Standard Wolfean riddle

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 12 Aug 2010, 20:08 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (DAVID STOCKHOFF)
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:08:07 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Standard Wolfean  riddle
In-Reply-To: <4C645192.1010409 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <466038.13612.qm at web84107.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Below.

--- On Thu, 8/12/10, Ant?nio Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Ant?nio Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Standard Wolfean  riddle
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Thursday, August 12, 2010, 3:54 PM

DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:>
> Jeff mentioned (IIRC) that for narrative reasons Yesod's being
> before Severian was born in Briah doesn't mean that Yesod is before
> Briah. That's obviously true but it's not mechanically helpful in
> terms of how the multiverses are constructed.

The concepts of before and after are meaningless across universes. Time
is a property of each universe, like space. Any other universe isn't in Briah's future any more than it is behind or west or south of it. This much is axiomatic physics, not something someone like Wolfe would not understand or leave aside.

---Exactly. Apheta said Severian's friends were yet unborn. Why?

> Possibly. Or, depending on exactly how the universes relate, maybe
> the Conciliator is in one possible future, along with Master Ash and
> so on with other sub-possibilities, and the Hieromakers are in
> another.

>From the Yesod perspective, there is no future nor past Briah. Briah, a
4-dimensional universe, is somehow a blob open to the Hiero* for observation and travel to and fro. But not necessarily all of Briah, and that means time and space.

>From such a perspective there aren't possible futures in Briah, there's
only Briah from east to west, north to south, back to forth, start to end.

---Right.

If you're in an unfamiliar building, you don't know what rooms and
corridors lie ahead. You can say there are 'possible' rooms and
corridors ahead. It doesn't mean the possible rooms are all really
possible. It just means you don't know them. Ditto for time. You really need multiple universes to have alternate futures, not a multiple-possibility one.

---Um, somebody better explain that to Wolfe before he makes this mistake again!

As I basically, said, if we already have multiple universes, they may branch. They may be branching universes. Wolfe proposes such branches. There must be other branches. They may not be important, but they may be important.

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