Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature.
Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.
I think you are spot on. What makes Chiang remarkable is that he never just builds a clever world and then leaves it at that. The counterfactuals are always put under pressure until their human consequences show through. That is why the religious stories work so well. He does not mock belief from the outside, he imagines a world where belief is literally true and then forces us to face the consequences. The horror comes from taking doctrines at face value and discovering that they are not comforting at all.
Exhalation is a good example of the same method applied to physics. The narrator dissects himself and his world with patient clarity, and in the process he reveals the same fragility that we face. The beauty of the story is that it does not rage against entropy or wrap it up in metaphors. It accepts the facts of decline and finds meaning in understanding them. That is why it feels sealed and perfect, as you say. The restraint is what gives it emotional weight.
Showing that flat earth beliefs or YEC are false is hardly a devastating critique of religion per se.
His own explanation of Hell is The Absence of God seems to suggest otherwise too. "He also said that the novelette examines the role of faith in religion, and suggests that if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable."
> "if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable."
I kind of see both sides of that.
On the "agree" side, I saw a quote somewhere that said, "that's why it's called 'faith' instead of 'reading comprehension'." If it were that cut and dried, then it would just be a matter of objectively evaluating the evidence, without even any "probably".
On the "disagree" side, the point of faith isn't really the existence of God. Yes, that's the starting point. But much further than that, the point is that we need God's forgiveness - a forgiveness that is completely unreasonable. Faith is "you have, I need, please give" (contrast with love, which is "I have, you need, I give"). The difference between those two postures is why it is faith, rather than love, that is the fundamental bottom line in dealing with God. Knowledge - even certainty - that God exists doesn't remove the need for a faith that goes beyond mere knowledge.
The various ambiguities of the word "belief" reminds me of a Terry Pratchett quote, from Reaper Man:
> Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
The dichotomy you describe only works with a rudimentary notion of faith, which might be better referred to as belief or superstition. It goes along with the image of God as a being, when God is better understood as Being itself. A deeper understanding of faith implies trust, a trust which one might not be conscious of but necessarily underlies and sustains any genuine love. The "you" of God cannot be put in opposition to "me", since God is our true nature, the real "me".
To get a better understanding of these things, I recommend checking out "The Experience of God" by D.B. Hart or the works of C.S. Lewis.
True, He already gave, once and for all. But it's still "please give me" - please impute to me Christ's righteousness that I in no way deserve, that is received by faith.
Perhaps faith is a type of choice and in either case difficult.
1. We see often where people deny an objective choice. Even those choices that are predominately 'good' and instead choose those that are predominately 'destructive'.
2. A choice to accept forgiveness is exceedingly difficult as the first step is to accept limits of your own power. That is to say, you must accept another's greater ability to forgive than your own.
In either case, regardless of the objective nature of the 'choice' they remain difficult for humans to make.
>But much further than that, the point is that we need God's forgiveness - a forgiveness that is completely unreasonable.
Why would one need forgiveness from their creator? He created us and the universe we exist in. There is nothing we do or think that is not a result of his design, so why should we ask forgiveness for doing exactly what we were designed to do?
It would be like expecting an AI I created to ask forgiveness from me for something bad it did, this is ridiculous, it's the creators fault not the creations.
> On the "agree" side, I saw a quote somewhere that said, "that's why it's called 'faith' instead of 'reading comprehension'." If it were that cut and dried, then it would just be a matter of objectively evaluating the evidence, without even any "probably".
"I don't comprehend what's going on and can hardly read, therefore my views about an invisible sky, man which cannot be proven in any way, are valid"
In a less mocking way of putting it, couldn't it be stated as:
"I don't understand the world, and it sometimes seems unfair, so I find comfort in trusting there's some all seeing power who has a plan. I don't understand the plan because I'm flawed, but I trust the plan exists. In the end, I trust this powerful being will reward the just and punish the unjust (or redeem them by showing them the evil of their ways)".
As an atheist, I don't subscribe to this worldview at all, but I can see how it could comfort people. It's a way to explain the unexplainable, and to face the uncertainty of death, illness and tragedy.
I didn’t really take Tower of Babylon as a “devastating critique of religion”, (or the other stories for that matter).
SPOILERS
In the story they successfully build a tower to the base of heaven and breakthrough, only to find themselves to have looped back to Earth. The implication I took from this is that heaven and earth are one and the same. This isn’t necessarily a refutation of religion or God, and in fact aligns with many religious beliefs. I wouldn’t even see it as “cosmic horror” or something that implies “we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature”.
Then again, the nuance in Chiang’s stories that allows for very different, but reasonable interpretations is one of the things that makes him enjoyable.
Agreed. The main character even remarks at the end of the story that the apparent cylindrical topology of the world (the physical explanation of how the world loops in on itself) is a marvel of God's design, and that the human trial of uncovering the nature of that design draws them closer to God. It struck me as a very ecumenical tone, not anti-religious.
I think OP was incorrect in writing, "thermodynamics appear to work differently", in Exhalation.
I think the thermodynamics works the same and you've nailed it by describing it as hermetically sealed perfection. It's a simpler world where a self-aware being can see and almost feel the march of entropy and their own brief existence being part of that.
Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment!
I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article:
> In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.
I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special.
Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.
TBH I'm glad you left it out! It's an uncomfortable aspect to his stories. His narration hovers above the action with such perfect grace... The satirical element, or its implication, somehow mars that perfection. It is probably better left unsaid by critics and admirers, and left to the individual reader. In truth I shouldn't have mentioned it.
Calling Hell is the Absence of God a critique of religion misses the point. Chiang isn’t saying “religion is false.” He imagines a world where God’s existence and Heaven and Hell are undeniable, and shows that even certainty doesn’t solve the problem of suffering or the struggle for meaning. The story critiques the idea that proof would make faith easier, not religion itself.
I've not read the book but beating this whole thing left and right in my head, I've come to a similar conclusion. It's pleasantly jarring to hear that Chiang (whose other works i like very much) had a similar position.
Interesting observation. Spoilers -> He does the same thing in Tower of Babel, where the topology of the universe is structured in such a manner that the tower can physically reach "heaven", which ends up being a surprise to the reader and the characters at the same time. Masterful stuff.
I want to nitpick two things.
On compatibalism, the first definition presented is the correct one, the framing that "you have to make peace with determinism" isn't quite right. For compatiablists, determinism is freedom, because if one's actions did not follow from prior causes then they would not align with one's internal states.
The other is sneaking in the characterization of Chiang's AI doomer skepticism as a "blindspot". This topic is being debated to death on HN every day so I'll leave that argument for another thread, but IMO it contradicts the tone of the article about a writer whose depth of thought the author was just heaping praise on. I'm not saying its necessary to adopt his views on all things, but I think it deserved more than a footnote dismissal.
Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used is a fine enough simplification for sci-fi readers (and, well, myself) vs whether it missed enough nuances that it's essentially misleading.
(Some academic philosophers follow me on substack so maybe they'll also end up correcting me at some point!)
Re #2 ah I don't think of it as "sneaking in". It's more like "this is a view I have, this is a view many of my readers likely also have, given that this is a widely debated topic (as you say) and I'm not going to change anybody's minds on the object level I'm just going to mention it and move on."
I understand you cannot write as if walking on egg shells; you have your position and maybe your readers do as well. But this is far from a settled matter, and Chiang's position (which was describing earlier rather than current LLMs, but I still think it arguably holds today) is arguably correct, or valid. I probably agree with Chiang more than I agree with you, which is why I find it odd to call it a blind or weak spot as if the matter was settled. Maybe "while I admire Chiang, I fundamentally disagree on some topics, such as LLMs" would have felt less jarring.
(Not saying you must write like this, and it's impossible to write in a way nobody will object to. I'm just explaining why I -- and presumably the person you're responding to -- found it jarring).
I agree. And this together with the obvious misunderstanding of Exhalation re: thermodynamics led me to put down the article.
I don't think the article was written by an LLM, but I'm convinced it was LLM-enabled. Which is a pity, because the author seems to have some interesting things to say. But that's the problem with leaning on an LLM: you lose your own voice, and good writing is centred around voice.
I thought the author was talking about Chiang's famous statement about LLMs being "lossy compression", and was ready to admit LLMs progress so fast this may not be the full picture.
However, this is not the author's actual criticism! TFA's states:
> I won't belabor obvious points like his nonfictional views on current-generation LLMs being surprisingly shallow [footnote]
Regardless of whether you agree or not with Ted Chiang, his article isn't about "current-generation LLMs"... it's about unchecked capitalism and the fears of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (at the risk of misrepresenting Chiang, he's saying it's ironic that Silicon Valley's worst fears resemble a sort of unchecked, rampant capitalism).
You don't need to agree with Chiang to realize he's article is sort of neutral on AI/LLM, and is actually a criticism of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs! TFA's author cannot critique his views on capitalism as "shallow" just because he disagrees with them, or misrepresent them as being about state-of-the-art AI/tech when they are actually about capitalism.
How could the article's author (and Scott Alexander) completely miss this?
As far as I know, compatibilism takes no position on whether the universe is deterministic. It is, rather, an antithesis to the thesis that determinism is logically incompatible with free will (or, from a more deflationary perspective, it offers an explanation for how we could feel we have 'classical' free will even in a deterministic universe.)
Something that helped me grok Compatibilism (I think…) is that there’s actually two layered ideas. The first layer is practical: there is a sense of freedom that is based on your actions and apparent choices being determined by your internal state and not just the state of the outside world. Similarly, that allows for a practical definition of responsibility. The second layer is metaphysical: because of the first layer these choices/actions have “meaning” and justify moral praise and blame. I agree with the first layer and not the second.
Compatibilism is the belief we are only characters in a story, but at least we can enjoy the show. Put another way, we should pretend to have free will, because if we are pre-determined, we don't have a choice anyway.
Honestly, I don’t find that explanation helpful or accurate. I don’t think Compatibilism says we need to pretend we have free will. It says we do have free will, just not the metaphysical kind that most people want.
I'd add that generally, compatibalists don't believe that libertarian free will is the kind that most people want.
Most people believe in free will, most people also believe that their actions follow from prior causes, and most people also believe in moral desert, so most people are definitionally compatibalists.
The typical framing where people are asked to go back in time and imagine redoing past events without memory of the future pumps their intuition for time travel fiction where doing things differently is the entire point of the scenario. If you ask people "if everything happened exactly as it happened, could you alter the past to change the future?" most people would say no.
If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan.
"Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real?
The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html
Greg Egan can write character-based science fiction when he wants to as well (you can find it in his short stories), but it has to be a topic that resonates with him personally. Without a resonance, the stories often look like "plausible vignette - fast-forward through technological implications - another plausible vignette with characters already changed by the experience".
I think he exceeds at doing both at once. One of the things I loved most about The Clockwork Rocket wasn't the exploration of a universe unlike our own - to be honest, most of it went over my head - but the characters dealing with very human issues in a very non-human world.
Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.
"story of your life" isn't quite about sapir-whorf but more about the lagrangian view of the world (as opposed to the Hamiltonian). That is difficult to convey in a movie and so the sapir-whorf part got emphasized there.
Also Exhalation is a beautiful story that captures the fact that all life and intelligence lives in the space between low entropy and high entropy. So it's not different thermodynamics.
But overall I align with the sense of admiration the OP has for Ted Chiang. He explores "what if" scenarios with such mastery I feel like I had a dip in a fresh water pool after a read.
Another of my favs (including the title itself) is "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".
Hi, Sriku. Um, is your dissertation available anywhere? I'm an electronic music amateur. Mostly a four-on-the-floor guy but interested in breaking out of that a bit. I'm reasonably mathy.
Folks please be gentle with the downvotes. I tried an email but can't seem to make it work!
> In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently
The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.
It wasn't one of the short stories I reread for the review. I thought he simplified the thermodynamics element to make the story work, but multiple people have corrected me by now. Note the specific wording was "appear to" because I wasn't sure.
Can't people simply misremember or misunderstand the story? I've seen more than once (and been accused of the same sin, to be fair) someone completely getting the point of a story backwards, no need to involve AI!
I found myself in agreement that Ted Chiang is one of the best scifi writers alive today, but disagreed with other points (that his understanding of then-current LLMs was weak -- I thought Chiang's lossy compression metaphor was on point -- or that he should somehow optimize his output to write more stories -- something one of the commenters from TFA deftly rebutts), but I still think it's a human who wrote most of the article.
Happy to be corrected by the author if he wrote it using LLMs. I'm not immune to being fooled; my objection to LLMs is not "they aren't good enough" but instead "I want to talk to humans, not bots".
That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship.
Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GPT 4.5, 4.1, o3, Claude 4 and DeepSeek R1.
Only GPT 5 and Claude 4.1 gave correct answers repeatedly (on repeated sampling in their case instead of logprobs).
This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.
I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes.
If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.
I reasoned that, based on the error falsely attributing a Chiang story as based on different thermodynamics, any thinking chain for generating a list of Chiang stories predicated on different physics (carried out by an autoregressive model obviously, since no deductions of this kind can be made for the output of diffusion llms) that could make the given error would have suggested a story where thermodynamics was different and then guessed that Exhalation fits its own criteria.
On the basis of that, the priming simulates the same scenario, since there is no feasible way to recreate the author's method of writing an article with unknown essay-writing prompts and a set of unknown proportions of AI to human-generation for different elements of content and editing.
Doesn't feel like AI to me but maybe it's harder to spot. This paragraph reads like a human to me as I've never seen AI write something like it:
> Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is by far my favourite of all Chiang's stories. It is always great intellectual pleasure to read them, however sometimes I find his writing style a bit dry and I don't get so involved emotionally as with Philip K. Dick's stories for instance.
I've been an ardent compatibilist for a long time, but I had no idea there was even a term for it. I'm grateful to now have additional context on my own belief system - context I didn't even know existed! It's weird because when I try to explain it to people they often don't seem to get it. It's like everyone gets locked into these false dichotomies... they become unable to look past them!
I loved Arrival but never really bothered to look into Story of Your Life or its author. I guess now I have to go and read all of Chiang's work... Stories about consistent fictional science are indeed a rarity. This is also why I like Sam Hughes' work (aka qntm) - he does this pretty well himself.
OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories!
Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided.
In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!
As someone who believes knowledge of one's own future is plainly impossible even under determinism (similar reasoning as the halting problem), I actually found myself kind of annoyed by Story of Your Life. It's a good story based on a nonsensical premise, but it's an essential premise, which to me undermines the whole thing. That being said, I'm a curmudgeon who dislikes essentially every single time travel story that has ever been written, for basically the same reason.
I mean, I'm a bit biased towards Denis Villeneuve. The man is literally the modern embodiment of Stanley Kubrick and everything he stood for. His films contain everything that's lacking in modern cinema - decent plots, good writing, slower pacing, artful framing and composition of shots, a dedication to hard sci-fi, respect for source material, very careful attention to lighting and sound design, miniatures so thoughtfully combined with CGI you don't even notice them because it all blends together so seamlessly, as special effects should... I could go on forever. I worship the ground he walks on.
With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).
I think Arrival was quite good, but has some blemishes that Chiang's story doesn't.
To name a few: the movie is way more sentimental -- I subscribe to the notion that "less is more" when trying to stir emotion, and I think Villeneuve overdid it -- and also has your standard "big movie" thriller/suspense/action moments that are completely unnecessary and are only there to make the movie commercially viable. I understand why they are there, but they are still blemishes.
To be fair, some things only work in the movie and are bits of genius, like when Louise suddenly asks why she's getting all these mental images of an unknown girl -- only then the viewer understands she's not remembering something from the past. It's a surprising moment and, to my recollection, it's only in the movie. Even if I misremember and it was in the story, the visual element works better.
Yeah, they are both beautiful works in their own right, and as such “which is better” comes down to such minor differences of opinion I think it’s silly to try to rank them against each other. They are both devastatingly effective works of art in their respective mediums, and both Chiang and Villeneuve are geniuses.
Chiang’s exploration of ideas epitomizes the ideal to which I hold science fiction (as opposed to science fantasy, which I also enjoy as a guilty pleasure).
> simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different
yeah, I don't understand the change tbh.
It's said Eric Heisserer spent years and years on the screenplay so I'm assuming he couldn't sell the original version. But it's a bit like making fight club and removing the big reveal. It ends up feeling the same, but not having the same impact and meaning almost the opposite.
I read Understand by him a really long time ago. I thought it was really good. However at the time I didnt understand the motivation of one of the main characters in it and the ending felt unjustified because of that. Years ago someone posted The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (pdf) by him on here. That one was a trip. He nailed the atmosphere and cadence of One Thousand and One Nights with a time travel story superimposed on top of it. Or it least that's how I remember it. Thought it was very Sufi in how it was told.
I love Ted Chiang and re-read his stories every few years. Most of author's criticisms arise from their refusal to accept that Chiang's stories are mostly science fantasy[1][2], and not some third option. Most/all of the stories primarily focus on characters and relationships on the macro and micro.
In each story, the gimmick(tm) is thoroughly examined and extrapolated in an internally-consistant way, but that is excellent world-building, and independent of genre.
1. As exemplified by Tower of Babylon which wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy anthology.
2. Understand is probably his number 2 "hardest" SF story. The way it is told is closer to a character study on the effects of human super-intelligence (unbelievably authored in 1991). Exhalation is no. 1, and it's focus is still very "soft" SF.
I think you’re using the typical aesthetic definition of fantasy vs.
sci-fi. You’re right that under that one, Tower of Babylon would be considered fantasy.
Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems.
Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1].
> His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply
His definition can get fuzzy at the edges - Understand and The Story of Your Life has very special narrators - does it matter why they're special? They could have been a seventh son of a seventh son, foretold by prophecy, gotten abilities from a magic potion, or a burst of gamma rays. It's just that the premise of the stories is science fiction-y. I've just realized the protagonists of "A Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Story of Your Life" have similar beats in their stories, despite belonging to different genres.
Charles Stross (hi!) retconned the Merchant Princes series from straight parallel-worlds fantasy into parallel-worlds SF on book 3 or 4 of the series (it might have been part of lightly rewriting 6 novellas into a trilogy). The transition was seamless, the distinction between Science Fiction and Science Fantasy is gossamer thin.
Nitpick (and overall I agree with tfa): "In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently". I'd say it works the same, but in a very simplified universe, so it gives you a much better understanding of the concept. Which is again, pretty genius.
Oh and "I think he doesn’t understand the power of this singularity-level technology he just introduced." <- I think he does, but this take would make for a much more boring and less powerful story.
Not addressed in tfa but there is one story where writing is first introduced in a society, and before that they had 2 concepts of truth: "The real truth" and "What all parties find convenient". So powerful, I think we do this more that we think, see also that story about that guy that needs coming to terms with his own memory.
Read Ted Chiang people. Any new book of his is an insta-buy for me. I think Greg Egan is up there with Ted Chiang btw, his stories are much longer but still have this high level of scientific and thoroughly structured imagination.
Something that hit me hard about this one is the purported full quote from Alex ends with "See you tomorrow." Given the context of Chiang's story, leaving this off just adds to the gut punch for me.
Comparing to old sci fi. (For anyone who still cares!) Chiang can be pitched as today's Stanislaw Lem. (And maybe a modern PK Dick but with much less insanity.) I'm thinking especially of His Master's Voice, which is my favorite Lem story and maybe his most Chiangian.
Very cerebral and great storytelling. The Chiang story where the mathematician discovers the horrible truth that 1+1=3 while her husband discovers he doesn't love her is ... I think Lem (or Dick) would be proud to have pulled that off.
Note: someone else commented that Chiang often seems dryer than PK Dick, which can make C feel like more work to read. Maybe that might be true sometimes :). But maybe it's only on the surface. If that makes sense. Chiang is condensed. Dick is ... not condensed.
PKD and Chiang -- I hadn't thought of this comparison, but as a fan of both, it rings true.
Didn't PKD even write a nightmarish story about god and angels being literally true and punishing the infidel that echoes Chiang's story about "Hell.."?
I don't think Chiang is drier than PKD. I think he's a saner PKD, without the tendency to psychedelic ramblings. I say this as an absolute fan of PKD!
> The ability to send bits across parallel universes is just insane in terms of economic and experimentation value. For example, pharmaceutical companies can do $100 billion trials for all sorts of novel drugs, and trade the results of this information with their clones in other universes.
I remember reading this short story and being obsessed with the consequences. It immediately solves P = NP, and makes guarding secrets way way way harder. This is the first time I've heard someone else mention it.
HPMOR had a similar technology (the time turners) and threw up defensive cannon early:
> If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn't have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry's standards of cheating.
> Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it.
> Paper-2 said in slightly shaky handwriting:
> DO NOT MESS WITH TIME
I'm a huge SciFi fan, especially Ted Chiang. I perceive his styles to be quite varied and creative. I think that he does a good job of portraying the "awe" of "awe-inspiring discovery".
I have a slightly different reading on Ted Chiang's approach to free will.
As I see it, free will is a perspective - not something true or false, just looking at things from a certain angle. Knowledge of future is another one - and it is incompatible with free will. You can choose, you can know the future, but not both.
I think free will should be understood as a game of repeated prisoner's dilemma game. Where we have to tweak our choices of whether to choose vanilla or chocolate based on our past experiences. Free will emerges in this repeated version but then determinism can creep in there too.
I could interpret that sentiment as "it's a terrible shame we don't have more Chiang to read". In that interpretation I don't see article-author-hubris.
> Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expected hard science fiction; Chiang was doing something different. Chiang created different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.
This is being overly kind. "What if religion was actually true?" does not create a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws; it creates a universe full of impossibility from which you then pick and choose one or two things to focus on, and end up with not science fiction but fantasy.
I think this is a case of trees and forest. Scifi doesn't require "a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws." Or, if you want to hold on to that interpretation, there is no scifi. Not even the ones that uphold our current knowledge of physics, since that is known to be incomplete.
Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
The story you refer to is consistent, though. It stays away from details that would break that. It can do that, because (1) realism is not the goal of the story, and (2) a practically omnipotent God is given, which allows every possible scenario.
> Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
Then what, for you, is the distinction between Sci-fi and Fantasy? I think if you draw that line where most people draw it and think through what Chiang is actually doing, he's on the other side of it.
Whatever definition you settle on, it would be more sensible if it didn't disqualify the works that immediately come to mind when we say 'sci-fi' despite them usually exhibiting bad relativity and thermodynamics.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The lack of a line is why we ended up with the term speculative fiction.
Trying to get it concise isn't easy. There is a cultural, shared definition. Fantasy simply isn't everything that involves fantasy. It has some specific ingredients. It seems to me that the fantastic element in Fantasy is the setting/environment/world where the characters operate, but that setting is not the important part. The story is about the characters, who usually behave realistic (given their options). It also tends to have a historical nature, although not accurate.
In sci-fi, there's often an (hypothetical) future setting/environment/world involved, but that doesn't really define the difference. The important part in sci-fi is how the events evolve in and how the characters react to and interact with that world, and how that particular definition of that world determines the outcome. The fantasy part is the main ingredient. It's a thought-experiment.
Chiang sets up a world, and his interest is in how that world affects "us" (the characters). It's not about the "arch" of the characters, but it's about the effect the world has on them.
It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather inconvenient for the PhD studying simulated intelligent life, he'd better just purchase and rearrange some pre-computed data.
The difference between science and religion doesn't lie in disagreement over particular facts or any facts at all, the difference is in the approach. Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). Science is built around making verifiable predictions but doesn't in fact give any answers, only theories that are (mostly) consistent with observable events (so far). They can however agree or disagree over any particular set of facts. Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
> It's not impossible from a scientific perspective ... to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.
I'm fairly certain simulating 16 billion years of physics (or 6000) in a shorter timeframe than 16 billion years (or 6000) is, in fact, scientifically impossible. Mathematically impossible, even, because it leads to absurd consequences such as the simulator being able to simulate itself faster than itself.
> science is built around making verifiable
> predictions but doesn't in fact give any
> answers, only theories
This is just redefining "theory" and "answer" to the point of meaninglessness.
Darwin didn't know a lot of things about evolution or biology, and I'm sure he had questions about some of those things. If you could talk to him today you could give him answers to those questions, and the reason for that is that those answers are found in theories and scientific progress in general.
But yes, it doesn't provide "answers" in the mushy religious sense, i.e. "what is it all for?".
> The difference between science and
> religion doesn't lie in disagreement
> over particular facts or any facts at all
Yes, it does. You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.
Do you think Galileo clashed with the Catholic church over heliocentrism because the church didn't understand what religion should and shouldn't be making claims about?
The point being, a theory only holds "true" until it's superseded by a better theory. Furthermore, multiple conflicting theories can be in use at the same time in the absence of a good unifying theory. In the end science neither says nor cares what is "true", it just looks for theories that are good at predicting stuff.
"Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent" or at least that's how I understand the word.
EDIT apparently the comment above got extended, so I'll address some of newer points too.
> You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying all these claims can be as well true in a different (fully consistent and scientific) world. Furthermore, if you assume we live in a simulation then basically anything becomes possible in OUR world too, including Jesus walking on water turned into wine. It's just our simulation overlords had a good sense of humor.
The reason why we don't usually consider simulation theories is not because they're false (this can't be proven), but because they aren't practical and don't predict much. Even if we do live in a simulation, this simulation so far seems to follow some consistent internal "laws" so we can as well study those. Not that it means anything, but helps us to exterminate those who neglect these laws so it's a survivorship bias in action.
> "Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent"
I would argue that answers are supposed to be useful for the purpose motivating the question.
Q: What is the price of gas?
A1: The number of units of some other good or service demanded by a seller in echange for a given quantity of it.
A2: about $4.00/gal
A1 is, I would say, both "true" and "permanent". Assuming it is at least approximately accurate, though, A2 is much more of an answer in most cases the question is asked, even though it is at perhaps only approximately and in any case at best transitorily true.
The goal of science is to disprove our theories so we can find out if they are true, and hopefully replace them with improved versions.
The goal of religious study is to try to prove that it is not impossible, not that it is a probably reading of what happened. To find some absurd way of reconciling different stories. I have no idea how you can call that an answer.
Well these "answers", whether absurd or not, were good enough for societies to live by them and survive for millennia.
Furthermore, even though you can argue that science can give some answers, it definitely under-delivers on questions like "what is good and evil" or "why you should have kids". Some of those are covered by the "humanism" neoreligion, some of them aren't. This whole experiment is very modern, it's not clear what are long-term survival rates of societies that completely give up on religions in a classical sense. It could turn out that societies that believe in nonsense have an edge over the ones that don't, after all this matches our experience all the way up until the 20th century.
I agree science doesn’t give good answers for good and evil, for me religion gives even worse answers. For example the Bible is clearly in favor of slavery as an institution. Other religions like Buddhism are for me better.
The scary part is that there may not be a good or evil, and the answers we have are just made up stuff.
Slavery made a lot of economic sense prior to the industrial revolution. If you consider "good and evil" as a set of norms that help society to thrive (as in outcompete other societies for resources) then it's not surprising that slavery went from good to bad as the technology progressed.
That's the only remotely rational view of it that I'm aware of. "Remotely" because without some kind of religion it doesn't follow that outcompeting other societies or survival in general is "good".
So in the end yes, I do believe "good and evil" are made up. Luckily, it's not a bad thing.
I do think it’s possible that God and evil are a set of norms that help society (or actually their leaders) thrive, but are presented as universal values.
I think there is a huge distinction to what it’s good for the average person in society vs what is good for the rulers, and it is unclear which one of those you mean.
> I think there is a huge distinction to what it’s good for the average person in society vs what is good for the rulers, and it is unclear which one of those you mean.
I mean it in the most brutal sense, maximizing replication and persistence of religion bearers (you can say average person in society).
In a short term religions can benefit current rulers, but in a long term selection must be geared towards survival of societies and cultures as a whole, otherwise they wouldn't have lived into the modern age.
> Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well).
No, it doesn't.
I mean, it does the horoscope thing where it makes predictions vague enough that people can retrospectively fit whatever actually happens into them easily, but that's not actually predicting very well.
Religions are to a big extent codified traditions and many traditions emerged and persisted because they benefited their bearers in one way or another. That's fundamentally different from horoscopes.
> Religions are to a big extent codified traditions and many traditions emerged and persisted because they benefited their bearers in one way or another.
Religions are a lot more than just codified traditions, but yes, some traditions are have benefits. That doesn't mean that the religion as a whole is good at predicting anything, it just means that they occasionally preserve things that are beneficial. But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs, and with a very big "past utility is no guarantee of future utility" even on the bits that are useful, because the utility of the tradition may be tied to conditions that are not preserved, while the tradition itself is blindly perserved.
> But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs
But you agree this must be much better than random? Evolutionary pressure on species is also rather weak: unfit specimen survive and fit specimen die due to chance all the time. But look where it got us when averaged over long periods of time.
I don't buy the "systematic knowledge of what works or how it works" part. That's what NLP scientists used to say about neural nets while building monstrous systems based on "systematic knowledge of grammar". You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
> But you agree this must be much better than random?
Well, no, without a definition of what domain it is supposed to be better in, and what the actual alternative it is being compared to more concretely than "random" (irreligious humans don't behave randomly, and, in fact, even without religion preserve traditions, some of which are useful), and probably some argument to make the case, no, I'm not going to agree with that.
> You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
You have to actually make predictions to make predictions, certainly. And religion is manifestly very bad at making predictions where it does make them, and the things you are talking about are very much not predictions, they are memes in the original sense.
Saying that religious predictions use the same style of vagueness that allows people to retrospectively reconstruct them to match facts as horoscopes is not a claim that horoscopes are a religious belief.
> The majority of atheists globally believe in astrology
Even assuming this is true, what relevance does it have to the discussion?
> What religious predictions? Religions do not generally make many predictions.
Religions tend to not make a lot of predictions, but they do make some (there's kind of an inverse relation between size and durability of religion and the number and specificity of predictions, though.)
But, if they didn't make any, they wouldn't have a special word for it ("prophecy").
Prophecy is not synonym for prediction. it is a "message from God" in the major theistic religions.
The only prophecies that were predictions I can think of with regard to Christianity were Jewish prophecies of a messiah. The Jewish prophets were leaders, not soothsayers.
> there's kind of an inverse relation between size and durability of religion and the number and specificity of predictions, though
I would question that - things like the Oracle at Delphi lasted a long time. So did fortune telling (mostly non-religious) around the world. How long as astrology lasted?
CITATION NEEDED — except not really, that's utter bollocks that doesn't warrant a counter.
But, you triggered me lol:
1.) The Chinese meaning of "atheist" may not mean what you think it means: a.) it means not following a major established religion, and b.) they have an Orwellian surveillance-state dictatorship government which very much opposes major established religions
2.) For many people, including in China, astrology is just something like buying a lottery ticket, or asking the Magic 8-Ball for advice — fun, but not something actually believed in[1].
3.) It's much more likely that 3% of atheists "believe in" astrology[2] — and the idea that a majority would is insane on its face
You quote American numbers as a counter to a claim about global beliefs? You even cite the powresearch link to to make a claim about China!
Even in the US the group most likely to believe in astrology as the "nothing in particular" - non religious but not strongly identifying as atheist or agnostic.
Most Chinese people say they are "convinced atheists"[1] so I find your first claim unconvincing. Yes, they live in a dictatorship, but the dictatorship's promotion of atheism is what makes them atheist - they are brainwashed (in a casual, not formal, sense) into it.
Even when asked more specific questions about belief they are atheists. Its not just fear of government because they will admit to superstitious practices the state also disapproves of in the same surveys[2].
Claiming Chinese atheists are not really atheists is a no true Scotsman argument. They say they are atheists, their beliefs about religious things are atheist.
> and the idea that a majority would is insane on its face
It might to fit what you think atheists should believe, but the evidence points to it being true.
I don't see anything in your links that remotely supports your original claim that "The majority of atheists globally believe in astrology".
Even if you expand your claim to add fengshui, it's entirely plausible that only about 10% of the Chinese population are atheists who believe in fengshui. That would mean only 17% of Chinese atheists believe in fengshui.
> At the very least its an indicator that atheist and superstition are a common combination.
The very least is even less than what I wrote: it's the smallest possible overlap between convinced atheists and fengshui believers: (47-(100-61)) = 8% of the population being both.
You can call it common if you want, but again I don't see how you'd get from that to anywhere near "the majority of atheists globally believe in astrology".
> some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like")
You really can't. They're very different.
> It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.
True enough. But such a world would be very different from a world in which the bible was literally true, and a world in which the bible is actually literally true is genuinely scientifically impossible. You would have to redefine an unimaginably large number of things and you would still have a world full of impossible contradictions to the point that nothing could be said.
> Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
> You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
Why not? I don't think it's likely and I definitely don't build my life under an assumption that this is true.
However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
> However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
If you took that hypothesis seriously you'd still be able to apply predictions and laws. Giving up on trying to understand it is what's unscientific.
> You mean, like those silly science fiction stories where FTL travel is possible? Or time travel?
FTL or time travel are not necessarily unscientific - we know that relativity permits CTCs to exist, they're something that can be explored rigorously and scientifically. Even for stories that adopt decidedly unscientific handwave versions, one dropped stitch won't necessarily unravel the whole garment, especially when it's not the focus - if you're telling a story about life on Omicron Persei 3, how one gets to Omicron Persei 3 may well be beside the point. But yes if a story is full of things like that, even for things that are the focus of the story, then it's not science fiction.
Well, feel free to send my review to anybody cool living in SF or East Bay, especially people new to the area! Maybe they'd read the review and think they'd vibe well with me :)
If you like Chiang, Netflix has an adaptation of his work called “Pantheon” that’s very good. Animated, two seasons, about the rise of uploaded humans.
I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.
Just chiming in to recommend this show as well. Very well done and it has a complete story arc in 2 seasons which is close to my optimal TV show duration.
Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here:
Hell is the Absence of God is one of my favourite stories of all time. Ted Chiang is truly incredible. The short story anthologies are unbelievable. Every one a banger.
It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories!
Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.
> Chiang’s much weaker at the middle level, where we consider how societies and civilizations collectively face novel technologies.
I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.
Seconded. Not all of it, though. Particularly the trilogies fade in quality and precision of ideas/writing when compared to the standalones. Cage of Souls is one of his latest standalones and it blew me away.
It seems like this was written by someone who does not read literary fiction. It was defeined by this higher order portraiture of truth, and the effect that emerges from the whole piece. It's a full composition, where like classical music, you really need to hear the whole thing and not just a few bars or a riff.
Chiang is great. I think of him as the last good writer, as reviewers seemed to stop acknowledging anything good after his Exhalations, which was just before the culture was fully consumed by spasms. Maybe there is an opportunity, where AI will polarize the market for fiction, and the best stuff becomes a super valuable and rarefied pleasure against a backdrop of formulaic genre fiction and AI slop?
> I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.
Wow, thanks for enlightening the unwashed masses of Ted Chiang fans.
One nitpick is that Black Mirror is usually dystopian in its view of technology but there has been more than 1 happy ending. The author probably only has San Junipero fresh in their mind.
I don't know how one could classify USS Callister and Black Museum as having happy endings! The fates of the bad guys in those episodes are so horrible they still haunt me. Doesn't make it any better that they are bad guys!
Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature.
Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.
I think you are spot on. What makes Chiang remarkable is that he never just builds a clever world and then leaves it at that. The counterfactuals are always put under pressure until their human consequences show through. That is why the religious stories work so well. He does not mock belief from the outside, he imagines a world where belief is literally true and then forces us to face the consequences. The horror comes from taking doctrines at face value and discovering that they are not comforting at all.
Exhalation is a good example of the same method applied to physics. The narrator dissects himself and his world with patient clarity, and in the process he reveals the same fragility that we face. The beauty of the story is that it does not rage against entropy or wrap it up in metaphors. It accepts the facts of decline and finds meaning in understanding them. That is why it feels sealed and perfect, as you say. The restraint is what gives it emotional weight.
Showing that flat earth beliefs or YEC are false is hardly a devastating critique of religion per se.
His own explanation of Hell is The Absence of God seems to suggest otherwise too. "He also said that the novelette examines the role of faith in religion, and suggests that if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Is_the_Absence_of_God#Bac...
> "if God undeniably existed, then faith would no longer be applicable."
I kind of see both sides of that.
On the "agree" side, I saw a quote somewhere that said, "that's why it's called 'faith' instead of 'reading comprehension'." If it were that cut and dried, then it would just be a matter of objectively evaluating the evidence, without even any "probably".
On the "disagree" side, the point of faith isn't really the existence of God. Yes, that's the starting point. But much further than that, the point is that we need God's forgiveness - a forgiveness that is completely unreasonable. Faith is "you have, I need, please give" (contrast with love, which is "I have, you need, I give"). The difference between those two postures is why it is faith, rather than love, that is the fundamental bottom line in dealing with God. Knowledge - even certainty - that God exists doesn't remove the need for a faith that goes beyond mere knowledge.
The various ambiguities of the word "belief" reminds me of a Terry Pratchett quote, from Reaper Man:
> Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn't see the point of believing, of going around saying "O great table, without whom we are as naught." Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe in them or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
The dichotomy you describe only works with a rudimentary notion of faith, which might be better referred to as belief or superstition. It goes along with the image of God as a being, when God is better understood as Being itself. A deeper understanding of faith implies trust, a trust which one might not be conscious of but necessarily underlies and sustains any genuine love. The "you" of God cannot be put in opposition to "me", since God is our true nature, the real "me".
To get a better understanding of these things, I recommend checking out "The Experience of God" by D.B. Hart or the works of C.S. Lewis.
If you think that the works of C.S. Lewis support "God is our true nature, the real 'me'", then you have seriously misread him.
Nicene Christian faith is "You have, I need, You gave".
"he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified"
True, He already gave, once and for all. But it's still "please give me" - please impute to me Christ's righteousness that I in no way deserve, that is received by faith.
I agree, but I think that if God undeniably existed it would make faith (in the second sense) more difficult - or at least change how people felt it.
Perhaps faith is a type of choice and in either case difficult.
1. We see often where people deny an objective choice. Even those choices that are predominately 'good' and instead choose those that are predominately 'destructive'.
2. A choice to accept forgiveness is exceedingly difficult as the first step is to accept limits of your own power. That is to say, you must accept another's greater ability to forgive than your own.
In either case, regardless of the objective nature of the 'choice' they remain difficult for humans to make.
Can you elaborate on the need for forgiveness? Forgiveness for what and by whom?
>But much further than that, the point is that we need God's forgiveness - a forgiveness that is completely unreasonable.
Why would one need forgiveness from their creator? He created us and the universe we exist in. There is nothing we do or think that is not a result of his design, so why should we ask forgiveness for doing exactly what we were designed to do?
It would be like expecting an AI I created to ask forgiveness from me for something bad it did, this is ridiculous, it's the creators fault not the creations.
> On the "agree" side, I saw a quote somewhere that said, "that's why it's called 'faith' instead of 'reading comprehension'." If it were that cut and dried, then it would just be a matter of objectively evaluating the evidence, without even any "probably".
"I don't comprehend what's going on and can hardly read, therefore my views about an invisible sky, man which cannot be proven in any way, are valid"
In a less mocking way of putting it, couldn't it be stated as:
"I don't understand the world, and it sometimes seems unfair, so I find comfort in trusting there's some all seeing power who has a plan. I don't understand the plan because I'm flawed, but I trust the plan exists. In the end, I trust this powerful being will reward the just and punish the unjust (or redeem them by showing them the evil of their ways)".
As an atheist, I don't subscribe to this worldview at all, but I can see how it could comfort people. It's a way to explain the unexplainable, and to face the uncertainty of death, illness and tragedy.
I didn’t really take Tower of Babylon as a “devastating critique of religion”, (or the other stories for that matter).
SPOILERS
In the story they successfully build a tower to the base of heaven and breakthrough, only to find themselves to have looped back to Earth. The implication I took from this is that heaven and earth are one and the same. This isn’t necessarily a refutation of religion or God, and in fact aligns with many religious beliefs. I wouldn’t even see it as “cosmic horror” or something that implies “we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature”.
Then again, the nuance in Chiang’s stories that allows for very different, but reasonable interpretations is one of the things that makes him enjoyable.
Agreed. The main character even remarks at the end of the story that the apparent cylindrical topology of the world (the physical explanation of how the world loops in on itself) is a marvel of God's design, and that the human trial of uncovering the nature of that design draws them closer to God. It struck me as a very ecumenical tone, not anti-religious.
I think OP was incorrect in writing, "thermodynamics appear to work differently", in Exhalation.
I think the thermodynamics works the same and you've nailed it by describing it as hermetically sealed perfection. It's a simpler world where a self-aware being can see and almost feel the march of entropy and their own brief existence being part of that.
Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment!
I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article:
> In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.
I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special.
Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.
TBH I'm glad you left it out! It's an uncomfortable aspect to his stories. His narration hovers above the action with such perfect grace... The satirical element, or its implication, somehow mars that perfection. It is probably better left unsaid by critics and admirers, and left to the individual reader. In truth I shouldn't have mentioned it.
Calling Hell is the Absence of God a critique of religion misses the point. Chiang isn’t saying “religion is false.” He imagines a world where God’s existence and Heaven and Hell are undeniable, and shows that even certainty doesn’t solve the problem of suffering or the struggle for meaning. The story critiques the idea that proof would make faith easier, not religion itself.
I've not read the book but beating this whole thing left and right in my head, I've come to a similar conclusion. It's pleasantly jarring to hear that Chiang (whose other works i like very much) had a similar position.
Interesting observation. Spoilers -> He does the same thing in Tower of Babel, where the topology of the universe is structured in such a manner that the tower can physically reach "heaven", which ends up being a surprise to the reader and the characters at the same time. Masterful stuff.
I want to nitpick two things.
On compatibalism, the first definition presented is the correct one, the framing that "you have to make peace with determinism" isn't quite right. For compatiablists, determinism is freedom, because if one's actions did not follow from prior causes then they would not align with one's internal states.
The other is sneaking in the characterization of Chiang's AI doomer skepticism as a "blindspot". This topic is being debated to death on HN every day so I'll leave that argument for another thread, but IMO it contradicts the tone of the article about a writer whose depth of thought the author was just heaping praise on. I'm not saying its necessary to adopt his views on all things, but I think it deserved more than a footnote dismissal.
I appreciate the nitpicks!
Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used is a fine enough simplification for sci-fi readers (and, well, myself) vs whether it missed enough nuances that it's essentially misleading.
(Some academic philosophers follow me on substack so maybe they'll also end up correcting me at some point!)
Re #2 ah I don't think of it as "sneaking in". It's more like "this is a view I have, this is a view many of my readers likely also have, given that this is a widely debated topic (as you say) and I'm not going to change anybody's minds on the object level I'm just going to mention it and move on."
For the record, I also found #2 jarring.
I understand you cannot write as if walking on egg shells; you have your position and maybe your readers do as well. But this is far from a settled matter, and Chiang's position (which was describing earlier rather than current LLMs, but I still think it arguably holds today) is arguably correct, or valid. I probably agree with Chiang more than I agree with you, which is why I find it odd to call it a blind or weak spot as if the matter was settled. Maybe "while I admire Chiang, I fundamentally disagree on some topics, such as LLMs" would have felt less jarring.
(Not saying you must write like this, and it's impossible to write in a way nobody will object to. I'm just explaining why I -- and presumably the person you're responding to -- found it jarring).
I agree. And this together with the obvious misunderstanding of Exhalation re: thermodynamics led me to put down the article.
I don't think the article was written by an LLM, but I'm convinced it was LLM-enabled. Which is a pity, because the author seems to have some interesting things to say. But that's the problem with leaning on an LLM: you lose your own voice, and good writing is centred around voice.
It's actually even worse.
I thought the author was talking about Chiang's famous statement about LLMs being "lossy compression", and was ready to admit LLMs progress so fast this may not be the full picture.
However, this is not the author's actual criticism! TFA's states:
> I won't belabor obvious points like his nonfictional views on current-generation LLMs being surprisingly shallow [footnote]
The footnote then links to an alleged "rebuttal" to Chiang by Scott Alexander, link here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/15/maybe-the-real-superin...
This alleged "rebuttal" is actually referencing this Buzzfeed article by Ted Chiang: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-dang....
Regardless of whether you agree or not with Ted Chiang, his article isn't about "current-generation LLMs"... it's about unchecked capitalism and the fears of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (at the risk of misrepresenting Chiang, he's saying it's ironic that Silicon Valley's worst fears resemble a sort of unchecked, rampant capitalism).
You don't need to agree with Chiang to realize he's article is sort of neutral on AI/LLM, and is actually a criticism of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs! TFA's author cannot critique his views on capitalism as "shallow" just because he disagrees with them, or misrepresent them as being about state-of-the-art AI/tech when they are actually about capitalism.
How could the article's author (and Scott Alexander) completely miss this?
As far as I know, compatibilism takes no position on whether the universe is deterministic. It is, rather, an antithesis to the thesis that determinism is logically incompatible with free will (or, from a more deflationary perspective, it offers an explanation for how we could feel we have 'classical' free will even in a deterministic universe.)
Something that helped me grok Compatibilism (I think…) is that there’s actually two layered ideas. The first layer is practical: there is a sense of freedom that is based on your actions and apparent choices being determined by your internal state and not just the state of the outside world. Similarly, that allows for a practical definition of responsibility. The second layer is metaphysical: because of the first layer these choices/actions have “meaning” and justify moral praise and blame. I agree with the first layer and not the second.
Compatibilism is the belief we are only characters in a story, but at least we can enjoy the show. Put another way, we should pretend to have free will, because if we are pre-determined, we don't have a choice anyway.
Honestly, I don’t find that explanation helpful or accurate. I don’t think Compatibilism says we need to pretend we have free will. It says we do have free will, just not the metaphysical kind that most people want.
I'd add that generally, compatibalists don't believe that libertarian free will is the kind that most people want.
Most people believe in free will, most people also believe that their actions follow from prior causes, and most people also believe in moral desert, so most people are definitionally compatibalists.
The typical framing where people are asked to go back in time and imagine redoing past events without memory of the future pumps their intuition for time travel fiction where doing things differently is the entire point of the scenario. If you ask people "if everything happened exactly as it happened, could you alter the past to change the future?" most people would say no.
Great point - I shouldn’t have suggested what most people want, that’s always dangerous
If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan.
"Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real?
The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html
Greg Egan can write character-based science fiction when he wants to as well (you can find it in his short stories), but it has to be a topic that resonates with him personally. Without a resonance, the stories often look like "plausible vignette - fast-forward through technological implications - another plausible vignette with characters already changed by the experience".
I think he exceeds at doing both at once. One of the things I loved most about The Clockwork Rocket wasn't the exploration of a universe unlike our own - to be honest, most of it went over my head - but the characters dealing with very human issues in a very non-human world.
Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.
"story of your life" isn't quite about sapir-whorf but more about the lagrangian view of the world (as opposed to the Hamiltonian). That is difficult to convey in a movie and so the sapir-whorf part got emphasized there.
Also Exhalation is a beautiful story that captures the fact that all life and intelligence lives in the space between low entropy and high entropy. So it's not different thermodynamics.
But overall I align with the sense of admiration the OP has for Ted Chiang. He explores "what if" scenarios with such mastery I feel like I had a dip in a fresh water pool after a read.
Another of my favs (including the title itself) is "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".
Hi, Sriku. Um, is your dissertation available anywhere? I'm an electronic music amateur. Mostly a four-on-the-floor guy but interested in breaking out of that a bit. I'm reasonably mathy.
Folks please be gentle with the downvotes. I tried an email but can't seem to make it work!
If you look at his LinkedIn he lists his thesis title, and googling that will bring you to it, hosted on his site.
Found it, thanks!
Is this an ai written article?
> In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently
The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.
It wasn't one of the short stories I reread for the review. I thought he simplified the thermodynamics element to make the story work, but multiple people have corrected me by now. Note the specific wording was "appear to" because I wasn't sure.
Can't people simply misremember or misunderstand the story? I've seen more than once (and been accused of the same sin, to be fair) someone completely getting the point of a story backwards, no need to involve AI!
I found myself in agreement that Ted Chiang is one of the best scifi writers alive today, but disagreed with other points (that his understanding of then-current LLMs was weak -- I thought Chiang's lossy compression metaphor was on point -- or that he should somehow optimize his output to write more stories -- something one of the commenters from TFA deftly rebutts), but I still think it's a human who wrote most of the article.
Happy to be corrected by the author if he wrote it using LLMs. I'm not immune to being fooled; my objection to LLMs is not "they aren't good enough" but instead "I want to talk to humans, not bots".
That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship.
Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GPT 4.5, 4.1, o3, Claude 4 and DeepSeek R1.
Only GPT 5 and Claude 4.1 gave correct answers repeatedly (on repeated sampling in their case instead of logprobs).
This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.
I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes.
If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.
checking logprobs doesn't seem weird to me, it was the priming that was weird.
I reasoned that, based on the error falsely attributing a Chiang story as based on different thermodynamics, any thinking chain for generating a list of Chiang stories predicated on different physics (carried out by an autoregressive model obviously, since no deductions of this kind can be made for the output of diffusion llms) that could make the given error would have suggested a story where thermodynamics was different and then guessed that Exhalation fits its own criteria.
On the basis of that, the priming simulates the same scenario, since there is no feasible way to recreate the author's method of writing an article with unknown essay-writing prompts and a set of unknown proportions of AI to human-generation for different elements of content and editing.
Doesn't feel like AI to me but maybe it's harder to spot. This paragraph reads like a human to me as I've never seen AI write something like it:
> Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is by far my favourite of all Chiang's stories. It is always great intellectual pleasure to read them, however sometimes I find his writing style a bit dry and I don't get so involved emotionally as with Philip K. Dick's stories for instance.
I've been an ardent compatibilist for a long time, but I had no idea there was even a term for it. I'm grateful to now have additional context on my own belief system - context I didn't even know existed! It's weird because when I try to explain it to people they often don't seem to get it. It's like everyone gets locked into these false dichotomies... they become unable to look past them!
I loved Arrival but never really bothered to look into Story of Your Life or its author. I guess now I have to go and read all of Chiang's work... Stories about consistent fictional science are indeed a rarity. This is also why I like Sam Hughes' work (aka qntm) - he does this pretty well himself.
OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories!
Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided.
In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!
As someone who believes knowledge of one's own future is plainly impossible even under determinism (similar reasoning as the halting problem), I actually found myself kind of annoyed by Story of Your Life. It's a good story based on a nonsensical premise, but it's an essential premise, which to me undermines the whole thing. That being said, I'm a curmudgeon who dislikes essentially every single time travel story that has ever been written, for basically the same reason.
I mean, I'm a bit biased towards Denis Villeneuve. The man is literally the modern embodiment of Stanley Kubrick and everything he stood for. His films contain everything that's lacking in modern cinema - decent plots, good writing, slower pacing, artful framing and composition of shots, a dedication to hard sci-fi, respect for source material, very careful attention to lighting and sound design, miniatures so thoughtfully combined with CGI you don't even notice them because it all blends together so seamlessly, as special effects should... I could go on forever. I worship the ground he walks on.
With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).
I think Arrival was quite good, but has some blemishes that Chiang's story doesn't.
To name a few: the movie is way more sentimental -- I subscribe to the notion that "less is more" when trying to stir emotion, and I think Villeneuve overdid it -- and also has your standard "big movie" thriller/suspense/action moments that are completely unnecessary and are only there to make the movie commercially viable. I understand why they are there, but they are still blemishes.
To be fair, some things only work in the movie and are bits of genius, like when Louise suddenly asks why she's getting all these mental images of an unknown girl -- only then the viewer understands she's not remembering something from the past. It's a surprising moment and, to my recollection, it's only in the movie. Even if I misremember and it was in the story, the visual element works better.
The short story is perfect.
Yeah, they are both beautiful works in their own right, and as such “which is better” comes down to such minor differences of opinion I think it’s silly to try to rank them against each other. They are both devastatingly effective works of art in their respective mediums, and both Chiang and Villeneuve are geniuses.
Chiang’s exploration of ideas epitomizes the ideal to which I hold science fiction (as opposed to science fantasy, which I also enjoy as a guilty pleasure).
> simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different
yeah, I don't understand the change tbh.
It's said Eric Heisserer spent years and years on the screenplay so I'm assuming he couldn't sell the original version. But it's a bit like making fight club and removing the big reveal. It ends up feeling the same, but not having the same impact and meaning almost the opposite.
You are one of today’s lucky 10,000.
You’re going to have a great time reading those 2 anthologies.
I've already read much of qntm's work!
I read Understand by him a really long time ago. I thought it was really good. However at the time I didnt understand the motivation of one of the main characters in it and the ending felt unjustified because of that. Years ago someone posted The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (pdf) by him on here. That one was a trip. He nailed the atmosphere and cadence of One Thousand and One Nights with a time travel story superimposed on top of it. Or it least that's how I remember it. Thought it was very Sufi in how it was told.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is SO good. I tear up every time I reread it.
If you haven't already done so, check out The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.
I love Ted Chiang and re-read his stories every few years. Most of author's criticisms arise from their refusal to accept that Chiang's stories are mostly science fantasy[1][2], and not some third option. Most/all of the stories primarily focus on characters and relationships on the macro and micro.
In each story, the gimmick(tm) is thoroughly examined and extrapolated in an internally-consistant way, but that is excellent world-building, and independent of genre.
1. As exemplified by Tower of Babylon which wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy anthology.
2. Understand is probably his number 2 "hardest" SF story. The way it is told is closer to a character study on the effects of human super-intelligence (unbelievably authored in 1991). Exhalation is no. 1, and it's focus is still very "soft" SF.
I think you’re using the typical aesthetic definition of fantasy vs. sci-fi. You’re right that under that one, Tower of Babylon would be considered fantasy.
Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems.
Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1].
[0] - better explained him here: https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html, see “You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?”
[1] - I don’t know if Chiang intended this, but I think you could probably draw a parallel to missionaries to the new world.
I was going by the fine article's own definition.
> His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply
His definition can get fuzzy at the edges - Understand and The Story of Your Life has very special narrators - does it matter why they're special? They could have been a seventh son of a seventh son, foretold by prophecy, gotten abilities from a magic potion, or a burst of gamma rays. It's just that the premise of the stories is science fiction-y. I've just realized the protagonists of "A Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Story of Your Life" have similar beats in their stories, despite belonging to different genres.
Charles Stross (hi!) retconned the Merchant Princes series from straight parallel-worlds fantasy into parallel-worlds SF on book 3 or 4 of the series (it might have been part of lightly rewriting 6 novellas into a trilogy). The transition was seamless, the distinction between Science Fiction and Science Fantasy is gossamer thin.
Understand was really good IMO.
Nitpick (and overall I agree with tfa): "In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently". I'd say it works the same, but in a very simplified universe, so it gives you a much better understanding of the concept. Which is again, pretty genius.
Oh and "I think he doesn’t understand the power of this singularity-level technology he just introduced." <- I think he does, but this take would make for a much more boring and less powerful story.
Not addressed in tfa but there is one story where writing is first introduced in a society, and before that they had 2 concepts of truth: "The real truth" and "What all parties find convenient". So powerful, I think we do this more that we think, see also that story about that guy that needs coming to terms with his own memory.
Read Ted Chiang people. Any new book of his is an insta-buy for me. I think Greg Egan is up there with Ted Chiang btw, his stories are much longer but still have this high level of scientific and thoroughly structured imagination.
For anyone that wants a quick taste of Ted's writing, I heartily recommend having a read of The Great Silence as it's available here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...
The last line always gets me.
Oof. Things got awfully dusty in here thinking about The Great Silence. It's a very short piece with huge emotional impact.
Something that hit me hard about this one is the purported full quote from Alex ends with "See you tomorrow." Given the context of Chiang's story, leaving this off just adds to the gut punch for me.
I it the same story as I keep sending as a taster for Ted Chiang.
Comparing to old sci fi. (For anyone who still cares!) Chiang can be pitched as today's Stanislaw Lem. (And maybe a modern PK Dick but with much less insanity.) I'm thinking especially of His Master's Voice, which is my favorite Lem story and maybe his most Chiangian.
Very cerebral and great storytelling. The Chiang story where the mathematician discovers the horrible truth that 1+1=3 while her husband discovers he doesn't love her is ... I think Lem (or Dick) would be proud to have pulled that off.
Note: someone else commented that Chiang often seems dryer than PK Dick, which can make C feel like more work to read. Maybe that might be true sometimes :). But maybe it's only on the surface. If that makes sense. Chiang is condensed. Dick is ... not condensed.
PKD and Chiang -- I hadn't thought of this comparison, but as a fan of both, it rings true.
Didn't PKD even write a nightmarish story about god and angels being literally true and punishing the infidel that echoes Chiang's story about "Hell.."?
I don't think Chiang is drier than PKD. I think he's a saner PKD, without the tendency to psychedelic ramblings. I say this as an absolute fan of PKD!
> The ability to send bits across parallel universes is just insane in terms of economic and experimentation value. For example, pharmaceutical companies can do $100 billion trials for all sorts of novel drugs, and trade the results of this information with their clones in other universes.
I remember reading this short story and being obsessed with the consequences. It immediately solves P = NP, and makes guarding secrets way way way harder. This is the first time I've heard someone else mention it.
HPMOR had a similar technology (the time turners) and threw up defensive cannon early:
> If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn't have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry's standards of cheating.
> Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it.
> Paper-2 said in slightly shaky handwriting:
> DO NOT MESS WITH TIME
I'm a huge SciFi fan, especially Ted Chiang. I perceive his styles to be quite varied and creative. I think that he does a good job of portraying the "awe" of "awe-inspiring discovery".
I have a slightly different reading on Ted Chiang's approach to free will.
As I see it, free will is a perspective - not something true or false, just looking at things from a certain angle. Knowledge of future is another one - and it is incompatible with free will. You can choose, you can know the future, but not both.
I think free will should be understood as a game of repeated prisoner's dilemma game. Where we have to tweak our choices of whether to choose vanilla or chocolate based on our past experiences. Free will emerges in this repeated version but then determinism can creep in there too.
I feel the author of the article shows extraordinary hubris in writing, "his lack of output being tragic for a generational talent".
I could interpret that sentiment as "it's a terrible shame we don't have more Chiang to read". In that interpretation I don't see article-author-hubris.
Maybe, but I did come to the article hoping to learn that he had just published another collection of short stories, but alas not.
> Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expected hard science fiction; Chiang was doing something different. Chiang created different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.
This is being overly kind. "What if religion was actually true?" does not create a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws; it creates a universe full of impossibility from which you then pick and choose one or two things to focus on, and end up with not science fiction but fantasy.
I think this is a case of trees and forest. Scifi doesn't require "a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws." Or, if you want to hold on to that interpretation, there is no scifi. Not even the ones that uphold our current knowledge of physics, since that is known to be incomplete.
Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
The story you refer to is consistent, though. It stays away from details that would break that. It can do that, because (1) realism is not the goal of the story, and (2) a practically omnipotent God is given, which allows every possible scenario.
> Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
Then what, for you, is the distinction between Sci-fi and Fantasy? I think if you draw that line where most people draw it and think through what Chiang is actually doing, he's on the other side of it.
Whatever definition you settle on, it would be more sensible if it didn't disqualify the works that immediately come to mind when we say 'sci-fi' despite them usually exhibiting bad relativity and thermodynamics.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The lack of a line is why we ended up with the term speculative fiction.
Trying to get it concise isn't easy. There is a cultural, shared definition. Fantasy simply isn't everything that involves fantasy. It has some specific ingredients. It seems to me that the fantastic element in Fantasy is the setting/environment/world where the characters operate, but that setting is not the important part. The story is about the characters, who usually behave realistic (given their options). It also tends to have a historical nature, although not accurate.
In sci-fi, there's often an (hypothetical) future setting/environment/world involved, but that doesn't really define the difference. The important part in sci-fi is how the events evolve in and how the characters react to and interact with that world, and how that particular definition of that world determines the outcome. The fantasy part is the main ingredient. It's a thought-experiment.
Chiang sets up a world, and his interest is in how that world affects "us" (the characters). It's not about the "arch" of the characters, but it's about the effect the world has on them.
> Scifi doesn't require "a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws."
Hell, our own understanding of the universe is barely self consistent.
It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather inconvenient for the PhD studying simulated intelligent life, he'd better just purchase and rearrange some pre-computed data.
The difference between science and religion doesn't lie in disagreement over particular facts or any facts at all, the difference is in the approach. Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). Science is built around making verifiable predictions but doesn't in fact give any answers, only theories that are (mostly) consistent with observable events (so far). They can however agree or disagree over any particular set of facts. Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
> It's not impossible from a scientific perspective ... to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.
I'm fairly certain simulating 16 billion years of physics (or 6000) in a shorter timeframe than 16 billion years (or 6000) is, in fact, scientifically impossible. Mathematically impossible, even, because it leads to absurd consequences such as the simulator being able to simulate itself faster than itself.
In our own universe — sure. In some "bigger" universe it could be entirely possible, ours would fit nicely.
You wouldn't need to simulate much. If you were a simulation, you could exist right now only, and merely have false memories about everything else.
Darwin didn't know a lot of things about evolution or biology, and I'm sure he had questions about some of those things. If you could talk to him today you could give him answers to those questions, and the reason for that is that those answers are found in theories and scientific progress in general.
But yes, it doesn't provide "answers" in the mushy religious sense, i.e. "what is it all for?".
Yes, it does. You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.Do you think Galileo clashed with the Catholic church over heliocentrism because the church didn't understand what religion should and shouldn't be making claims about?
The point being, a theory only holds "true" until it's superseded by a better theory. Furthermore, multiple conflicting theories can be in use at the same time in the absence of a good unifying theory. In the end science neither says nor cares what is "true", it just looks for theories that are good at predicting stuff.
"Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent" or at least that's how I understand the word.
EDIT apparently the comment above got extended, so I'll address some of newer points too.
> You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying all these claims can be as well true in a different (fully consistent and scientific) world. Furthermore, if you assume we live in a simulation then basically anything becomes possible in OUR world too, including Jesus walking on water turned into wine. It's just our simulation overlords had a good sense of humor.
The reason why we don't usually consider simulation theories is not because they're false (this can't be proven), but because they aren't practical and don't predict much. Even if we do live in a simulation, this simulation so far seems to follow some consistent internal "laws" so we can as well study those. Not that it means anything, but helps us to exterminate those who neglect these laws so it's a survivorship bias in action.
> "Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent"
I would argue that answers are supposed to be useful for the purpose motivating the question.
Q: What is the price of gas? A1: The number of units of some other good or service demanded by a seller in echange for a given quantity of it. A2: about $4.00/gal
A1 is, I would say, both "true" and "permanent". Assuming it is at least approximately accurate, though, A2 is much more of an answer in most cases the question is asked, even though it is at perhaps only approximately and in any case at best transitorily true.
In that sense yes, I agree that science gives good answers.
The goal of science is to disprove our theories so we can find out if they are true, and hopefully replace them with improved versions.
The goal of religious study is to try to prove that it is not impossible, not that it is a probably reading of what happened. To find some absurd way of reconciling different stories. I have no idea how you can call that an answer.
Well these "answers", whether absurd or not, were good enough for societies to live by them and survive for millennia.
Furthermore, even though you can argue that science can give some answers, it definitely under-delivers on questions like "what is good and evil" or "why you should have kids". Some of those are covered by the "humanism" neoreligion, some of them aren't. This whole experiment is very modern, it's not clear what are long-term survival rates of societies that completely give up on religions in a classical sense. It could turn out that societies that believe in nonsense have an edge over the ones that don't, after all this matches our experience all the way up until the 20th century.
I agree science doesn’t give good answers for good and evil, for me religion gives even worse answers. For example the Bible is clearly in favor of slavery as an institution. Other religions like Buddhism are for me better.
The scary part is that there may not be a good or evil, and the answers we have are just made up stuff.
Slavery made a lot of economic sense prior to the industrial revolution. If you consider "good and evil" as a set of norms that help society to thrive (as in outcompete other societies for resources) then it's not surprising that slavery went from good to bad as the technology progressed.
That's the only remotely rational view of it that I'm aware of. "Remotely" because without some kind of religion it doesn't follow that outcompeting other societies or survival in general is "good".
So in the end yes, I do believe "good and evil" are made up. Luckily, it's not a bad thing.
I do think it’s possible that God and evil are a set of norms that help society (or actually their leaders) thrive, but are presented as universal values.
I think there is a huge distinction to what it’s good for the average person in society vs what is good for the rulers, and it is unclear which one of those you mean.
Most religions are here to support the rulers.
> I think there is a huge distinction to what it’s good for the average person in society vs what is good for the rulers, and it is unclear which one of those you mean.
I mean it in the most brutal sense, maximizing replication and persistence of religion bearers (you can say average person in society).
In a short term religions can benefit current rulers, but in a long term selection must be geared towards survival of societies and cultures as a whole, otherwise they wouldn't have lived into the modern age.
> Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well).
No, it doesn't.
I mean, it does the horoscope thing where it makes predictions vague enough that people can retrospectively fit whatever actually happens into them easily, but that's not actually predicting very well.
Religions are to a big extent codified traditions and many traditions emerged and persisted because they benefited their bearers in one way or another. That's fundamentally different from horoscopes.
> Religions are to a big extent codified traditions and many traditions emerged and persisted because they benefited their bearers in one way or another.
Religions are a lot more than just codified traditions, but yes, some traditions are have benefits. That doesn't mean that the religion as a whole is good at predicting anything, it just means that they occasionally preserve things that are beneficial. But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs, and with a very big "past utility is no guarantee of future utility" even on the bits that are useful, because the utility of the tradition may be tied to conditions that are not preserved, while the tradition itself is blindly perserved.
> But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs
But you agree this must be much better than random? Evolutionary pressure on species is also rather weak: unfit specimen survive and fit specimen die due to chance all the time. But look where it got us when averaged over long periods of time.
I don't buy the "systematic knowledge of what works or how it works" part. That's what NLP scientists used to say about neural nets while building monstrous systems based on "systematic knowledge of grammar". You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
> But you agree this must be much better than random?
Well, no, without a definition of what domain it is supposed to be better in, and what the actual alternative it is being compared to more concretely than "random" (irreligious humans don't behave randomly, and, in fact, even without religion preserve traditions, some of which are useful), and probably some argument to make the case, no, I'm not going to agree with that.
> You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
You have to actually make predictions to make predictions, certainly. And religion is manifestly very bad at making predictions where it does make them, and the things you are talking about are very much not predictions, they are memes in the original sense.
Horoscopes are not a religious belief.
The majority of atheists globally believe in astrology (because of the large number of atheists in China, IIRC).
> Horoscopes are not a religious belief.
Saying that religious predictions use the same style of vagueness that allows people to retrospectively reconstruct them to match facts as horoscopes is not a claim that horoscopes are a religious belief.
> The majority of atheists globally believe in astrology
Even assuming this is true, what relevance does it have to the discussion?
> Saying that religious predictions
What religious predictions? Religions do not generally make many predictions.
> What religious predictions? Religions do not generally make many predictions.
Religions tend to not make a lot of predictions, but they do make some (there's kind of an inverse relation between size and durability of religion and the number and specificity of predictions, though.)
But, if they didn't make any, they wouldn't have a special word for it ("prophecy").
Prophecy is not synonym for prediction. it is a "message from God" in the major theistic religions.
The only prophecies that were predictions I can think of with regard to Christianity were Jewish prophecies of a messiah. The Jewish prophets were leaders, not soothsayers.
> there's kind of an inverse relation between size and durability of religion and the number and specificity of predictions, though
I would question that - things like the Oracle at Delphi lasted a long time. So did fortune telling (mostly non-religious) around the world. How long as astrology lasted?
CITATION NEEDED — except not really, that's utter bollocks that doesn't warrant a counter.
But, you triggered me lol:
1.) The Chinese meaning of "atheist" may not mean what you think it means: a.) it means not following a major established religion, and b.) they have an Orwellian surveillance-state dictatorship government which very much opposes major established religions
2.) For many people, including in China, astrology is just something like buying a lottery ticket, or asking the Magic 8-Ball for advice — fun, but not something actually believed in[1].
3.) It's much more likely that 3% of atheists "believe in" astrology[2] — and the idea that a majority would is insane on its face
So yeah, nah.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/05/21/3-in-10-amer...
[2]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/11/42552/
You quote American numbers as a counter to a claim about global beliefs? You even cite the powresearch link to to make a claim about China!
Even in the US the group most likely to believe in astrology as the "nothing in particular" - non religious but not strongly identifying as atheist or agnostic.
Most Chinese people say they are "convinced atheists"[1] so I find your first claim unconvincing. Yes, they live in a dictatorship, but the dictatorship's promotion of atheism is what makes them atheist - they are brainwashed (in a casual, not formal, sense) into it.
Even when asked more specific questions about belief they are atheists. Its not just fear of government because they will admit to superstitious practices the state also disapproves of in the same surveys[2].
Claiming Chinese atheists are not really atheists is a no true Scotsman argument. They say they are atheists, their beliefs about religious things are atheist.
> and the idea that a majority would is insane on its face
It might to fit what you think atheists should believe, but the evidence points to it being true.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150430232945/http://www.wingia...
[2]https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/05/chinese-c...
I don't see anything in your links that remotely supports your original claim that "The majority of atheists globally believe in astrology".
Even if you expand your claim to add fengshui, it's entirely plausible that only about 10% of the Chinese population are atheists who believe in fengshui. That would mean only 17% of Chinese atheists believe in fengshui.
Over 60% of Chinese people say they are convinced atheists (i.e. as opposed to being just non-religious). Nearly half of them believe in feng shui.
At the very least its an indicator that atheist and superstition are a common combination.
> At the very least its an indicator that atheist and superstition are a common combination.
The very least is even less than what I wrote: it's the smallest possible overlap between convinced atheists and fengshui believers: (47-(100-61)) = 8% of the population being both.
You can call it common if you want, but again I don't see how you'd get from that to anywhere near "the majority of atheists globally believe in astrology".
> some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like")
You really can't. They're very different.
> It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.
True enough. But such a world would be very different from a world in which the bible was literally true, and a world in which the bible is actually literally true is genuinely scientifically impossible. You would have to redefine an unimaginably large number of things and you would still have a world full of impossible contradictions to the point that nothing could be said.
> Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
> You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
Why not? I don't think it's likely and I definitely don't build my life under an assumption that this is true.
However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
> However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
If you took that hypothesis seriously you'd still be able to apply predictions and laws. Giving up on trying to understand it is what's unscientific.
> You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory.
You mean, like those silly science fiction stories where FTL travel is possible? Or time travel?
> You mean, like those silly science fiction stories where FTL travel is possible? Or time travel?
FTL or time travel are not necessarily unscientific - we know that relativity permits CTCs to exist, they're something that can be explored rigorously and scientifically. Even for stories that adopt decidedly unscientific handwave versions, one dropped stitch won't necessarily unravel the whole garment, especially when it's not the focus - if you're telling a story about life on Omicron Persei 3, how one gets to Omicron Persei 3 may well be beside the point. But yes if a story is full of things like that, even for things that are the focus of the story, then it's not science fiction.
Greg Egan is someone who also does this, and does it prolifically and for the ~thirty years.
Arrival is my new favorite movie ever
I didn't like the movie at all. I later read the story and it was fantastic.
We're doing a watch party next Monday! In case you and/or ppl you know live in East Bay!
Now I feel bad I won't be able to attend, being on the other side of the country... :(
Well, feel free to send my review to anybody cool living in SF or East Bay, especially people new to the area! Maybe they'd read the review and think they'd vibe well with me :)
Me too
If you like Chiang, Netflix has an adaptation of his work called “Pantheon” that’s very good. Animated, two seasons, about the rise of uploaded humans.
I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.
I think you are mixing up Chang and Ken Liu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
Oh, I think you’re right. Oops!
Just chiming in to recommend this show as well. Very well done and it has a complete story arc in 2 seasons which is close to my optimal TV show duration.
Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here:
https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/
However, in this case I think the TV adaptation did a better job with the story than the original short.
That was a really fun show. It got even better at the end
Hell is the Absence of God is one of my favourite stories of all time. Ted Chiang is truly incredible. The short story anthologies are unbelievable. Every one a banger.
It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories!
Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.
> Chiang’s much weaker at the middle level, where we consider how societies and civilizations collectively face novel technologies.
I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.
Thanks for this. I'd never heard of Chiang, and now I've bought my first book!
I'm so glad my review had an effect on people! I hope the book can bring you half as much joy as it brought me <3 <3 <3
I feel joy for your impending joy.
"strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis"
I didn't know this was discredited? Is it? I thought this was still being studied.
If you like that style of scifi, you may also like Adrian Tchaikovsky's work.
Seconded. Not all of it, though. Particularly the trilogies fade in quality and precision of ideas/writing when compared to the standalones. Cage of Souls is one of his latest standalones and it blew me away.
It seems like this was written by someone who does not read literary fiction. It was defeined by this higher order portraiture of truth, and the effect that emerges from the whole piece. It's a full composition, where like classical music, you really need to hear the whole thing and not just a few bars or a riff.
Chiang is great. I think of him as the last good writer, as reviewers seemed to stop acknowledging anything good after his Exhalations, which was just before the culture was fully consumed by spasms. Maybe there is an opportunity, where AI will polarize the market for fiction, and the best stuff becomes a super valuable and rarefied pleasure against a backdrop of formulaic genre fiction and AI slop?
> I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.
Wow, thanks for enlightening the unwashed masses of Ted Chiang fans.
I'm enjoying this article.
One nitpick is that Black Mirror is usually dystopian in its view of technology but there has been more than 1 happy ending. The author probably only has San Junipero fresh in their mind.
https://screenrant.com/black-mirror-happy-ending-episodes/
I don't know how one could classify USS Callister and Black Museum as having happy endings! The fates of the bad guys in those episodes are so horrible they still haunt me. Doesn't make it any better that they are bad guys!
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