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.

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

And show what happen if we are deaf to words.” “Yes,” Ha said. “That’s the problem.”

It is not just the symbols we use in our language that are arbitrary—it is what we choose to signify with them. 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. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

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.

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.”

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.

Communication is communion. When we communicate with others, we take something from them into ourselves, and give them something of ours.

It wasn’t that she had ever believed he was real—it was more like she had believed he was enough.

“No,” she said to herself. Since I’m the only one left to talk to. “Stop being so dramatic. You don’t bury something that was never alive to begin with. You move on.”

“I think, therefore I doubt I am,” Ha said.

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.’

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

We are, and have always been, a part of the world. We do not stand above it. We are “involved” with the world. This word has a sense not just of participating, not just of complication, but also of a curling inward, a coiling we call “involution.” We are coiled into the world, nestled inside its processes, wound into its forms. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

But writing is real power. If they have writing, or achieve it soon, it means their rate of cultural change has become exponential, or soon will. It will mean they can store information without distortion, transferring it more easily from one generation to the next, accessing it when they need it, building on it. It is a permanent cultural storage system. Writing is what has allowed humans to get from scattered tribes to global dominance in five thousand years: that’s a flash of lightning in deep time.

Symbolic language retains meaning even in the absence of physical points of reference: the word “tree” does not need a real tree to be present to communicate its meaning. Symbols form systems that remain stable from one generation to another. Even for centuries.