In the novel that I’m working on, Mathematicians in Love, I’m starting to talk about this special mode of thought called hierophantics. I get that word from a certain Tarot card, a trump of the Major Arcana. I love that esoteric stuff — that’s why I ended up as a mathematician.
The Hierophant card shows a wise woman who explains mysteries. At least I think she’s a woman. The etymology of the word is Hiero + phant = mystery + show; it’s akin to hiero + glyph = mystery + symbol.
In my novel, some cockroach mathematicians from Galaxy Z claim that hierophantics can collapse even the largest exponential search into a few ultraefficient steps. So now I’m trying to figure out a hand-waving explanation of how hierophantics works, and then I’ll want to think about how it would feel to think hierophantically.
A quantum mechanics advocate might suggest that knowing hierophantics means being able see across the multiverse and search all the universes at once. But I'd rather avoid QM, as I think the QM worldview has gotten a free ride for too long as being self-evidently “correct”. QM could be wrong, after all, it could an epiphenomenal view on a par with statistical mechanics. You can have hidden variable as long as you're cool with reverse causation and cosmic synchronicity.
A non-QM way to have hierophantics works might be by having your mind become in some sense infinite. Perhaps some of the gray matter becomes fractalized into an infinite number of sub-particles. (And don’t worry about quantum fuzz, as in my universe quantum mechanics is wrong; it’s merely so we can have arbitrarily small particles.)
The way you learn hierophantics is by eating Nataraja worms, by the way. These creatures live in this other world La Hampa that my characters are visiting. It looks a lot like Micronesia there, transreally enough.
Bela, Paul and Alma are having a luau with some alien mathematicians at the edge of this lagoon. One idea is that the fractal matter of the worms gets into your system. Our heroine Alma is dubious about eating the worms.
“I don’t know,” said Alma. “What if the food’s full of sick eggs that’ll hatch larvae inside us that eat our flesh and burst out — yuuuugh?” She made a rapid gesture to mime something erupting through the wall of her abdomen.
Here I’m referring to the classic first Alien movie. I couldn’t find an image of that scene online, but I did find a terric short cartoon version of Alien re-enacted by bunnies, by Jennifer Shiman.
Do the worms have to “teach” hierophantics by putting a new kind of matter into you? Maybe it could be more of a software change.
As I discuss in The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul,
exponential speedups have arisen at several of the stages in the human history of technology. Could it happen again?
The development of a common language, for instance, allows all the members of a society to think faster. The speedup seems more than merely linear, as entirely new kinds of cooperation become possible. And the introduction of writing, of the printing press, of telephony, and of the Web — each of these has brought about a large and possibly exponential speedup in the computation rate of the hive mind as well. My sense is that the introduction of language and the successive communication enhancements have sped up the hive mind’s activities to the same degree that using numbers speeds up the process of arithmetic.
Could there be some new thought mode that would provide us with another exponential speed-up? If you look at the intellectual history of the human race, you’ll notice that there aren’t really all that many new ideas we’ve come up with. A lot of what scientists and artists occupy themselves with is putting old wine in new bottles. Maybe there’s a whole level of thought that simply hasn’t occurred to us yet — a breakthrough as radical as calculus, as radical as positional arithmetic notation, as radical as language.
Hierophantics!
Imagine being a person who knows no language at all trying to imagine language. That's how it is for us to imagine hierophantics. I see it as a system of high-level patterns that provide immense short-cuts, far in excess of the mere linear speedup you'd obtain from any piddling little “Singularity”…
I figure once Bela knows hierophantics he'll be able to figure out how to finally get the Republicans out of power!
May 13th, 2005 at 1:45 am
I’ve been up since 5AM, yesterday.
It is now 1:30AM today. Therefore you give me some slack. I have been wondering lately about what might happen if we turn the logic of infinities on it head. I think we can make a strong arguement for the idea that is is the small numbes, 1, 2, 3, … that are nonexistant. What happens if we first assume the infinite, the continuum? As we look closely at the world the we don’t actaully find small numbers, what we find is unities, except on the largest scales don’t actually exist. Perhaps Hierophantics is the mathematics of assuming the continuum. I don’t know where to go with it exactly, but I’m pretty sure it would/could/does change how we view the world. It certainly would explain why the world works so damn well.
May 13th, 2005 at 8:26 am
Continuum hierophantics isn’t a bad idea. Like analog computing. Suppose it really IS more powerful than digital thought. Of coruse our brains are already somewhat analog, in that the chemical concentrations and electric fields are smoothly varying. But the neurons do chunk it into something fairly digital. The paradigm I keep thinking of is: A fluttering leaf as a model of the stock-market. I’m also thinking of this idea that Asian languages (I think) approach reality in a different way, in terms of layers of pictures instead of locomotive-lever-linked machines of logic.
Turn your stomach into a powerful supercomputer!
May 14th, 2005 at 7:47 pm
Ideas like this are why I love reading your stuff.
I suspect any real advances in intelligence will eliminate both Republicans AND Democrats, or at least put them on display in some sort of zoo, or pro wrestling ring.
May 15th, 2005 at 4:35 am
that Hurt
pop goes the weasel
May 15th, 2005 at 4:48 am
” If you look at the intellectual history of the human race, you’ll notice that there aren’t really all that many new ideas we’ve come up with. A lot of what scientists and artists occupy themselves with is putting old wine in new bottles. Maybe there’s a whole level of thought that simply hasn’t occurred to us yet — a breakthrough as radical as calculus, as radical as positional arithmetic notation, as radical as language.”
say hello, timewave goodbye?
‘And now with the engines of technology in our hands we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the galactic millenium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. This is the moment. A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime, and we are ready, and we are poised. And as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own. It’s there. Go for it, and thank you.’
– Terence McKenna, recorded live February 27th, 1993
May 16th, 2005 at 12:31 pm
You might browse “The Book of Thoth” at a local bookstore for Crowley’s version of the Hierophant. His version of the Tarot deck is radically different than the standard version.
Also you might browse this:
Hierophant
May 19th, 2005 at 8:07 am
I agree: shortcutting turns up in a lot of places in the analog psychological experience: sometimes I hear such a tiny snippet of a song, a quarter-second of music from a tinny car-radio 50 yards away on a busy street, and somehow my brain flashes “Doo-doo-doo, Daa-daa-daa by the Police” before I even know I’ve heard it.
Try to do that search digitally!
There’s also some shortcutting / ‘heirophantics’ suggested in Stuart Kaufman’s book “Investigations” where he discusses protein dynamics. The computation time necessary to list all possible protein chains of length 200 (which isn’t long at all) exceeds the age of the current age of the universe by some huge order of magnitude. Kaufman delicately suggests that there is some search process that skips around this ‘non-ergodic’ field of possible proteins to find ensembles that work.
July 14th, 2005 at 2:35 am
Heirophantics: I am suddenly reminded of flatworm knowledge – train a flatworm to run a maze, grind said flatworm up and feed it to another flatworm. This second flatworm has the knowledge of the maze. This would seem to be a kind of heirophantic/participatory knowledge.
November 13th, 2012 at 2:09 am
All of these are older posts. I’m a newbee, for sure. Thank you for your books. Your writing has my brain twained and twanged. I’m looking forward to The Lifebox, the Seahell, and the Soul. For my puny thought processes, it might as well be shells & cheese. We’ll see. I am the daughter of a mathematician and engineer who got to meet Einstein during the Manhattan Project while at Princeton. I just didn’t get the math.