Standard Wolfean riddle

David Stockhoff · 13 Aug 2010, 00:52 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:52:00 -0400
Subject: (urth) Standard Wolfean  riddle
In-Reply-To: <4C6477CA.90400 at gmail.com>
References: <466038.13612.qm at web84107.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<4C6477CA.90400 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C649730.1070406 at verizon.net>

That's a good question. All I can do is point to Ash and the Green Man, 
who clearly were born in futures far ahead of Severian's. Since their 
futures are presumably incompatible, they represent a branching.

As for Yesod being before Briah, I don't think so. I understand Yesod to 
be "higher" than Briah; but what that means is not entirely clear. I 
generally agree with Roy's position that this means exactly what it 
seems to mean: a higher plane with no intersection with Briah. Madregot 
or FTL is needed to bridge them.

By saying she was in a time before the birth of Severian, Apheta seems 
to contradict this scheme. It needs to be explained away.

Ant?nio Marques wrote:
> DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
>> Below.
>
> It would be really nice if you'd get an e-mail client that understood 
> quoting. (This is not a jab; I really think the world would be a 
> better place if everyone followed the perfectly simple and 
> understandable old standard.)
>
>> --- 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?
>
> Doesn't really have to mean anything. Are you suggesting Yesod is the 
> same universe as Briah?
> (I think someone's suggesting that Yesod and Briah 'overlap in time' 
> or something like that. That's just not tenable.)
>
>>      > 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.
>
> Ok, so now explain to us what a branching universe is. This is a 
> rhetorical demand, but an honest one.
>
>
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