Hm well, I haven't written about it although I fully intended to. Look, I guess I've always found Neal Stephenson a bit dodgy in philosophical terms. Snow Crash was basically predicated on there being a Gödel sentence for the human brain, or something similar. And yet he has this determination that AI is impossible, to the extent that one protagonist in The Diamond Age works out that there's a real person behind the Young Lady's Primer or whatever that book was called because a Turing Machine couldn't possibly do the job...
That certainly appears in Anathem, but it's woven in amongst the stuff that really irritates me, which is the totally weirdass Platonism - and the way in which the parody-anti-Platonists (who want everything to flow from syntax or something?) are caricatured (and yet near the end they seem to be part of the whole big hidden game that's going on or something). But... well, to me Platonism is just absurd full stop, even mathematical Platonism of a sort that good ol' Roger Penrose seems to believe in. In what sense can these concepts/ideals/whatevery-things be seen to exist? How does the mind apprehend them? etc - all the usual problems for dualism.
Stephenson takes this to a totally new level of insanity with his heirarchies of worlds, not alternate worlds but worlds which are somehow... Platonic worlds for other worlds down the track. Like, huh? There's this whole idea that somehow the viewpoint world is more ideal than ours politically, aeshetically and so on, and there are worlds that are further along in some way, and there can be some kind of communication via the mental realm (because of course the wise old millenialists knew ages ago that mind cannot just be matter and relational stuff), and... it's just all incoherent, to my mind.
So, OK, incoherence in itself is acceptable, but when it's wrapped up in heavily laboured worldbuilding, unnecessary made-up words (which didn't annoy me in the practice of reading - I could follow the book just fine), and gradually more caricatured characters on both sides of the strange philosophical fence... well, it gets a bit much. For me.
Not sure the above is particularly coherent either, but there you go. Can attempt something more useful when it's not so late :)
I just feel that Stephenson is a very bright fellow who has never been adequately challenged by someone brighter than himself. So his views are glib and shallow, because they haven't been tested against a really challenging opponent. And then the mere fact of them being glib and shallow means that the intellectual challengers he needs, let us say from academic philosophy, won't engage with him now.
It's difficult because I only have dark suspicions until I read the book, and my suspicions make me feel nauseous about tackling it.
I found his philosophy similarly frustrating. It was amusing having it be part of the background, but intensely frustrating when it became Truth and vital to the plot.
The word-games amused me more than anything else, so I was fine with them.
Look, I guess I've always found Neal Stephenson a bit dodgy in philosophical terms. Snow Crash was basically predicated on there being a Gödel sentence for the human brain, or something similar. And yet he has this determination that AI is impossible, to the extent that one protagonist in The Diamond Age works out that there's a real person behind the Young Lady's Primer or whatever that book was called because a Turing Machine couldn't possibly do the job...
That certainly appears in Anathem, but it's woven in amongst the stuff that really irritates me, which is the totally weirdass Platonism - and the way in which the parody-anti-Platonists (who want everything to flow from syntax or something?) are caricatured (and yet near the end they seem to be part of the whole big hidden game that's going on or something).
But... well, to me Platonism is just absurd full stop, even mathematical Platonism of a sort that good ol' Roger Penrose seems to believe in. In what sense can these concepts/ideals/whatevery-things be seen to exist? How does the mind apprehend them? etc - all the usual problems for dualism.
Stephenson takes this to a totally new level of insanity with his heirarchies of worlds, not alternate worlds but worlds which are somehow... Platonic worlds for other worlds down the track. Like, huh? There's this whole idea that somehow the viewpoint world is more ideal than ours politically, aeshetically and so on, and there are worlds that are further along in some way, and there can be some kind of communication via the mental realm (because of course the wise old millenialists knew ages ago that mind cannot just be matter and relational stuff), and... it's just all incoherent, to my mind.
So, OK, incoherence in itself is acceptable, but when it's wrapped up in heavily laboured worldbuilding, unnecessary made-up words (which didn't annoy me in the practice of reading - I could follow the book just fine), and gradually more caricatured characters on both sides of the strange philosophical fence... well, it gets a bit much. For me.
Not sure the above is particularly coherent either, but there you go. Can attempt something more useful when it's not so late :)
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It's difficult because I only have dark suspicions until I read the book, and my suspicions make me feel nauseous about tackling it.
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The word-games amused me more than anything else, so I was fine with them.
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