2312

Is isomorphic the same as consilient? The “standard model” in physics would hope and expect to be the foundation of all the disciplines, all consilient with its fundamental findings. Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so?

Is the totality simply praxis, meaning what we do with ourselves and our world? Is there no such thing as totality, but only convergence? Convergence of all our fields of thought into human actions?

At the time of our study, these issues were very confused, and different disciplines took differing attitudes. Some fields focused on strictly human problems. This limited focus was deliberate, a statement about meaning that said that human life should be the subject of study for human beings until we reach a point where we are all well enough we can afford to think about other things.

Some in physics and other disciplines replied to this idea by asserting that many extrahuman realms have decisive effects on the achievement of human justice, so the strongest humanism would arise from a focus including physics, biology, and cosmology, also consciousness science. Justice would be considered as partly a consciousness state, and partly a particular physical or ecological state among symbiotic organisms.

Those holding the anthropocentric view argued that if focusing on the extrahuman realm could have helped to achieve justice among humans, it would have already. Because humans had been extremely powerful for centuries, and yet justice had not arrived.

Physics advocates riposted with the assertion that this failure had happened only because the larger physical reality was still being excluded from the project of justice.

These mirror arguments rebounded back and forth for a long time, not just in the Dithering but all the way into the Balkanization and the fateful year 2312. And so humanity hung suspended in the face of its unenacted project. They knew but they didn’t act. The reader may scoff at them; but it takes courage to act, and perseverance too. Indeed if the reader’s own time is still imperfect, though it be ever so long after the time described here, the author would not be surprised to hear it.

SWAN IN THE VULCANOIDS

Terminator’s council had finally chosen the new Lion of Mercury, an old friend of Alex and Mqaret’s named Kris. Soon after being installed, Kris asked Swan to join a trip being organized to the Vulcanoids; Kris wanted to reaffirm the agreement Alex had made with the Vulcanoids to broker their light transmission to the outer planets. “It was another one of Alex’s verbal deals,” Kris said with a frown, “and since she died, and even more after the city burned, we’ve seen signs that the Vulcanoids are going upsystem behind our backs. It’s made some of us wonder-do you know if Interplan is investigating the Vulcanoids as possible suspects in the attack on Terminator?”

“I don’t think they are.”

Swan didn’t really want to go, or think about Genette’s ongoing investigation, as she was now absorbed in planting the redesigned park. But it would be a short trip, and the work would still be going on when she returned. So she packed her bag and stepped off with Kris and some aides onto the platform nearest Ustad Isa Crater, where there was a new railgun launch complex throwing ships downsystem.