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Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

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Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#71

Post by graemep »

simpaticoder wrote: post #2

Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if c…

Showing that flat earth beliefs or YEC are false is hardly a devastating critique of religion per se.

His own explanation of Hell is The Absence of God seems to suggest otherwise too. "He also said that the novelette examines the role of faith in religion, and suggests that if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Is_the_Absence_of_God#Bac...

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#72

Post by graemep »

dragonwriter wrote: post #23
alexey-salmin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather…

> Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). No, it doesn't. I mean, it does the horoscope thing where it makes predictions vague enough that people can retrospectively fit whatever actually happens into them easily, but that's not actually predicting very well.

Horoscopes are not a religious belief.

The majority of atheists globally believe in astrology (because of the large number of atheists in China, IIRC).

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#73

Post by IAmBroom »

lmm wrote: post #29
alexey-salmin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather…

> some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like") You really can't. They're very different. > It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simu…

> You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory.

You mean, like those silly science fiction stories where FTL travel is possible? Or time travel?

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#74

Post by OgsyedIE »

LinchZhang wrote: post #69
OgsyedIE wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes. If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.

checking logprobs doesn't seem weird to me, it was the priming that was weird.

I reasoned that, based on the error falsely attributing a Chiang story as based on different thermodynamics, any thinking chain for generating a list of Chiang stories predicated on different physics (carried out by an autoregressive model obviously, since no deductions of this kind can be made for the output of diffusion llms) that could make the given error would have suggested a story where thermodynamics was different and then guessed that Exhalation fits its own criteria.

On the basis of that, the priming simulates the same scenario, since there is no feasible way to recreate the author's method of writing an article with unknown essay-writing prompts and a set of unknown proportions of AI to human-generation for different elements of content and editing.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#76

Post by nelox »

simpaticoder wrote: post #2

Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if c…

I think you are spot on. What makes Chiang remarkable is that he never just builds a clever world and then leaves it at that. The counterfactuals are always put under pressure until their human consequences show through. That is why the religious stories work so well. He does not mock belief from the outside, he imagines a world where belief is literally true and then forces us to face the consequences. The horror comes from taking doctrines at face value and discovering that they are not comforting at all.

Exhalation is a good example of the same method applied to physics. The narrator dissects himself and his world with patient clarity, and in the process he reveals the same fragility that we face. The beauty of the story is that it does not rage against entropy or wrap it up in metaphors. It accepts the facts of decline and finds meaning in understanding them. That is why it feels sealed and perfect, as you say. The restraint is what gives it emotional weight.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#77

Post by noufalibrahim »

poszlem wrote: post #51
simpaticoder wrote: post #2

Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if c…

Calling Hell is the Absence of God a critique of religion misses the point. Chiang isn’t saying “religion is false.” He imagines a world where God’s existence and Heaven and Hell are undeniable, and shows that even certainty doesn’t solve the problem of suffering or the struggle for meaning. The story critiques the idea that proof would make faith easier, not religion itself.

I've not read the book but beating this whole thing left and right in my head, I've come to a similar conclusion. It's pleasantly jarring to hear that Chiang (whose other works i like very much) had a similar position.

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#78

Post by [deleted] »

graemep wrote: post #71
simpaticoder wrote: post #2

Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if c…

Showing that flat earth beliefs or YEC are false is hardly a devastating critique of religion per se. His own explanation of Hell is The Absence of God seems to suggest otherwise too. "He also said that the novelette examines the role of faith in religion, and suggests that if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Is_the_Absence_of_God#Bac...

[deleted]

Re: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

#79

Post by pavel_lishin »

orthoxerox wrote: post #45
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #20

If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan. "Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real? The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html

Greg Egan can write character-based science fiction when he wants to as well (you can find it in his short stories), but it has to be a topic that resonates with him personally. Without a resonance, the stories often look like "plausible vignette - fast-forward through technological implications - another plausible vignette with characters already changed by the experience".

I think he exceeds at doing both at once. One of the things I loved most about The Clockwork Rocket wasn't the exploration of a universe unlike our own - to be honest, most of it went over my head - but the characters dealing with very human issues in a very non-human world.

Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.

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