Allow me a few observations and then see if you still feel the same.
First, have you heard that the daughter of Hugh Everett killed herself (some years after his death), and in her suicide note she said she was leaving to join him in another world where he was still alive? Or something like that.
I don't know enough to say whether the idea of the multiverse actually had a bad effect on her life, or whether it provided her with some comfort. But it's most likely that Everett's daughter was among the inspirations of this story. And the larger point is that weird ideas have consequences (hello Roko's basilisk, hello Zizians...), whether or not they are true, and whether or not they truly have the implications that people associate with them.
I also suspect that Greg Egan has become very uncomfortable with people taking scenarios of transcendence from science fiction, and trying to live them literally. It's been quite a while since he wrote a story in which the protagonists started human and made their way to some fundamentally better plane of existence. Undoubtedly the character Derek Linderman is an attack on pop-science and pseudoscience sensationalism; but may I suggest that also lurking here, is Egan's own fear or even guilt that as science fiction writers, he and his colleagues will do in reality, what Linderman did in this story - that is, propagate exciting falsehoods that will wreck the lives of some of their readers.
This is why Egan is avoiding stories of transcendence - out of fear that these will become comforting or enervating falsehoods for the superfans who take it literally. (I believe Egan was raised religious but became an atheist.) It's why Charlotte's own consolation is that, amid the grifting and the delusions of the world, she played a part in fostering the genuine search for truth. It's even why he is apriori against the idea of an LLM-powered singularity happening in the real world.
So this isn't just an attack on Max Tegmark. It's a story of someone whose life was gravely affected by a scientific myth of transcendence, who made a career of falsifying the myth and succeeded, only for there to be no existential change because new myths are always available, but who at least managed to pass on the flame of true rationalism in an otherwise fallen world. Whatever Egan may think of Tegmark, in this story he's just one ingredient, along with lore about closed cosmologies, the story of Everett's daughter, and whatever else went into the mix.
Fiction writers are constantly getting in trouble for drawing on aspects of real people as an ingredient for their fictions, whether it's for depicting them libelously, stealing their life story unacknowledged, or whatever. And probably Egan quite dislikes Tegmark, for multiple reasons. But possibly you can appreciate that there is also a story here. It's not a transhumanist story, it's not the human condition transformed by technology, but it is fiction about science and the impact of science on human life.
One last thing that I almost missed: One of the minor characters in Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime is called Derek Lindemann (slightly different spelling). And Vinge's Lindemann, in a very different way, does what Egan's Linderman did. So I think the similarity of names is no coincidence.
3
2some years after his death
his own death was more or less a slow suicide by alcoholism, due explicitly to nihilism born of his physics.
What do you mean by "explicit"? That you can give a citation? Would you do so?
Adam Becker claims that his lifestyle was his goal from before starting his PhD.
apologies. i went looking for a citation, certain i could find one quickly, but cannot. it appears i was under a mistaken belief. thank you for pointing it out.
>This is why Egan is avoiding stories of transcendence - out of fear that these will become comforting or enervating falsehoods for the superfans who take it literally.
I don't think that is quite true. He has been pretty explicit in interviews of his views in this regard--he was dissatisfied with writings in the 80s he saw as "churning out very lame noir plots that utterly squandered the philosophical implications of the technology," regularly expresses dissatisfaction with re-treading concepts he feels he has already explored and whatnot. It seems pretty evident he views transcendence similiarly, less interesting to him as a philosophical concept to explore and a trope he has engaged with already in a lot of his works (and one many others have engaged with).
>It's even why he is apriori against the idea of an LLM-powered singularity happening in the real world.
I think it is better to assume he is honest about his reasons for being critical of AI. He facially doesn't find the idea of AI in general implausible, but views many claims as being on their face seemingly silly and unevidenced. He has expressed sympathy that human minds are not inherently unique (including by citing Tegram, incidentally), and could be emulated by artifical machines (some of his works deal with this directly!) but explicitly doesn't see on its face how running human language through a series of regression models would lead to human extinction or create an emergent entity with human intelligence (lacking any evidence of such a thing). That is a perfectly reasonable view and I would agree with cautioning in favor of understanding technology and advancements inside empirical frameworks that we can evidence.
1If "Didicosm" evoked such emotion in you, be sure to also read "Death and the Gorgon". (Commentary.)
I have encountered several times in Greg Egan’s fiction characters talking of superintelligence as nothing more than self-indulgent techbro fantasy. Get angry if you like, it won’t make any difference to him or any of the many others of like view.
I don’t know if he has written directly of the issue elsewhere, arguing it without the emotional name-calling. If he has, I would be interested in reading it.
i find Egan's characters to be extremely flat, the science often interesting, and the plots grossly underrated.
in the case of this story, the conflict between science and science communicators is expressly not the point. for example, though our main character confronts the pop sci author, she achieves no resolution. she declines to doggedly pursue the author -- she does not care to prove him wrong.[1]
her argument after all is not with this author. it's with her father.
her father made a certain claim: your suffering is outweighed by my relief; your fortitude will justify my weakness. our girl rejects that claim, but now must defend her position. if her father's metaphysics are correct, then his actions can be justified. so it is this that she must overturn.
though proving the universe finite, still she is given no rest: what if there are many finite universes? she expresses anger at the masses here, but it's easy to understand this as projection. she is angry at the part of herself that agrees with them. she is angry that she cannot dismiss the claim.
the hope the undergrad offers is not some trite hope of "the next generation will continue!" -- it is rather this: she can condemn her father's suicide without hesitation[2]. he is well and truly dead. her suffering was for nothing, and for everything.
It also misrepresent quantum immortality: killing oneself will not move you to better world, but only in worse one - as there are many worlds where suicide will end with severe injury but not death. However. the story can be made stronger if the father of protagonist was trying to build universal lottery winning machine via qunatum immortality.
Also, it is interesting to note that early versions of QI have used time dimension instead of spatial, like in Nietzscheт eternal return.
I went and read Didicosm ahead of this angry review and don't think it was particularly worth my time. I'm writing this as info for future readers of this review and as suggestion to this post's author to prepend the review with a non-spoiler heavy info about what the story "is about" and who might or might not wanna read it.
For context, I found many Greg Egan stories really good so read this one based on that prior and am confident in saying this story is not worth reading for most people who like classic Greg Egan.
Re the potshot "Or when people with actual political power believed that AI was on the verge of bootstrapping itself to superintelligence?”, it is pretty rich to place yourself in the future and claim nothing bad ended up happening ahead of it happening. Rather like saying "Fool! I have written speculative fiction set in the future where your worries didn't pan out, so you are already foolish now to be worrying about them!"
I think this is not a very well-written piece of fiction, but I think Mitchell's comment is pretty much right.
I did enjoy the very ending, and the description of the process of science, irrespective of the author's views on the discussed topics in reality.
I've only read one of Egan's books all the way through—Teranesia.
He's a smart guy with bags of ideas. I didn't enjoy the constant, snide little jabs against religion, and postmodernism, and conservatism. Even when I agreed with what he was saying, it just got tiresome to watch his heroic smart protagonists (author mouthpieces) epically dunk on strawman opponents with facts and logic. It felt like that was the point of the book, not particularly the genetic science.
Richard Needham's quote "People who are brutally honest generally enjoy the brutality more than the honesty." came to mind.
I've partly read Zendegi, which takes a lot of shots against LessWrong/Overcoming Bias (eg, the "Nate Caplan" character). It felt strange: Egan's high on the list of fiction authors without whom LW/OB (arguably) wouldn't have existed in the form that they did.
I rarely find that reading fiction makes me upset. Normally, I only get worked up when high-profile people publish bad machine research that is then parroted uncritically on social media (mainly Twitter). Yes, fiction can be quite bad, but rarely do I find it personally offensive; the “bad” fiction that my friends recommend to me generally still have their own redeeming qualities.
But Greg Egan’s short story “Didicosm” managed it anyway.
Spoilers ahead.
A standard take on Greg Egan’s writing is that the science part of his science fiction is quite good, but the fiction part is comparatively much worse. His skill lies in coming up with interesting alternative physics or integrating interesting math to create an alternative world, but he often struggles to populate the world with characters with satisfying character arcs. “Didicosm” is no exception to this.
The core scientific conceit of the piece is the following: (in reality,) we seem to observe that the universe is flat and spatially unbounded. A natural conclusion (often made in modern cosmology) is that we exist in an infinite, flat universe.
However, this does not necessarily follow. A 3-torus, for example, is locally flat and has no boundary, but of finite volume. In fact, there exist 10-such closed flat Riemannian 3-manifolds, which John Conway dubbed the platycosms, from the Greek platys-, meaning flat, and kosmos/cosmos. (See Conway and Rossetti’s Describing the platycosms for a full discussion of the 10 platycosms.)
The way you’d distinguish between a spatially infinite flat universe and any of the platycosms is by looking for places where the universe seems to repeat. We don’t seem to observe any such patterns in the night sky. But strictly speaking, our observations of the observable universe only strictly rule out platycosms that are small; if our universe is a platycosm with spatial extent much larger than the observable one, then this would be consistent with our observations (even though this might matter for predicting the shape of the far future).
As the title suggests, the universe in “Didicosm” takes on the form of a didicosm, perhaps the most interesting of the platycosms.
So what, then, is the plot of “Didicosm”? How does one turn this interesting mathematical observation into an interesting story?
The plot of didicosm is less about the shape of the universe, and more about the effectiveness of scientific critique in a world where the public’s understanding of science is mediated through charismatic but unaccountable science communicators.
The story starts with the protagonist Charlotte’s father giving her a lecture on how he believes the universe to be spatially infinite, before committing suicide to “live in a better world”.
Charlotte comes to believe that her fathers suicide resulted from claims in a popular science book, Everything Happens! (a parody of Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe):
Following a confrontation with the book’s author Derek Linderman (a mixture of Max Tegmark and Michio Kaku), she then dedicates her life to proving this claim wrong.
Based on all we can observe, the universe does not contain the repeated patterns that would serve as a smoking gun for a platycosm over the spatially infinite physics, even if we use the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which allows us to map the universe as it existed ~400k years after the big bang.
Charlotte’s idea is to measure the cosmic neutrino background, which would allow us to map the universe as it existed around a second after the big bang. (This allows us to measure the shape of the universe in a volume 3% larger than the CMB data dose). After some effort, she eventually contributes to a new scientific project called NuWave that successfully does so, and her collaborators find that the universe turns is a didicosm. (How exactly NuWave functions is neither described nor important for the plot).
After they announce this discovery to the world, Charlotte becomes disheartened by seeing Linderman refuse to concede defeat and instead pivots to arguing for an infinite greater reality, composed of finite volume didicosms.
But eventually, an undergrad at her university comes to her after class with a quantum gravity based explanation for why the universe takes on the form of a didicosm as opposed to any other platycosm. Charlotte takes comfort in the fact that, even if she cannot change the behavior of science communicators, she can at least inspire the next generation of scientists:
Sprinkled alongside this main plot are conversations between Charlotte and her partner Vince. Their relationship itself matters little for the plot, and Vince’s main role is to serve as the uninformed outsider that Charlotte and her fellow cosmologists can dump exposition at.
—
If I had to pick one sin in science fiction writing, it’s in writing a story in which the plot does little to add to a description of the central conceit. Despite my complaints about the short story, I found both Conway’s platycosm paper and Egan’s notes on didicosms fascinating. But I think “Didicosm” avoids this sin to some degree – while yes, his characters are relatively flat, and yes, the plot is barebone and not dependent on the specific, there’s a fair amount of exploration
The reason that “Didocosm” made me upset was because it felt like a story of Greg Egan taking potshots at scientific communicators as morally bankrupt while strawmanning their arguments, and also casually inserts some fun facts about flat Riemannian 3-manifolds that matter little for the plot.
First, Egan doesn’t actually present Tegmark’s arguments from his work – instead, his Tegmark stand-in Lindermann first only argues that the spatially infinite universe is the null hypothesis, that Charlotte has failed to reject:
After the universe is shown to be spatially finite, his arguments turn even more cartoonish:
Second, Egan takes aim at not just physics/cosmologists, but also other speculative ideas that are obviously ridiculously:
Oh hey, that’s me.
For all that Charlotte demands epistemic humility of pop science cosmologists in his story, she sure lacks the same epistemic humility when it comes to other areas of scientific communication.
I think I would be interested in an essay from Greg Egan responding to Tegmark I arguments, and also against the simulation hypothesis and the possibility of ASI. And as previously mentioned, I found his mathematical notes on Didicosms fascinating.
But “Didocosm” is neither. And its lack of charity toward those espousing ideas that Greg Egan finds ridiculous (such as myself) made me upset enough to write this piece.
Also, if you want to come meet me or other InkHaven residents, InkHaven is hosting a fair this Saturday that’s open to the public! See the Partiful for more information.