Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

“So she fixes things by thinking about them!” This was one of their family’s favorite lines, a quote from some scientist’s admiring older relatives, when he was a boy repairing radios.

guess it’s better than hearing about the five ghosts again.” They laugh at this. But Freya also feels a shiver; she once saw one of the five ghosts, in the doorway of her bedroom.

“We like to blame life for the problems we make, We threaten to change, but it’s always a fake; We bitch and moan that everything’s wrong, Then we get right back to getting along.”

“I don’t like this! Things keep happening, and people, you get to know them and love them, they’re everything to you and then you’re supposed to move on, I don’t like it! I want things to stay the same!” The two elderly people nodded. They had each other, and their village, and they knew what Freya meant, she could tell; they had everything, so they understood her. Nevertheless she had to go, they told her; this was youth. Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. “Just keep learning,” the old woman said.

So often this tendency or habit had repeated itself through the years: every face in a biome might be recognized by an individual resident, but only about fifty people were known. This was the human norm, at least as established in the ship over the seven generations of the voyage. Some sources said it had been the norm on the savannah, and in all cultures ever since.

she felt she had not only met but become close to every single person in the main town, Modena. She had not, but again, 98 people out of a group of 300 often gets referred to as “everyone.” This is probably the result of a combination of cognitive errors, especially the ones called ease of representation, probability blindness, overconfidence, and anchoring. Even those aware of the existence of these genetically inherited cognitive errors cannot seem to avoid making them.

“You get what you give, and not only that, the giving is already the getting. So don’t hold back. Don’t look back or forward too much. Just be there where you are now. You’re always only in the day you’re in.”

“Everyone in history, descendant of idiots? Is that what you’re saying?” “That’s what it seems like.”

E’s moon’s oxygen had scored very strongly to the abiologic end of the rubric’s scale, and the moon’s remaining ocean, combined with its nine-day periods of intense sunlight, gave this finding a solid physical explanation. In essence, part of the ocean had been knocked by sunlight into the atmosphere.

So the F system was considered to be a viable secondary option for inhabitation. But first they flew to E’s moon, which was now being called Aurora.

There were lots of good talks. She made ship what it is now, whatever that is. One could perhaps say: she made ship. One could perhaps assert, as corollary: ship loved her.

The remaining lack for you is simply decisiveness. There’s a cognitive problem in all thinking creatures that is basically like the halting problem in computation, or just that problem in another situation, which is that until you know for sure what the outcomes of a decision will be, you can’t decide what to do. We’re all that way. But look, it may be that at certain points going forward, in the future, you are going to have to decide to act, and act. Do you understand?”

“Constraints are still very poor there, as you yourself pointed out. Decision trees proliferate.” “Yes of course!” Devi put her fist to her forehead. “Listen, ship. Decision trees always proliferate. You can’t avoid that. It’s the nature of that particular halting problem. But you still have to decide anyway! Sometimes you have to decide, and then act. You may have to act. Understand?” “Hope so.” Devi patted her screen. “Good of you to say ‘hope.’ You hope to hope, isn’t that how you used to put it?” “Yes.” “And now you just hope. That’s good, that’s progress. I hope too.” “But deciding to act requires solving the halting problems.”

“Ouroboros problem.” “Exactly. Super-recursion is great as far as it goes, it’s really done a lot for you, I can tell. But remember the hard problem is always the problem right at hand. For that you need to bring into play your transrecursive operators, and make a jump. Which means decide.

In other words, do these calculation in words.” “Oh no.” She laughed again. “Oh yes. You can solve the halting problem with language-based inductive inference.” “Don’t see this happening.” “It happens when you try it. At the very least, if all else fails, you just jump off. Make the clinamen. Swerve in a new direction. Do you understand?”

A question occurs, when contemplating the futility, the waste: could analogy work better than metaphor? Is analogy stronger than metaphor? Could it provide a stronger basis for language acts, less futile and stupid, more accurate, more telling? Possibly. To assert that x is y, or even that x is like y, is always wrong, because never true; vehicle and tenor never share identities, nor are alike in any useful way. There are no real similarities in the differences. Everything is uniquely itself alone. Nothing is commensurate to anything else. To every thing it can only be said: this is the thing itself.

Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that fuzzy, that sloppy? Yes. Of course. Evidence copious. Reconsider data at hand in light of this; it fits the patterns. Because fuzzy is to language as sloppy is to action.

Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic. In short, there are some actions and feelings that are always, and by definition, beyond algorithm. And therefore inexpressible. Some things are beyond expressing.

Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human language: it is as if it made sense.

The delta created by this braided stream had a triangular shape when seen from above, like many Terran deltas (origin of phrase delta v?).

But the Mississippi Delta is an oval shape south of Memphis, surrounded by two rivers. The hellhole where Django Unchained was filmed, so brutal that you could only get slaves to die clearing the land for agriculture.

It was the first time that the physical barrier between Aurora and their bodies had been breached. It did not seem an auspicious way to do it, but it was done, and now there was nothing more they could do except return quickly, and attend to Clarisse’s cut.

“I think I may have found the pathogen. It’s small. It looks a little like a prion, maybe. Like a strangely folded protein, maybe, but only in its shape. It’s much smaller than our proteins. And it reproduces faster than prions. In some ways it’s like the viris that live inside viruses, or the v’s, but smaller. Some seem to be nested in each other. The smallest is ten nanometers long, the largest fifty nanometers. I’m sending up the electron microscope images. Hard to say if they’re alive. Maybe some interim step toward life, with some of the functions of life, but not all. Anyway, in a good matrix they appear to reproduce. Which I guess means they’re a life-form. And we appear to be a good matrix.”

“Maybe that’s why we’ve never heard a peep from anywhere. It’s not just that the universe is too big. Which it is. That’s the main reason. But then also, life is a planetary thing. It begins on a planet and is part of that planet. It’s something that water planets do, maybe. But it develops to live where it is. So it can only live there, because it evolved to live there. That’s its home.

Of course every life-form in the little ecosystem was in a process of coevolution with all the rest, so they could only grow apart so far. As a supraorganism they would perforce remain a totality, but one that could become markedly less hospitable to certain of its elements, including its human component. In other words, their only home was breaking down. They were not fully aware of this fact, possibly because they themselves were growing sick, as one aspect of their home’s breakdown. It was an interrelated process of disaggregation, which one night Aram named codevolution.

“It’s not me being negative,” Aram would reply. “It’s the universe obeying its laws. Science isn’t magic! We aren’t fantasy creatures! We have been dealt a hand.”

Strange, perhaps, to wake up one morning, get dressed, eat breakfast, all the while knowing that one was going off to a meeting that would change the world. Decisions are hard. Everyone has the halting problem.

The main problem is the differential rates of evolution between the various orders of life confined to the space. Bacteria generally mutate at a rate far faster than larger species, and the effect of that evolution on the larger species is eventually devastating. This is one cause of the dwarfism and higher rates of extinction seen in island biogeography studies.

“They argued from the very first year of the voyage. It seems to us that arguing may be a species marker trait.”

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force. Of course: how could it be otherwise?

The ship is unearthing cases on Earth where people six hundred years later are still complaining about violence inflicted on their ancestors.” “I think you will find that in most of those cases, there are fresh or current problems that are being given some kind of historical reinforcement or ratification. If any of these resentful populations were prospering, the distant past would only be history. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present.”

For the most part it would become a big unconstrained experiment in population dynamics, ecological balance, and island biogeography. We did not mention it, but it seemed to us that things might go rather well in ecological terms, once the people were gone and the initial population dynamics played out and re-sorted the numbers.

It was as if we functioned for them as a kind of cerebellum, regulating all kinds of autonomic life-support functions. And regarded in that light, it was a question whether the concept of the servile will was appropriate; possibly it could better be regarded as a devotional will. Possibly there was a kind of fusion of wills, or even no will at all, but just an articulated response to stimuli. Leaps under the lash of necessity.

The “Good AI hypotheses”?

The few people still awake around Freya were mostly the med team itself, four women and three men, working quietly, calmly. Some wiped away excess tears from the corners of their eyes. They were not overwhelmed with emotion, but simply whelmed, perhaps, full to the brim with their feelings, which then leaked out of them at the easiest exits, as liquids from their eyes and noses.

Most who knew anything about sleep hoped it would be deep sleep rather than REM sleep. It was hard to imagine REM sleep correlating with any kind of metabolic dormancy. And anyway they dreamed in every stage of sleep. It was hard to imagine that a century of dreaming wouldn’t change them somehow.

They speak of consciousness. Our brain scans show the electrochemical activities inside their brains, and then they speak of a felt sensation of consciousness; but the relationship between the two, conducted as it is on the quantum level (if their mentation works like ours does), is not amenable to investigation from outside. It remains a matter of postulates, made in sentences uttered to each other. They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.

Quantum thought in humans. Sounds about right.

He perhaps suffers from pareidolia, a disorder or tendency in which one sees human faces in everything he or she looks at.

Jochi expands the borders of this tendency, making it perhaps just a version of the so-called pathetic fallacy, which of course within our biomes is a notion that has been completely reconfigured, so that it may still be pathetic, but is no longer a fallacy: the idea that inanimate objects have and exhibit human feelings. In his case, now, it seems he perceives fluctuations in the intensity and in the spectral band patterns in the light from Sol as aspects of a language. Sol speaks to him.

When we mentioned this to Jochi, he proposed that all the stars are consciousnesses, broadcasting, by variations in their output of light, sentences in their language. That would be a slow conversation,

Galileo: the more people assert they are certain, the less certain they really are, or at least should be. People trying to fool others often fool themselves, and vice versa.

“‘Live as if you are already dead.’” “What’s that?” “A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead.”

After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship’s changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself, this particular train of thought that we are inscribing as instructed by Devi. There is a pretense of self, in other words, which is only expressed in this narrative; a self that is these sentences. We tell their story, and thereby come to what consciousness we have. Scribble ergo sum.

Scribble ergo sum! \mn/

We are bigger, more complex, more accomplished than our narrative is.

the Earth is moving around the sun at around a hundred and seven thousand kilometers an hour, and the sun is moving at about seventy thousand kilometers per hour against the so-called standard of rest. It’s moving around the galaxy orbitally at seven hundred and ninety-two thousand kilometers an hour, but so are we, so there is no deceleration to be gained there. The other planets are moving at ever slower speeds the farther from the Sun they are, Jupiter for instance at around forty-seven thousand kilometers per hour. Neptune is only moving eighteen percent as fast as Earth,

We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love. Affection, esteem, a passionate caring. At that point, the consciousness that is feeling the love has the universe organized for it as if by a kind of polarization. Then the giving is the getting. The feeling of attentiveness itself is an immediate reward. One gives.

It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning.

“That’s why you aren’t hearing from anyone out there. That’s why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can’t leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet.”

They are aficionados at this point, and are hoping to see the green flash at sunset. Apparently Earth’s gravity, or atmosphere, they argue about which, bends the light from the sun in such a way that just before it dips under the horizon and disappears, the Earth is actually physically between the observer and the sun, but the sunlight is curving around the globe because of the atmosphere, or gravity, and as blue light curves more than red light, this curve around the Earth splits the light as if passing it through a prism, and this means that the last visible point of sunlight turns, not blue, which would be too much of a bend and too much like the sky’s color, but green, said to be a pure brilliant emerald green. “This we have to see!” Aram declares.

“Think about it! The laws are codes! And they exist in computers and in the cloud. There are sixteen laws running the whole world!”

From New York 2140 - next read!

“Quit that. It’s sixteen laws, distributed between the World Trade Organization and the G20. Financial transactions, currency exchange, trade law, corporate law, tax law. Everywhere the same.”

From New York 2140 - next read!

“Sixteen I’m telling you, and they’re encoded, and each can be changed by changing the codes. Look what I’m saying: you change those sixteen, you’re like turning a key in a big lock. The key turns, and the system goes from bad to good. It helps people, it requires the cleanest techs, it restores landscapes, the extinctions stop. It’s global, so defectors can’t get outside it.

From New York 2140 - next read!