In which the last human on Earth attempts to understand the computer into which everyone has supposedly uploaded...
here.Readers familiar with John Searle's skepticism about artificial intelligence will see his influence on the story.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Last Janitor of the Divine
Posted by Eric Schwitzgebel at 2:48 PM
Labels: science fiction
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6 comments:
Wow, that hooked me in...so sad...
It helps that even if its dread things happening, things are happening in the story. It's funny the conflict there - the dread things might not happen if they all just slowed down and didn't race into things - but we want things to be happening in a story.
Why do the mites eat them?
Also you're very hygenic about saying the machine simply gives certain sound waves and photon arrangements which happen to align with certain human responces?
Why is that - in your setting, is there a dishonesty, rather like twin A claiming they are twin B? Or are you treating the machine entities as less than that, Eric?
Thanks for the kind comments, Callan! I was thinking that the mites would eat Horatio partly for cleanliness and partly to use his resources. It seems the natural thing to have happen to a being whose life is supported by mites, when that being dies.
I am careful about the sound waves and photon arrangements because I want to tell it from Jesus's perspective, where it's open whether there really is any consciousness in the machine or not; and where it's open whether whatever consciousness there might be in fact resembles what the machine is presenting to Jesus at his interface. I don't want the reader to know more about those issues than Jesus does. One of the aims of the story is to challenge to the usual sci-fi assumption that we can take for granted that cyberpunk-style uploading onto machines can really transfer consciousness into the machines.
Is it Jesus's perspective, or is it an absolute perspective? What does Jesus think about how he keeps things at arms length, keeping things as sound modulations and pixel arrangements?
I was trying to keep the absolute perspective open, by presenting it wholly from the outside, even in the last sentence. I'm not sure whether it works, but my hope was to leave open the possibilities all the way from, on the one hand, there never having been any consciousness in there at all (because of some immaterial soul or magic of brain and blood that could not transfer in) to, on the other hand, its having actually achieved some kind of temporally accelerated divinity.
If the reader thinks that philosophically some of these options are closed or that narratively I have closed off some of these options or pointed to one specific conclusion, she might be right. I don't claim any strongly privileged knowledge about the resolution of the story.
Jesus's view, as I meant to portray it, is that at one level he feels psychologically compelled to react to its outputs as though they were the outputs of a conscious person, but stepping back and thinking philosophically, he really has no idea whether there's consciousness in there or not and if there is consciousness, what kind of consciousness it is.
Hmmm, I'd argue it seems like the story is telling me it's just sound and light, rather than raising the question. But anyway, I get what your saying now. And yeah, it's a bit taken for granted the old conciousness transfer (what I love is when people assume a force grown clone will have the same memories as the person it was cloned from! I've encountered this notion!)
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