Much Ado About Everything

Books can affect us in various ways—laugh, cry, find out more about or reconsider some of our beliefs. I want to talk about There Is No Antimemetics Division, but my thoughts on it were set up by the book I read (purely by coincidence) just before it, The Tao of Physics. Both question how we see the world, what we call reality, the things we assume we don’t have to think about it because they just are. But are they?

Published in ’75, The Tao of Physics brought together concepts from high-energy/quantum physics with some from Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. The new physics broke apart the old model of proton neutron electron, first adding a panoply of subatomic particles, then those particles becoming probabilities. Then Werner Heisenberg throws in his uncertainty principle—you can know one of two prime factors but not both—and later we get the bootstrap principle saying the best we can have are rules  that only offer partial solutions—the best we can do for now. The search for Einstein’s unified field theory may never be solved, and, among some scientists, isn’t being looked for anymore. String theory is still around, and no one’s sure how many dimensions exist.

On the eastern religion side it boils down to everything is nothing/ nothing is everything.

“he who pursues learning will increase every day,
He who pursues Tao will decrease every day.”
Lao Tzu.

Consider enough contradictory beliefs and you’ll break or break through, or maybe breaking has nothing to do with it.

This and more as background to There is No Antimemetics Division. The central invention in this book, set in an alternative present time, are SCPs—Self-Censoring Properties. They don’t censor themselves as much as censor our perceptions and memories of them, as well as our memories of various stretches of time. No one knows where they came from, though it’s speculated at one point that they are expressions of parts of human nature and have always been among us. Some resonance to the way some powerful people try to deny/alter our memories. There is an apocalyptic, metaphorical tone throughout this book.

On the first page we meet an SCP that is a “self-keeping secret” or “anti-meme.” The Foundation has a complex where SCPs are kept in thick concrete, Farraday-caged, airlocked rooms. Folks working in the foundation take drugs that protect them and their memories from exposure to SCPs. Unprotected exposure to SCP’s can melt flesh and more.

ome SCPs are a little more benign—like potentially dangerous pets, you just need to keep them fed, not with kibbles or raw meat but information and media. Towards the end of the book an SCP wipes out most of the world’s human population.

The most resonant line from this books is “there is time missing from our world.” Think of all nobody knows. If there’s no evidence or memory, did something happen? And I don’t just mean whether a tree falls or not but entire ‘historic’ civilizations. And what is time? Can it stand still, or stand at all? Can space or time exist without each other?

A few days ago while reading The Tao of Physics, before I started Amtimememtics, I thought, considering the big bang theory, millions of years, stars whose light hasn’t had enough time to get to us, that our universe couldn’t possibly exist. If it started with the big bang who started the big bang? Who dug the first black hole?

The eastern religions in Tao of Physics say the world is all our perceptions, but I’m not clear whether they say—and the 3 religions here are not always consistent with each other, as well as having evolved over millennia—whether our world actually exists or not. A book I came across a year or three ago, but didn’t get far into, proposes that without beings to perceive the universe, it wouldn’t exist. But where do those beings come from? While the reality one knows is based on perception and experience, one needs to remember those experiences to continue processing them.

And theories/ideas about each of us being in our perceptual microverses, so that two people can experience/witness the same thing, describe two different experiences, and both be right. Seems clear that Heisenberg’s principle that you can know either a or b needs a larger alphabet.

But back to the Antimemetics book. I don’t see what you’re reading here as book review as much as an idea exploration. Maybe the library shouldn’t have classified it as science fiction. Maybe in these days of non-binary genres, it’s a speculative science book taking the form of a novel.

Posted as a wiki in 2008, then in 2015-202, and published as a book in 2021 before the wide spread of AI, Antimemetics is fairly binary—there’s the world we know and what the SCPs destroy. Perhaps the SCPs have their world, are like black gateways to other universes, whose science could be totally unamicable to ours [my speculation].

The source religious texts quoted in T of P were written way before electricity, many of them before Christ.  A recurring theme is that all is illusion. Today, with wide-spread AI, much of what is seen on social media is illusion, totally fabricated. There are probably labs where AI has already taken three-dimensional form, like some of the SCPs in anti-meme. Maybe the universe began when the tiniest bit of nothing split into a zero and a one.

Maybe I’m being overly abstract here. I admit that I’m both abstract and scientific, trying to make sense of, find truth. Taking the Einsteinian speculation that with a curved universe if you keep going in the same direction you’ll come back to where you started—every straight line is a circle. So are most binaries. Thus there are place where abstraction/non-physical reality and science/physical reality meet. Maybe it’s my bookshelf, where The Tao of Physics and There Is No Antimemetics Division sit side by side.

Back to being a book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division is not superbly written. Its value is not in the writing, but the ideas and possibilities, and how those inspire more thinking, observations and re-observations of the world around us.

But there are plenty of fie lines here, like these:

“People born with extra organs that no one can see.”

“Passive black holes of information, active predatory infovores, unrememberable worms that that covered the human skin like dust mites”

Towards the end of the book, as perhaps the last remaining character alive is trying to find an answer: “It’s not clear whether the Sun or the Moon still exist, or any celestial object at all other than the red-black eye socket at the horizon. The eye never moves.”

Wake up, even if you think you’re not asleep. Look out the window. Or is that a screen?