Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“So. There was a demonstration. You blocked a road or something?”

“We blocked roads, we lay down in front of bulldozers. Some people slashed a few tires. The locals put their ingenuity to work, and things got a bit out of hand. Mr. Wing's dear friends in the government took offense and called out the Army. Seventeen people were arrested. Unreasonably high bail was set for them as a punitive measure—if these people can't get out of jail they can't make money and their families suffer terribly. I could get bailed out if I wanted to, but have elected to stay behind bars as a gesture of solidarity.”

It all seems like a plausible enough cover story to Randy. “But I'm guessing that a lot of people in the government are appalled by the fact that they have thrown a saint into jail,” he says, “and so they have moved you here, to the high-prestige luxury jail with private cells.”

“Once again your understanding of the local culture is conspicuous,” Enoch Root says. He shifts position on the bed and his crucifix swings back and forth ponderously. He also has a medallion around his neck with something startling written on it.

“Do you have some occult symbol there?” Randy asks, squinting.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can make out the word 'occult' on your medallion there.”

“It says ignoti et quasi occulti, which means 'unknown and partly hidden' or words to that effect,” says Enoch Root. “It is the motto of a society to which I belong. You must know that the word 'occult' does not intrinsically have anything to do with Satanic rituals and drinking blood and all of that. It—”

“I was trained as an astronomer,” Randy says. “So I learned all about occultation—the concealment of one body behind another, as during an eclipse.”

“Oh. Well, then, I'll shut up.”

“In fact, I know more than you might think about occultation,” Randy says. It might seem like he's beating a dead horse, except that he catches the eye of Enoch Root while he's saying it, and gives a significant sidelong glance at his computer. Root processes this for a moment and then nods.

“Who's the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?” Randy asks.

Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, “Reasonable guess. But wrong. It's Athena.”

“The Greek goddess?”

“Yes.”

“How do you square that with Christianity?”

“When I phoned you the other day, how did you know it was me?”

“I don't know. I just recognized you.”

“Recognized me? What does that mean? You didn't recognize my voice.”

“Is this some roundabout way of answering my question about Athena worship v. Christianity?”

“Doesn't it strike you as remarkable that you can look at a stream of characters on the screen of your computer—e-mail from someone you've never seen—and later 'recognize' the same person on the phone? How does that work, Randy?”

“I haven't the faintest idea. The brain can do some weird—”

“Some complain that e-mail is impersonal—that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. Some would say that's not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately.”

“So what's your explanation of how I recognized you?”

“I would argue that inside your mind was some pattern of neurological activity that was not there before you exchanged e-mail with me. The Root Representation. It is not me. I'm this big slug of carbon and oxygen and some other stuff on this cot right next to you. The Root Rep, by contrast, is the thing that you'll carry around in your brain for the rest of your life, barring some kind of major neurological insult, that your mind uses to represent me. When you think about me, in other words, you're not thinking about me qua this big slug of carbon, you are thinking about the Root Rep. Indeed, some day you might get released from jail and run into someone who would say, 'You know, I was in the Philippines once, running around in the boondocks, and I ran into this old fart who started talking to me about Root Reps.' And by exchanging notes (as it were) with this fellow you would be able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the Root Rep in your brain and the Root Rep in his brain were generated by the same actual slug of carbon and oxygen and so on: me.”

“And this has something to do, again, with Athena?”

“If you think of the Greek gods as real supernatural beings who lived on Mount Olympus, no. But if you think of them as being in the same class of entities as the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity that the mind uses to represent things that it sees, or thinks it sees, in the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting and relevant as real people. Why? Because, in the same way as you might one day encounter another person with his own Root Rep so, if you were to have a conversation with an ancient Greek person, and he started talking about Zeus, you might—once you got over your initial feelings of superiority—discover that you had some mental representations inside your own mind that, though you didn't name them Zeus and didn't think of them as a big hairy thunderbolt-hurling son of a Titan, nonetheless had been generated as a result of interactions with entities in the outside world that are the same as the ones that cause the Zeus Representation to appear in the Greek's mind. And here we could talk about the Plato's Cave thing for a while—the Veg-O-Matic of metaphors—it slices! it dices!”

“In which,” Randy says, “the actual entities in the real world are the three-dimensional, real things that are casting the shadows, this Greek dude and I are the wretches chained up looking at the shadows of those things on the walls, and it's just that the shape of the wall in front of me is different from the shape of the wall in front of the Grecian—”

“—so that given a shadow projected on your wall is going to adopt a different shape from the same shadow projected on his wall, where the different wall-shapes here correspond to let's say your modern scientific worldview versus his ancient pagan worldview.”

“Yeah. That Plato's Cave metaphor.”

At this very moment some wag of a prison guard, out in the corridor, throws a switch and shuts off all of the lights. The only illumination now is from the screensaver on Randy's laptop, which is running animations of colliding galaxies.

“I think we can stipulate that the wall in front of you, Randy, is considerably flatter and smoother, i.e., it generally gives you a much more accurate shadow than his wall, and yet it's clear that he's still capable of seeing the same shadows and probably drawing some useful conclusions about the shapes of the things that cast them.”

“Okay. So the Athena that you honor on your medallion isn't a supernatural being—”

“—who lives on a mountain in Greece, et cetera, but rather whatever entity, pattern, trend, or what-have-you that, when perceived by ancient Greek people, and filtered through their perceptual machinery and their pagan worldview, produced the internal mental representation that they dubbed Athena. The distinction being quite important because Athena the-supernatural-chick-with-the-helmet is of course nonexistent, but 'Athena' the external-generator-of-the-internal-representation-dubbed-Athena-by-the-ancient-Greeks must have existed back then, or else the internal representation never would have been generated, and if she existed back then, the chances are excellent that she exists now, and if all that is the case, then whatever ideas the ancient Greeks (who, though utter shitheads in many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people) had about her are probably still quite valid.”