[FRIAM] Double Master Function (was Re: bad covid story)

[Steve Smith]

I like the refinement you are gesturing at here, if I'm following.  I 
think that is what Zelazny did with his Amber stuff and the ideation of 
this whole (infinite?) milieu of  parallel worlds being held in the 
tension of Logos and Chaos.

I haven't read any of this work in decades so I expect my understanding 
of all that would be different today, but at the time I think I held 
that as the spectrum/gradient of entropy between the low-information of 
perfect order and low information of random order with "the interesting 
stuff" happening somewhere in between.   The specific quantization of  
coherent "worlds" that individuals can participate in more or less in 
the way *we* experience our world (or think we do?) is fascinating to 
me. There is a variant of the anthropic principle at-work here perhaps?

What you say about alternate logics is more obvious in it's coherent 
quantization...   and the world of whack-a-doodle "alternative facts" is 
obviously seductive to those who indulge in it, but the requirement of 
internal consistency seems to be what yields quantization or at least 
concentrations of clusters of factoids (like virtual particles?)?


On 2/4/22 8:03 AM, glen wrote:
> We had an argument about absurdist humor at the salon the other night. 
> I argued that it was akin to the (false) distinction I learned about 
> fiction awhile back, that there are 2 kinds: 1) ordinary people in 
> weird context or 2) ordinary context with weird people. My stance was 
> that absurdist humor was a form of (1). The Wikipedia page backs me a 
> bit, I guess, in the cherry-picked claim that it's "predicated on 
> deliberate violations of causal reasoning". But my principle adversary 
> proposed that the pet store skit, Cleese and the context were ordinary 
> but Palin was weird. My counter was that Palin and Cleese were 
> ordinary, two typically self-defensive arguers in a ridiculous 
> context. (The gods know this particular dude has argued some 
> ridiculous stances like the ambiguity of the word "energetics" in an 
> ecological context ... so he should recognize when entrenched people 
> get stuck arguing emphatically about the meanings of words.)
>
> I think one of the reasons I *want* to believe in parallel worlds and 
> a fully embellished conception of counterfactuals is *because* of my 
> preference for stories with such variation in what can be tweaked and 
> then iterated forward to watch the consequences. It's also why I'm 
> gobsmacked by alternative logics, despite my incompetence therein. 
> What we call "absurd" almost never really feels absurd to me. It's 
> fine! Just play along.
>
> On 2/3/22 13:15, Steve Smith wrote:
>> Stephen C Gould, the difference between SF and Fantasy is that in SF, 
>> one singular known fact is changed (faster than light travel, time 
>> travel, wormhole, infinite cheap energy, etc.) and everything else 
>> ensues from that, while in Fantasy, *everything* is up for grabs 
>> (e.g. Magic) and everything ensues from that!
>>
>> Zelazny's Amber-schtick seems to follow *somewhat* from that idea...  
>> in some sense, it seems as if everything Magical he invoked was 
>> somehow a natural consequence of the schmear of physical laws across 
>> the schmear of parallel worlds suspended between the antipodes of 
>> Logos and Chaos (my interpretation of his deal)...
>