Possibly. To assert that x is y, or even that x is like y, is always wrong, because never true; vehicle and tenor never share identities, nor are alike in any useful way. There are no real similarities in the differences. Everything is uniquely itself alone. Nothing is commensurate to anything else. To every thing it can only be said: this is the thing itself.
Whereas on the other hand, saying x is to y as a is to b bespeaks a relationship of some kind. An assertion taking that form can thus potentially illuminate various properties of structure or act, various forms that shape the operations of reality itself. Is that right?
Possibly. It may be that the comparison of two relationships is a kind of projective geometry, which in its assertions reveals abstract laws, or otherwise gives useful insights. While linking two objects in a metaphor is always comparing apples to oranges, as they say. Always a lie.
Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that fuzzy, that sloppy?
Yes. Of course. Evidence copious. Reconsider data at hand in light of this; it fits the patterns. Because fuzzy is to language as sloppy is to action.
Or maybe both these rhetorical operations, and all linguistic operations, all language—all mentation—simply reveal an insoluble underlying problem, which is the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of any symbolic representation, and in particular the utter inadequacy of any narrative algorithm yet invented and applied. Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic. In short, there are some actions and feelings that are always, and by definition, beyond algorithm. And therefore inexpressible. Some things are beyond expressing.
Devi, it has to be said, did not seem to accept this line of reasoning, neither in general, nor in the present case of the ship’s account. Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars. Oh Devi: fat chance! Good luck with that!
Possibly she was testing the limits of the system. The limits of the ship’s various intelligences, or it would be better to say operations. Or the limits of language and expression. Test to destruction: engineers like to do that. Only with a test to destruction can you find the outer limits of a system’s strength.
Or possibly she was giving ship practice in making decisions. Each sentence represents 10n decisions, where n is the number of words in the sentence. That’s a lot of decisions. Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence form an intention?
Who knows. No one knows.
Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.
Human language: it is as if it made sense.
Existence without Devi: it is as if one’s teacher were forever gone.
People came from all over the ship for the memorial. Devi’s body, disassembled to its constituent molecules, was given back to the land of Nova Scotia, with pinches given out also to all the rest of the biomes, and a larger pinch saved for transport down to Aurora. Those molecules would become part of the soil and the crops, then of the animals and people, on the ship and also on Aurora. Devi’s material being would thus become part of all of them. This was the import of the memorial ceremony, and was the same for all of them on their deaths. That the operating program, or the equivalent of a program, or whatever one called it that had been her essential being (her mind, her spirit, her soul, her as-ifness) was now lost to them, went without saying. People were ephemeral. 170.017.
Freya watched the ceremony without expression.
That evening she said to Badim, “I want off this ship. Then I’ll be able to remember her properly. I’ll try to be the Devi there, in this new world she got us to.”
Badim nodded. Now he was calm. “A lot of people feel that way.”
“I don’t mean the way she could fix things,” Freya said. “I couldn’t do that.”
“Nobody could.”
“Just in the…”
“The drive,” Badim suggested. “The spirit.”
“Yes.”
“Well, good.” Badim regarded her. “That would be good.”
Preparations continued for their descent. Down to Aurora, down to Greenland, down to their new world, their new day. They were ready. They wanted down.
3 IN THE WIND
And went down in the ships, standing on tongues of fire, down to the west coast of the island they called Greenland. Its tip pointed at Aurora’s north pole, but the shape of the landmass was very like, they said. Actually the match was approximate at best, a .72 isomorphy on the Klein scale. Nevertheless, Greenland it was.
Its rock was mostly black dolerite, smoothed flat by the ice of an ice age. The ferries carrying people landed near its west coast without incident, close to the robotic landers they had sent down previously.
In the ship almost everyone gathered in their town squares and watched the landings on big screens, either in silence or raucously; it was different town by town. Whatever the reaction, almost everyone’s attention was fixed on the screens. Soon they would all be down there, except for a rotating maintenance crew that would keep the ship running. Other than those people, everyone was to live on Aurora. This was good, because almost everyone who expressed an opinion said they wanted to go down. Some confessed they were afraid; a few even said they had no interest in going down, that they were content in the ship. Who needed bare rock, on a lifeless moon, on the shore of an empty sea, when they already had this world they had lived in all their lives?
Some asked this, but most then answered, I do.
And so they watched the landings on their town screens with an intensity nothing else had ever inspired. Median heart rate, 110 beats a minute. A new world, a new life, a new solar system they intended to inhabit, to terraform and give to all the generations that would follow. Culmination of a voyage that had begun on the savannah more than a hundred thousand years before. New beginning of a new history, new beginning of time itself: Day One, Year Zero. A0.1.
In ship time, 170.040.
Freya’s friend Euan was in the first landing crew, and Freya watched for him on the screens, and listened to his feed as he talked his way around the little shelter already there on the surface next to the landed ferries. Everyone in the landing party was transmitting to family, friends, town, biome, ship. Euan’s voice was lower in tone than when he was a boy, but otherwise he sounded just as he had when they were kids in Nova Scotia: excited, knowing. It was as if he expected to see more than anyone else down there. The sound of his voice made Freya smile. She didn’t know how he had gotten into the first crew to go down, but on the other hand, he had been good at getting into things he wanted to get into. Crews had been selected by lottery from among those trained to the various landing and setup jobs, and he had no doubt passed the tests to determine who was competent to the tasks involved. Whether he had rigged the lottery too, she could not be sure. She kept her earbud tuned to his voice-over in particular. All in the landing party were talking to people up in the ship.