6.20: Not so fast, again
“I/we do not see it that way. You are thinking of the Disorder in the wrong way. You think that it is a mystic sublunary force, like the Order of the Sponge. The Sponge is a real order. It may well be mystical, but it is earthly and contingent. It might never have existed had Joseph of Arimathea not had an encounter with a cleanliness-obsessed mystic in the desert. The Disorder is not like that. It has to exist, willy-nilly.”
TW looks confused. “But you engineered the signs of the Disorder through all your fancy-schmancy manipulations!”
“I/we made very slight changes to the situation which had a dramatic effect on it. Does that not remind you of anything? I/we enacted catastrophe theory. Was that fakery? No, it was exemplification. We are all enmeshed in it.”
“But catastrophe theory is not like chaos theory. One has to be in the right area of the graph for small changes to have ‘catastrophic’ effects.”
“And why were we there?”
“Well: the Plan. The Seldon Plan, even as it went wrong, got us that far. We were bound to be there.”
“Indeed. The Plan placed us all in just the right place even as it ‘deviated’. And do you think I/we are exempt from the Plan?”
“No, no. Although you are exceptional in many respects, you too are represented in the field equations, albeit the mathematics seem particularly dense there!”
“Again, exactly. The Plan contains me/us and also catastrophe theory. And thus it contains the ‘Disorder of Catastrophe’. The disorder is platonic. It has to exist. And thus there was no fakery. The Plan corrected itself.”
“But that means it was never broken! So we never needed to do anything! But then if we’d done nothing, it would still be broken! I’m confused.”
“Let this be a lesson on the nature of free will. Paradoxical though it sounds, rational necessitation is constitutive of freedom. I drum this into my minion peas from the moment of their podding.”
“That sounds the sort of flim-flam Hipparchus might teach Lottie in the boring airy-fairy pedagogical episodes of the JugginsVerse. Not the stuff of this adventure. The readers of these stories are quite distinct! What should we call this adventure? Perhaps ‘The Subtle Intents of the Disorder of Catastrophe’.”
“Good enough. But again, in naming your predicament as a predicament, you replicate just the same problem of free will. You Seldon-Planners, you psycho-historians, are gluttons for punishment!”
“Perhaps this adventure will be followed by a dry account of Hipparchus teaching Lottie the philosophy of free will!”
“Almost certainly. That seems to be necessitated by the story.”