The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

We understand the encoding of genetic sequences, the folding of proteins to construct the cells of the body, and even a good deal about how epigenetic switches control these processes. And yet we still do not understand what happens when we read a sentence. Meaning is not neuronal calculus in the brain, or the careful smudges of ink on a page, or the areas of light and dark on a screen. Meaning has no mass or charge. It occupies no space—and yet meaning makes a difference in the world.

You can ask the automonks questions on philosophy, religion, their views on life. They’ll answer like the dead men they are modeled on. They are walking repositories of memory. Yet they have no apparent will of their own—their present state is automated. If you asked me personally, I would say they are not conscious. They do not progress. They have no orientation to the future—what you might call ‘will.’ They are like encyclopedias of the minds of dead devotees. Or maps of those minds. But the map is not the same as the territory.”

“What exactly is the point,” a stream interviewer once asked Mínervudóttir-Chan, “of an android? Why go to such trouble to make them so human, when making humans is almost free?” Mínervudóttir-Chan had answered, “The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.” They descended

In an aquarium, it’s often only the dolphins, otters, and octopuses that get named by volunteers. Two mammals, which is understandable, as they are species relatively close to our own—and a cephalopod, a species so different from us that our last common ancestor was five hundred million years ago. Why? People name octopuses because, no matter how different they are from us, we recognize something in them. Something we have in common. Even people who don’t study them are aware of this, on some level.

“The bigger complication is that they use their primary, mixed method of communication—skin pattern, texture, and coloration, which they employ in a simple way to warn one another off or express a feeling—for a lot of other things as well: camouflage, the confusion of predators, fight-or-flight responses, and so on. And because they are not producing light from their surface, but rather reflecting ambient light from the environment, the colors they are producing shift in different light conditions—so if the cuttlefish were using color to communicate, they may be saying, “Hey, Bob,” in bright light, but it may sound a lot like, “Watch fob,” when a shadow crosses overhead. It would be like humans talking with their mouths full while using a language that has a different grammar indoors and outdoors, and trying to whistle and hide from a bear while carrying on the conversation.”

Communication is not what sets humans apart. All life communicates, and at a level sufficient to its survival. Animal and even plant communications are, in fact, highly sophisticated. But what makes humans different is symbols—letters and words that can be arranged in the self-referential sets we call language. Using symbols, we can detach communication from its direct relation to things present around us. We can speak with one another about things not here and now. We can tell stories. Tradition, myth, history, culture—these are storage systems for knowledge, and they are all products of the symbol. And the use of symbols is something we have not seen outside our own species.

This is the mystery we thrust ourselves into: A single neuron is not conscious of its existence. A network of billions of unconscious single neurons is. These monads living in a world without perception become a being that perceives, thinks, and acts. Consciousness lies not in neurons, but in a sophisticated pattern of connectivity.

“So, it’s a joke, right? Or not exactly a joke. 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.

The octopus was a soft, shell-less packet of easily digestible protein in a hungry world. It survived that world by its wits and the protean fluidity of its form. It lived through trickery, concealment, and guile. It lived through creativity.

Death is a part of us. It shapes our bodies from the very beginning. You might think your fingers are formed by the division of cells in the womb—but that is not the case. Fingers are chiseled out of a paddle of flesh by the death of cells, the same way David was chiseled by his sculptor from a block of marble. Without death, life would have no shape at all.

But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.

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.

There isn’t anything a coward can’t live with. No amount of pain and suffering is too much.

Evrim is special. Evrim has passed the final Turing test: that’s when a machine believes it is conscious, because it asks a question of itself—and someone answers. It’s simple. Evrim has asked the question, ‘Am I a conscious being?’ And Evrim has answered, ‘Yes’—that’s all: when the machine asks the machine a question, and answers it, fully convinced it is talking to itself, fully convinced it exists as a conscious entity, we have closed the loop.

“So what did I do about it? Did I try to understand what their needs were? Why they were doing what they were doing? Did I establish a relationship with the village elders? Did I reason with them? Did I try to work for a compromise? Did I reach out to anyone from my team for advice? No. None of those things. I was arrogant. I knew right from wrong: what I was doing was right, and what they were doing was wrong.

A philosopher of the twentieth century, Paul Virilio, said: ‘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.’

“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.”

Think of the phrase “morally upright” and what it shares with ideas in English such as “standing up for yourself” and “standing out from the crowd.” Once you see the way our physical structure and movement become metaphors we use to talk about ethics, conduct, and morality, you begin to understand the problems we would have communicating with a creature that does not share our physical form.

“Neanderthal. The Denisovan hominins. Homo naledi. Homo floresiensis. Homo luzonensis. This isn’t a list of our ancestors: it’s a list of the toolmaking, culture-bearing species of humans we wiped out.

There are two selves in the mind. One is the present self, the ship—neural activity, tacking between the elevated and the mundane. Between thoughts of the meaning of life and of how to glue a handle back on a broken coffee mug. The other is the current on which the vessel is borne: the more permanent self. The memories of childhood, learned concepts, habits and resentments—the built-up layers of previous interactions with the world. This self changes as well, but only slowly—as slowly as a river’s course is changed by shifts in environment and erosion, time wiping a sandbank away or building one up anew. We consist only of change—but some change is fast, and some comes only over years, decades, a lifetime.

The mind and the body are not two things—they are one. The destination of every neural pathway is the synaptic connection to muscle fibers. Thought leads to action, down bundled axons that terminate in the tools that make novels, factories, cathedrals, and nuclear bombs.

“I keep thinking of the dogs,” Rustem said. “On the island. Why did you tell me about them?” “To give you something to consider. A problem to work out.” “I keep thinking of those people, rowing to the island to leave food.” “The kind ones. The ones who cared enough.” “No. They weren’t kind. They were weak. They should have acted right away. They should have resisted when the authorities came to take the dogs away. Violently, if that was what was needed. 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.

There is a “real” world, out there, but we do not perceive it directly. It is assembled by the sensory and nervous systems of each individual animal, and it is assembled differently by every one of them. What we perceive is a construct. Every animal’s perception of the world, constructed by its evolved sensory apparatus and nervous system to take best advantage of its environment, is subjective—there are no colors out there, as we perceive them, waiting for us. There is no sound—only waveforms. And perhaps the strangest fact of all: Outside our bodies, there is no pain. Pain is something we create.

But what it came down to, in the end, was violence. Her safety, Evrim’s safety, the safety of the Shapesinger singing whatever legend it was singing on its skin—all of it depended upon violence. Without that violence, without the devastation Altantsetseg controlled, the world would rush in and destroy all of this. Altantsetseg was right: killing is what our existence does on this planet. All we have—everything we use to live—is taken from someone else.

One of the great tragedies of science is that the increase in its complexity has made most scientists into little more than technicians, driving them into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The further the scientist progresses down into the mine of knowledge, the less she can see the world into which that knowledge fits.