms of clinical psychology, the answers to this first question of the modular calculus proliferate endlessly and become the psychology/physiology of perception. We can leave this question to the psychophysiologists with our next point: (Two) Within the human organism—indeed, within any animal nervous system—once the proper passage has occurred between system-B and system-A, be it material or waves (reflected or generated), and we are dealing with the information that has gotten through the surface of the system, so to speak (i.e., past the sense organs), and into the nervous system itself,
all
of it has been translated into the form of
generated-wave models.
In other words, sound is the
modular form
of
all
information
within
the nervous system itself, and that includes smell, taste, touch, and sight. The aesthetician Pater wrote: “All art aspires to the condition of music.” Yes, and so does everything else. But our answer to the first question of the modular calculus has altered the second question so that it begins to be quantifiable, or at least topological: What is the necessary structure of a series of generated wave models within system-A which will allow it to know/experience aspects of the system-B which first excited these waves, either by reflected waves, as generated waves, or with material?

Answers to this rephrased question, some of which Slade lists, with all the attendant symbols and terminology, fill the next six notes; presumably these and like notes form the bulk of the calculus. How he arrived at some of these solutions would, presumably, have been discussed in the two, undelivered lectures. Fortunately, Slade’s students from BPR-57-c have been able to fill in much here, as this is exactly what Slade had been wrestling with during the original work sessions for three years. Some of their papers will appear in future issues.