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Reality Control in Nineteen Eighty-Four

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In The Orwellian Calculus (2026), Professor Vuong Quan Hoang formalized five mechanisms from Animal Farm, among them a shifting-baseline ratchet for gradual record revision. Applied to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), that ratchet fits the Ministry of Truth's daily rectification of the past closely, but it does not cover the novel's more extreme case: a single , total, openly witnessed reversal of recorded fact (the mid-speech switch of Oceania's enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia during Hate Week) that goes undetected not because it is small, but because the checking act itself is suspended. This note states and proves a comparison-suspension proposition that extends the ratchet's setup to cover this case, together with a partition-axis corollary showing the graduated and single-jump cases as dual extremes of one construction rather than points on a common limiting sequence. A second, independent extension reuses the entropy-based value-formation apparatus of The Sage's Empty Purse (Vuong & Nguyen, 2026) to formalize two further mechanisms: Newspeak's vocabulary contraction as a reduction in the maximum entropy a mind-state can achieve, and a partial formalization of doublethink as an exogenously imposed, rather than endogenously filtered, concentration of belief probability. That formalization is explicitly partial, and the note treats the gap itself as a result worth stating rather than a defect to excuse: because the model represents the mind-state as a single random variable, as the entropy apparatus itself requires, it can be shown directly that the probability of the two contradictory claims being held at once is exactly zero at every modeled instant, which means the model formalizes only successive near-certain commitment , not doublethink's requirement of genuinely simultaneous contradictory belief. Each proposition is proved in full and paired with a computational worked example (a numeric table or a plotted curve) tying the mathematics to a specific, cited passage of the novel; each application is anchored to that passage. None of the four results is mathematically novel, and the note states plainly, from its first page, what it does and does not establish.
DOI: 10.17613/jkfba-eth54
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7203689786
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