Logic* got a Needs Improvement on her quant test! Logic is never going to be able to learn math. She's a worthless person and it would be better for everyone around her if she were never born. Given the absence of a time machine, she's going to run off into the woods and live on hunting and fishing and mushrooming, where it doesn't MATTER if she's good at math, and if she eats a poisonous mushroom it would be FINE and NO ONE WOULD CARE, because her being alive would make everyone miserable.

Unfortunately, when she entered her closet to prepare for this, her closet turned into an interdimensional restaurant. Running away to an interdimensional restaurant seems even better than running away to the woods, so now she's clutching her favorite stuffed animal Teddy and drinking a cup of tea, which she isn't allowed to have because it has caffeine in it and she's too small for drugs. 

*This is not actually etymologically related to "logos" in the Teaching's language. 

Oh hey, there's someone else(A) here! Maybe A knows what's up. Hopefully Jana(B) can solve this mystery in time to catch B's train; the next one isn't for three hours.

"Hey, do you know why this is a restaurant and not the train station bathroom?"

"It's a restaurant that connects different universes! And time stops while you're in here. The logos gives us many blessings," she adds devoutly, wanting to make a good impression on the alien.

Jana waves an arm around and observes it move through space. "Time doesn't look stopped. What's the logos?"

"The logos created the universe and maintains it in every moment and tells us what we should be doing! --Time is only stopped outside. It goes fine in here. You can check if you want."

Jana runs to the door and checks. Sure enough, none of the people walking around the station make any progress while the door is shut.

"Wow! Now I definitely won't stay in here too long and miss my train. And you're from another universe? That needs maintaining all the time? Ours just keeps going with deterministic physics and nobody needs to do anything about it."

"Oh! The logos is the deterministic physics. You have it too!"

"Well, I sure thought we did but this whole restaurant that's in multiple universes thing is a big surprise! We should do experiments on it and publish and get famous and stuff. What's your universe like? Do you have a sun and a moon and fastplanet and hotplanet and redplanet and hugeplanet and ringplanet and sidewaysplanet and blueplanet?"

"I don't think we have it by those names," Logic says uncertainly. "We have Mercury and Venus and Mars and Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. Those are all named after mythological gods that aren't real."

"Cool! Hey, if you're from another universe with different names for things, how come you speak Convergentlanguage?

"I don't! I speak Romish."

"Hmmm. Do you want to try telling me some facts about Romish grammar so I can tell if it's almost the same as Convergentlanguage or if I'm just hearing Convergentlanguage when you're speaking something else?"

"Uh-- adjectives have to agree with their nouns, 'to' takes the genitive, the words you emphasize go at the end or the beginning of the sentence--"

"That's completely different--Iiiiii'm wildly hallucinating, aren't I. Uh, uh, can you say you're going to take some action and then wait a few seconds and then take it so I can see if what I hear you saying lets me make correct predictions?"

"I'm going to jump up and down." She waits one recitation of Joy To The Universe and then she does so.

"Okay, if I'm losing my mind I'm doing it consistently. I guess I'll accept my sense data and investigate the situation it looks like I'm in and not do anything especially risky. Which might mean I miss my train but I shouldn't run away to Bridgecity while I'm hallucinating anyway."

"Oh, are you running away? I'm running away too!"

"I am, yeah! My parents think I should go to more school and become an engineer or an architect or something mathy, but I don't actually like math even though I'm good at it and I'm metaphorically sick of them and I want to go get a job and not live with them anymore for a few years."

And when Jana(A) comes back A will have been living independently with NO trigonometry and A's parents(B) will have to admit B were wrong about what would make A happy even if it turns out A just needed a break, because B weren't planning to give A one. Except now A's maybe hallucinating and should go home or to the hospital, or has just discovered other universes with language magic and should go to a physicist or a newspaper or someone in government. A'll figure out which sooner or later.

"Oh, I'm terrible at math! I was running off to go live in the woods because I'm worthless and everyone's lives would be better off without me because I got Needs Improvement on my quant test."

"Getting bad grades is the worst but probably your family will still miss you. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't run away! You should do whatever you want. Just, probably it won't make anyone else's life better, just yours. Are you going to go live with the autarkoids or are you trying to pull a This Is My Mountain*?"

* The most famous instance of a genre of escapist/coming-of-age novels in which someone(A), most often a teenager, ends up lost in the wilderness for some reason, survives by hunting and gathering, overcomes various trials, eventually makes contact with civilization again, and either joins an autarkyvillage or just tells A's family A's alive and then goes right back to the wilderness. 

"I don't know what an autarkoid is so probably the second thing? I'm going to go hunt and fish and eat mushrooms." She leaves out the part of the plan where she was going to eat a poisonous mushroom and die because then the alien might stop her. "I'm Logic."

"I'm Jana. I wouldn't want to pull a This is My Mountain because I like having toilets and I'm too scared of dying but if you pull it off it'll be totally awesome."

"Dying isn't bad," Logic announces. "Everyone would be better off if I were dead."

"If you die in the woods you won't get preserved in time! And what good would you being dead do anybody?"

"Well, they wouldn't have to put up with me," Logic says. She thinks this is a great point.

"If people(A) don't want to put up with you A can just leave. Except your parents(B), I guess, but you just need to run away to another city or your auncles' place or something for that."

"But then my auncles have to put up with me!"

"Not if you go live in a dormpartment somewhere but I guess then your dormmates would. What do you do that people don't like?"

"Be bad at math!"

"Then people(A) who don't like that just shouldn't ask you to do any! There are loads of people(B) who are good at math and like it, A should get B to do it!" Jana is annoyed. There is involuntary math in two universes and that is bogus.

"You're totally right," Logic says. "--What does preservation mean?"

"Uh, it's when you bodydie and the surgeons chop off your head and do stuff to it so you don't braindie and put you in a vault where nothing can mess with you until we* get uploading."

*Note: Convergentlanguage has four forms of 'we' that indicate whether or not the listener is included and whether or not any third parties are included. Jana used the one indicating the inclusion of both Logic and at least one third party.

"Oh! We don't have that I think. When we bodydie we braindie."

". . . FECES."

"WAIT this the thing where if something really bad happens and makes no sense it's probably a dream."

Jana(A) convulses A's entire body in the manner of someone trying to thrash around in bed and wake A's self up. No metaphorical dice.

"Double feces!"

"Have you tried pinching yourself? That sometimes helps."

Jana tries this, to no avail. "Nope. Hey, if you're a dream character why are you telling me how to wake up and if you're not a dream character why did you think I could?"

"Well, I don't know if dream people have souls," Logic says sensibly.

"I think I missed a step there, can you introsplain?"

"Well, if dream people have souls, I might be a dream person even though there's something it feels like to be me."

". . . I don't remember having any separately sapient personalityaspects. And I don't think they show up all of a sudden. So if you have qualia you're probably not running on my brain. Or I'm even more insane than it looks like."

"Dreams are pretty weird," Logic says. "I don't know how dreams work."

"I don't know either but probably you're all braindying and I don't know what to do!"

"Well, it's better that you know about it," Logic says, "because then you can stop it!"

"Yeah. I should call a bunch of preservation companies who can set up teams in your universe, in addition to the scientists and journalists. But nobody's dying right now, right, because time is stopped. So I can stay here and get more information until I'm sure I know everything everyone's going to need to know that I can find out and it can all get set up really fast. Also if there are two universes there are probably loads so I should learn more about that too."

"The Bar said that there are loads. She talks on napkins."

"Oh! Hi there!" Jana(A) says to the bar(B). A reads B's resulting napkin and requests a "some kind of almondshake with something tasty from another universe." Now A has an almondshake.

"So what else is your universe like? Are there any other problems we* should figure out solutions for?"

*This is the one that means 'just the people in this conversation'.

"Well, time is stopped, so we could just talk about things until we find more problems? I wouldn't have thought of preservation as being a problem on my own. --People back home are really worried about factory farming and the world outside the Teachingsphere and nuclear war and wild animals."

"I've heard of nuclear war but not factory farming or the Teachingsphere. Is the problem with wild animals that sometimes they attack people or that it's sad when they die?"

"The wild animals might be sad! If they're sick or hungry. --The Teachingsphere is people who worship the logos and in other places it's really bad and they have genocides and stuff."

"Oh, yikes. Genocide is--a war that goes on until everyone on one of the sides is dead? Firstplanet used to have those but then everyone who didn't figure out how to stop doing it died and now if cities don't like each other they just avoid each other and show off how rich they are at each other and try to get each other's citizens to move to them. Does worshipping the Logos help with that somehow?"

"Oh yeah! Because people study it and then they know what the right things to do are so they don't commit genocides."

"So the Logos means decision theory as well as physics?"

"I think so? I don't know what decision theory is. Mostly I have to go to Virtue class and learn to meditate and resolve conflicts and not smash things when I'm mad." She makes a face.

"Are you starting a career as a mediator? I've heard smashing things when you're mad can be fun but I don't like sudden noises so I haven't tried it."

"No, everyone has to learn that kind of thing, or they'll go around throwing things whenever they get mad or not eating or things like that."

"Huh. When I get mad I mostly complain about whoever I'm mad at to someone else. Or get in an argument. Or cry. We have classes on how to have productive arguments but I don't see how you could have classes on not crying; it'd be like having a class on not sneezing."

"Well," Logic says, "you can distract yourself until you don't feel like crying anymore, or think about it in a different way that makes you less mad, or fix whatever you're mad about."

"Fixing whatever I'm mad about usually works but I can do that and cry at the same time." Shrug. "It makes sense as a thing to practice, though, to get faster at it."

"Oh. When I cry I want to solve my problems by"-- she refuses to admit that running off to the woods is a bad solution to getting a Needs Improvement on her math test-- "biting myself or something."

Jana(A) nibbles thoughtfully on the skin over one of A's knuckles. "Not my favorite distraction, but I can see why someone'd go for it."

"Oh, no, I bite my arm really hard. See?" She shows Jana the marks she left.

"That looks like it'd keep hurting past when you wanted a distraction, so I can see why you'd want to do something else. What else do you learn in Virtue class?"

"So much meditating." Logic makes a face. "My breath is BORING."

"What's meditating?" Jana(A) considers the question of whether A's breath is boring and concludes that it mostly is, except for how it's neat that the air goes into A's nostrils (two pipes) and then A's trachea (one pipe) and then A's bronchial tubes (two pipes again).

"Meditating is"-- she screws up her face trying to remember-- "one of a family of mental techniques intended to reliably induce certain mental states through changes in thought, often involving awareness and concentration on an object of meditation."

"That . . . narrows my hypothesis space some, but I notice that definition includes all of falling asleep, trying not to fall asleep, cheering oneself up by remembering one's plans for tomorrow, getting ready to do something by imagining doing it, and arguably reviewing chess openings. So I think I would need more detail to make any useful predictions."

Oh! This is time to use the skill of Giving An Example!

"Uh, it's learning to concentrate by focusing on your breath, learning to feel compassion by sending positive wishes to people, calming down by breathing slowly, practicing being mindfully aware of things like tea or music so you can really appreciate them, listening to the voice of the logos..."

"Is that last thing a metaphor? Our math doesn't talk except in that people write books about it. We do the being really aware of food or music thing but we don't learn it in school, it's just sort of what eating and listening to music are like. And we mostly learn to feel compassion by talking to people and reading about people, and we learn to concentrate by doing things that take concentration or by playing games."

"Oh! I don't think you know any meditation," she says. "Maybe we should teach you guys meditation so you can talk to the logos."

". . . Wait, does the Logos talk back?"

"Yeah! You feel still and calm inside of you and you can hear its voice." Logic doesn't like doing this because it tells her not to run away from home.

"What does it say? Our physics doesn't talk, it just produces experimental results--I mean, everything anyone perceives is an experimental result and physics also produces the things no-one perceives, but, like. The point is that it's just the process of things happening and not, like, itself separately also a thing."

"Oh, physics is also sentient. But it makes sense that you don't know that yet! We didn't know about freezing people."

"Oh yikes. How did you find out? Is it possible to hurt your physics? How do you reach a Pareto optimum* with a physics? Some people are worried about some kinds of software being sentient but it's not clear how to reach a Pareto optimum with them so mostly we just don't write that kind." Jana(A) really hopes A's physics isn't like that.

*Literally 'no-strictly-better-world', where strictly-better is its own two-syllable word.

"I don't think it's possible to hurt it? It's... physics."

"Well that's good. I'd say 'ask for a faster speed of light and for it to be possible to decrease entropy' but that would probably kill everyone by some mechanism I don't know enough math to predict, so actually I won't say that."

"I think if the logos could arrange things in a way that would be better for us it would?" Logic says uncertainly.

"Yeah I wouldn't be at all surprised if only a very narrow set of possible configurations of physics could support humanoid life. How did you find out your physics was a person anyway? Did it evolve or are you in a simulation or what?"

(Obviously if Logic is in a simulation then so is Jana but that's arguably a nicer possibility than 'Jana is going insane', at least for Jana if not necessarily for the rest of Firstplanet.)

"The Teacher found out how to listen to the logos two thousand years ago and he taught us how to do what the logos wanted! Why would we be a simulation?"

"If you're a simulation it would explain where the Logos' brain was. Can the Logos tell people information they don't already know? Can you pass a message from one continent to another by telling the Logos to tell someone else something?"

"I bet it could," Logic says, "but it doesn't do things like that because miracles are blasphemous. Physics is beautiful and it would be less beautiful if there were random exceptions to get people things they wanted."

Jana looks absolutely baffled!

"But--you just said the Logos talks to people! Talking to one person is fine but passing messages is ugly? That's random!"

"Well, there isn't any rule against it talking to one person," Logic says, concerned that this conversation is involving more theological knowledge than she possesses.

"Look, maybe this is a stupid question but I'm basically an alien and aliens asking stupid questions is fine, so: if the Logos never talks to someone about a conversation with someone else, how do you know you're hearing physics and not just your own second thoughtvoice?"

"What's a second thoughtvoice?"

"So you know how you hear your own thoughts in your brain? And then sometimes you have a conversation between your thoughts and also-your-thoughts? Those are thoughtvoices and the side of the conversation that feels less like you is the second one."

"Oh. I think maybe the logos put a logos-thoughtvoice into our head so we can talk to it without breaking the laws of physics?"

"How do you empirically distinguish that hypothesis from the hypothesis where physics isn't a person and the thoughtvoice is your model of it?"

"I don't know, I'm not a theologian, I'm twelve," Logic says.

"This seems important enough to teach it before age twelve! But I don't know what the prerequisites are I guess; maybe it's a complicated neuroscience thing."

"Anyway, if you can hear it it feels obvious. Like knowing how many toes you have."

"Lots of stuff is obvious but not true. Optical illusions and whether a string of numbers is random and what grade an essay is going to get, but also lots of people in my universe think their second thoughtvoice might be another person but it never is."

"How do they know that?" Logic wondered. "My aunt hears voices but we're not sure if they're people or not."

"If one introspects carefully one can hear oneself deciding what they should say, and they never provide any information one doesn't already know even if one hears them claiming that they can, and if one writes fictional characters enough some of one's thoughtvoices will start talking like the fictional characters. On my planet, I mean; I don't know anything about your aunt other than priors."

"Why would people originally being fictional characters mean they're not people?"

"Well sometimes thoughtvoices(A) start as fictional characters and end up as people, but A come from the person whose brain A're in, A aren't a separate thing showing up from somewhere else. If people(B) imagine the Logos as a character so hard the character becomes a person that's different from there having been a Logos-person(C) that existed before humans evolved and would go on existing if all the humans stopped thinking about C."

"The logos sometimes provides information we don't have already! Like if you don't know what to do about a problem sometimes the logos will tell you."

"In a way that's the same as your brain having a good idea or in a way that's like getting information about external reality that you didn't have--actually can I just get some examples of impressive known cases, that'll be easier than trying to define what I mean exactly."

"Well, the Teacher, obviously-- and there were a bunch of people whom the logos told that slavery was wrong or that animals are people or that you shouldn't discriminate against people based on their ethnicity. And people develop new techniques, or art projects."

"That's all stuff one can figure out just by thinking about it though. Except the which animals are people thing but one can figure that out by seeing animals and reading about animals and then thinking. So that's weak evidence. Strong evidence would be 'there's ore under this mountain' or 'there's going to be a big earthquake next year' or the exact speed of light or something. What are the new techniques, if it's stuff like steelmaking techniques or surgical techniques where there would otherwise be a lot of trial and error that would be an in-between amount of evidence."

"Brain things, mostly? Like new kinds of meditation or emotional regulation. --The logos doesn't want to tell you what to do, it wants to tell you how to do it."

"That really really sounds like a thoughtvoice with no substrate outside people's brain and no access to any information that isn't in their brains. Which is not me claiming the Logos-instances in people aren't sapient; you could have a large fraction of multiminds with one mind being very similar between people."

"But if there's no logos how come math accurately describes the world?"

"Well, something's got to accurately describe the world, doesn't it? If it was something other than math we'd've evolved to think in terms of whatever it was and then formalized that instead."