The Memory of Whiteness

The Memory Of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance, is Kim Stanley Robinson's third book, and from what I can gather his most philosophical. In it, he tries to tie a few threads of thought together: how determinism ties in with quantum physics and free will; art as representation of reality; how human thinking corresponds with reality & direct and indirect kinds of knowledge. The device KSR uses to connect all this is music.

The Memory Of Whiteness is philosophical musings first, and story second. I don't think it has aged particularly well, and I don't think it has a lot to offer to people that are already familiar with the topics I listed above--and I don't mean as familiar like a CERN scientist, but familiar in a Quantum Physics For Dummies kinda way. I'm not sure how well known the general outlines of quantum physics were back in the 1980ies, but today those outlines are pretty much common knowledge to people with a healthy interest in their reality and a library card.

The notion of indeterminacy on a subatomic level has been a veritable feast for some philosophers of the postmodern ilk: an electron's speed can't be measured at the same time as its spin! Nothing is certain!! What we feel has been proven by hard science!!! Praise Heisenberg!!!! It went so far that people thinking philosophically about truth and representation--and that means nearly everybody writing theory about the arts, as most (if of not all) art is grounded in representation, as also non-representative art stems from representative predecessors--needed to become familiar with the Quantum. Of course, all this was quite overblown. It's not because some subatomic processes are strange and weird that our Newtonian world--still the only world we live in--all of a sudden becomes unknowable and undetermined. Still, serious writers and serious philosophers needed to opine about Schrödinger's cat and the possible existence of the Higgs boson, and Einstein's dictum that 'God doesn't play dice' was made fun of, even in works of popular culture that needed a claim to depth.

Kim Stanley Robinson clearly wasn't a fool, not even back in those days. He saw through this mirage of uncertainty, and envisioned a world that was beyond these debates.

Newtonian physics is deterministic. It is true that it fits into the larger framework of the probabilistic system of quantum mechanics. But quantum mechanics fits into the larger framework of Holywelkin physics; and Holywelkin physics is again deterministic.

Holywelkin is a fictional scientist, and The Memory Of Whiteness is set in 3229 AD--it chronicles a tour of humanity's most important musician/composer throughout the solar system.

(...)

Please read the rest of the analysis on Weighing A Pig...