THE INTEGRITY PAPERS

Genre Group  - Adams

ceptualinstitute.com/genre.htm

Narrative humor in the hands of Douglas Adams has wisdom that pleases sharpies and savants alike.

"Mostly Harmless"
by Douglas Adams. Harmony Books, New York 1992.
read May 1-5, 1999 ()

 

p.17
"One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of a grip, whether it’s the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in. the fire storms of Frastra, where, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere."

"It will even live in New York, though it’s hard to know why."

p.32
"The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. .. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of the problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphic dust on a piece of paper to see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s been now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing the indentations."

p.40
"Very little of (the subject of parallel universes) is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is well established that all known gods came into existence a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics at this time."

"The first thing to realize about parallel universes ... is that they are not parallel."

"It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you don’t try to realize that until a little later, after you’ve realized that everything you’ve realized up to that moment is not true."

"The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or a Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn’t actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did."

The reason they are not parallel is the same reason the sea is not parallel. It doesn’t mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home."

p.60-61
"Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks."

"Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop."

[then some funny Neural Correlates of Consciousness relevant commentary follows, through page 62]

p.86-7
"A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about."

p.91-2        [Story line:      One of the story’s characters is trying to erase any
                           trace that he had just tampered with a primary computer program.]
"Five minutes later he was out of there. About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred ownership of the entire organization into his own name, but he doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want it anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights at the office, not to mention the massive and time-consuming fraud investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds."

The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything."

"It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and then he could safely leave the computer to rationalize its own defenses against the information’s ever emerging. It was a programming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to high office."

"The other minute was spent discovering that the computer system already had a mental block. A big one."

"He would never have discovered it if he hadn’t been busy engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course, then blankly refused that there was anything even to deny knowledge of and was generally so convincing that even Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake."

"He was impressed."

"He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn’t bother to install his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones that were already there, which then called themselves into question, and so on."

"He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had installed himself, only to discover they weren’t there. Cursing, he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them at all."

"He was just about to start installing them all over again when he realized that the reason he couldn’t find them was they were working already."

"He grinned with satisfaction."

p.109-10
"Arthur got terribly excited. ... Here was a man who seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying really profound things about all sorts of stuff."

"It was unnerving, though. The man was now stepping from pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of Arthur’s spatial universe. ‘Please stop!’ Arthut said, suddenly."

" ‘Can’t take it, huh?’ said the man. Without the slightest movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the pole forty feet in front of Arther. ‘You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual, I suppose.’ He sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance."

p.137-8
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

p.155-6
"It’s a whole complicated insurance thing. They just bury the whole thing. Pretend it never happened. The insurance business is completely screwy now. You know they’ve reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?"

"Really?" said Arthur. "No, I didn’t. For what offense?"

"Trillian frowned, ‘What do you mean, ‘offense’?’ "

"I see." replied Arthur

p.159
"In a spirit of scientific inquiry he hurled himself out of the window again."

p.164
"We live in strange times."

"We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, " Oh, hi, Ed! Nice tan. How’s Carol?" involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble. So give your kid a break, okay?'

                                ...extract from Practical Parenting in a Fractally Demented Universe"

p.169-171
"It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training."

p.195
"Hmmm. Well, I think we’ve sorted all that out now. If you’d like to know, I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions thirteen to twenty-two that you really wouldn’t want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place."

p.201
"Your universe is vast to you. Vast in time, vast in space. That’s because of the filters through which you perceive it. But I was built with no filters at all, which means I perceive the Mish Mash which contains all possible universes but which has, itself, no size at all. For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient and omnipotent, extremely vain and, what’s more, I come in a handy self-carrying package. You have to work out how much of the above is true."

p.214
"We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong."

p.219
"Somewhere there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space."