In practice this has turned into my attempt to write a rambling cross-disciplinary essay. The idea is to synthesise the great thoughts of great men from various fields into a structure whose parts are stolen but whose blueprints can nonetheless be patented.
But mostly because I couldn't help it. I started out to write an essay in support of alternate history. After a while I noticed that all my analogies were arguments against my thesis. The only intellectually honest course was for my original thesis to be thrown to the wolves, and a contract with the opposite conclusion signed with indecent haste.
Besides, I'd grown attached to those analogies.
The counterargument is equally obvious: an alternate history enthusiast would be the last person to suggest we should stop studying real history. Contrafactuals are suggested as complementary to factuals, not as alternatives.
To add a touch of irony I've titled this section with a quotation from Mao Zhedong, announcing the Cultural Revolution of 1970s China. Mao switched to weedkiller shortly afterward.
Needless to say, this doesn't work. The reason is that it takes effort to forget. Once the demon has flipped his shutter open or closed he has to lever it back up into the ready position, and that takes energy. Just as much, if we make the system as efficient as theoretically possible, as is produced by the turbine.
So what does this prove? Well, first, that physicists, like mediaeval demonologists, tend to be small thinkers when it comes to taking advantage of supernatural assistance.
But the second conclusion is worthy of a Zen koan. Existence is of itself useless, as is non-existence. If both sides are full of gas, or both are empty, nothing useful happens. Value derives from the contrast between existence and non-existence.
And it's harder to forget falsehood than to learn the truth.
There are several metaphors I could use here. Greg Egan's Permutation City has a particularly bizarre version, for instance. But the commonest metaphor here is of an infinite number of monkeys, composing a script for Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Their method is to hammer away, each to his typewriter, striking keys at random. After a short time each will have created its own opus. Of course each opus will be replicated an infinite number of times by other monkeys, but that doesn't make any individual monkey's work any less original.
So after letting the monkeys hammer away for a bit we check whether the results are sufficiently Shakespearian to satisfy us. Most of the works are quite short, the monkey having been distracted by a banana, or the typewriter having jammed, before they got past the first act. The vast bulk of the remainder are meaningless gibberish, or only make sense if read in the language of the ancient Incus rather than English, or are source code for web browsers.
That leaves an infinite number which are English plays. Most of these don't make a lot of sense, or are very dull. But there are an infinite number of copies of Hamlet, and an infinite number of copies of any play you name. And of plays far better than Hamlet, written or as yet unwritten.
Which raises some obvious questions:
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Definition: God is the most perfect being that can possibly exist.
Unsupported Assertion: Anything that exists is more perfect than an otherwise identical thing that doesn't exist.
Conclusion: There's no need to fund my philosophy department next year because we've proved what we wanted to prove ... wait, I've found a flaw in the proof.
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