Bear, Greg: Anvil of Stars (1992, 2008)

In the distant future, the Earth has been destroyed by killer machine intelligences. Another advanced civilization, the Benefactors, have saved some of the survivors of Earth's destruction. As well, they've set the Children of Earth, as the young human volunteers are described on a mission to fulfill the Law: to destroy the destroyers. In order to accomplish this task, the Children are provided with a Benefactor Ship of the Law. Machine intelligences themselves, the Benefactors teach the Children how to use the technology now available to them, as well as how to innovate with the tech using Benefactor "math," which the Children name "momerath."

Momerath, as Bear describes it, is a visual-analytical method for solving extremely complex problems (such as calculating orbits and the simultaneous and interactive trajectories of many thousands of objects, for example). The story of the Children's odyssey is told from the point of view of Martin, a leader among the Children. Here's a description of momerath in use:

"Martin visualized the space of probability behind tight-closed eyes, hands opening and closing, seeing the numbers and the paths, making them converge and diverge" (39).

Chuang Tzu

A couple hundred years after Lao Tzu's saying were collected as the Dao De Ching, his follower Chuang Tzu (4th century B.C.) picked up and elaborated upon a number of Lao's ideas.

Lao had a saying: "The recognition of beauty as such implies the idea of ugliness, and the recognition of good implies the idea of evil."

Giles writes: "Following up this hint, Chuang Tzu is led to insist on the ultimate relativity of all human perceptions. Even space and time are relative. Sense-knowledge is gained by looking at things from only one point of view, and is therefore utterly illusory and untrustworthy" (Musing of a Chinese Mystic, 7).

Although an objective reality exists as the foundation "underlying the flow of phenomena," that hardly need concern us. The purpose of life, "true wisdom," "consists in withdrawing from one's own individual standpoint and entering into 'subjective relation with all things'" (Musing of a Chinese Mystic, 8).

Crowley, John: Engine Summer (1979, 1994)

Engine Summer is set in post-apocalyptic distant future, hundreds of years, at least, after a series of anthropogenic catastrophes, known collectively as the Storm, have reduced human populations to a fraction of their former billions. The teller of Engine Summer is Rush (as in reed), a member of the Little Belaire community, all of whom are "truth speakers." Truth speakers attempt to communicate in such a way that "they mean what they say, and say what they mean." One of the ways they do this is by telling lots of stories. As a boy, Rush -- Rush that Speaks is his full name -- spends time with a "gossip," a wise woman, named Painted Red.

Storytelling allows for the creation of communal meaning; but by what cognitive means is that accomplished? In as much as Crowley's novel is a meditation on this question, he seems to argue that the means is through perception. For instance, the young Rush is being counseled by Painted Red while they are both in a heightened state of consciousness thanks to the use of a "rose-colored substance" dabbed on the lips:

What I did notice was that Painted Red's questions, and then my answers, began to take on bodies somehow. When she talked about something, it wasn't only being talked about but called into being. When she asked about my mother, my mother was there, or I was with her, on the roofs where the beehives are, and she was telling me to put my ear against the hive and hear the low constant murmur of the wintering bees inside. When Painted Red asked my about my dreams, I seemed to dream them all over again, to fly again and cry out in terror and vertigo when I fell. I never stopped knowing that Painted Red was beside me talking, or that I was answering; but -- it was the rose-colored stuff that did, of course, but I wasn't aware even of that -- though I knew that I hadn't left her side and that her hand was still on mine, still I went journeying up and down my life. (359)

To go "journeying up and down" one's life is, of course, precisely the novelist's (that vendor of rose-colored stuffs) goal. And novelists get us to journey so by hewing close to the perceptual. Indeed, it is hard to find a better example of this than in this metaphor of Crowley's that bridges from the aural to the oral, those perceptual domains, via the textual skills of the people of the List, who maintain literacy of that now lost language, English. Rush is in a large building, perhaps the remains of an office building:

...she took me up the wide flight of stairs that led to the big platform which covered the back part of the place -- the mezzanine, they called it (the List knew such words, words that rang like ancient coins flung down [on] angelstone--mezzaine). (469)

As a reader, I've always been insulted by the thought that I was somehow "suspending disbelief" when I engaged with fiction. Rather, it's been my experience that, by hewing close to the perceptual, writers gain our trust as we perceive the veracity of their observational skills. Although fiction is a textual art, its success depends on taking advantage of the brain's ability to mirror experience through a wide variety of domains and media. And so there has developed among writers a kind of cognitive folk science -- something that could probably be fairly said of most areas of creative service (design, commercial arts, musical performance, etc.) -- about what "works."

Rush's distant future remembers our civilization as that of "angels." When, in his wanderings outside Little Belaire, he first experiences a pictorial calendar (other than the seasonal one he lived by growing up), it's at a month-changing ritual among the people of the List. As the tribal elder turns the old, June picture down and the new July picture up, the people "all made a satisfied sound, like aaaah." Rush tells us:

That picture let me know, and laugh to know, that however strange and old the angels were, still they were men, and knew what men know, if they could make this. The same two children... lay on green grass darker than June's.... But what really made me laugh: the grass and they were at the top of the picture, and looked down into the clouds which floated below: and that's how it feels, in summer, to watch clouds. (472)

In other words, we know who we are, and are able to identify one another through perceptual experience.

When Rush first meets Painted Red, she tells him he is not a truth speaker. He acknowledges that this is so, and endeavors to learn to speak truly, for it is an acquired art. Later in life, Painted Red asks Rush, now a practice truth speaker, how speaking truly is accomplished. He thinks, then admits that he can't say. She laughs and whispers a secret: neither does she. The metaphysical quotient of truth speaking is heightened when we learn of saints in the folk culture of Little Belaire. Saints "learned to make speech -- transparent, like glass, so that through the words the face is seen truly" (376). And later, as Rush sets out to learn how to be a saint: "Transparent: that's what Painted Red said the saints were, or tied to be...." (410). He remembers what Painted Red said to him more fully:

She said: "The saints found that truthful speaking was more than just being understood; the important thing was that the better you spoke, the more other people saw themselves in you, as in a mirror. Or better: the more they saw themselves through you, as though you had become transparent." (410)

The gossips, including Painted Red, have copies of an ancient psychological text, called the File System -- a vast database of traits, apparently, and the original intent of which has been lost -- that they interpret, having discovered knew knowledge in the text that it's creators, the angels, were not aware of. In the following, "Palm cord" may be read as "Palm tribe":

From the long box that was Palm cord, she drew out a second square of glass and out it in with the other. The board changed; colors mixed and become other colors; masses changed shape, became newly related to other masses.

"Do you see?" she said. "The saints are like the slide of the System. Their interpenetration is what reveals, not the slides themselves."

"It's like the saints," I said, "because they made their lives transparent, like the slides; and their lives can be placed before our own, in our remembering their stories, and reveal things to us about ourselves. Not the stories or the lives themselves, but their--"

"Interpenetration, yes," Painted Red said. "They're saints not because of what they did, especially, but because in the telling of it, what they did became transparent, and your own life could be seen through it, illuminated.... And in transparent life, the saints hoped that one day we might be free from death: not immortal, as the angels tried to become, but free from death, our lives transparent even as we live them: not through a means, you see, like the Filing System or even truthful speaking, but transparent in their circumstances: so that instead of telling a story that makes a life transparent, we will ourselves be transparent, and not hear or remember a saint's life, but live it...." (412)