Stories of Your Life and Others

Understand
This is the oldest story in this volume and might never have been
published if it weren't for Spider Robinson, one of my instructors at
Clarion. This story had collected a bunch of rejection slips when I first sent
it out, but Spider encouraged me to resubmit it after I had Clarion on my
resume. I made some revisions and sent it out, and it got a much better
response the second time around.
The initial germ for this story was an offhand remark made by a
roommate of mine in college; he was reading Sartre's Nausea at the time,
whose protagonist finds only meaninglessness in everything he sees. But
what would it be like, my roommate wondered, to find meaning and order
in everything you saw? To me that suggested a kind of heightened
perception, which in turn suggested superintelligence. I started thinking
about the point at which quantitative improvements— better memory, faster
pattern recognition— turn into a qualitative difference, a fundamentally
different mode of cognition.
Something else I wondered about was the possibility of truly
understanding how our minds work. Some people are certain that it's
impossible for us to understand our minds, offering analogies like "you
can't see your face with your own eyes." I never found that persuasive. It
may turn out that we can't, in fact, understand our minds (for certain values
of "understand" and "mind"), but it'll take an argument much more
persuasive than that to convince me.

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Division by Zero
There's a famous equation that looks like this:
When I first saw the derivation of this equation, my jaw dropped in
amazement. Let me try to explain why.
One of the things we admire most in fiction is an ending that is
surprising, yet inevitable. This is also what characterizes elegance in
design: the invention that's clever yet seems totally natural. Of course we
know that they aren't really inevitable; it's human ingenuity that makes
them seem that way, temporarily.
Now consider the equation mentioned above. It's definitely surprising;
you could work with the numbers e, and i for years, each in a dozen
different contexts, without realizing they intersected in this particular way.
Yet once you've seen the derivation, you feel that this equation really is
inevitable, that this is the only way things could be. It's a feeling of awe, as
if you've come into contact with absolute truth.
A proof that mathematics is inconsistent, and that all its wondrous
beauty was just an illusion, would, it seemed to me, be one of the worst
things you could ever learn.

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