Speculation in Fiction and the Essence of Consciousness

Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick started co-writing the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1964. They had to do a lot of guessing. Given the state of computer technology at the time and the rate at which both computational power and data storage capacity were increasing, it seemed reasonable to predict the existence of thinking, self-aware machines like HAL within 40 years. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor (and later the CEO of Intel), projected, based on historical trends, that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would continue to double every year or two. With some fluctuations, this has largely been proven to be true. Moore’s law, as it came to be called, applies to all kinds of electronic devices: the number of pixels in a digital camera, processor speed, the information density of memory chips. If we took every computer in the world in 1964 and hooked them all together, they would still be no match for the capabilities of the phone you’re holding in your hand right now.

We have apps that can convincingly simulate thought and emotion, and programs that can learn and adapt and even teach themselves new things. So why don’t we have robots that WANT things, NEED things, and FEEL things⁠—robots who can truly cogitate, who are able to contemplate their own selfhood?

Predicting the future is tricky, as a writer or just as a person trying to navigate life. The Victoria da Vinci series of novels is a speculative historical fantasy adventure, and for me it’s kind of like science fiction looking backwards. Whereas in traditional science fiction an author living in their own present imagines what might be technologically possible in the future, in these books I’m imagining what might have seemed plausible to people living in the past.

Indeed, the main character (Victoria, the trilogy’s namesake) is a technology optimist, a utopianist really, a bit messianic in her obsessions, and her breathless expectations for the hope and promise that her inventions held turned out to be wildly, sadly wrong.

But back to robots. If you’re like me, maybe you thought that as computers went from megabytes per second to terabytes per microsecond, inevitably some critical threshold would be reached, and they would start to “wake up.” So with all the hyperfast processors in the world, why hasn’t that happened?

Perhaps the real reason is that consciousness is not intrinsically analytical or logical; it does not arise from neurons firing electric impulses like a computer using binary code to run complex programs. Perhaps⁠—and this is where I’m going to get a bit philosophical⁠, sorry—the essence of consciousness is chemical.

It’s the burn of capsaicin on the taste buds. It’s the rush of adrenaline and cortisol when you stand near the edge of a high precipice. It’s the glow of serotonin when you sit by the campfire on a starry night. It’s the surge of dopamine when you admire the artfully crafted sentence you have just wrought. It’s the warm, exhilarating flood of oxytocin when you’re in love. It’s the blast of endorphins when you go for a vigorous bike ride. It’s the looseness imparted by alcohol, the mellowness from cannabis, the energizing jolt of caffeine, the aggressive self-assuredness of testosterone. It’s the fabulously complicated interaction of these and a thousand other chemicals that gives rise to our true sense of self. We perceive that we are individuals interacting with the world because of this dance of molecules in our blood.

The ability to perform cognitive tasks is an overlay to this consciousness. We can do things like identify objects, add numbers together, and make decisions. But that’s just how we make sense of it all; consciousness still exists in the absence of all reason and logic . . . and vice versa.

I suspect we will eventually create artificial brains capable of consciousness, but I strongly suspect that when we do, they will be wet: organic rather than electronic, organically engineered in a neurobiology research lab, not assembled in a factory.

Then again, maybe I will turn out to be as wrong about that as Victoria was.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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