BlackOxford's Reviews > Diaspora

The Revised Book of Genesis

As is usual with everything by Egan, Diaspora is so densely packed with ideas that all summaries are inadequate. Only one comparison seems even remotely appropriate - to the biblical Book of Genesis.

Diaspora is a history of the re-creation of the universe, one in which there is no need for divine power to either start it off or continue its development. In fact, this is a history of how the defects and design flaws of the original creation story are corrected by hard experience. One of those flaws, perhaps the most destructive, is the vulnerability of the universe to arbitrary and uninformed divine intervention.

Egan lays out a blueprint for how a very different form of life than has been previously known comes into existence. Moving from the self-referential algorithms necessary to produce consciousness, to the algorithms of transformational topology necessary to impose that consciousness on the world coherently, he provides step by step instructions for the evolution of primitive pyschoblasts, embryonic minds as pure bits of energy, into citizens of the polis, an entirely electronic civilisation.

Such citizens are free to explore the Truth Mines containing not just the records of human experience, but the mathematical implications of that experience ‘experienced’ by its fellow-citizens. Through collective reasoning the polis has recognised that reliance on pure deduction is dangerous. It can lead to disaster, particularly that of exponential growth, as previous generations of the original creation had discovered on numerous occasions.

In other words there are limits to strictly mathematical reasoning: “The only way to grasp a mathematical concept was to see it in a multitude of different contexts, think through dozens of specific examples, and find at least two or three metaphors to power intuitive speculations... Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.” This is the function of art. Not just as a means of tempering mathematical logic, but as a way to find undiscovered truths - about ourselves as well as the rest of the universe.

The new creation of the polis has also learned how to interact with the old creation of flesh and blood. It can embody itself in robotic form and engage in productive discussion and planning with those unfortunate beings, us, who are the result of the original botched creation-attempt. Although Egan doesn’t claim it explicitly, this is functionally a new religion, one of the self-creation of the world and our total responsibility for it. A remarkable new theology generated from primordial circuitry.