Arrival

by Ted Chiang

For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

They’re like a crowd of people unable to read music, peering at the score for a Bach sonata, trying to explain how one note leads to another.

Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term “self-aware.”

I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve.

So much of mathematics had no practical application; it existed solely as a formal theory, studied for its intellectual beauty.

“Linguists describe writing like this”—I indicated the printed words—“as ‘glottographic,’ because it represents speech. Every human written language is in this category. However, this symbol”— I indicated the circle and diagonal line—“is ‘semasiographic’ writing, because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There’s no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds.”

“Ease of learning isn’t the primary force in language evolution. For the heptapods, writing and speech may play such different cultural or cognitive roles that using separate languages makes more sense than using different forms of the same one.”

“I see what you mean. Maybe they think our form of writing is redundant, like we’re wasting a second communications channel.”

Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you’ll always be further along than I expect.

“This hypothetical path is shorter than the path the light actually takes. But light travels more slowly in water than it does in air, and a greater percentage of this path is underwater. So it would take longer for light to travel along this path than it does along the real path.”

In other words, the route that the light ray takes is always the fastest possible one. That’s Fermat’s principle of least time.”

So to be precise, Fermat’s principle isn’t a minimal principle; instead it’s what’s known as a ‘variational’ principle.”

That meant the heptapod had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke.

The thing is, while the common formulation of physical laws is causal, a variational principle like Fermat’s is purposive, almost teleological.”

I used to wonder what it was like to have one’s thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice.

I saw semagrams with my mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane.

And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated.

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle. Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations.

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.

Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

For them, speech was a bottleneck because it required that one word follow another sequentially. With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously.

Freedom isn’t an illusion; it’s perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness.

Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other.

It’s like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There’s no...

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

But language wasn’t only for communication: it was also a form of action.

For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place.

Like physical events, with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.

Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present.

After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn’t arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades.

“I think what I propose is more accurately described as a restoration than a disruption.”

Beauty isn’t the problem, it’s how some people are misusing it that’s the problem.