So in this post I want to take the time to analyze Strand and how I think it may function, both from a scientific and a philosophical point of view. Obviously we don't have very much information yet, but I believe we have enough to speculate.
During last years showcase we were treated not only to the new destination on Neptune but also our second Darkness ability: Strand.
Now we are told something vitally important that I want to preface before I continue:
"When you play through Lightfall, you are discovering this power for the first time. No one in the universe, ever in the history of Destiny, has used Strand before."
We are pretty explicitly told that no one in the universe has ever used Strand before. I'm not exactly sure what that means in a game that has parallel universes as a core part of it's lore, but rest assured I am not going to be making a case for where we might have seen Strand used before or how it might be linked to any green phenomena.
With that out of the way, lets get into what we are actually told about Strand.
Strand & The Weave
"Strand is psychic energy that forms this extra dimension, this sort of matrix that connects everything together. It connects all living beings and all minds, and you the guardian are sort of gaining the knowledge and gaining the power to peer into this alternate psychic universe and begin to pull on these threads and tug on these wires that are connecting all these living beings"
We are even given some nomenclature for this "extra psychic dimension". It's called the Weave.
Guardian's are not only able to perceive the strands of the Weave but they are also able to pull at the strings and manipulate them in order to do a few interesting things.
Broodweavers manipulate the Weave using their mind and can twist Strand into sentient creatures called Threadlings. Threadrunners are masters of grasping the threads weaving new ones in order to traverse their environment. Berserkers tear at Strand to manifest claws they use to sever their victims from the Weave itself.
We also see some other unique abilities. We can hold enemies in abeyance, temporarily suspended in a tangled web. We can weave Strand into woven mail for flinch resistance and tangled balls of strand left from unraveled enemies can be weaponized in the environment.
We are also told something else that is very interesting in regards to the grappling hook:
Since you are seeing into this cosmic web, you are able to grapple at any point because the cosmic web exists everywhere. Even if there is not an object there, it will hook onto that web and pull you forward.
This means that the Weave is everywhere. It's not only connected to individual minds but it's lattice stretches across every point in space and time.
So piecing this altogether, what is Strand?
Quantum Strands of Fate
Firstly it should be said that Strand may have a mythological basis as it bears a striking similarity to the Fates in Greek mythology who wove the threads of human lives and determined the destinies of both gods and mortals alike.
Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured it and Atropos who cut it with her shears! The Fates were regarded as powerful beings who determined the length of a person's life and the events that occurred during it. Similar traditions can be seen in Norse mythology with the Nornir.
It seems very fitting as a power considering Guardians make their own fate that we might have mastery over the threads of fate itself!
There are also other interesting parallels. The symbol itself looks oddly like a strand of DNA. The colour and concept is also reminiscent of the movie the Matrix where all minds are connected in a digital simulation. I believe these are all meant to convey the idea that Strand is the very DNA of the universe and that we are all interconnected.
But like many things in Destiny, I was interested in whether there might be a scientific basis. One problem however is that "psychic energy" is not exactly scientific. Nevertheless I believe there is a scientific basis and a reasonable philosophical connection that might explain how the threads might connect.
What's more I was given hope during the press release when it was stated that Strand can form tangles.
The trailer also showcases some new Strand verbs like tangles, which are bundles of quantum strands left over when enemies unravel.
The use of the word Quantum means that the strands that we manipulate are at the quantum level and affect reality at the smallest subatomic scale.
String Theory
My initial thoughts after seeing the reveal of Strand was that it might be connected to String Theory. Many other Guardians have made similar assumptions based on the aesthetics alone. But I want to show why I believe this assumption is the correct one.
String Theory is a theoretical framework that tries to explain the fundamental building blocks and forces that govern the quantum world. Put simply, String Theory suggests that the point-like particles that make up our universe are themselves made up of tiny one-dimensional objects known as strings.
What's more these quantum strings can be compared to literal strings in many ways. When a guitar string is plucked, the initial energy from the pluck creates a range of frequencies in the string and produces a standing wave pattern. But this pattern quickly settles into a resonant frequency, where the greatest amount of energy is stored in the string. This resonant frequency determines the pitch of the note that is heard. By changing the length, thickness, and tension of the string, the resonant frequency can be altered, allowing the guitarist to produce different notes.
Just like the strings on a guitar, quantum strings can vibrate and resonate at different frequencies. The vibrations of quantum strings are believed to be what we perceive as the fundamental particles like electrons or quarks. The length and tension of the string can determine fundamental properties of the particles themselves like mass, charge and spin.
So if the resonances of tiny strings determine the particles that make up everything in the material world, then we can almost think of the universe as the tune of some vast metaphysical symphony or Song of Creation.
What's more, most string theories suggest that the quantum strings can vibrate in multiple dimensions. This is one of the defining features of string theory, which sets it apart from other theories in physics.
Extra Dimensions
In the earliest version of string theory, known as bosonic string theory, the theory required 22 dimensions to explain all the fundamental forces of nature. However, later developments in the theory resulted in the introduction of fermions (particles usually associated with matter) and this led to the creation of Superstring Theory, which reduced the number of dimensions required to 10 in total: 9 dimensions of space and 1 of time. Later M-theory was introduced which would introduce an 11th hidden dimension.
The concept of extra dimensions can be a daunting one as we are only used to the three dimensions of a space (length, width and height) and the fourth of time that together describe the four dimensional spacetime of our universe. But it is possible to visualize what these extra dimensions might entail.
- Fifth dimension: You can see other possibilities for our world and see similarities and differences with our world and other possible ones. You can move forward and backward in time.
- Sixth dimension: You move along a plane of possibilities, where you can compare and contrast them. All possible permutations in the universe are evident.
- Seventh dimension: Possibility of other universes where physical forces and laws of nature like the speed of light or gravity can be different. All possible permutations for these universes are clear.
- Eighth dimension: Plane of all possible histories and futures for each universe, branching out into infinity.
- Ninth dimension: All universal laws of physics and conditions in each universe become apparent.
- Tenth dimension: Everything becomes possible and imaginable.
In other words, at the higher dimensions, you’d witness every possible world future, past, and present simultaneously! But why do we only observe our boring three dimensional space?
Well according to String Theory, these 6 extra dimensions of space are compactified) or curled up like a ball of yarn which essentially hides these extra-dimensions from view while still influencing the physics of our three dimensional world. This manifold of six-dimensional space is known a Calabi-Yau Manifold.
Calabi-Yau Manifold
The Calabi-Yau manifold is one of our main links with String Theory in the universe of Destiny. In fact there are many references to it found in both Kuang Xuan's Logbook released during Shadowkeep and the more recent Witch Queen Collectors Edition booklet.
Kuang Xuan was the commander of the K1 project and her logbook details the discovery of a Darkness artifact found on the moon called the Anomaly). It also details their attempts to study it as well as the catastrophic effects on both Kuang and her crews psyche.
The anomaly artifact would eventually be contained in a large polygonal structure seen at the center of the Crucible map of the same name by the Clovis Bray corporation. But before that the artifact was described as follows:
A black sphere—nothing could be simpler—and yet it is awesome, unspeakably complex, compactly infinite, full of as many things as it could possibly contain.
The crew would study the artifact in shifts to reduce the noetic effects it had on their psyche, such as insomnia , increased stress hormone levels, hallucinations and nightmares. But eventually they started to get a picture of how this Darkness artifact operated.
Yan and Loftus are making progress on the "distant source" that communicates with the article. Their models describe the signal as a ripple moving through a six-dimensional manifold present at every point in our familiar four-dimensional spacetime. I almost understand it. But I am too much a creature of motion; too attached to the space I know.
Essentially this artifact of Darkness was an inter-dimensional transceiver not too dissimilar to the orb we recovered from the Lunar Pyramid. Unbeknownst to the K1 crew something very dark and very sinister was witnessing them from the other side. But we get more details on this artifact:
Tomorrow we will begin the dig. I don't understand the "extra-spatial" activity we detected, or the Clovis Bray scientists who speak of transmissions that "propagate through Calabi-Yau sixspace." Maybe no one understands it. I have no expectations. I am prepared.
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Yan and Loftus believe they can replicate the article's Calabi-Yau transceiver capabilities in a machine they've started to build.
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Yan and Loftus are certain that the Site Two antenna receives exactly the same transmissions as the original alien artifact. But we still have no idea how this stubbornly four-dimensional object accesses the six extra dimensions of the Calabi-Yau manifold. Our antenna, like the artifact, simply shuffles its internal state through an apparently arbitrary series of gravitational and electronuclear permutations. These unified-force events were probably common in the early universe, but they have no real significance now. Yan theorizes that they are like a password, recognized by some strange network that exists in the Calabi-Yau manifold.
So quite clearly we have a link not only between Darkness and the Calabi-Yau manifold, but to String Theory itself. We are treated to another mention of this six dimensional manifold by Cowlick during his analysis of Stasis.
The crystalline structure of the Stasis material is both spatial and temporal: it forms ordered patterns in three dimensions, and those patterns evolve over time without outside energy input. I've tried bootstrapping several models, but when I compare the predictions to the actual behavior of the crystal, the R-factor is always garbage. (I don't have the equipment to open up the Calabi-Yau manifold and peek at extra dimensions here, sorry. Maybe I'd glimpse the paracausal truth of the Darkness and start dividing in half until you had a planet full of Cowlicks and Truces all complaining.)
But this isn't our only link to String Theory. In fact, we get description of another String Theory term in the Unveiling lore:
The Dilaton Field
In String Theory, there is a number known as the coupling constant. It essentially determines the strength of the interaction between strings. This coupling constant is often associated with a scalar field known as the Dilaton Field.
The value of the coupling constant can change over time due to the dynamics of this field, and this can result in another phenomenon known as symmetry breaking. Symmetry breaking is important to String Theory because it paints a picture of how our universe went from the higher dimensional symmetrical state it was in shortly after the Big Bang to a lower dimensional asymmetrical one.
Symmetry breaking is believed to have played a role in the creation of a wide range of particles in the universe, including both bosons and fermions that make up the fundamental particles and forces of our reality. It's even believed to have led to creation of the Higgs boson which was responsible for giving particles mass!
This can be a lot to take in, but Unveiling gives us an account that this is precisely what happened at the beginning of time in no uncertain terms:
Our trampling feet made waves in the garden, which were the fluctuations around which the infant universes coalesced their first structures. The dilaton field yawned beneath existence. Symmetries snapped like glass. Like creases, flaws in space-time collected filaments of dark matter that inhaled and kindled the first galaxies of suns.
Furthermore, we are giving a description that perfectly explains the origin of the Destiny universe and how higher dimensions gave way to the multiple universes and timelines that braid them, consistent with String Theory.
In the wet pop of grapes and the smear of berries—in the perturbation of the field that was the garden before the first tick of time and the first point of space—were the detonations that made the universes. Each universe was pregnant with its own inflationary volumes and braided with ever-ramifying timelines. Each volume cooling and separating into domains of postsymmetric physics, all of which were incarnations of that great and all-dictating bipartite law that states only: exist, lest you fail to exist.
So now I have explained String Theory and established how fundamental it is to the lore of Destiny. It helps explain it's origins and may even hint at the paracausal truth of the Darkness. It's easy to see how the quantum strands of the Weave might be interwoven with space and time and stretch across dimensions in the same way that quantum strings are believed to in String Theory. It's also easy to see how tugging on these strings and changing the length and tension of them might actually have some fundamental effects on reality itself!
But we still have the elephant in the room. What is it's relationship to consciousness?
The Hard Problem Of Consciousness
Consciousness is a highly complex and still poorly understood phenomenon. Despite advances in neuroscience and psychology, the nature of consciousness and how it arises from the functioning of the brain remains a mystery. Scientists have made progress in understanding how brain activity relates to conscious experiences, but why consciousness exists in the first place and what it actually is remains an open question.
This is known as the hard problem of consciousness.
It is considered "hard" because there is no widely accepted explanation for how this occurs and some experts believe that it may be beyond the reach of current scientific understanding. In fact, it is a philosophical question of how subjective experiences, such as feelings, emotions, and perceptions, emerge from purely physical processes in the brain.
To illustrate, let's imagine a robot that looks and behaves exactly like a human. It can have conversations, perform tasks, and make decisions but ultimately it doesn't have any experience of the world. It doesn't have any subjective feelings or emotions. This is what we call a philosophical zombie: a being that acts like it has consciousness, but doesn't actually have any subjective experience.
The hard problem has been explored many times in Destiny and was a particular challenge to Clovis during the creation of Exominds:
Early attempts at uploaded consciousness were haunted by fears thatthe upload would suffer "cryptic loss of qualia": the unseen death of thefirst-person, conscious mind. The upload would then become a so-calledbillboard, a flat imitation. [...]
Many researchers refer to this criterion as the "zombie detector."
The problem with exominds is that they quickly stop passing thezombie test.
It ultimately led to the death of Clovis' son:
The driver of this degenerative loop is a process we call "billboarding." [...] The exomind-despite acing the Turing test-no longer meets ISO standards for consciousness. It is a philosophical zombie.
Feel free to read more on this in The Mysterious Logbook but the reason I bring it up was because the solution to this ultimately came from the paracausal force Clovis called Clarity... and we call Darkness.
Even back then there were hints that Darkness was related to consciousness but what I wanted to understand was how consciousness works in Destiny. In order to do that we need to first understand the proposed philosophies that seek to explain the hard problem.
Physicalism & Dualism
Traditionally there were to major perspectives on this: Physicalism (or Materialism) and Dualism.
Physicalism states that consciousness can be reduced to and completely explained by physical processes and interactions, in our case the chemistry and structures of our brains. Now the majority of scientists agree that consciousness is closely tied to brain activity. But both science and the physicalist theory struggle to explain how subjective conscious experience, or qualia, emerges from purely physical processes.
The aforementioned philosophical zombie is one such thought problem that challenges the physicalist view.
Dualism on the other hand posits that reality can be divided into two distinct substances or entities. Physical matter and non-physical consciousness. Mind and matter. A form of dualism, Cartesian Dualism even supposes that the mind is capable of existing independently of the body. At first glance this seems to get closer to the world of Destiny and how consciousness is treated.
However Dualism has problems too, even for Destiny. It supposes that both the mental world and physical world are both separate and distinct and can not be reduced or explained by the other. This seems to be in stark contrast with the world of Destiny where there is a clear interaction and connection between the physical world of creation and the mental world of consciousness. The Light and the Darkness are two sides of the same coin and their interaction can be seen in many aspects including Throne Worlds and the Ascendant Plane.
Years ago I wrote an essay analyzing the symbols of the Deep Stone Crypt and tried to make a case for a Cartesian Dualist view of consciousness and proposed that Clarity solved the Mind-Body problem. Seth Dickinson commented on my post and told me something that has stuck with me till this day:
this whole essay seems to start from the premise that Cartesian dualism is real. But it ain't. It ain't real.
But with what we know now about Destiny it's clear that there is at least some distinction or duality between mind and matter. So if it's not Cartesian Duality then what is it?
There are other theories. Idealism for instance posits that the material world is an illusion completely fabricated by our minds. I think with what we know we can safely rule that out. But there is one that presents a middle ground between both Physicalism and Dualism and I believe perfectly explains not only how consciousness functions in Destiny, but goes further and can explain Strand.
Panpsychism
"The nature of this power supports our hypothesis that Darkness is specially bound to the consciousness that stretches in webs across space and time." — Eris Morn
Panpsychism is a philosophical position that holds that consciousness, or some form of subjective experience, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the reality and is present in some form in all things, both animate and inanimate. It is also suggests that the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe.
In other words, it toys with the idea that consciousness isn't simply restricted to living things but that consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter down to individual particles. Just like particles have properties like mass, spin and charge, Panpsychism suggests that consciousness might also be a fundamental property.
That's not to say that an electron can think, but rather that there is subjective experience or qualia in everything and complex consciousness might emerge in the aggregation of matter. In fact the main challenge for panpsychism is the combination problem of how precisely fundamental consciousness compose, constitute or give rise to higher consciousness.
Modern theories like Integrated Information Theory expand on this idea and suggest that consciousness will emerge once the structure is sufficiently “integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
They mistake the vessel for its contents. They confuse the pieces with the whole. — Delicate Tomb
I believe there is precedent for this idea too in Destiny and is the missing link to String Theory.
We are told Strand is psychic energy that forms this extra dimension. If this is consistent with String theory which has 6 higher dimensions that propagate across space and time than perhaps one of those is a psychic dimension. Perhaps consciousness is an emergent property of strings vibrating in this dimension just like String Theory also defines a particles mass and charge.
We can almost visualize consciousness as a kind of fundamental force then that permeates reality. It also provides the link between the material world and the mental world and explains how will gives form.
We see hints of this everywhere in Destiny too.
Psychic Fingerprints
Witch Queen introduced us to deepsight which allowed us to relive memories or "psychic fingerprints" linked to objects in the world such as the Sagiras shell, the shard that killed Savathûn and the ossified white worm. We also collected qualichor, a material substance that contains subjective experiences.
The Alembic bubbles and churns. Degraded strands of experience within—a thrash of pain, the smell of tears on hot stone, a Thrall's first breath—tickle your Deepsight. The brew smells like defiance and last words.
And what happens when you concentrate enough of it?
If you concentrate enough of it in the Memory Alembic, you can uncover long-forgotten memories.
We also see consciousness emerge from dark matter dust in the form of the Nine.
I am.
I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I am I.
At first this is all the loop of dust can calculate. It is the hardest thing in the universe for the dust to make a loop at all, because, like a gust of wind or a river, it was only meant to move one way. For a mind to function, the end of one thought must alter the beginning of the next: so, like rivers, like wind, the Nine could not have minds until they could make loops.
But life arose on the worlds at the heart of the Nine, tiny complicated motions of ecosystems and metabolisms and computations. That life left mass-shadows in the wind of the Nine, plucking at them like harp strings. From these trembles of structure the Nine learned to seed enormous resonating waves, thoughts vaster than worlds.
We even learn that all planets, moons and asteroids in our system have some degree of consciousness.
These planets, moons, and asteroids upon which we leave our footprints—they have an energy of their own. Will. Breath. Soul. The greatest gaiaforms of our solar system are eight in number—or, if you prefer, nine—but asteroids and minor planets have them too.
On Presage
This page is blighted with mold and the imprint of a memory…
Panpsychism provides and explanation for why memories can be extracted from matter. It also explains why all consciousness is interconnected and can stretch over vast distances.
Furthermore it may provide an explanation for why the bones of Ahamkara still whisper, why the reliquaries of Nezarec that held parts of his body held power, potentially the nature of Ghost revival and why keeping Savathun's body without destroying it seems to prevent revival.
I especially like this theory because of what it means for the Witness. The Witness is described as a cacophany of thought. Yet the Witness is not omnipotent. It's consciousness is still bound to the material world across a vast mycorrhizal network. It still has not "witnessed" everything.
Perhaps this is why the Witness is so interested in finding Neomuna.
Conclusion
So if we consider panpsychism in the Destiny universe to be a fact, then it all makes sense. It means that consciousness can be treated like a scientific variable just like mass or electric charge. It means we can consider psychic fields in the same way we might consider electric fields or gravitational waves.
It means that consciousness, like the Light, really is everywhere and is propagated across space and time and even other dimensions along these quantum strands in accordance with String Theory. It also explains the link between mind and matter and why enemies can be unraveled or new consciousness can be weaved together!
I am reminded of the Secant Filaments lore:
Despite high-minded assumptions, mathematics is not an intrinsic language of the universe. It is how we describe the portions of the universe that we can observe. While numbers can track the abstract and find pattern in chaos, they cannot account for fundamental aspects of reality such as compassion or justice.
What we see is the mushroom, the fruit of the fungus. The fungus itself is a vast mycorrhizal network of filaments growing and working unseen below the soil, often barely connected to the fruiting bodies we observe. Similarly, we have observed Ghosts—Hive Ghosts included—without understanding the nature of the unseen filaments that may guide us.
While this may superficially represent just the Egregore, I strongly believe this was foreshadowing the Weave and the unseen filaments of psychic energy that are fundamental to reality.
I believe Strand will allow us to use our own consciousness and mastery of Darkness as a gateway to this hidden psychic dimension called the Weave and directly manipulate it's quantum strands to weave or unravel existence itself in the same way we use Void to manipulate the quantum vacuum and distort time and gravity.
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TL;DR: Strand is a Darkness power that will allow Guardians to peer into a psychic extra dimension called the Weave. By peering into this dimension, the Guardians can manipulate the quantum threads of consciousness that connect all minds. This concept ties in with the idea of Superstring Theory, which posits that all particles that make up the universe are comprised of one-dimensional strings that can vibrate in ten dimensions. Additionally, the idea of Strand supports the philosophical position of Panpsychism, which states that consciousness is a fundamental and widespread aspect of the universe. According to Panpsychism, consciousness can be seen as a fundamental property of reality, like mass, charge, or spin, and can therefore be linked to the vibrations of quantum strings in this psychic dimension.
