Inhale

Hello James,

I really appreciate your thoughts on the story. I suggested it after you briefly mentioned being tired of mechanistic thinking - something I’ve personally been doing a lot lately. I think what I got out of Exhalation was mechanistic thinking won’t ultimately save us, but will provide a solid foundation to find clarity and deepen our appreciation of the whole.

I loved the isomorphisms in the book: the robots gold flakes and our firing neurons. The only difference being the robot can look at them while making objective sense of them. The protagonist being both the subject and the observer creates a strange loop that seems to bring an equilibrium to himself and cause the end of his universe (or at least the recognition of it) - aligning an objective truth with a subjective experience.

Often the connections Chiang creates are made through inversions: like the universe is biological and the beings are mechanical. What does that mean? I haven’t got the brain power to figure it out, but the flip is really satisfying. It’s also written more lyrically than a sci-fi story usually is, maybe to bypass the scrutiny of its flimsy science or to soften its brutal truths. I find this makes it closer to philosophy in a poem over physics in a textbook. If God could explain the universe in a Haynes manual, I wonder how that would read. Would it be more enjoyable than Exhalation™? It would certainly be more mechanistic™.

I like that you brought up the enlightenment. It might have snuck passed me on first read, but it seems totally relevant to me now. This is a painting I think a lot about when discussing “enlightenment” - I might have seen it first at uni. A man kills a bird by putting it in a vacuum pump, and all the onlookers express different feelings about it. If only that bird were smart enough to read this story, it would understand that its existence is just a manifestation of universal patterns - magically all its conscious problems would disappear, but instead it likely resisted. Stupid bird.

Agree so much of what you said regarding the birth of life through a breath. There must be an innate belief in an external force pushing life into something previously static. We can’t as people get past the creator / creation idea, although I feel this story pushes against that somewhat with its cyclical theories.

“I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily.” - yes but then what please. Other than, another explanation of perhaps a bigger universe out there to be explored, which is a recursive thing to latch onto. I’m starting to feel as cold as the chromium wall that describes the limit of their robot world.

Would you prefer the spiritual ascension? I feel like his “ascension” is the writing. His patterns, what he regards as himself, being committed to paper and assumed by the next reader. You could think of it as cold, but you could also think of it as peace.

The ending: as eloquently as it is put, I also found it to be slightly lacklustre and I have a feeling why. It’s because we don’t believe it parallels our experience enough to draw a moral from the story — there is no call to action for us here. We leave thinking, “oh you want me to dive into the deepest voids of my mind to appreciate the miracle of the universe just as much as our inevitable decline and death?” Absolutely not.. Oor maaaybe..

It takes a certain person to enjoy stories like this. And I wonder if the enjoyment of such stories are dependent on the friction between the stories’ moral and the reader’s personal belief system. Too different, and they reject it, too close, and it’s obvious and uninteresting. Maybe I enjoy it more because I’m surfing that middle ground perfectly. The flow state in epistemic form. Or maybe it just affirms a philosophy that I already believe and that massages my world view.

Does systemic thinking terminate at an individual’s enlightenment, or is it an Ouroboros that will eats own ass until the universe implodes? Fuck knows, but I’m only toe deep and the universe hasn’t imploded yet.

     Exhale,

I’m going to read your newsletter now :)