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Yonder
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"I said earlier that most of them are hesitant to cull the weak, that they view it as inexpedient. But efficiency has nothing to do with it. It's connected to--it might in fact be more efficient, but there is something so much bigger than efficiency--"
Ployon cut it off. "Bigger than efficiency?"
Archon said, "There is something that is real to them that is not real to us that I am having trouble grasping myself. For want of a more proper label, I'll call it the 'organic'."
"Let's stop a minute. I'll give you a point for how things would be different if we were limited to one body, but you're hinting at something you want to call 'organic', which is very poorly defined, and your explanations seem to be strange when they are not simply hazy. Isn't this a red flag?"
"Where have you seen that red flag before?"
"When people were wildly wrong but refused to admit it."
"And?"
"That's pretty much it."
Archon was silent.
Ployon said, "And sometimes it happens when a researcher is on to something big... oh... so what exactly is this nexus of the 'organic'?"
"I can't tell you. At least, not directly. The mind-body unities are all connected to a vast (to them) biological network in which each has a physical place--"
"That's original! Come on; everybody's trivia archive includes the fact that all consciousness comes out of a specific subnet of physical processors, or some substitute for that computing machinery. I can probably zero in on where you're--hey! Stop jumping around from subnet to subnet--can I take that as an acknowledgment that I can find your location? I--"
"The location is not part of a trivia encyclopedia for them. It's something as inescapable as the flow of time--"
"Would you like me to jump into a virtual metaphysics where time doesn't flow?"
"--correction, more inescapable than the flow of time, and it has a million implications for the shape of life. Under the old order, the unities could connect only with other unities which had bodies in similar places--"
"So, not only is their 'network' a bunch of slime, but when they look for company they have to choose from the trillion or however many other unities whose bodies are on the same node?"
"Their communities are brilliant in a way we can never understand; they have infinitesmally less potential partners available.
"You mean their associations are forced on them."
"To adapt one of their sayings, in our network you connect with the minds you like; in their network you like the people you connect with. That collapses a rich and deeper maxim, but what is flattened out is more organic than you could imagine."
"And I suppose that in a way that is very deep, but you conveniently have trouble describing, their associations are greater."
"We are fortunate to have found a way to link in our shared tastes. And we will disassociate when our tastes diverge--"
"And shared tastes have nothing to do with them? That's--"
"Shared tastes are big, but there is something else bigger. A great deal of the process of making unities into proper unities means making their minds something you can connect with."
"Their minds? Don't you mean the minds?"
"That locution captures something that--they are not minds that have a body as sattelite. One can say, 'their' minds because they are mind-body unities. They become greater--in a way that we do not--by needing to be in association with people they could not choose."
"Pretty convenient how every time having a mind linked to a body means a limitation, that limitation makes them better."
"If you chose to look at it, you would find a clue there. But you don't find it strange when the best game players prosper within the limits of the game. What would game play be if players could do anything they wanted?"
"You've made a point."
"As I was going to say, their minds develop a beauty, strength, and discipline that we never have occasion to develop."
"Can you show me this beauty?"
"Here's a concrete illustration. One thing they do is take organisms which have been modified from their biological environment, and keep them in the artificial environments which you'd say they keep their bodies in. They--"
"So even though they're stuck with biological slime, they're trying to escape it and at least pretend it's not biological? That sounds sensible."
"Um, you may have a point, but that isn't where I was hoping to go. Um... While killing another unity is something they really try to avoid, these modified organisms enjoy no such protection. And yet--"
"What do they use them for? Do the enhancements make them surrogate industrial robots? Are they kept as emergency rations?"
"The modifications aren't what you'd consider enhancements; most of them couldn't even survive in their feral ancestors' environments, and they're not really suited to the environments they live in. Some turn out to serve some 'useful' purpose... but that's a side benefit, irrelevant to what I'm trying to let you see. And they're almost never used as food."
"Then what's the real reason? They must consume resources. Surely they must be used for something. What do they do with them?"
"I'm not sure how to explain this..."
"Be blunt."
"It won't sting, but it could lead to confusion that would take a long time to untangle."
"Ok..."
"They sense the organisms with their cameras, I mean eyes, and with the boundaries of their bodies, and maybe talk to them."
"Do the organisms give good advice?"
"They don't have sophisticated enough minds for that."
"Ok, so what else is there?"
"About all else is that they do physical activities for the organisms' benefit."
"Ok. And what's the real reason they keep them? There's got to be something pragmatic."
"That's related to why I brought it up. It has something to do with the organic, something big, but I can't explain it."
"It seems like you can only explain a small part of the organic in terms of our world, and the part you can explain isn't very interesting."
"That's like saying that when a three-dimensional solid intersects a plane in two dimensions, the only part that can be detected in the plane is a two-dimensional cross-section (the three-dimensional doesn't fit in their frame of reference) so "three-dimensional" must not refer to anything real. The reason you can't make sense of the world I'm describing in terms of our world is because it contains real things that are utterly alien to us."
"Like what? Name one we haven't discussed."
"Seeing the trouble I had with the one concept, the organic, I'm not going to take on two at once."
"So the reason these unities keep organisms is so abstract and convoluted that it takes a top-flight mind to begin to grapple with."
"Not all of them keep organisms, but most of them find the reason--it's actually more of an assumption--so simple and straightforward that they would never think it was metaphysical."
"So I've found something normal about them! Their minds are of such an incredibly high caliber that--"
"No. Most of their minds are simpler than yours or mine, and furthermore, the ability to deal with abstractions doesn't enter the picture from their perspective."
"I don't know what to make of this."
"You understand to some degree how their bodies are real in a way we can never experience, and time and space are not just 'packaging' to what they do. Their keeping these organisms... the failure of the obvious reasons should tell you something, like an uninteresting two-dimensional cross section of a three-dimensional solid. If the part we can understand does not justify the practice, there might be something big out of sight."
"But what am I to make of it now?"
"Nothing now, just a placeholder. I'm trying to convey what it means to be organic."
"Is the organic in some relation to normal technology?"
"The two aren't independent of each other."
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