Anathem

I've been thinking about monks as example of people who have developed their own technology to manage attention. It made me think of this book, so I got it to reread it. It has a lot of worldbuilding right at the start that is a lot to get through - I do love the world, though. Something very cozy about it.

I finished _Anathem_ today, with a big stretch of reading on vacation, probably for a couple of hours or more each day. I really feel immersed within that world. I think one of the appealing things for me (maybe too easy) is the idea that a lot can be accomplished if you set the terms of debate to finding the truth. I guess it’s a version of ‘good faith’, but I think there’s even more agreement on the structure - things like that we’ll go retrace over first principles or simple principles until we get it, to see if something shakes out. That we trust each other that that sort of thing is for a reason. I think I’ve had some of that trust at different times, in college - although not too often in class since people’s egos are tied up in it there - though sometimes in the relief of individual conversations. It always works better when you’re both trying to figure something out, rather than demonstrate knowledge to each other. So the promise of Mathic living is living in a society where that principle is central. And maybe part of the fantasy is that the rest of society has agreed to it - here it really is similar to the Glass Bead Game. Where society has agreed that that sort of thinking adds some value and so it will be tolerated within bounds. That it leads to magic - influencing of the past and future - in Anathem is a bit different. Though I love that that tie is by way of phenomenology, another topic I keep returning too. I’ll have to look at Husserl and his copper tray sometime.