Codex of the Synapse: Folio A2.6
World-image Decay
"I bet him 10,000 marks I could drink the glass of water under we had placed the hat, without touching the hat. Of course, to verify he had won the bet, he had to lift the hat. And when he did so, I calmly took the glass and drank the water. To grasp the world, we must always lift the hat, but the very act of doing so does not reveal so much as determine what lies beneath it at that moment....and for every hat we lift, there a million hats we do not. "
Erwin Schroedinger, Letters and Diaries
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Image decay happens all around us. Subtle and imperceptible, Decay occurs among objects, images - even people - that "disppear" by increments. Such disappearances are forestalled as long as the object in question is being actively observed or given conscious thought periodically. The vast majority of objects however, exist anonymously. Imagine a box of paper clips, a beach full of sand, or the myriad smaller units that consitute our world. Who watches such things? Who notices the vanishing of one or a few from such a vast sea of multiples? Such is our complacency that we accept "lost" objects with a compliant shrug, and seek no explanation for the misplaced keys, the missing sock, or the letter that never arrives. The Keepers believe we live in a local-world of shifing sands, tenuously held together by the attentions we apply to what little we can. If world-image decay continued unilaterally, the sum of sensory impressions through which we experience reality would dissolve entirely into the white noise of Pattern Language. However, this does not occur, because World Image Decay works in equilibrium with a reciprocal process, Pattern Language Reclamation. In fact, the recollection of a lost object may in fact reclaim it from oblivion, but what is brought back is not the object itself. Rather it is memory given form, reconstructed from the decayed Pattern Language of a nieghbor-world. Our minds fail to make any distinction between the original vanished object, and the reconstruction The equilibrium is not perfect. The Keepers believe that the scales are slightly tipped in favor of Decay, and tiny portions of Pattern Language are lost in every transaction, just as any machine, no matter how efficient, loses some of its energy to friction. This miniscule loss will eventually become significant, and finally cataclysmic, bringing the Cycle to a halt and resulting in Synaptic Apocalypse, or The Uncreation.
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ADJOINING FOLIOS: |
Local-world images, the sense impressions that
make up our entire local-world experience, are constantly decaying
into Pattern Language, sending impressions of our world out into
the Synapse.