true names and the opening of the collective conscious

Yesterday I read Vernor Vinge's "True Names," and was inspired into finally using this blog account. This short story is perhaps one of the the key science fiction tales in shaping the vision and direction technology has taken over the last several decades as the first accredited depiction of cyberspace. Though that term didn't come about until later, from another sci-fi author, William Gibson, Vinge's "the Other Plane" essentially sets the foundation for the technological interface of humanity's information flows that we know of as the internet. It was a pretty good prophecy, as far as that goes. The interesting thing though was Vinge's choice to encode the story in terms of magick, the technological processes spelled out in terms of interpreting symbols and its most knowledgable users as warlocks. Which in a sense they are, the times not yet gone when working the complex code capable to craft a program, or even use a computer, seems to some a magical act. I personally know next to nothing about programming languages, but then again, I've been known to believe in magick.

The term 'true name' comes from magical traditions where it is believed that knowledge is power, and one of the surest ways to get knowledge of something was to have a name for it. A name being not only a definition but a contagious and associative link with the thing. The common words we use to refer to things are nothing more than a rudimentary label, whereas the true name of that thing is akin to a complete understanding of its entire being. If such a thing were possible. In Vinge's story this amounted to knowing the users real name and thus where their body was jacked in; you could do anything in the Other Plane just as long as no one could actually kill you. Though you could say that about the real world too.

There is an oft-quoted zen saying that claims a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself, as words are not the things they name but only reference pointers to them. All the concepts we have for objects, processess, and beings are nothing more than pointers, convenient fictions created to allow us to be able to make reference of discrete parts of the vast and oftentimes incomprehesible world around us. And as language is a function of communication, these symbolic tags are used mainly to represent our own disjointed experiences of the world in terms that others might understand. Which is in its essence the heart of story telling, creating symbol-complexes in which others can recognize experiences in their own lives and of life in general. In this light, one could say that any belief, any understanding of the world based on words, is just a story and contains no more truth than the teller (and listener) is willing to interpret into it; meaning belonging solely in the mind of the beholder and being not so much truth as comprhension in the pattern of one's own story. That being said, the truths of every great religion, culture and science are not truths at all but really convincing fictions. Even the belief that we have individual bodies interacting with other discrete beings is only a story for the flow of subatomic wavicles, the current quantum tale on the subject.

We have been telling ourselves stories since the dawn of history, in an attempt to give explanation and meaning to a world that proffered neither. And now we have reached a point where we are so wrapped up in the stories that we have forgotten they are just that, and go about in our beliefs as if they are the worlds they represent. Which, as language based creatures, for most intents and purposes they are. Our realities are fostered by our descriptions of it, the magical act being to change your description changes your reality. Now more than ever though, we can see that our stories, like the lower level words, are not static things; and it is through the interaction of different stories inside the larger discoursive flow of information that has allowed for all the breakthroughs of understanding that gave rise to the technologies we have today. Call them memes, themes, or belief constructs, but when ideas cross they either agree or conflict. And if they conflict either a synthesis occurs and both stories are broadened, or one steam rolls the other into oblivion and becomes the predominant belief structure; such is the case with the major religions, whose stories seems hopelessly out of date yet retain some amount of staying power by virtue of being really big. Regardless, the really groundbreaking changes have occured in our society when the stories have been allowed to influence each other and adapt accordingly, thus broadening our collective understanding of existence. Which is where the internet comes back in as a continually evolving matrix of humanity's stories, and thus the roots of all knowledge. A virtual Indra's Net or Tower of Babel, if you will, comparable to current stories of the Noosphere or global brain in which each person is a neuron or symbol processor. Another fitting metaphor is Borges's Aleph, a point which contains all other points, delightfully illustrated in "True Names" when Erythrina and Mr. Slippery become privy to the total flow of information on the Other Plane and essentially learn humanity's true name by experiencing it all at once.

One of the more magical properties of storytelling, as is expemplified by Vinge's "True Names," is that of prophecy. Stories are not only metaphors for life as we experience it, but projections of what life might be like, as we have the ablity to project our patterns ahead of us to understand what is likely to happen. Such subjunctive imagination is responsible for everything from the flight of airplanes to moment to moment survival, and at best allows anything we can think of to become real. In the realm of stories the most portentious visions of the future open up whole realms of possibility not previously imagined, allowing the future of today to become the past of tomorrow. Once we have a description of what a desired world might look like it is that much easier to find the steps necessary to bring it into being.
Which is precisely the intention of this blog, the collection and connection of stories that point towards a broader understanding of our experience in and manipulation of the world on a collective level.

The use of the term 'true names' is meant to be somewhat ironic, for as the Hashhashin sage Hasan-I-Sabbah reputedly said, "Nothing is true, everything is permissable," though a perhaps more fitting quote is the magical axiom "Everything is true in one sense, false in one sense, and meaningless in a third." I do not claim that any of the stories here-after told, or any of the connections I'll draw between them contain any explicit element of truth outside the meaning I and the rest of humanity have given them. As this is the case I do not expect people to believe what I say, since I don't myself, and would rather encourage them to comment with their own interpretations as that will only further the collective understanding of these stories and hence ourselves.

All that being said, welcome to True Names.