why is there such an intrigue in alternate/virtual reality? reading this book "V" thomas pynchon there's a passage about mirror/virtual time.
the setting is a plastic surgeons office -
"Four months from now it would be June; this meant many pretty Jewish girls who felt they would be perfectly marriageable were it not for an ugly nose could now go husband-hunting at the various resorts all with uniform septa.
...
Directly across the room from rachel was a mirror, hung high on the wall, and under the mirror a shelf which held a turn of the century clock...
Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45 degrees, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did a real time plus virutal or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? Or was it only the mirror world that counted; only a promise of a kind that the inward bow of a nose-bridge or a promontory of extra cartilage at the chin meant a reversal of ill fortune such that the world of the altered would thenceforth run on mirror-time; work and love by mirror-light and be only, till death stopped the heart's ticking (metronome's music) quietly as light ceases to vibrate, an imp's dance under the century's own chandeliers...."
In writing this out i've begun to actually realize that there's much more of a specific intrigue in this idea of an alternate reality and the way that individual portions of a "reality" are stitched together to create a larger sense of Reality is more of a specialized, niche interest and one that is common between the last book I read, Permutation City by greg egan.
It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that this is common between the two- theyre both nerds. i guess when you think too much about reality while also being hyperspecialized in any field (computing/coding/writing/wtv.) then when you take a step back from your work and see everything continuing as if you had never left it, it makes you wonder how the bigger thing works. is there something else thats making the cogs tick?
ticking is something that they actually both mention throughout their books, and something thats actually pretty key to understanding permutation city. The portion of the book where the real programmer guy who makes the whole simulation makes his "clone" count down second by second is a key instance of ticking. Meanwhile pynchon makes reference to the ticking of a clock, a metronome, and a ticking as a sort of connection between this mirror/virtual world and "reality". They are both bound by time, and a time that can be observed as the same in the two different realities.
But., going back to the idea that there must be something else that makes these things "tick" - do they realize that they are actually unimportant in making things "tick"? that we all are? that we each have a role to play. they aren't the quarterback. no one is. and i think thats hard for people to grasp with, especially white guys who make books that people read and have their name on the front of it. (even though greg egan is a pen name)
I don't even know what the point of this post is - i guess its my own homework in trying to understand these books. I told myself i should write more.
I often get to the end of some writing and then I say "this doesn't matter" because i think what i just wrote is rambling and doesn't matter and people wont get through it, and if they do get through it they'll think im weird or stupid because what i write doesn't have anything of value. but that is just me getting down on myself. i need to keep writing