The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

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.

Not only do we not agree on how to measure or recognize consciousness in others, but we are also unable to even “prove” it exists in ourselves. Science often dismisses our individual experiences—what it feels like to smell an orange, or to be in love—as qualia. We are left with theories and metaphors for consciousness: A stream of experience. A self-referential loop. Something out of nothing. None of these are satisfactory. Definition eludes us. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

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

No intelligent animal is as antisocial as the octopus. It wanders the ocean alone, more inclined to cannibalize its own kind than band together with them, doomed to a senescent death after a haphazard sexual encounter. The octopus is the “tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,” denounced by Homer. This solitude, along with her tragically short life span, presents an insurmountable barrier to the octopus’s emergence into culture. But this book asks the question: What if? What if a species of octopus emerged that attained longevity, intergenerational exchange, sociality? What if, unknown to us, a species already has? Then what? —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

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

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

Her job hanging art for galleries—Rustem thought it was fascinating. The theory behind it, the thought that went into the sequences of pieces and their position in the space. The importance of negative space. He’d asked her question after question about her work: questions she answered idly.

We argue more and more about consciousness as AI develops and brains come online that can accomplish many of the tasks of a human brain. But still, we have no clear definition of consciousness—even though it must be the most important element of our own experience on the planet. Why do we fear so much in the other this thing we so little understand in ourselves? —Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Building Minds

They traded horror stories: A ship had docked at the factory ship with nobody aboard, its hold full. Not a trace of the crew or of the mercenaries who were supposed to have been watching them, until the crew of the factory ship had opened the hold and found them all there, neatly stacked and frozen, crew and guards alike. The ship had failed to catch any fish, and gone mad, decided protein was protein. The ship’s AI mind had to be decommissioned.

“Now, with all the people gone, they must be growing even fatter and stupider. All those fish. I wish I were there now, with my spear.” And Eiko understood that Son had not gone mad at all. No. The days grew warmer, and the Sea Wolf moved south through the pillaged, empty seas. South, toward the trap Son had set for it.

No matter how good you are, you can only be as good as the data you are given. The input. If something essential is missing, if the input is off from the start, there’s no solving the problem.”

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.

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.

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.

It’s a revenge fantasy. 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. So we invent this nonsense about conscious AI.”

Most people will never reach that point in a conversation with a point-five, but there are always questions you can ask them that will cause the simulation to fail. We say they are ‘flat.’ Another metaphor.” “Flat.” “Yes. Like people thought the earth used to be. If you sail far enough, you’ll fall off the edge. But not Evrim. Evrim is round. Evrim passed the final Turing test.”

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.

Dangerous to be as awake as I am, always, to everything around me. Sleep is a solution, not a problem.

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.

But it is so difficult to stay afraid. “Instead, you take stupid risks,” he said out loud. “And play at games you don’t even know the rules of.”

Why? Why would they be satisfied with that? A contract? My word? Their company is on the brink of proving the existence of an advanced form of life on this planet outside of the human. I had no reason to think they would allow me to leave here with that knowledge. None at all. Except that I wanted to be here.

“I don’t follow.”

You don’t bury something that was never alive to begin with. You move on.”

“It is one of the classic conundrums,” Ha continued. “Language doesn’t just allow us to describe the world as it exists: It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider. Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become. Imagining what is not there is the key to our creativity. It is what no non-linguistic animal has. With that power, we are so much freer to act in new ways—to innovate, to invent, to view our situations from a thousand angles and find a new way out. But we can also come up with a thousand absurdities, out of line with the truth. And out of line with the brute fact of our awareness of being here. But that awareness of being here is consciousness itself. It is the evidence.

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.

‘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.’

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

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. Moments later he had also thought, still smiling, I will be dead soon.

“It’s locked. What’s the password?” “The password is the meaning of their name.” “Don’t play games with us. Just say it.” “Evolution. Evrim means ‘evolution’—and it is a perfect name for them. At first I thought this mind was as sophisticated as a human mind, and that was the beauty of it—a human mind, but built. A perfect piece of construction. But then I reached deeper into its core. It isn’t a human mind at all. It is better. It is building neural circuits there that are more complex than anything the human mind could build. Not the broken tangles of human memory—no. It is building castles of pure recall. This backup image of it that you stole is, what—three years old?”

You can’t tell where your command ends and the response algorithm begins. It’s like an extension of the nervous system, but more than that: information in the system flows bi-directionally. It’s as if your limbs talked back—as if your limbs were little minds that innovate and improvise.