From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn’t really possible to know what’s going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it’s possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside the swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner of this worldmind. Death is abolished; life is triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas, for the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls.
There is a persistent story at Warwick University that I ended my first ever undergraduate lecture by walking into the broom cupboard. It is time to set the record straight. Yes, I admit that it was a broom cupboard, but it was also the emergency exit from the lecture hall. I had assumed, without finding out ahead of time, that when the students left the hall by the main doors, I would be able to leave by what looked like a side door. But when I tried it, I found myself surrounded by buckets and mops. Worse, I discovered that the only way to leave the building by that route was to push open an emergency exit, which would set off an alarm. I had noticed the EXIT sign over the door but had failed to spot the word “emergency” above it. So I was forced, rather sheepishly, to emerge from the so-called broom cupboard and join the students as they walked up the stairs to the back of the hall and out the main doors.
If a proof is a story, then a memorable proof must tell a ripping yarn. What does that tell us about how to construct proofs? Not that we need a formal language in which every tiny detail can be checked algorithmically, but that the story line should come out clearly and strongly. It isn’t the syntax of the proof that needs improvement: it’s the semantics.
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Psychologists now tell us that without emotional underpinnings the rational part of our mind doesn’t work. It seems that we can only be rational about things if we have an emotional commitment to such a recently evolved technique as rationality … I don’t think I could get very emotional about a structured proof, however elegant. But when I can really feel the power of a mathematical story line, something happens in my mind that I can never forget … I’d rather we improved the storytelling of proofs, instead of dissecting them into bits that can be placed in stacks of file cars and sorted into order.
Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.
The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I need but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew. The actual experience would have let me see the realistic outlines of what was really happening, but as long as it remained something terrible and yet remote, something whose horror and blood might descend upon me at any moment, I was compelled to give me entire imagination over to it, an act which blocked the springs of thought and feeling in me, creating a sense of distance between me and the world in which I lived.
It would have been impossible for me to have told him how I felt about religion. I had not settled in my mind whether I believed in God or not; His existence or nonexistence never worried me. I reasoned that if there did exist an all-wise, all-powerful God who knew the beginning and the end, who meted out justice to all, who controlled the destiny of man, this God would surely know that I doubted His existence and he would laugh at my foolish denial of Him. And if there was no God at all, then why all the commotion? I could not imagine God pausing in His guidance of unimaginably vast worlds to bother with me.
… I hungered for new books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different. … The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it. … Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
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