Nihil Obstat II

This is part of a loose series about Dubito, which starts here. The immediately preceding installment is Nihil Obstat.

“Dante’s imagination failed”, Dubito said one late summer afternoon, “because he could only conceive of hell as a series of ever deeper circles, thus failing to accommodate souls like yours.” This was his way of letting me know he suspected me of committing some intellectual sin. Now, in his worldview I knew this to comprise a fairly narrow taxonomy: either I said something that was not falsifiable, or fallacious, or argued after the fact, inconsistent with evidence, or unparsimonious. He sometimes called it the Seven Sins, unbothered by the fact that they were only five in number.

He stood still, looking at the garden through the window, in the light of the fading day. His hands folded behind his back, holding his glass of Scotch. We had been drinking and engaging in one of our more frivolous games: redesigning and deepening the circles of Hell to accommodate people who play the accordion, or talk during movies. I was sitting on the floor, with my back against the cool wall, and he was occupying his usual bench. Then some internal mechanism made him stand up and step towards the window in order to tell me that Dante, once of the most imaginative minds in history, was not imaginative enough.

This is a conversation that we had had since the dawn of mankind. When we talked about what ancient man would have known, he belittled them for their willingness to ascribe a voluntary animus to mere natural phenomena. I in return reminded him that evidence was sustained by the framework of knowledge one is equipped with, and which our Cro-Magnon ancestors possessed little of. “You would have me be consistent to the point of perfection in my arguments” I’d retort. “But you would condemn primitive men for having too little to make consistent for themselves…” Of mediaeval superstition he would have none, but he would relent when reminded that mankind, at that time, had forgotten even Anaximander and Anaxagoras.

“Take, for instance, your Obstats.” He would finally get around to. His assaults on my thinking were preambled with all the prior art, as if required by a Thesis committee to survey the field before advancing it. One hour and fifteen minutes is what it took for him to say “Hey, that thing you said about the Obstats the other day…”

He must have been thinking about it for 6 weeks, which is when we had that conversation, and the topic must have been ringing inside his head like a Christmas carol in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church.

---

I do not know if the room is real, in the sense that a place can be real without existing, the way a proof is real before anyone writes it down. But I have pictured it so many times, over so many years, that it has accreted its own permanence: circular, high-domed, lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves that recede past where the light reaches. At its center stands a mechanism, brass and glass, gently turning, for no purpose I have ever been able to determine except its own continuation.

If it is not real, why do I always picture it the exact same way? It is not like I painted it in my head one bit at a time, the mechanism first, perhaps, then the bookshelves, then the rest of the details. No, the room has always been the same, including the suspicion that the number of the books contained within it is infinite — with all that implies. And why the mechanism? Is it a distant echo of a library in some mediaeval monastery, one with an Orrery among its workbenches?

He is there for six weeks, in whatever manner six weeks passes for a man who does not, so far as I can tell, sleep in any sense I recognize. He walks the railed gallery around the mechanism, hands behind his back, and somewhere on lap four thousand he stops in front of a shelf that was not, I think, there before, and takes down a book with my handwriting on the spine, though I never gave him one.

He reads it the way he reads everything: once, completely, without appearing to turn a page. Falsifiable? He tests it against a counterfactual world in which the box gets checked and nothing happens, and finds that in my telling, nothing ever does — which is either a fatal flaw or the entire point, and he cannot yet tell which. Parsimonious? No, not remotely, and he makes a note of that the way you’d note a stain on a rug you intend to raise later. Consistent with the evidence? Here he lingers longest, because the evidence, such as it is, is a room full of men nodding the nod that means nothing will be done, and he has, by now, met enough of those men to suspect I am onto something I do not yet have the tools to prove.

He puts the book back exactly where he found it, not quite convinced, which is the only way he ever begins.

---

“Fine.” I said, before he could launch. “But we have to agree on one thing before we go on.” He then looked at me a bit dejected.

“That I have to allow for gaps?”

“Yes.” In many conversations in the past we had argued, and settled, that scientific truths are not the only form of truth. Any pocket of thought in which a truth, however unscientific, could reside, made such a truth allowable (if not, perhaps, established).

He thus braced himself, physically and mentally. He sat down on the edge of my bed, back straight, arms down by the outside of his thighs. He would probably stay in that position for hours. He took a deep breath, and laid down his first question.

“What is the nature of these Obstati?”

This was an opening salvo, not a timid question. Querying the nature of a thing was the prelude to questioning thing. He was telling me “These Obstats of yours are bullshit. Really? Incorporeal beings that feed on closure and can only lean into your thoughts?”

The shadow of the pine tree in the garden was establishing the locus of the Sun’s orbit against his face, tracing a precise arc patiently, with the mastery of billions of years of practice. One day the Sun will be gone too, like everything else.

He was expecting me to either wave hands, or come to some analogy that could disguise itself for the real thing… or to come to some accommodation that allowed me to hide the Obstat behind a thin pocket of philosophical plausibility. He was not expecting what came next.

“Well. I suspect that time is a biological process, that what we perceive as the now is a reality that has just been produced biologically, and that the moment it becomes past it gets consumed.” His face looked like a slot machine right when you pull the lever down. “I think the Obstats are what happens to the things that consume the present when they get too close to it, and kind of get run over by existence, and become trapped in it.”

The look of unbelief in his face told me that he had been too quick in understanding what I was saying; I had hoped to buy me a few minutes of confusion and questions, setting him on the back foot. The only way to get ahead of Dubito was to give him the impression that you had thought about something more than he had, he then would shut up and listen.

“I was asking you to minimize the nonsense I perceived in your statements, not to multiply it!”

“Alas, we are going to have to walk through things quickly, and you are going to have to give me leave to merely sketch the scaffolding of my thoughts, or we would run out of time before the heat death of the universe to explain things”

Compromise is something that came much quicker to him than people thought it would. “Granted” he said, nodding once.

“First you have to grant me that our senses are severely limited, in that the range of things we can sense, versus the extent to which there are sensible things is very small.”

“Explain.” That was our established shorthand for “With you so far, but give me more detail.”

“For instance, we know the electromagnetic spectrum to exist in a vast range of frequencies, but we can only perceive a small range of frequencies in that spectrum. Furthermore, it is a range of frequencies that happens to be particularly well suited to our existence…”

“That you are going to defend somewhat.”

“Well, we are diurnal beings, and our vision is adjusted to daytime… it would take very little to be able to sense, say, the near IR frequencies, but it turns out we are asleep for most of that.”

“Mmmkay”

“We are social beings that can recognize faces instantaneously, with a sense of taste that makes poisons and toxins distasteful. Our senses are driven by our biological needs.”

“You mean that evolution made it so that…”

“Yeah, yeah, all that…”

“So what other things do we sense in a completely limited fashion?”

He was not prepared for a profound-ish question right at that moment, but Dubito was nothing if not quick.

“We were talking time, so you are thinking time, and probably space… you are thinking curved dimensions and things hidden in them!!!”

He turned his face to me when he said this, a sure sign of excitement. For me, the feeling was one of a tiredness sinking onto itself; of weight pulling down more weight with it. I had never spoken of any of these ideas to anybody, ideas that had been growing in my head for decades, half a lifetime, fed in darkness through books, and chats, and sleepless nights. Thoughts arrived at through months and months of work, evolution, consideration. Different currents swirling, colliding, building strength or petering out, but years in the making.

And Dubito had caught up in minutes.

At moments like this I felt as if he was an actor who, despite knowing things as a person, had a role to play, and his character did not know the things that he did. Especially when, as he did now, he appeared to be mentally sorting the truths of his role from the truths of his self. “Would my character know this? How would he react to this question?” There was an air of sudden tension, like when you know a secret and you don’t want to let it out by accident.

“Yes, I have been thinking about how our sensory limitations impose a limit on our Mathematics, and therefore in our Physics…”

“Oh,” he said, then much to my pleasure: “I did not see that coming…” I let out a smile. “… I thought you were going to claim that the Obstat hid in dimensions that are curved into themselves, and therefore we could not sense them.”

“Well, if string theory ever turns out to be true, er, to be validated, we’ll be contending with more dimensions than the four we currently embrace, but the Obstat do not need string theory.”

“Oh.” He sounded a bit crushed. “So tell me about Math, and our sensorium.”

“Well, you are probably aware that our senses have been a central problem in our philosophy.”

I often imagined him wandering inside a circular room lined with bookshelves, at the center of which stood some kind of monstrous mechanical device. I always assumed that a large portion of those bookshelves was devoted to philosophy.

“True.” He said, making it sound like “Amen.”

“On one hand, you have the problem of our solipsistic nature: the only thing we seem to be sure of is ourselves; anything else can just be a figment of our imagination. Heck, we cannot even discern whether we are currently dreaming or not.”

“On the other hand, every bit of information we have, we gather through our senses.” I saw him assent out of the corner of my eye. “And is thus limited by them: vision, sound, touch, limited in range and sensitivity, derived only to serve as a result of an evolutionary process. We’d like to give this process purpose, even agency, and intent, but the truth is evolution is after the fact. Mutations happen, and some stick around. That is the opposite of purpose: it is random luck.”

I knew from previous conversations that he also objected to the characterization of evolution as a magical biological willpower with which, say, an ape could discern the biological environment and will a genetic change to their whole species consequently.

“The senses being so narrow, and aleatory, begs the question as to whether they can be the basis of an accurate understanding of some objective reality, were it to exist.”

He was looking at me now, the garden forgotten. He knew something was coming.

“So why would we be so arrogant as to think that, for instance, Mathematics is something that has an existence outside of our brains? Or that the description of reality that they provide is, in any way, but the crudest of distorted reflections of the world that’s out there?”

One of our first, and longest running conversations had been on the nature of Mathematics, whether mathematical truths were invented, or discovered. I had laid down my position on the subject, on my way to something else.

“For that matter, why would we be tempted to claim that the dimensions that we perceive are in any way meaningfully a feature of a reality external to us? What we discovered at the beginning of the 20th century was that outside of our native spatial scale, in the supremely large and minutely small, our intuition completely broke down.” By now my Scotch was tepid and watery, so I gulped it and put my glass down. “Perhaps dimensions are not the scaffolding whereupon matter is laid on, but something else entirely.”

He was still facing my direction, but had leaned against the window, and was looking at the opposite end of the room, where the platform bed was, and beyond.

“Our senses have ultimately served us biologically: to detect chemical gradients and guide us to safety, to food. To detect enemies, mates, to read the terrain, to plan, to form herds and tribes and political parties. I contend that our sensorium is exclusively devoted to detect biologically relevant phenomena, and as such dimensions, including time, are just the result of biological phenomena.”

“Time is just the place in which we reside in the deeper biological cauldron that is ultimate reality. Our sense of now is just the metabolic output of a biome I’ll call the Chronogens, which in essence represent the immediate future. The immediate past are the Chronophages, which consume the output of the Chronogens. Our existence relies on the drawing of energy from Chronogen poop, before it gets consumed. Time is our constant repositioning of ourselves in that thin boundary, so as not to be eaten by the Chronophages, and whatever horrible fate were we to meet if we stumbled into what we think is our future.”

“It is not that time is necessarily distinct to the Chronons, but it represents some boundary the crossing of which has consequences for all of us, and them. The Obstat are the Chronophages that stumble onto our present. Perhaps there is such a thing as the Adiuvats, which are the Chronogens that fall into our present, and nudge us into inspired action.”

I thought, but did not say, that this made Governance Man something closer to a victim than a villain: not a bad man who chose the box over the truth, but a good one who had simply been standing, three years running, in the one place in the room where a Chronophage could reach him. It did not make the meeting less infuriating. It made it something worse than infuriating, which I did not have a word for yet, and which Dubito, sensing that I had gone somewhere he could not follow, did not ask about.

But I did not want Governance Man, in his box-checking infamy, to be redeemed. No, I wanted him maligned. I wanted him to suffer. Perhaps he truly was a moral coward, and the scent of it attracted the Obstat to him. Perhaps, deep inside, he was aware of what he had become. Sometimes, the worst punishment that can be meted out, is for people to be who they are.