November 12, 2005
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Glory Season
“…his eyes ranged the Consul’s books disposed quite neatly… on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America,
there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather
bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical
books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection….”– Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Chapter VI
“… when Saul does reach for a slim leather-bound volume Eliza cannot
help but feel that something momentous is about to happen. There
is care in the way he carries the book on the short journey from its
shelf, as if it were constructed not of leather and parchment but of
flesh and blood….
“Otzar Eden HaGanuz,” Saul says. “The Hidden Eden.
In this book, Abulafia describes the process of permutation…. Once
you have mastered it, you will have mastered words, and once you have
mastered words, you will be ready to receive shefa.”“In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God.”
– The Gameplayers of Zan, a novel featuring games based on cellular automata
“Regarding cellular automata, I’m trying to think in what SF books
I’ve seen them mentioned. Off the top of my head, only three come to
mind:The Gameplayers of Zan M.A. Foster
Permutation City Greg Egan
Glory Season David Brin”– Jonathan L. Cunningham, Usenet
“If all that ‘matters’
are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to
be any important difference between the actual and the possible.
(Even if you aren’t a mathematical Platonist, you can always find
some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern.
In Permutation City this is called the ‘logic of the dust’ theory.)….
… Paul Durham is convinced by the ‘logic of the dust’ theory mentioned
above, and plans to run, just for a few minutes, a complex cellular
automaton (Permutation City) started in a ‘Garden of Eden’
configuration — one which isn’t reachable from any other, and
which therefore must have been the starting point of a simulation…. I didn’t understand the need for this elaborate
set-up, but I guess it makes for a better story than ‘well, all
possible worlds exist, and I’m going to tell you about one of them.’”– Danny Yee, review of Permutation City
“Y’know, I never imagined the competition version involved so many tricky permutations.”
– David Brin, Glory Season, 1994 Spectra paperback, p. 408
Related material:
Figure 2“… matter is consciousness expressed in the intermixing of force and form, but so heavily structured and
constrained by form that its behaviour becomes describable using the regular and simple laws of
physics. This is shown in Figure 2.
The glyph in Figure 2 is the basis for a kabbalistic
diagram called the Etz Chaiim, or Tree of Life. The first principle of
being or consciousness is called Keter, which means Crown. The raw
energy of consciousness is called Chokhmah or Wisdom, and the capacity
to give form to the energy of consciousness is called Binah, which is sometimes translated
as Understanding, and sometimes as Intelligence. The outcome of the
interaction of force and form, the physical world, is called Malkhut or
Kingdom. This is shown… in Figure 3.”Figure 3“This quaternary is a Kabbalistic representation of
God-the-Knowable, in the sense that it the most abstract
representation of God we are capable of comprehending….
God-the-Knowable has four aspects, two male and two
female: Keter and Chokhmah are both represented as male, and Binah and
Malkhut are represented as female. One of the titles of Chokhmah is
Abba, which means Father, and one of the titles of Binah is Imma, which
means
Mother, so you can think of Chokhmah as God-the-Father, and Binah as God-the-Mother. Malkhut
is the daughter, the female spirit of God-as-Matter, and it would not
be wildly wrong to think of her as Mother Earth. And what of
God-the-Son? Is there also a God-the-Son in Kabbalah? There is….”– A Depth of Beginning: Notes on Kabbalah by Colin Low (pdf)
See also
Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures,
Mathematics and Narrative,
Deep Game,
and the previous entry.
