Das wahre Wesen der Dinge

written on October 23, 2026, read September 2019

If you read a lot, you always get the feeling that you have basically never had a new thought in your entire life. A truly fresh thought, I mean. Somebody has always had that thought before you and written it down, too. With eight billion people on the planet, it’s hard to have such a thought anyway, when so many brains are competing for the limited supply of new ideas. Unfortunately, you never read enough to know this straight away when you have a thought that you initially consider new and, after lying awake for a while, take with you into sleep with a smile. But then again, you’re just a glorified computer nerd with a blog, not a writer.

I always found Terry Pratchett’s image of the inspiration particle rather apt:¹ the particle that carries inspiration. It could strike not only humans but also a frog, whose flash of genius you would then only notice by a highly inspired croak. At some point you start to believe you simply spend far too much time in the company of frogs. Or perhaps all you need is a muse (m/f/d, depending on preference) acting as an idea-flux moderator, slowing the inspiration down enough for it to get caught in your own brain.²

At the same time, there seem to be inspiration attractors. And I am sure that Ted Chiang is one of them.

In my entry on “Die Hölle ist die Abwesenheit Gottes” (“Hell Is the Absence of God”), I wrote that I later bought another book by Ted Chiang: “Das wahre Wesen der Dinge” (“The True Nature of Things”). This book, too, is a collection of short stories – the second of two German volumes. It contains eight stories in total – unlike the previous volume, however, none that has already made its way onto the big screen.

In general, very little of Chiang’s work has been filmed so far, and when you read his stories, you understand a little why. The texts read wonderfully – but to make them something you could watch would probably take quite a few adjustments.

One example is the very first text in the book: “Understand”. It has a number of parallels with Luc Besson’s film “Lucy”.³ It, too, is about expanding the mind through drugs. Whether Besson was the frog in this case, recycling a second-hand inspiration particle, or whether these were two separate inspiration particles of different energy, I cannot say – I don’t know what’s on Besson’s bookshelf.

“Lucy” is something you want to watch from a cinema seat with a bucket of popcorn next to you. Luc Besson, in other words. “Understand” is something you want to read on the sofa with a cup of tea.⁴ Or, if you want to follow the stereotype exactly: in a wingback chair with a glass of red wine – and, after the last sentence, with a long gaze into the fireplace, searching the embers for conclusions.

With “Story of Your Life”⁵, which was filmed as “Arrival”, the transfer from one medium to another worked well. I have read that several stories from this book are also set to be filmed. I hope it works out just as well then.

“Division by Zero” is said to be one such candidate. Yet this is precisely the one where I find it hardest to imagine a Hollywood adaptation. The story cries out to be made like a Scandinavian crime drama. Darkness. Broken people. And lots of profound silence. Or like Fassbinder’s “World on a Wire”. More something for the Scala⁶ than for the Cineplex⁷. It’s about a mathematician who turns her entire field upside down and can’t cope with it. But it’s also about a man who can’t quite cope with his wife despairing over the collapse of her world – and who is preparing to destroy yet another of her worlds, but doesn’t yet know how to go about it. Hollywood should please rather make “Transformers 19” than ruin this small, beautiful story.

I’d like to discuss one more story in this book: “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”. It, too, seems to be a candidate for a film adaptation. And here I believe the world urgently needs such a film to understand certain questions around AI.

An adaptation strikes me as rather difficult here as well, though. The tone of the story is precise, slow, almost like a report. With this subject, a rescue mission for the digital entities would probably be easier to film, but there is no such plot in the story. Nor would it suit Chiang. Then again, not fitting has never stopped film adaptations from adding something anyway. And if the director doesn’t proceed carefully⁸, the result is a story that may work as a film but disappoints readers of the original.

Some of the questions I found in the story and consider important are ones I also partly asked myself in “Thoughts: Welten der Zukunft” (in German): Do we actually know what we’re dealing with when something has the outward appearance of feelings? And much more importantly: What responsibility do we have towards such digital entities? What responsibility do we have towards ourselves when we interact with such entities? And how do we deal with the obsolescence of technical systems when they run software that, to us, seems like a real individual? For all these questions, whether such a system actually has consciousness, intelligence or individuality – or whether we are merely anthropomorphising it – is only a side issue. It’s not about the technology, it’s about us.

Chiang asked himself these questions back in 2010 – long before LLMs existed in their current form. Long before people talked to such systems as if a conscious being were sitting across from them, even though these systems cannot technically do that at all. And that’s why Chiang is a writer and I’m just a computer nerd with a blog.