Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
Mane sunervino ši knyga žiauriai. Knygos nuo kurios dar labiau skaudėtų galva senai nesu skaitęs.
...Tiek daug tipo-labai-moksliško bullshito!
Ugh.
Ir tiek žodžių.
Jezau. Ne.
...Tiek daug tipo-labai-moksliško bullshito!
Ugh.
Ir tiek žodžių.
Jezau. Ne.
This is really good. A few clever ideas woven together in a lovely structure. It all gets a bit quantum towards the end, and the reading didn't particularly consume me, but it did bring more than a few moments of thought.
4.5★
"Q: What can you tell us about how you wrote it? Did it develop out of your short work?
A: Quarantine took me about twelve months to write, starting early in 1990. I had a few breaks to write short stories, but other than that it pretty much monopolised my life until it was finished. It's not an expansion of a shorter work, although I did borrow ideas from some of my stories: the "priming" drugs used by cops in "The Caress" to prepare themselves for duty have been replaced by neural modifications which do the same thing - and the neural modifications themselves are used in much the same fashion as the neural implants of "Axiomatic" and "Fidelity". There are echoes of "The Infinite Assassin", but that story wasn't the seed for Quarantine; I actually wrote it half-way through writing the novel, so the influence was the other way round.
With the central idea for Quarantine, I'd been aware for about fifteen years that some physicists believed that only conscious observers "collapsed the wave" - that it was a biological or metaphysical property of being human. I was daydreaming about that when it finally occurred to me that taking the idea seriously could lead to some very bizarre conclusions. I spent about a month reading about the quantum measurement problem, catching up with all the competing theories - which had to turn out to be wrong in the novel, so they're barely mentioned. Roger Penrose's quantum gravity theory is so beautiful that it deserves to be right . . . but the idea that the human brain alone might be responsible for the collapse made a much better story.
Q: A number of critics - amongst them Adelaide academic Michael Tolley in Eidolon - have complained about the sections of Quarantine where you explain quantum mechanical principles et cetera, claiming these passages disrupt the flow of the novel. Are the criticisms valid and do you think you could have done it any other way?
A: I think the only changes I could have made would have been a matter of fine-tuning, rather than a completely different approach. I wanted the middle of the novel to be a time when the narrator had a chance to learn about the physics and metaphysics of his situation - and to think through some of the consequences - before things became too frantic for deliberations like that to be at all plausible. I can see why some reviewers would have preferred less theoretical discussion - but I wanted the events that followed to make sense to readers ranging from people who'd never even heard of Schrödinger's Cat, through to people who were familiar with all the latest debates about quantum metaphysics. If I'd cut out too much explanatory material, some people might have been left floundering.
I do wish I could have handled that section more smoothly - Michael Tolley rightly pointed out that some of the dialogue is pretty clumsy - but I still think that the basic structure was the right choice."-Egan, From his 1993 Eidolon interview
⩨NFO
⩐ Read Via Moon+ReaderPro Android-AsusXOOTD
⩨FootNotes/Remarks:
-N/A
"Q: What can you tell us about how you wrote it? Did it develop out of your short work?
A: Quarantine took me about twelve months to write, starting early in 1990. I had a few breaks to write short stories, but other than that it pretty much monopolised my life until it was finished. It's not an expansion of a shorter work, although I did borrow ideas from some of my stories: the "priming" drugs used by cops in "The Caress" to prepare themselves for duty have been replaced by neural modifications which do the same thing - and the neural modifications themselves are used in much the same fashion as the neural implants of "Axiomatic" and "Fidelity". There are echoes of "The Infinite Assassin", but that story wasn't the seed for Quarantine; I actually wrote it half-way through writing the novel, so the influence was the other way round.
With the central idea for Quarantine, I'd been aware for about fifteen years that some physicists believed that only conscious observers "collapsed the wave" - that it was a biological or metaphysical property of being human. I was daydreaming about that when it finally occurred to me that taking the idea seriously could lead to some very bizarre conclusions. I spent about a month reading about the quantum measurement problem, catching up with all the competing theories - which had to turn out to be wrong in the novel, so they're barely mentioned. Roger Penrose's quantum gravity theory is so beautiful that it deserves to be right . . . but the idea that the human brain alone might be responsible for the collapse made a much better story.
Q: A number of critics - amongst them Adelaide academic Michael Tolley in Eidolon - have complained about the sections of Quarantine where you explain quantum mechanical principles et cetera, claiming these passages disrupt the flow of the novel. Are the criticisms valid and do you think you could have done it any other way?
A: I think the only changes I could have made would have been a matter of fine-tuning, rather than a completely different approach. I wanted the middle of the novel to be a time when the narrator had a chance to learn about the physics and metaphysics of his situation - and to think through some of the consequences - before things became too frantic for deliberations like that to be at all plausible. I can see why some reviewers would have preferred less theoretical discussion - but I wanted the events that followed to make sense to readers ranging from people who'd never even heard of Schrödinger's Cat, through to people who were familiar with all the latest debates about quantum metaphysics. If I'd cut out too much explanatory material, some people might have been left floundering.
I do wish I could have handled that section more smoothly - Michael Tolley rightly pointed out that some of the dialogue is pretty clumsy - but I still think that the basic structure was the right choice."-Egan, From his 1993 Eidolon interview
⩨NFO
⩐ Read Via Moon+ReaderPro Android-AsusXOOTD
⩨FootNotes/Remarks:
-N/A
Notes:
Thought provoking but failed to hold up within the story confines.
Thought provoking but failed to hold up within the story confines.
The book starts well, with some interesting ideas, but the underlying “quantum” premise is, for me, not enough to hold up the second half. The ending is unsatisfying, not a page turner.
Mods, Moods, and Modes
To measure something is to change it, to cause it to become fixed by eliminating its infinite possibilities. This is a well-established principle of quantum mechanics. If that is true, human beings have much more to answer for than we thought. As our techniques of measurement have become more refined and better able to reach further into the far reaches of the cosmos, we have left a path of destruction literally as far as the eye can see.
The really spectacular advances in artificial intelligence in Egan’s world of Quarantine are not the ‘mods’ (apps) of data manipulation, communication, and presentation. Rather they are those which can control our basic moods - alertness, rationality, even our loyalties. There are experimental mods which are so advanced that they can alter our very mode of being. This is the real import of AI - not how it mimics human consciousness but what it does to human consciousness
Philosophically speaking, human are the thinking creatures. Thinking is what makes us different, possibly unique, from other sentient beings. Thinking is our mode of being and the essential cause of our destructive rampage throughout the universe as we measure, analyze, and judge it. It is what we value above all else - the ability to value at all - and what we are ‘hard-wired’ to pursue. But by thinking we are reducing the complexity of everything we think about. Through the quantum effects of reflective thought the universe becomes a less diverse entity. We are literally dumbing it down as we learn about it.
But suppose there were a mod which could effectively re-wire our brains, by-passing the normal neural processes that involve quantum effects. Perhaps we could then avoid the adverse consequences of thought. We could stop being in a state of permanent warfare with the rest of physical creation. Would such a leap represent a scientific breakthrough or an apocalyptic spiritual, moral and physical disaster?
Eagan is a genius. It is very possible only he knows the answer.
Postscript on Corporate Sociology
Quarantine is densely packed with speculative technological ideas and their consequences. But it also contains an important thread about human organization which is highly insightful in its own right. This is the issue of corporate structure and is implications for human behaviour.
The protagonist Nick is forcibly recruited to an entity called The Ensemble. A mod is inserted in his brain which ensures that he will be totally loyal to the interests of The Ensemble. He is aware of this but he is also aware that he can do nothing about this enforced loyalty except to go mad. The interests of The Ensemble are essentially his own interests.
However during the course of his duties Nick discovers that there are factions within the group that runs The Ensemble. This group, called the Canon, is composed of people who have not been implanted with the loyalty mod; and they have different views about what their interests and those of The Ensemble are.
One of his similarly loyal colleagues makes the point to him that only those who have the loyalty mod are actually qualified to judge what the interest of The Ensemble really are. But even this presents a dilemma because even such loyal and altruistic corporate citizens have different views about what the interests of The Ensemble are.
The only method available to resolve this situation is conversation. In this conversation, the views of each loyal participant must be accepted in their entirety and without compromise. These views are then used as the way to find the wider purpose in which the diverse views fit as special cases. The loyalty mod does not relieve Nick of the obligation to make judgments of value; it insists upon these judgments.
This is a profound vision of corporate organization. What Egan has demonstrated is that loyalty to a corporate entity does not mean abandoning one’s individual values. Rather, the identification of the corporate interests, of joint purpose, depends crucially on the preservation and transformation of those individual values. The idea is remarkably close to that of ‘loyalty to loyalty’ by the American philosopher, Josiah Royce: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/693656203. This theme alone would make Quarantine a masterpiece of sociological thought.
To measure something is to change it, to cause it to become fixed by eliminating its infinite possibilities. This is a well-established principle of quantum mechanics. If that is true, human beings have much more to answer for than we thought. As our techniques of measurement have become more refined and better able to reach further into the far reaches of the cosmos, we have left a path of destruction literally as far as the eye can see.
The really spectacular advances in artificial intelligence in Egan’s world of Quarantine are not the ‘mods’ (apps) of data manipulation, communication, and presentation. Rather they are those which can control our basic moods - alertness, rationality, even our loyalties. There are experimental mods which are so advanced that they can alter our very mode of being. This is the real import of AI - not how it mimics human consciousness but what it does to human consciousness
Philosophically speaking, human are the thinking creatures. Thinking is what makes us different, possibly unique, from other sentient beings. Thinking is our mode of being and the essential cause of our destructive rampage throughout the universe as we measure, analyze, and judge it. It is what we value above all else - the ability to value at all - and what we are ‘hard-wired’ to pursue. But by thinking we are reducing the complexity of everything we think about. Through the quantum effects of reflective thought the universe becomes a less diverse entity. We are literally dumbing it down as we learn about it.
But suppose there were a mod which could effectively re-wire our brains, by-passing the normal neural processes that involve quantum effects. Perhaps we could then avoid the adverse consequences of thought. We could stop being in a state of permanent warfare with the rest of physical creation. Would such a leap represent a scientific breakthrough or an apocalyptic spiritual, moral and physical disaster?
Eagan is a genius. It is very possible only he knows the answer.
Postscript on Corporate Sociology
Quarantine is densely packed with speculative technological ideas and their consequences. But it also contains an important thread about human organization which is highly insightful in its own right. This is the issue of corporate structure and is implications for human behaviour.
The protagonist Nick is forcibly recruited to an entity called The Ensemble. A mod is inserted in his brain which ensures that he will be totally loyal to the interests of The Ensemble. He is aware of this but he is also aware that he can do nothing about this enforced loyalty except to go mad. The interests of The Ensemble are essentially his own interests.
However during the course of his duties Nick discovers that there are factions within the group that runs The Ensemble. This group, called the Canon, is composed of people who have not been implanted with the loyalty mod; and they have different views about what their interests and those of The Ensemble are.
One of his similarly loyal colleagues makes the point to him that only those who have the loyalty mod are actually qualified to judge what the interest of The Ensemble really are. But even this presents a dilemma because even such loyal and altruistic corporate citizens have different views about what the interests of The Ensemble are.
The only method available to resolve this situation is conversation. In this conversation, the views of each loyal participant must be accepted in their entirety and without compromise. These views are then used as the way to find the wider purpose in which the diverse views fit as special cases. The loyalty mod does not relieve Nick of the obligation to make judgments of value; it insists upon these judgments.
This is a profound vision of corporate organization. What Egan has demonstrated is that loyalty to a corporate entity does not mean abandoning one’s individual values. Rather, the identification of the corporate interests, of joint purpose, depends crucially on the preservation and transformation of those individual values. The idea is remarkably close to that of ‘loyalty to loyalty’ by the American philosopher, Josiah Royce: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/693656203. This theme alone would make Quarantine a masterpiece of sociological thought.
I feel like I have to preface this with a note that I absolutely am not qualified to make any kind of objective quality analysis, and the only purpose of this text is to note "I liked this bit" and "I didn't like this other bit as much"...
I've never seen the word "smear" occur so many times in one body of work before.
The first Egan book I read was Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology, #2). I liked that (a lot), so I decided to start the Subjective Cosmology cycle from the beginning. Didn't do any research since I was pretty sure I'd like basically anything Egan wrote.
Wasn't disappointed. In retrospect, I do feel that the writing in Quarantine is a little weaker, that Egan is still hitting his stride. Quarantine's concepts are great, though, and sometimes Egan nails their presentation. For instance, I thought that the entwining of the core story (the main character's arc) and the background story (the things that have happened in the world) was great - the core story is wild enough that it naturally takes center stage, but over time the background story is revealed in bits and pieces until the reader realizes the background story is wilder by far - which I found very satisfying.
Maybe (since I'm a computer science, not a physics) I just don't get lit up by the quantum mechanics of Quarantine as much as I do by the simulation and self-reprogramming of Permutation City.
Good book. I'm halfway through on Distress (Subjective Cosmology, #3) now, and basically intend to keep reading the rest of Egan after that's done.
I've never seen the word "smear" occur so many times in one body of work before.
The first Egan book I read was Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology, #2). I liked that (a lot), so I decided to start the Subjective Cosmology cycle from the beginning. Didn't do any research since I was pretty sure I'd like basically anything Egan wrote.
Wasn't disappointed. In retrospect, I do feel that the writing in Quarantine is a little weaker, that Egan is still hitting his stride. Quarantine's concepts are great, though, and sometimes Egan nails their presentation. For instance, I thought that the entwining of the core story (the main character's arc) and the background story (the things that have happened in the world) was great - the core story is wild enough that it naturally takes center stage, but over time the background story is revealed in bits and pieces until the reader realizes the background story is wilder by far - which I found very satisfying.
Maybe (since I'm a computer science, not a physics) I just don't get lit up by the quantum mechanics of Quarantine as much as I do by the simulation and self-reprogramming of Permutation City.
Good book. I'm halfway through on Distress (Subjective Cosmology, #3) now, and basically intend to keep reading the rest of Egan after that's done.
I saw this book in my recommendations on Scribd. I decided to give it a shot, even though Greg Egan is one of the authors who seems to make me feel ignorant and stupid. It's not his writing style, which is quite good. It's his SUBJECT matter. He picks wickedly complex and difficult things to write about, like light has no universal speed, or (as in this book) quantum mechanics and eigenstates and collapsing wave functions. O.O
This books starts out like a nice cyberpunk detective story. Then it gets... COMPLICATED. There are various mental/emotional mods that Nick, the ex-policeman protagonist has undergone. In the course of searching for a woman who has been somehow escaping from locked rooms, he's caught and modded AGAIN to be perfectly loyal to the company who'd kidnapped the woman. And then he finds out what they're researching, and how he can be a part of it and use their research.
All this takes place in a world where the whole Solar System has apparently been enclosed in a Bubble (the Quarantine of the title) because Reasons. Ok, that was cool, even though the idea of never seeing the stars again would be daunting and depressing. And then there's the whole utilizing a myriad of "selves" to solve a really problem and then collapsing them into one entity ("you," for some iteration of YOU) to continue and to use the solution. The question is: is the YOU who is using the solution to the problem the same YOU who stated the problem at the outset? How would you know? HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? is the question that kinda obsesses our protagonist. And what if the ability to do this quantum testing was available to everyone? Would there be any objective reality anymore?
Honestly, it kinda made my head spin. I kept thinking of Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley If you can't tell if you're the same person, how could it matter if you are or not??? But I admit up front that I am not a really deep thinker or student of physics. I read it all anyway, and admired the ideas and the kind of mind that could come up with a book like this.
Egan, like Charles Stross, is a writer that I enjoy reading, mostly. But I tend to come away from their books thinking that my view of the world is so totally simplistic that I must be really stupid not to see it as they do. But sometimes it's ok just to enjoy the ride even if you don't know exactly why anyone wants to GO there.
This books starts out like a nice cyberpunk detective story. Then it gets... COMPLICATED. There are various mental/emotional mods that Nick, the ex-policeman protagonist has undergone. In the course of searching for a woman who has been somehow escaping from locked rooms, he's caught and modded AGAIN to be perfectly loyal to the company who'd kidnapped the woman. And then he finds out what they're researching, and how he can be a part of it and use their research.
All this takes place in a world where the whole Solar System has apparently been enclosed in a Bubble (the Quarantine of the title) because Reasons. Ok, that was cool, even though the idea of never seeing the stars again would be daunting and depressing. And then there's the whole utilizing a myriad of "selves" to solve a really problem and then collapsing them into one entity ("you," for some iteration of YOU) to continue and to use the solution. The question is: is the YOU who is using the solution to the problem the same YOU who stated the problem at the outset? How would you know? HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? is the question that kinda obsesses our protagonist. And what if the ability to do this quantum testing was available to everyone? Would there be any objective reality anymore?
Honestly, it kinda made my head spin. I kept thinking of Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley If you can't tell if you're the same person, how could it matter if you are or not??? But I admit up front that I am not a really deep thinker or student of physics. I read it all anyway, and admired the ideas and the kind of mind that could come up with a book like this.
Egan, like Charles Stross, is a writer that I enjoy reading, mostly. But I tend to come away from their books thinking that my view of the world is so totally simplistic that I must be really stupid not to see it as they do. But sometimes it's ok just to enjoy the ride even if you don't know exactly why anyone wants to GO there.
What improbable collapse of quantum potential states has resulted in the fact that immediately after reading a science book about confronting the measurement problem in quantum physics that I should read a science fiction book that is centrally about the measurement problem in quantum physics???
Quarantine is an extremely odd book. It’s a book of ideas. It’s bizarre, surreal and mind-bending and also grounded in quantum physics. As I discuss in my review of What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker, there are several primary theories (with multiple variations) that purport to solve the measurement problem of the Schrodinger Equation and explain what that equation says about reality. Becker sees the traditional Copenhagen Interpretation—despite being relatively the most popular theory among physicists—as the weakest solution and one that instead of actually confronting the measurement problem, looks the other way and says that there is no measurement problem. (See my review for more for more on this topic.)
Egan world-builds the premise of his novel by assuming the literal truth of one of the currently less-favored solutions to the measurement problem, one that Einstein himself considered illogical and absurd. That said, it makes for an interesting premise to project out a story. Egan begins with the theory that part of the human brain (some theorists have even described it as “consciousness,”*) is responsible for collapsing the wave function. He then lays on top of this premise, the fantastical idea that
With that as the basis, the storyline itself is a science fiction noir espionage/thriller involving evil corporations, cults and technology-based body modifications. It’s a fascinating story that is occasionally dragged down by extended scientific lectures and debates. I couldn’t quite tell if he was intentionally diverting the story into these “talking head” types of scenes as an almost absurdist distraction, or if that’s just how he wrote it, unironically. Sometimes I found the talking-head scenes amusing while other times I wanted him to just move on. Yes, Quarantine is driven by some rather absurd extensions of the Copenhagen Interpretation, but even so…they aren’t any more insane than quantum physics itself is. I think Egan did a pretty remarkable and highly inventive job applying cutting edge quantum theory to a wild ride of a story that I found hard to put down. If you enjoy science fiction, particularly of the cyberpunk variety, then this book is highly recommended.
*Since consciousness is an abstraction, or as philosophers would label it, qualia...an inner representation of neurological functions...how could qualia affect matter directly? That is, how could something immaterial affect a particle that is merely "observed?" It's far from clear that this is possible or even what observation exactly is.
Quarantine is an extremely odd book. It’s a book of ideas. It’s bizarre, surreal and mind-bending and also grounded in quantum physics. As I discuss in my review of What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker, there are several primary theories (with multiple variations) that purport to solve the measurement problem of the Schrodinger Equation and explain what that equation says about reality. Becker sees the traditional Copenhagen Interpretation—despite being relatively the most popular theory among physicists—as the weakest solution and one that instead of actually confronting the measurement problem, looks the other way and says that there is no measurement problem. (See my review for more for more on this topic.)
Egan world-builds the premise of his novel by assuming the literal truth of one of the currently less-favored solutions to the measurement problem, one that Einstein himself considered illogical and absurd. That said, it makes for an interesting premise to project out a story. Egan begins with the theory that part of the human brain (some theorists have even described it as “consciousness,”*) is responsible for collapsing the wave function. He then lays on top of this premise, the fantastical idea that
Spoiler
some living beings can exist in “smeared” state, before the wave form collapses, and that there is a way to alter the human brain to control quantum behavior and determine what possibility is selected from all the infinite possibilities. In quantum physics, the so-called smeared state (which is actually a presumption under the Copenhagen Interpretation—according to theories such as Many-Worlds Interpretation or Pilot Waves theory, there is no smeared state) is the period before measurement when a particle exists in all possible states simultaneously.With that as the basis, the storyline itself is a science fiction noir espionage/thriller involving evil corporations, cults and technology-based body modifications. It’s a fascinating story that is occasionally dragged down by extended scientific lectures and debates. I couldn’t quite tell if he was intentionally diverting the story into these “talking head” types of scenes as an almost absurdist distraction, or if that’s just how he wrote it, unironically. Sometimes I found the talking-head scenes amusing while other times I wanted him to just move on. Yes, Quarantine is driven by some rather absurd extensions of the Copenhagen Interpretation, but even so…they aren’t any more insane than quantum physics itself is. I think Egan did a pretty remarkable and highly inventive job applying cutting edge quantum theory to a wild ride of a story that I found hard to put down. If you enjoy science fiction, particularly of the cyberpunk variety, then this book is highly recommended.
*Since consciousness is an abstraction, or as philosophers would label it, qualia...an inner representation of neurological functions...how could qualia affect matter directly? That is, how could something immaterial affect a particle that is merely "observed?" It's far from clear that this is possible or even what observation exactly is.