Words&Dirt

“‘No one thought it would ever be possible to cross from one universe to another.  That would violate fundamental laws, we thought.  Well, we were wrong; we learned to see the world up there.  If light can cross, so can we.  And we had to learn to see it, Lyra, just as you learned to use the alethiometer.

‘Now that world, and every other universe, came about as a result of possibility.  Take the example of tossing a coin: it can come down heads or tails, and we don’t know before it lands which way it’s going to fall.  If it comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed.  Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.

‘But on another world, it does come down tails.  And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. I’m using the example of tossing a coin to make it clearer.  In fact, these possibility collapses happen at the level of elementary particles, but they happen in just the same way: one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist.  Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen.

‘And I’m going to that world beyond the Aurora,’ he said, ‘because I think that’s where all the Dust in this universe comes from.  You saw those slides I showed the Scholars in the retiring room.  You saw Dust pouring into this world from the Aurora.  You’ve seen that city yourself.  If light can cross the barrier between the universes, if Dust can, if we can see that city, then we can build a bridge and cross.  It needs a phenomenal burst of energy.  But I can do it.  Somewhere out there is the origin of all the Dust, all the death, the sin, the misery, the destructiveness of the world.  Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it.  That’s original sin.  And I’m going to destroy it.  Death is going to die.’

‘Is that why they put you here?’

‘Yes.  They are terrified.  And with good reason.’”

––The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, loc. 5272-87

“It’s easy for us humans, safe inside our well-functioning minds, to be jaded about the mundane activities of cognition and to attend instead to the extraordinary and the lurid.  But the science of mind begins with a recognition that ordinary mental activities––seeing, hearing, remembering, moving, planning, reasoning, speaking––require our brains to solve fractious engineering problems.  Despite the immense hazard and cost of manned space flight, most plans for planetary exploration still envision blasting people into the solar system.  Partly it’s because of the drama of following an intrepid astronaut in exploring strange new worlds rather than a silicon chip, but mainly it’s because no foreseeable robot can match an ordinary person’s ability to recognize unexpected objects and situations, decide what to do about them, and manipulate things in unanticipated ways, all while exchanging information with humans back home.  Understanding how these faculties of mind work is a frontier of modern science.

Among these magnificent faculties, pride of place must go to language––ubiquitous across the species, unique in the animal kingdom, inextricable from social life and from the mastery of civilization and technology, devastating when lost or impaired.”

––The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker, pg. 27-8