The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

There is no silence in the living nervous system. An electrical symphony of communication streams through our neurons every moment we exist. We are built for communication. Only death brings silence.

We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.

Meaning has no mass or charge. It occupies no space—and yet meaning makes a difference in the world.

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

Because verbal speech is efficient, nearly universal, teachable, and highly translatable.

We are shaped and limited by our skeletons. Jointed, defined, structured. We create a world of relationships that mirrors that shape: a world of rigid boundaries and binaries. A world of control and response, master and servant. In our world, as in our nervous systems, hierarchy rules.

Soon enough, they understood that the things that had given them security—families, states, laws, futures, and pasts—were all located on a solid planet, a planet of land. In this never-ending world of lawless water they were trapped in now, none of that existed.

“I think the rule,” Ha said, “is never to answer critics. One simply moves on with the work.”

Her attention on him had warped her memories, the way the gravity of a star will warp space-time around it.

How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters.

He was forcing himself to connect, to feel, to identify with others. Because people had to matter. They had to. If they did not matter, it meant he did not matter.

THE WORLD STILL CONTAINS MIRACLES, despite everything that has been done to it.

Despite everything we have done to the ocean, despite everything we have done to this world, life finds a way.

Someone said that people don’t really want to date other people. They don’t really want equal partnership—you know, two full people in a relationship. Two people with demands and desires and differences of opinion about everything. What they want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be the complete one, the person who controls the relationship—and they want the other person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them, but who doesn’t have their own demands. Someone who appears complete, with all these personality quirks and their own opinions and stories about the world—but not in an annoying way. Not in a way that would demand you change.

It keeps people at a distance. I don’t always want to have a conversation. In fact, I almost never want to have a conversation.”

We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place. In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside this pattern, this semiotic cosmos.

It was strange how many other details you noticed about a person when their face was obscured.

This was the kind of person who wished others no harm. Who had no malice in him, and who the world, in return, left alone. He lived enclosed in a space of innocence.

“War broke out. War came to my home, and I knew I could use the skills I had learned to help my people.” “Yes—but after the war?” “After the war I wasn’t that person anymore.”

We are embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of the world—we fear the end of the world as we know it.

“The world goes away,” she had once told Kamran. “A new world replaces it. When you dive, there is only the here and the now: no past, no future. You don’t think about plans for the next experiment, about grants and laboratory equipment purchases. You think about the world in front of your mask. There are so many times in life when you just aren’t there. When you are elsewhere, drifting through schemes for this or that, remembering slights and injuries, shortcomings and faults. But not when diving. Down there, there is only now.”

That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

If he could be dead without having been born at all—if it were as easy as never having existed—he would do it.

This society—what we call modern society, what we always think of as the most important time the world has ever known, simply because we are in it—is just the sausage made by grinding up history.

We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us, who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us—we fear it won’t. We fear we will continue to degrade life on this planet until we destroy ourselves. And we will have no one to blame for what we have done but ourselves.

This is why it can be so difficult to overcome trauma: Memories are inscribed in us. They are etched into our physical being.

How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall through, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don’t even recognize? And become a person I don’t recognize.”

But I didn’t have to start down that path—the path of violence. Of murder. And now I know it was all for nothing. The guards were only here for show. They weren’t the real enemy. They never were. They were just people, like us. People who went down a path—went farther and farther down it, until they couldn’t find their way back home.”

What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select between different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel alive”—and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices.

To be seen by others is the core of being. Perhaps this is why humans are driven to create minds besides our own: We want to be seen. We want to be found. We want to be discovered by another. In the structured loneliness of this modern world, so many of us are passed over by our fellow humans, never given a second glance.

He had kept her from wanting the things that anyone should want—friendship with others, a relationship with someone who had their own needs: someone who could be offended, could walk away. That was the key: That ability of the other person to leave, to disappear. The choice they could always exercise to not be there.

“Being with you was easy because all you are is a loop, feeding my thoughts back to myself—just an externalized version of my own thought processes, given a different shape.

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.

It was your fault. Those were the words Ha had been waiting, for far too long, to hear. Those words should have felt like a condemnation: instead, they felt like forgiveness.

‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.’

I think, in a way, it is technology that moves us, and not the other way around. We invent things blindly. We invent whatever we are capable of inventing.

“So you see, it is not human beings that are controlling technology—rather, it is the other way around. Technology has always been an unstoppable force, a creature evolving out of our need to invent—a creature feeding that need and creating the shapes and possibilities of our lives, shaping us to its purposes.”

“Good coffee is nothing more than expensive beans, clean water, and math.”

“We all accept the responsibility for killing other things. And even for killing people. That is what it means to be alive. Killing is what our existence does on this planet. All we have—everything we use to live—is taken from someone else. If you think otherwise, you are nothing but a naïve child.”

That’s the thing about humans—we think everything is about us. We attribute everything to our own actions.

Part of leading is knowing how to place one’s trust in the proper hands.”

That all of them were living lives as important to them as his was to him, with worries and goals and connections to others as valuable as he felt his own were. And he was filled, in that moment, with a wonderful sense of belonging. He felt that warmth in him that sometimes came from a good conversation. This is the truth of the world. And none of us sees it, because we must ignore it in order to live within our shallow system.

That would have been real kindness: To act. To save the animals from being taken in the first place. To protect them. But they did nothing when it counted, and then tried to make up for it later with actions that were not enough. It was useless, and cruel. It just created more suffering. Their inaction, when it really counted, was also a kind of action. It was a choice they made.”

I think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change.

What one human does is what all humans are doing, from their point of view.”

The further the scientist progresses down into the mine of knowledge, the less she can see the world into which that knowledge fits.

She was killed for nothing: killed because some ship tried to break through the perimeter in exactly the wrong place. Killed by some fishing conglomerate’s profit incentives. And killed because the octopuses couldn’t have cared less whether she lived or died. She had been killed for the same reason a dolphin, tangled in a tuna net and drowned, was killed: the species that caught her didn’t care enough not to kill her. She meant nothing to them. It was that indifference that had to end.