I like the refinement you are gesturing at here, if I'm following. I
think that is what Zelazny did with his Amber stuff and the ideation of
this whole (infinite?) milieu of parallel worlds being held in the
tension of Logos and Chaos.
I haven't read any of this work in decades so I expect my understanding
of all that would be different today, but at the time I think I held
that as the spectrum/gradient of entropy between the low-information of
perfect order and low information of random order with "the interesting
stuff" happening somewhere in between. The specific quantization of
coherent "worlds" that individuals can participate in more or less in
the way *we* experience our world (or think we do?) is fascinating to
me. There is a variant of the anthropic principle at-work here perhaps?
What you say about alternate logics is more obvious in it's coherent
quantization... and the world of whack-a-doodle "alternative facts" is
obviously seductive to those who indulge in it, but the requirement of
internal consistency seems to be what yields quantization or at least
concentrations of clusters of factoids (like virtual particles?)?
On 2/4/22 8:03 AM, glen wrote:
We had an argument about absurdist humor at the salon the other night.
I argued that it was akin to the (false) distinction I learned about
fiction awhile back, that there are 2 kinds: 1) ordinary people in
weird context or 2) ordinary context with weird people. My stance was
that absurdist humor was a form of (1). The Wikipedia page backs me a
bit, I guess, in the cherry-picked claim that it's "predicated on
deliberate violations of causal reasoning". But my principle adversary
proposed that the pet store skit, Cleese and the context were ordinary
but Palin was weird. My counter was that Palin and Cleese were
ordinary, two typically self-defensive arguers in a ridiculous
context. (The gods know this particular dude has argued some
ridiculous stances like the ambiguity of the word "energetics" in an
ecological context ... so he should recognize when entrenched people
get stuck arguing emphatically about the meanings of words.)
I think one of the reasons I *want* to believe in parallel worlds and
a fully embellished conception of counterfactuals is *because* of my
preference for stories with such variation in what can be tweaked and
then iterated forward to watch the consequences. It's also why I'm
gobsmacked by alternative logics, despite my incompetence therein.
What we call "absurd" almost never really feels absurd to me. It's
fine! Just play along.
On 2/3/22 13:15, Steve Smith wrote:
Stephen C Gould, the difference between SF and Fantasy is that in SF,
one singular known fact is changed (faster than light travel, time
travel, wormhole, infinite cheap energy, etc.) and everything else
ensues from that, while in Fantasy, *everything* is up for grabs
(e.g. Magic) and everything ensues from that!
Zelazny's Amber-schtick seems to follow *somewhat* from that idea...
in some sense, it seems as if everything Magical he invoked was
somehow a natural consequence of the schmear of physical laws across
the schmear of parallel worlds suspended between the antipodes of
Logos and Chaos (my interpretation of his deal)...
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