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“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”
These people cared about eternal truths. Believed that some—but not all—such truths were written down in a book. That their book was right and the others wrong. This much they had in common with most of the other people who had ever lived.
In
ancient times the plaza had been plentifully supplied with tiles made of clay baked in molds. There were seven molds, hence seven different shapes of tile. Their shapes were such that it was possible to fit them together in an infinite number of patterns.
He let me stew on that for a few moments. And then it came to me. Just like those ideas we had spoken of earlier—suddenly there in my head. “You don’t even need the model any more, do you?” Orolo just nodded, smiled, egged me on with little beckoning gestures. I went on—seeing it as I was saying it. “It is so much simpler this way! My brain doesn’t have to support this hugely detailed, accurate, configurable, quantum-superposition-supporting model of the cosmos any more! All it needs to do is to perceive—to reflect—the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.”
No matter how many times I failed to get what he was talking about, he had this steady faith in my ability to understand what he understood. It was an endearing quality—his only one.
The ability of our consciousness to see—not just as a speelycaptor sees (by taking in and recording givens) but identifying things—copper bowls, melodies, faces, beauty, ideas—and making these things available to cognition—that ability, Atamant said, is the ultimate basis of all rational thought.
Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings—something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies.
“But Raz, you are educable, you can learn ‘this kind of thing,’ if by that you mean how to maneuver an S2-35B and how to assemble a Cold Black Mirror. You’ve spent your whole life, ever since you were Collected, becoming educable.”
