《The Three-Body Problem》is indeed a pretty good science-fiction novel: the conception is very ingenious, and it also contains many elements that invite deep reflection. But given Teacher Jiang Xiaoyuan’s excessive elevation of it, I actually found myself becoming rather resistant. As an ordinary fantasy novel, whether it is Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics or Liu Cixin’s cosmic sociology, these are all clever designs; but if one wants to elevate them to the level of genuine social science or philosophy and discuss their profound significance, that is going too far.
I had already made sarcastic remarks about cosmic sociology back then. Of course, at that time I had not yet read *The Three-Body Problem*; I was mainly targeting Teacher Jiang. After reading it, I felt that Teacher Jiang really has gone off the deep end. I do not know whether Liu Cixin himself took “cosmic sociology” seriously, but in the book there actually already appear many contradictory settings.
The crux of the matter is that, whether intentional or not, *The Three-Body Problem*’s understanding of evolution is quite superficial. On the surface, evolution is said to be about survival of the fittest through the elimination of the weak, but what exactly is the unit of competition, and what exactly is it that the fit are adapting to? These all require a deeper understanding. Evolution is a rather basic framework for thinking, applicable on multiple scales: it can be applied to a species, to a series of populations, or to the evolution of certain traits within them. And what the fit adapt to is the environment, and that environment is in turn made up of many other species and of fit ones at different levels; so survival of the fittest is rather a kind of mutual adaptation. To interpret it as “those who fit in survive” is more apt.
Once we use evolution in a more comprehensive and complete way, many links need to be reexamined. For example, consider the event that led Luo Ji to be convinced of his theory: the fact that in the space fleet that had broken away from Earth, limited resources and mutual suspicion led to internecine slaughter. In fact, this is precisely an example that refutes that theory. We discover that the so-called survival competition envisioned according to the theory of the suspicion chain can very well occur within the same species or the same civilization; that is to say, before any competition between species or civilizations or planets takes place, once a survival crisis is faced, internal infighting and internal attrition within any group may well occur.
In the novel, the Three-Body civilization faces a crisis of the uncertainty of the triple-star system, rather than the crisis caused by “limited material resources” that the author emphasizes more in his cosmic sociology. Suppose that the Trisolarans, like the space fleet, faced a resource crisis; then before they could even fight their way to Earth, they should already have been exhausted in internal strife. Of course, even under the crisis of the triple-star system there is a similar problem: if not all Trisolarans immigrate to Earth at the same time, then who should be sent first to the new home and who should be left behind in an environment that may perish at any moment? Wouldn’t that also require a fight to the death?
In any case, in the evolutionary course of a civilization, it will surely encounter countless survival crises large and small. If a civilization survives a long history of evolution, then it must already have established some strategies for resolving internal conflict. For if some civilizations can resolve internal strife in a more effective way, while others are always unable to avoid serious internal waste, then the former should have a stronger survival advantage than the latter; according to evolution, the former will have the last laugh.
It is like in a space fleet with limited energy: if one fleet develops a tradition of resolving internal conflict in a more refined and more civilized way, while another fleet, whenever crisis strikes, only knows to compare who will strike first to kill a companion, then in the end the former is surely at an advantage. For example, if the former uses a game or a lottery to decide who gets rescued first, then though still cruel, it avoids internal war, at least saving a dozen hydrogen bombs and escaping the risk of mutual annihilation.
That is to say, cooperation and mutual assistance are also important parts of evolution. Evolution not only explains the evolution of certain conquering survival skills; it also explains how cooperation and coexistence evolve. Groups that are better at communication and cooperation have, in the long run, stronger survival advantages. Human civilization is in fact exactly like this: all the mechanisms of politics, religion, ethics, and so on, can be said to be game mechanisms for resolving internal disputes. These game mechanisms, even if they are full of deceit and maneuvering, are still more efficient than simply competing over who can physically eliminate the other side first, and they are better able to ensure the continuation of civilization. Such mechanisms of cooperation and communication are not merely a kind of unrealistic hypocrisy; they are instead saturated into the blood of every species through millions upon millions of years of evolutionary history. The infighting of the space fleet precisely proves that this evolutionary law still applies in cosmic space—imagine that this fleet were sustained by a powerful religion; then it might achieve the same result at a lower cost, while saving many hydrogen bombs. Fine-tuned civilization itself is the product of evolution. Even if cosmic sociology can be made more abstract and more fundamental, it still cannot deny the fact that refined civilization, as an evolutionary advantage, truly developed on Earth. Civilization has indeed prevailed over barbarism in the history of evolution. In cosmic sociology, if one wants to deny the superior status of civilization, then one must overturn evolution, not apply it. And *The Three-Body Problem* also acknowledges that evolution is something more basic than cosmic sociology, so then it is self-contradictory.
On the other hand, *The Three-Body Problem* also depicts how, when Earthlings place the humanities in a higher position, their technology instead flourishes. If the priority of the humanities can make a civilization more evolutionarily advantageous, then even on a cosmic scale, a more humane civilization ought to be more advantageous as well.
Evolution also requires understanding the concept of the ecological niche. In an ecosystem, only organisms occupying exactly the same ecological niche will compete with one another; for example, a single mountain cannot accommodate two tigers, but tigers and insects can perfectly well coexist on the same mountain. If humans, relative to a powerful alien civilization, are only a swarm of insects, then perhaps there would not even be any direct survival competition.
Moreover, the richer the diversity of an ecosystem, the more levels it has, the more stable it often is. A simple doubling of the area of the biosphere will not have much substantive impact on the evolution of the ecosystem, but a doubling of its richness can greatly promote the evolution of the biosphere. Then it is easy for us to imagine: if the civilization of one planet encounters another entirely different intelligence, what is the optimal choice? Is it to destroy them outright and simply double one’s own living space, or is it to strive to accommodate one another and thereby double the richness of one’s own ecological environment? Choosing the latter will also involve considerable risk, but after all it includes the possibility of qualitative transformation; choosing the former definitively rules out any possibility of one’s own civilization making a leap forward. Evolution tells us that evolution happens through mutation, and changes in the environment are the opportunity for a species to make a leap. When advanced alien civilizations enter a new world, would they really miss the opportunity to further improve themselves, and merely, like unicellular organisms, know only how to replicate and proliferate themselves?
Take the Trisolarans, for example: it is said that their technology can only develop at a constant rate and cannot accelerate the way Earthlings’ can. Therefore they fear Earthlings, and so they blockade the development of Earthlings’ basic science and try to eliminate Earthlings. But after eliminating Earthlings, can they be certain that the technology of the Trisolarans who move to Earth will also develop at the same accelerated rate as Earthlings’ does? I’m afraid there is no necessary guarantee of that. In any case, if their technology’s acceleration of development cannot match Earthlings’, then even if they expand their territory, what real significance does that have? Is the most reasonable choice not to cooperate with Earthlings, actively promote the development of Earth technology, and share research成果? Wouldn’t such a joint civilization of Trisolarans + Earthlings be more advantageous? Of course, perhaps the Trisolaran civilization and the Earth civilization ultimately still distrusted each other and failed to cooperate. But if the universe truly contains countless civilizations, then two other similar civilizations—for example, a four-body civilization and a celestial-sphere civilization—if they were to transcend suspicion and achieve cooperation, then the new civilization formed by them would obviously have a stronger survival advantage than the Trisolaran civilization. A Trisolaran civilization that has not transcended suspicion may have won in competition with Earth civilization, but in competition on a larger scale it will surely lose to those civilizations that are better at cooperation. For any group, if one is considering long-term survival opportunities, going against the evolutionary law that survival belongs to those who fit in is not a wise move. In fact, in the third volume of *The Three-Body Problem* (by the way, the third volume is completely an unnecessary blemish, especially its utterly disgusting female protagonist), it is depicted that during the brief period in which Trisolarans and Earthlings achieved peace through deterrence, the exchange of technology and culture greatly benefited both sides. If from the very beginning (the twentieth century) one had earnestly sought cooperation, the advantages the Trisolarans obtained would have been even greater and more stable. Who knows whether there was a more powerful civilization in the universe that intercepted Earth’s information at the same time as the Trisolaran civilization and just happened to locate both Earth and the Trisolaran planet? If the universe truly is full of threats, then if the Trisolarans could have carried out mutually beneficial cooperation with Earthlings a few hundred years earlier, the Earth–Trisolaran joint civilization would have held the initiative before any potential threat.
Teacher Jiang and Liu Cixin both fail to truly understand the true severity of the evolutionary law. They may feel that natural selection is harsh because it is a brutal competition in which it is either you die or I live; in fact, that is not the case. The harshness of evolution lies in its explanatory power, which stands above all moral conceptions. Whether it is mutual-benefit cooperation or mutual suspicion and slaughter, whether the rule feels positive or negative to people or is simply impossible to understand, as long as it has a survival advantage and history can provide enough space for competition, then it will become reasonable. To take an example, the prisoner’s dilemma fails on the scale of evolution. A rational prisoner will choose suspicion and betrayal in order to maximize his own interests, but on a larger scale, all the prisoners who choose suspicion and betrayal, and all the prisoners who choose trust and mutual assistance, compete with one another on the scale of evolutionary history. No matter how incomprehensible the latter’s choice may be, in any case they achieved a win-win through some principle or belief or skill or any method; in each choice, the latter always gain more than the former, and across countless choices the latter accumulate a huge survival advantage, with the result that it is the former who are eliminated. That is where the harshness of evolution lies. This is why, after a long evolution, there are still so many mutually beneficial and altruistic behaviors in human society: these are not obstacles to evolution, nor vestiges of an evolution that has not been carried through thoroughly; they are precisely products of evolution.
The only thing that can save dark forest theory is the so-called suspicion chain. *The Three-Body Problem* holds that communication between civilizations in the universe is difficult to bridge into mutual trust because the spatial distance and species distance are too great. But this assumption is obviously not contained within the two axioms of the so-called cosmic sociology. It is an additional setting. If Luo Ji had listed it as a third axiom, perhaps it would have made a bit more sense logically, but it is not an axiom, which means it is not self-evident; yet his argument merely emphasizes distance in a simple way, and is entirely unconvincing. The greater the difference, the harder it is to establish communication—this is obvious—but that does not mean cooperation cannot be established. Do humans suspect livestock? Yet humans and livestock have indeed established a stable symbiotic relationship.
Even more ironically, *The Three-Body Problem* itself is a counterexample to the “suspicion chain” theory: it is said that Trisolarans do not lie. People who do not lie obviously cannot understand what suspicion is; lying and suspicion may well be merely specialties of narrow-minded Earthlings—how can they serve as cosmic axioms?
In Liu Cixin’s depiction, Trisolarans do not understand the meaning of lying and concealment; their thinking is expression, and individuals communicate directly through brain waves, therefore there are no secrets, no conspiracies, and no lying.
This setting should not be Liu Cixin’s own invention; many science-fiction works imagine the existence of similar alien species, which, through completely “direct” communication, are fully open to one another without reservation. But is such “direct” communication possible? Even if such creatures existed, could they form an intelligent civilization? If such a civilization really were possible, what on earth would their “language” mean? Could they possibly decipher Earthlings’ language?
I think this setting is unreasonable. Of course, with regard to the possible modes of communication of alien civilizations, we are hard-pressed to imagine them. We can hardly even grasp the form of communication of ants; how then can we presumptuously speculate about aliens? Although we cannot imagine “thought = expression,” how can we dare to say it is impossible?
But after all, we are imagining from a human perspective. At the very least, “intelligence” and “civilization” are both human concepts. If a creature imagined in this way does not conform to the concept of intelligence or civilization as we understand it, then at least it can hardly be called an intelligent civilization at all (perhaps it would be God). In addition, *The Three-Body Problem*’s setting also involves the Trisolarans’ understanding of Earthlings. Notice that the Trisolarans took only a few seconds to decipher Earthlings’ language from several k of data, yet they were unable to understand deception and concealment. This setting is in fact not about aliens, but about our understanding of human language: is it possible to fully understand our language without learning concealment?
Of course, perhaps innocent children, just after learning how to speak, still cannot lie, but that is precisely a sign that they have not yet fully mastered language and that their personalities have not yet matured. Children have fewer problems of deliberate concealment, but more problems of being unable to express what they mean.
The ability to fail to express oneself adequately is almost the ability to deceive. Deception is nothing more than deliberately failing to express oneself adequately under free will. The Trisolarans obviously have free will; what they lack is the ability to fail to express themselves adequately, because their thinking and expression are one and the same.
But that is impossible. First, thinking requires the capacity for mnemonic re-presentation, and memory and its re-presentation are necessarily at the same time also forgetting, a certain kind of simplification. When you recall what happened yesterday, you must be selectively re-presenting only some parts of it while ignoring others; otherwise, if recalling a single day’s experience were to consume a whole day, then no recollection would be possible. Furthermore, when I want to express these memories to someone else, they must undergo yet further simplification and embellishment. Of course, you can spend two hours recounting an hour’s experience, because the world always has infinitely rich details, while expression is always a selective simplification. In my previous article I quoted Stiegler to reveal the relationship between memory and technique: the possibility of remembering depends on the ability to record, and media technologies such as words and writing provide the form of “simplification.”
Thought and memory always accompany this process of simplification and externalization: first, memory must be “taken out” in some way in order for expression to take shape. No expression can take account of all the infinite details of the lifeworld; it can only selectively present one side of it. This means that “being unable to express what one means” is an essential part of language and can never be avoided.
What about the imagined Trisolarans who communicate “directly” via brain waves? Suppose one Trisolaran is thinking, and the brain waves of that thought are simultaneously transmitted to another Trisolaran’s brain. Then although his thinking/expression is a simplification of his memory, can the other side not receive his thought without any distortion? Indeed it cannot. When A is expressing himself, B, while listening to A’s expression, must also think—simply put, must “filter.” Listening to someone else’s thought is nothing more than part of life, and any life experience, when transformed into personal memory and reflected upon, must always undergo some simplification. Generally speaking, when I listen to someone else’s expression, I am chewing over and understanding it while also listening; that is to say, in the listener’s mind there is not merely a re-presentation of the expression, but a process of filtering and organizing it. Even if, when listening to someone else, a Trisolaran adds absolutely no new thoughts of his own and merely lets that brain wave duplicate itself synchronously in his own head, when he wants to respond to that expression, he still needs to savor it again. And in the process of reflection, the expression being reflected upon cannot keep repeating itself in full without end; rather, it will be extracted, distilled, and organized, becoming the object of the next stretch of thought. What had previously been expression as part of the process of thought is, in the next process of thought, no longer a process but something presented as an object.
Generally speaking, the techniques for refining and simplifying memory or thought layer by layer are mainly language, and also the use of other concrete symbolic objects.
If a Trisolaran, while listening to another Trisolaran’s expression, also thinks, that is to say, if he thinks synchronously in a way slightly different from the speaker, and his thinking is at the same time expression, then his expression will also synchronously pass back into another Trisolaran’s brain, thereby once again stirring up that other’s thinking. In this way his original thinking will be interrupted, or will oscillate in a loop and become more and more chaotic. And if, when another Trisolaran is thinking, Trisolarans can only simply reflect that thought, then however many Trisolarans gather together, it is equivalent to only one person thinking.
The “directness” of brain waves is not at all a good thing for communication. Communication is in its essence mediated, precisely because the simplifying, symbolic, and abstract characteristics of communication media make communication between different individuals possible. If there were no effective way to simplify communication, then interpersonal communication would either become infinitely chaotic or become infinitely monotonous.
Even if we could communicate directly with brain waves, we would still necessarily need some method of symbolizing brain waves. When I see a stone, when I recall a stone, and when I reflect on this memory and compare it with another stone I saw last month, my brain waves are certainly different. But under different brain waves, the symbol of the stone still has a certain identity, making it possible to distinguish these units from the chaotic and variegated stream of consciousness. Yet this recognizable symbol of “stone,” compared with the stone I felt in any single concrete experience, is itself a kind of simplification; this symbol cannot contain within itself the infinite details of every stone in every experience. In fact, every experience of a stone is different.
My experience of “stones” may be incomparably rich: at five I may have used stones as toys, at eight I may have tripped over a stone, at twenty I may have carved stone. But when I mention or think about “stone” in a specific context, I do not need each time to reproduce the infinite connotations behind it; I only need to introduce the brief sign “stone,” a sign that provides a clue through which, in a particular context, a specific memory of mine can be evoked (rather than all my memories), linking one part of my memory with another. But how it evokes and connects memories depends not only on the sign itself, but also on the specific context. As sign, a sign is always ambiguous and polysemous. Simplification and ambiguity are not defects of signs, but essential properties of signs as signs. Some people try to eliminate ambiguity and make words more precise by means of exact definitions, even by creating artificial languages, but this comes at the cost of shrinking the expressive space of signs; the more precise a language is, the harder it is to express the rich layers of the lifeworld. Moreover, the very process of making language more precise also requires the ability to conceal: we must, consciously or not, ignore many things, cut away the cumbersome and retain the essentials, in order to obtain a precise language. For the real world is inherently mixed, changeable, and without clear boundaries. People try to draw boundaries around things with language; this is a capacity for selection and extraction.
Expression is mediatory; it always keeps a distance from what is expressed, or rather, expression is precisely the unfolding of this “interval” in one way or another. And this interval in turn constitutes the space of thought. Thought and expression are indeed, in a certain sense, the same thing: externalized techniques in turn shape internalized memory; we think in the mode of expression, and thinking is like speaking to oneself. But on the other hand, expression and thinking are always different: they are nested within each other, and each serves as the object of the other.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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