The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
by William Egginton
In many and most of the foundational console RPGs—the Finals Fantasy, Quests Dragon, and so forth—your little iconographic polygon née pixel person makes a representational shift from bumpkin to champion, the Hero’s Journey from the literary monomyth template. This ultrastandard device is, I’m slowly starting to feel, some sort of vague allegory for a rural peasant becoming a member of the integrated urban mass. What a coup, to become a cog in the great industrial revolution, but be taught that grinding away in a smog-filled factory you’ve self-actualized beyond those fieldhands and villagers back home.
In videogames, though, there are world-saving implications; replete with chosen-one mythos and “no one else” resignation, you are literally the only one that can stop what is happening to the world because you are the only entity with agency (though that agency is pre-determined by the programmers and the script of the game, another potent metaphor, perhaps).
A common refrain from the post-adolescent, pre-maturation audience of videogame aficionados is “Why do the townsfolk make me pay for stuff when the world will end from demon invasion/magical meteor swarm/ global sea-level rise due to an ever-warming climate? Don’t they know I need a weapon upgrade to help them?”
And the answer is, well, it’s ‘cause shopkeepers gotta eat too, bro. Even if they believe in your prophetic destiny–which is not a guarantee–their family can’t eat messianic appreciation. Pay for the sword, oh Enlightened One.
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality crashes headlong into the intersection of “give this guy stuff for free” and “well, no one else can really afford my adventuring wares and the baby needs medicine”. Why aren’t we donating the most protective armor the nations of humanity can forge to keep safe the only hope we have as a species? Why aren’t we funneling all discretionary funds into quantum physicists so they can figure out what the actual nature of our shared reality means–or even is? I cannot walk away from this book without becoming a zealot for the RPG party: “Guys, they’re our only hope to seal away the 3rd Parasite; let them have free potions. At least a discount!”
The riddles that arise from Heisenberg’s starting point would seem to constitute the most vital questions of existence. And yet one of the curious side effects of quantum mechanic’s extraordinary success has been a kind of quietism in the face of those very questions. The interpretation of quantum mechanics, deciding what all this means, has tended to go unnoticed by serious physics departments and the granting agencies that support them in favor of the “shut up and calculate” school, leading the former to take hold mainly in philosophy departments, as a subfield of the philosophy of science called foundations of physics.
The triptych of great thinkers in Rigor don’t share equal billing: to me, Borges was the draw as his name has a lot of contemporary glow from things I’m interested in. Borges’ work has been reinterpreted to thematically incorporate some of the promises of machine learning, but there is a dearth of Borges in Rigor compared to the other two. Not that I’m complaining: having a book that is both friendly and approachable in its formatting–the font and margins are large and inviting–that walks a reader through some of Kant’s more dense concepts is a remarkable achievement.
I find the whole structure of the text pretty remarkable, to be honest. As an essay writer in college and, tragically for my publication rate in Law School law journals, I was obsessed with novelty. I always wanted to say, conclude, or uncover something new, even if my new idea was kind of stupid or didn’t follow logically from the evidence or material. “If my writing is a reworking of someone else’s thoughts,” I figured, “then why go through me? Just read the original.”
Having someone actually walk you through, with insightful commentary and clear cultural perspectives, what some of humanity’s best thinkers concluded is not actually bad. I don’t want to come across as internet-poisoned, but it is not what I think of when I am presented with an academic writing–it makes me think of videogame Let’s Plays. I don’t think they need to be new or novel because they take a foundation I like and have someone else add flavor, context, commentary, or opinion while they control the little guys on the screen. Good Let’s Players draw conclusions from their well of knowledge, summarizing or structuring the current game in a landscape of their own experience.
For example, to draw the conclusion that items shops should be giving away potions in RPGs, you need to be familiar with the tropes inherent to the genre. Then, to conclude that people inhabiting a doomed world would keep the wheels of commerce in motion, you need to have played enough to extend the reality presented on the screen beyond the scope of the perspective that you, the player/prime mover, inhabit.
“help yourself”? I’m helping us all, buddy.
So it is with Rigor: the author does the best Kant/Borges/Heisenberg Let’s Play because they’ve already mastered all the other games in the series. I don’t have a lifetime spent with the physical underpinnings of microreality, but I sure can listen to someone who does understand it talk me through some existent and comprehensible philosophical texts that bump against the thornier issues:
When we understand space-time not as an empty container in which all existence takes place but as an index for an observer to measure the interaction between two entities or events, intrinsic and necessary limits emerge: on the one hand, a lower limit on how small and how close together those events or entities can be before ceasing to be separate entities; and on the other hand, an upper limit on how far apart and how fast they are moving apart for a relation to exist at all. [in a universe]...without such limits on observation…no movement or change can happen because any given thing can only ever be identical to what it is here and now.
All people can enjoy Rigor of Angels. It might even convince you that society’s understanding of the nature of reality might depend on how much public funding the silent protagonist and her mismatched menagerie of adventurers receive. Give away the sword—we’ve all gotta help however we can.