Do Androids Dream of Sanctuary Moon?

guest post by Amy Kind

In the novel that inspired the movie Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick famously asked whether androids dream of electric sheep. Readers of the Murderbot series by Martha Wells might be tempted to ask a parallel question: Do androids dream of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon?

Let me back up a moment for those who haven’t read any of the works making up The Murderbot Diaries.[1] The series’ titular character is a SecUnit (short for Security Unit). SecUnits are bot-human constructs, and though they are humanoid in form, they generally don’t act especially human-like and they have all sorts of non-human attributes including a built-in weapons system. Like other SecUnits, Murderbot has spent most of its existence providing security to humans who are undertaking various scientific, exploratory, or commercial missions. But unlike other SecUnits, Murderbot has broken free of the tight restrictions and safeguards that are meant to keep it in check. About four years prior to the start of the series, Murderbot had hacked its governor module, the device that monitors a SecUnit and controls its behavior, sometimes by causing it pain, sometimes by immobilizing it, and sometimes by ending its existence.

So how has Murderbot taken advantage of its newfound liberty? How has it kept itself occupied in its free time? The answer might initially seem surprising: Murderbot has spent an enormous amount of its downtime watching and rewatching entertainment media. In particular, it’s hooked on a serial drama called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. We’re not told very much about Sanctuary Moon, or why it would be so especially captivating to a SecUnit, though we get some throw-away details now and then over the course of the series. We know it takes place in space, that it involves murder, sex, and legal drama, and that it has at least 397 episodes. In an interview with Newsweek in 2020, Wells has said that the show “is kind of based on How to Get Away with Murder, but in space, on a colony, with all different characters and hundreds more episodes, basically.”

It's not uncommon for the sophisticated AI of science fiction to adopt hobbies and pursue various activities in their leisure time. Andrew, the robot in Asimov’s Bicentennial Man, takes up wood carving, while Data, the android of Star Trek, takes up painting and spends time with his cat, Spot. HAL, the computing system built into the Discovery One spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, plays chess. But it does seem fairly unusual for an AI to spend so much of its time binge-watching entertainment media. Murderbot’s obsession (one might even say addiction) is somewhat puzzling, at least to its human clients. In All Systems Red, when one of these clients reviews the SecUnit’s personal logs to see what it’s been up to, he discovers that it has downloaded 700 hours of media in the short time since their spacecraft landed on the planet they are exploring. The client hypothesizes that Murderbot must be using the media for some hidden, possibly nefarious purpose, perhaps to mask other data. As the client says, “It can’t be watching it, not in that volume; we’d notice.” (One has to love Murderbot’s response: “I snorted. He underestimated me.”)

Over the course of the series, as we learn more and more about Murderbot, the puzzle starts to dissipate. Certainly, Sanctuary Moon is entertainment for Murderbot. It’s an amusing diversion from its daily grind of security work. But it’s also much more than that. As Murderbot explicitly tells us, rewatching old episodes calms it down in times of stress. It borrows various details from Sanctuary Moon to help it in its work, as when it adopts one of the character’s names as an alias or when it decides what to do based on what characters on the show have done in parallel scenarios. And watching this serial helps Murderbot to process emotions. As it states on more than one occasion, it doesn’t like to have emotions about real life and would much prefer to have them about the show.

Though Murderbot is not comfortable engaging in self-reflection and prefers to avoid examination of its feelings and motivations, it cannot escape this altogether. We do see occasional moments of introspection. One particularly illuminating moment comes during an exchange between the SecUnit and Mensah, the human to which it is closest. In the novella Exit Strategy, when Mensah asks why it likes Sanctuary Moon so much, it doesn’t know how to answer at first. But then, once it pulls up the relevant memory, it’s startled by what it discovers and says more than it means to: “It’s the first one I saw. When I hacked my governor module and picked up the entertainment feed. It made me feel like a person.”

When Mensah pushes Murderbot for more, for why Sanctuary Moon would make it feel that way, it replies haltingly:

“I don’t know.” That was true. But pulling the archived memory had brought it back, vividly, as if it had all just happened. (Stupid human neural tissue does that.) The words kept wanting to come out. It gave me context for the emotions I was feeling, I managed not to say. “It kept me company without…” “Without making you interact?” she suggested.

Not only does Murderbot want to avoid having emotions about events in real life, it also wants to avoid emotional connections with humans. It is scared to form such connections. But a life without any connection is a lonely one. For Murderbot, watching media is not just about combatting boredom. It’s also about combatting loneliness.

As it turns out, then, Murderbot is addicted to Sanctuary Moon for many of the same reasons that any of us humans are addicted to the shows we watch – whether it’s Ted Lasso or Agents of Shield or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These shows are diverting, yes, but they also bring us comfort, they give us outlets for our emotions, and they help us to fight against isolation. (Think of all the pandemic-induced binge-watching of the last two years.) So even though it might seem surprising at first that a sophisticated AI would want to devote so much of its time to entertainment media, it really is no more surprising than the fact that so many of us want to devote so much of our time to the same thing. Though it seems tempting to ask why an AI would do this, the only real answer is simply: Why wouldn’t it?

The reflections in this post thus bring us to a further moral about science fiction and what we can learn from it about the nature of artificial intelligence. In our abstract thinking about AI, we tend to get caught up in some Very Big Questions: Could they really be intelligent? Could they be conscious? Could they have emotions? Could we love them, and could they love us? None of these questions is easy to answer, and sometimes it’s hard to see how we could make progress on them. So perhaps what we need to do is to step back and think about some smaller questions. It’s here, I think, that science fiction can prove especially useful. When we try to imagine an AI existence, as works of science fiction help us to do, we need to imagine that life in a multi-faceted way. By thinking about what a bot’s daily life might be like, not just how a bot would interact with humans but how it would make sense of those interactions, or how it would learn to get better at them, or even just by thinking about what a bot would do in its free time, we start to flesh out some of our background assumptions about the capabilities of AI. In making progress on these smaller questions, perhaps we’ll also find ourselves better able to make progress on the bigger questions as well. To understand better the possibilities of AI sentience, we have to better understand the contours of what sentience brings along with it.

Ultimately, I don’t know whether androids would dream of Sanctuary Moon, or even of anything at all.[2] But thinking about why they might be obsessed with entertainment media like this can help us to get a better big-picture understanding of the sentience of an AI system like Murderbot… and perhaps even a better understanding of our own sentience as well.

-----------------------------------

[1] And if you haven’t read them yet, what are you waiting for? I highly recommend them – and rest assured, this post is free of any major spoilers.

[2] Though see Asimov’s story “Robot Dreams” for further reflection on this.

[image source]

-----------------------------------

Postscript by Eric Schwitzgebel:

This concludes Amy Kind's guest blogging stint at The Splintered Mind. Thanks, Amy, for this fascinating series of guest posts!

You can find all six of Amy's posts under the label Amy Kind.

Social Change and the Science Fiction Imagination

guest post by Amy Kind

In “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the first episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Captain Kirk pulls out his communicator to hail the Enterprise.[1] At the time this episode aired in September of 1966, this kind of communication device probably struck most viewers as pure fantasy. But, according to a story told in the 2005 documentary, How William Shatner Changed the World, Star Trek’s depiction of the communicator helped turn the fantasy into a reality. Inspired by Star Trek, inventor Martin Cooper worked with a team of engineers to create a genuinely portable phone. The DynaTAC, which made its public debut at a press conference in 1973, was 9 inches tall, weighed 2.5 pounds, and had a battery life that allowed for 35 minutes of talk time.

Cooper has subsequently recanted the story about having been influenced in this way by Star Trek. In a 2015 interview, he claims that the real inspiration for his communication device came many years earlier from the two-way radio wristwatch worn by Dick Tracy in the eponymous comic strip. Whichever of these works was the inspiration, however, this technological development provides a testament to the power of science fiction to change the world.

And this is not the only such testament. Numerous articles suggest various other instances where technology imagined by science fiction authors led to the actual development of such technology. To mention just one illustrative example, an article on Space.com details eleven ideas “that went from science fiction to reality.” In some of these cases, the causal link is undoubtedly exaggerated, but in others, it seems considerably more plausible. Perhaps one of the best examples of such a causal link comes from Igor Sikorsky’s work in aviation – in particular, on helicopters. As described by his son, Sikorsky was deeply inspired by the helicopter described in Jules Verne’s The Clipper of the Clouds:

My father referred to it often. He said it was “imprinted in my memory.” And he often quoted something else from Jules Verne. “Anything that one man can imagine, another man can make real.”

Typically, the kinds of examples mentioned to demonstrate science fiction’s influence relate to what are seen as the traditional themes of science fiction – themes like technological invention, space exploration, and robotics. Interestingly, however, the ability of science fiction to inspire the future is not limited to these kinds of themes. Consider, for example, a recent discussion about the power of science fiction on an episode of the Levar Burton Reads podcast. In a conversation between the podcast host, actor Levar Burton (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame), and writer and activist Walidah Imarisha, what gets highlighted is the power of science fiction to effect change not in the technological realm but in the social realm. Science fiction, says Imarisha, helps us imagine “a world without borders, a world without prisons, a world without oppression.” And as she underscores, this is really important, because “we can’t build what we can’t imagine.”

This line of thought is part and parcel of what I think of as an optimism about imagination. There are many dimensions to optimism about imagination, but for my purposes here, what’s important is the optimist’s view that imagination can play a key role in bringing about social change. So far I’ve been focused on imagination in the context of science fiction, but that’s not the only context in which such imagining occurs. We see this kind of imagining in political contexts, as when US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invokes imagination in discussing the Green New Deal. The first big step in bringing it about, she says, is “just closing our eyes and imagining.” Such imagining is also a key tool for organizers and activists more generally – and also for just about anyone who is aiming to make our world a better and more just place.

In making a case for optimism, one might point to various examples of positive change that have occurred throughout our history, and one might point to how much of this change has been brought about by the prodigious powers of imagination manifested by various key figures who have driven such change. But the case for optimism is met with persistent criticism. Those who are more pessimistic question whether imagination can really have the power that the optimists attribute to it. As noted in an essay by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, “our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are. They are not some special, uninfiltrated realm that transcends the messy realities of our lives and minds.” Our imaginations are limited by our experiences and our embodiment – by our race, by our sex and gender, and by our ability status, to name just a few of the relevant sources of limitation.

Confronted with this push-pull between optimism and pessimism, what’s the solution for someone looking to harness the power of imagination to bring about social change? Recently, Shen-yi Liao has argued we would do best not to rely on agent-guided imaginings (or not solely so) but rather on prop-guided imaginings. Drawing an analogy to children’s games of pretense, he notes that the relationship between children’s imagining and props is a two-way street. When children are outside pretending to be Jedi Knights, they will likely look around for some tree branches to serve as light sabers and ignore other objects in their vicinity like rocks and leaves. On the flip side, when children are trying to decide what game of pretend to play, the fact that there are tree branches around might influence them to pretend to be Jedi Knights rather than astronauts. Though our imaginings influence how we use props, our props also influence how we use imaginings.

This leads Liao to an important moral: If we want to bring about social change, we might look to props to “guide and constrain our socially situated and ecologically embedded imagination.” This means that one effective way to bring about social change would be to think about what kinds of props are available to us in the world (e.g., monuments, memorials, and all sorts of other artifacts) and to work to make different props available. So, concludes Liao, “we do have to imagine differently to change the world. But to imagine differently, we might also have to change the world.”

Though I don’t think Liao himself is best described as a pessimist, the pessimist might nonetheless take these reflections as grist for their mill.[2] In particular, Liao’s conclusion might seem to suggest that we face an impossible task, a loop into which there is no entry point. We saw above the suggestion by Imarisha that we can’t build what we can’t imagine, but now it seems that we can’t imagine what we haven’t already built. Perhaps imagination can’t really play an important role in social change after all.

I count myself in the optimist camp, and so this is a conclusion that I’d like to resist. Moreover, as my opening reflections about science fiction suggest, the task can’t be an impossible one, because we’ve seen it happen. The various props that we have in the world inspire the imaginations of science fiction writers, and then the science fiction they produce inspires the imaginations of the engineers and inventors, who then create new and different props, which in turn can inspire the imaginations of a new generation of science fiction writers. We know it can be done with technology, and so it seems eminently plausible that something similar can be done with respect to the social domain – and indeed, when we think about the radical social imaginings in works by science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin (and so many others), it undoubtedly has already been done. Because of this past progress, the science fiction of today begins from new starting points and can push things even further. In short, just as the science fiction imagination can be an important driver in bringing about technological change, it’s also an important driver in bringing about social change.

---------------------------------------------

[1] Since people sometimes get picky about this sort of thing, I’ll clarify that “Where No Man…” is the first episode of season 1, 1x01. The original pilot, “The Cage,” did not air until 1988 and is treated as 0x01, that is, the first episode in season 0.

[2] Liao thinks that this difficult dialectic means that any progress we make is likely to be incremental. But, of course, incremental progress is still progress, and it’s certainly better than no progress at all! [image source]

The Time of Your Life

guest post by Amy Kind

In The Matrix, Morpheus presents Neo with a difficult choice.  Take the red pill, and get access to genuine reality, as brutal and painful as it is.  Take the blue pill, and remain in blissful ignorance in the world of illusion.  Neo chooses the red pill, and to my mind, he makes the right choice – though others disagree.  But now suppose that we were in another movie altogether, one in which someone was offered pills that asked them to make an entirely different difficult choice.  Take the red pill, and get access to endless reality, that is, become immortal.  Take the blue pill, and go back to your normal mortal life.  What’s the right choice here?  

This latter dilemma is essentially the scenario envisioned by the Čapek play, The Makropulous Secret. Having been given an elixir of life, Elina Makropulous has lived for over three centuries.  But now, though she is scared to die, she no longer has any desire to live on.  Should she take another dose of the elixir, or should she let her life end?  As Elina assesses things, immortality is not something to be valued.  She describes herself as frozen, as in a state of ennui, and she thinks anyone else who lived as long as she has would likewise come to see that nothing matters.  There is nothing to believe in, no real progress, no higher values, no love.  Yes, she could continue to exist forever, but it would be an existence in which “life has stopped.” 

In an influential philosophical discussion of this play, Bernard Williams agrees with Elina’s assessment of an immortal life.  In his view, immortality is not something to be valued.  No matter what kind of person one is, at a certain point one’s ceaseless life would by necessity become tedious.  One simply runs out of the kinds of desires that can sustain one through eternity.  The case against immortality is bolstered by numerous works of science fiction, from Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire to The Twilight Zone episode “Long Live Walter Jameson” to the story “The Immortal” by Jorge Luis Borges.  As Jameson says in the Twilight Zone episode, it’s death that gives life its point.

But there are other SF works that present a different picture – works like Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, in which the immortal characters Anyanwu and Doro each find projects to sustain themselves.  Williams’ view has also come under criticism from philosophers.  Some have argued that he neglects to consider the fact that many pleasurable experiences are infinitely repeatable and thus can continue to sustain us through an immortal life.  Others have argued that he is working with a misconception of the notion of boredom.  When it comes to the value of immortality, there thus seems room for reasonable disagreement.

This question concerns the temporal duration of life.  But in addition to questions about life’s duration, there are other kinds of temporally related questions we might ask about life.  And just as SF has valuable insights to provide about life’s temporal duration, we might naturally expect that SF would have some valuable insights to provide in exploring these other questions as well.[1] 

One such question has to do with the temporal directionality of life:  What would happen if instead of starting as a baby and growing older over time, we started at an advanced age and grew younger over time?  Here our expectations about the relevance of science fiction are indeed met.  The archaeologist Rachel Weintraub in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion presents a thought-provoking case study of backwards aging.  Likewise, Philip K. Dick’s short story “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday” presents an entire world that is aging in reverse; in doing so, Dick shows how hard it is to conceptualize what life would be like were this to happen.

Yet another question has to do with the temporal rate of life:  What would happen if we aged at a vastly different rate?  This issue too has often been explored in science fiction, and we see case studies from Star Trek to Star Wars.  In “The Deadly Years,” an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, various members of the Enterprise crew begin to age about a decade a day after coming down with an unusual form of radiation poisoning.  The clones bred to be clone troopers in Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones are genetically engineered to age at twice the normal rate.  And we see numerous other examples of rapid aging throughout science fiction, from books and stories to tv shows and movies.

Oddly, however, when these SF works explore themes of rapid aging, they don’t really seem to pursue any interesting philosophical issues that it might raise.  Are there other works that do so?  Or is the problem that there aren’t really any interesting philosophical issues to be raised on this topic?

I was prompted to think about this issue recently after watching, “Old,” a 2021 film by M. Night Shyamalan.  According to the promos, the movie follows a family on vacation “who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly … reducing their entire lives into a single day.”  I didn’t expect the movie to be good.  Its score on Rotten Tomatoes was worrisome.  But I did expect it to raise interesting philosophical questions about aging.  Alas, though my first expectation was proved correct, my second was not.

Afterwards, I found myself thinking more and more about this second expectation.  Why didn’t the movie raise any interesting questions?  I don’t buy the answer that it’s because it was a bad movie.  In fact, I think there are all sorts of bad movies that raise interesting philosophical questions.[2] 

Initially I was toying with the idea that it had something to do with the genre of the movie.  “Old” is a horror movie, not a science fiction movie.  And while the genre of science fiction is well positioned to raise philosophical questions in an interesting way, perhaps the genre of horror is not.  The fact that there’s very little coverage of horror in the Blackwell or Open Court pop culture and philosophy series might provide some very small measure of support for this hypothesis (though I’m hesitant to put too much weight on this kind of evidence).  Having thought it over more, however, I’m less sure that the hypothesis is right.  To take one salient counterexample, Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out explores all sorts of important philosophical issues about black lives and black bodies.  In any event, though I know lots about SF, I don’t think I know enough about horror or have enough familiarity with horror to make a real judgment about this.

Ultimately, my reflections about horror/science fiction led me to a second hypothesis.  As I thought more about genre and how it affected the kinds of reflections on aging that “Old” undertook (or, rather, failed to undertake), I started wondering what the movie would have been like had it been a SF film.  How would the questions have been explored?  My main thought was that the accelerated rate of aging would have to be considerably slowed down.  In “Old,” with the characters aging at the rate of two years per hour, life moves too quickly for one even to have time to reflect on how one would want to live it.  I’m not sure what acceleration rate would be more thought-provoking.  A year a day?  At that rate, an average US lifespan of 78 years would be lived in less than three months.  A year a week?  At that rate, an average US lifespan would be lived in roughly a year and a half.  But neither of these strikes me as a particularly interesting scenario to explore – even via SF.  Thus, my second hypothesis arose:  The problem wasn’t genre, the problem was the topic itself.  Unlike other temporal questions related to life, issues about temporal rate aren’t especially ripe for philosophical exploration.  

I’m not convinced this hypothesis is right, and I worry that I’m missing something obvious here.  Perhaps those of you more creative than I am can think of something.  (And maybe those of you who write SF can take this as a challenge.)  In any case, I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments.

But I’ll close with one last thought that might seem to support the hypothesis.  There’s lot of room to disagree about which choice is right with Morpheus’ red pill/blue pill choice, i.e., lots of room to disagree about whether ignorance is bliss.  And there’s lots of room to disagree about which choice is right with my amended red pill/blue choice, i.e., lots of room to disagree about whether immortality is desirable.  But were Morpheus to offer you a choice between the red pill that would make you age at a rate vastly quicker than normal, and the blue pull that would allow you to return to your normal aging rate, it’s hard to see how there’s any room for disagreement here.  Why would anyone want to take the red pill?

---------------------------------------------

[1] Of course, in addition to exploring temporal questions about life, science fiction also explores issues relating to the nature of time and our experience of it. I take up the treatment of time in Star Trek (and particularly in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) in my “Time, the Final Frontier.”

[2] Many of my former students will attest to this, as I have often assigned (forced) them to watch bad movies in the service of a philosophical point. Perhaps the most dramatic example is The Thirteenth Floor (which scores 30% on the Tomatometer). The entire room of students exploded into laughter at various parts of the movie – parts that unfortunately were not at all intended to be funny.

[image source]

Identity Across the Multiverse

guest post by Amy Kind

Philosophical thinking about personal identity often focuses on identity across time. What makes the baby named Dwayne, born to Ata and Rocky Johnson in May 1972, the same person as the WWE wrestler known as The Rock? And what makes them both the same person as the actor who voiced the part of the shapeshifting demigod Maui in the 2016 animated film Moana? Confronted with an ordinary case of aging like this one, we might naturally think that the answer lies in a combination of facts about biological and psychological continuity. Unfortunately, however, the situation is complicated by the fact that the biology and the psychology facts can come apart.

Examples arise in various real-life situations, such as when an individual in a persistent vegetative state has biological continuity with an earlier individual without having any psychological continuity with them. Or to take an even more mundane example: Consider a college student who wakes up after a night of such heavy partying that they had a complete blackout. Though they remember nothing of the events of the previous evening, they are nonetheless biologically continuous with the person who imbibed all that alcohol. An even vaster variety of such cases have been depicted in science fiction. When a Star Trek character is beamed from the USS Enterprise to the planet the starship is orbiting, they are dematerialized and sent to the planet as an energy beam. The planetary individual has all the thoughts and memories as the individual who stepped onto the transporter pad, but none of the same atoms. So, does that make transporting a quick means of travel, or should it instead be viewed as a quick means of death?

Unsurprisingly, philosophers have split primarily into two different camps on the issue of personal identity over time – with one camp following in a tradition associated with John Locke that focuses on psychological facts and the other camp instead focusing on the biological facts. (A third camp offers a theory based on the soul.) Though various considerations can be advanced in favor of each position, that’s not my interest here.[1] Rather, I want to explore how our thinking about personal identity becomes further problematized when we turn from the question of identity across time to the question of identity across worlds.

Cases of identity across worlds don’t seem to arise in real life (or at least not yet!). But just as identity across time has been insightfully treated in a variety of SF works – in Star Trek episodes like TNG: “Second Chances”, Robert Sawyer’s Mindscan, Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” and Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, to give just a few examples – science fiction also provides us with some interesting explorations of identity across worlds. In some works of science fiction, multiverse travel proceeds via something like a consciousness transfer. To travel to another world, one’s Earthly consciousness inhabits (or, one might say, takes over) the consciousness of one’s cross-world counterpart. This is how multiverse travel was imagined in Matt Haig’s 2020 novel The Midnight Library. But in other works, travel to other worlds operates more like travel to other places, though the mode of transportation is not a typical airplane or even spaceship. In Black Crouch’s Dark Matter, for example, the relevant vehicle is some kind of mysterious metal cube.

On either of these models, however, an interesting philosophical question arises: How should we view the relationship between a person in one world of the multiverse and their counterpart in another world of the multiverse?

On the one hand, there are good reasons to deny that the counterparts are identical to one another. Counterparts exist in different places at the same time. Their bodies may be qualitatively similar to one another, and perhaps even indistinguishable from one another, but they are not numerically identical to one another. Moreover, though counterparts may have very similar psychological make-ups to one another, there is no shared consciousness between them. Someone from one world cannot introspectively access the thoughts and feelings of their counterpart on another world. All in all, the relationship between an individual and their counterpart is more like a relationship between twins or clones than it is like the relationship between an individual and their past or future selves.

But here it’s worth noting that science fiction depictions of clones frequently sometimes the relationship between clones as one akin to something like identity and, moreover, identity in a non-metaphorical sense. SF clones sometimes seem to think of their own personal identity as unified across clones into a single self. In Ursula LeGuin’s short story “Nine Lives,” for example, when a group of genetically identical clones reports for a mission on the planet Libra, they introduce themselves as a single entity: “We’re a tenclone. John Chow’s the name.” Moreover, after nine of the ten die in an earthquake, the one remaining clone wants to die as well: “I am nine-tenths dead. There is not enough of me left alive.”

So that brings us to the other hand: There may well be good reasons to accept that cross-world counterparts also share personal identity. And this is how science fiction often presents the matter. One particularly compelling example comes in Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds. (For another, see Greg Egan’s short story “The Infinite Assassin” from the collection Axiomatic.) In Johnson’s 2020 novel, the Eldridge Institute employs cutting-edge technology to explore the multiverse and bring information and resources back to their own world, what they call Earth Zero. But there’s one important catch. The technology prevents anyone from travelling to a world in which their counterpart is still alive.

Caramenta, the novel’s protagonist, is an especially useful “traverser” for the company. Since her counterparts have died in 372 of the 380 worlds to which travel is technologically possible, she has a greater capacity for world travel than other traversers. It’s hard to tease out exactly how we’re to understand Caramenta’s relationship with her remaining counterparts. She sometimes refers to a counterpart as “her,” sometimes as “me,” sometimes as “another me.” After one of her counterparts dies, her emotions are complicated. When she tells her sister that she and the counterpart weren’t close, her sister disagrees: “You are as close to her as anyone can ever be. You are her.”

When Caramenta does reflect explicitly on the matter, she notes that while she has always believed that her selves are separate, and that “they – we – exist independently,” in quiet moments she can feel her other selves and their experiences. In describing this feeling, she says something especially revealing: “I can feel it all happening. Not just my selves collapsing, but time collapsing, because past and future are other selves just as surely as those on different worlds.”

How should we take this suggestive remark? Is it meant to carve out more distance between our different temporal selves – and more disconnect in our personal identity over time – than we typically recognize? Or is instead meant to encourage us to think of our counterpart selves throughout the multiverse no differently from the way we think of our past and future selves throughout time? Ultimately, I’m not sure. But whichever way Caramenta’s analogy should be taken, it seems clear that our philosophical reflection about personal identity across time could benefit from more philosophical reflection about personal identity across worlds. To understand what makes us who we are, we need to understand not just who we were and who we will be, but also who we could have been.

-------------------------------------------------------

[1] I discuss this debate in some detail in my book Persons and Personal Identity.

[image source]

What Is It Like to Be a Plant?

guest post by Amy Kind

Is there something that it’s like to be plant? I suspect that most people hearing this question would unhesitatingly answer in the negative. In this respect, plants seem quite different from animals. In fact, it’s this difference that undoubtedly helps to explain why so many people who feel squeamish about eating animal products don’t feel at all squeamish about eating fruits, vegetables, and other plant products.

Philosophical assessment of the consciousness of plants and animals is generally in line with this common-sense judgment. Though there’s disagreement about how far consciousness extends throughout the animal kingdom (Are ants conscious? What about garden snails?), and though there’s disagreement about whether and to what extent we can understand the nature of non-human consciousness (can we know, for example, what it’s like to be a bat?), there is general philosophical agreement that at least some non-human animals are conscious. In contrast, very few (if any) philosophers have defended the claim that plants are conscious. Even philosophers such as Chauncy Maher who have recently argued that plants have minds tend not to commit to the claim that there’s something that it’s like to be a plant.

In refraining from this commitment, Maher suggests that the predicate “consciousness” is not determinate when it comes to plants, i.e., there is (currently) no fact of the matter about whether plants are or are not conscious. Maybe they are; maybe they’re not. But given our present understanding of the nature of consciousness, Maher claims that “our standards don’t yet settle whether plants belong in the extension of the term.” When it comes to plants, we simply don’t yet have an adequate understanding of what it would be for them to be conscious.

On this score, however, a recent science fiction duology by Sue Burke helps provide some important insight. Semiosis, the first book in the duology, takes place in the 2060s. Fleeing the wars and environment crises that have engulfed earth, a group of humans united by pacifist ideals travel to a distant planet they name Pax. In their efforts to build a settlement, they eventually come across signs of another sentient animal species on the planet, the Glassmakers. But the Glassmakers are not their only encounter with sentience. As they soon discover, the bamboo-like plant (“rainbow bamboo”) that grows rampant in the area they are settling is also sentient. This plant, whom they name Stevland, initiates communication with the humans and eventually becomes integrated into their society as a full and valuable member – even taking on a leadership role.

We are told even more about Stevland in Interference, the second book in the duology, which takes place about a hundred years after the events of Semiosis when a team of earth scientists travel to Pax to find out what had happened to the original expedition (with whom they had long lost contact). With the more sophisticated equipment these scientists bring, it’s discovered that the rainbow bamboo on Pax has nerve tissue, and that Stevland has a collection of neurons that deserved to be called a brain.

Rainbow bamboo, and Stevland in particular, is clearly very different from bamboo plants on earth. For one thing, earth plants do not adopt names and pronouns for themselves. More to the point for our discussion here, earth bamboo plants lack neurons. Earth bamboo plants also lack the kind of linguistic and emotional capacities that Stevland has, nor can they develop and execute complex and temporally extended plans. But when we set aside these capacities that Stevland has in virtue of his sentience, he nonetheless exhibits a lot of the properties that seem essential or constitutive of plants in general. He relies on sunlight and water, and he is in competition with other nearby plants for these resources. He does not need to sleep. He has a long life span. He is situated in one place with no capacity to move himself to an entirely different place. But he is distributed over a large area, and he can extend his presence to connected terrain. He can survive significant damage to various of his parts and can even survive their destruction. Moreover, such parts can be regrown.

All of these features of plants seem relevant to how they would experience the world. What would give a plant joy? What would make it angry? Given that a plant lacks visual and auditory sense capacities, how would it gain an understanding of its environment? How would it initiate communication? How would it form relationships – whether friendly or unfriendly – with others? Given that a plant lacks mobility, how would it execute plans? How would it strike at its enemies? (Interestingly, and non-coincidentally, Burke herself started thinking seriously about the nature of plant and plant behavior after she witnessed one of her house plants “attacking” another.) Thus, even though Stevland’s neuronal system makes him different from earth plants – so different that, as plant biologist Laci Gerhart has complained, a “scientific reader will struggle with … the seemingly preposterous abilities of Pax’s plant life compared to their terran equivalents.” – the important similarities that he shares with earth plants means that Burke’s exploration of his sentience can help us understand more generally what plant sentience might be like. Unsurprisingly, this was something I thought a lot about as I read the books.

So how does Stevland do the kinds of things just mentioned? Much of his behavior proceeds via his root system. He learns about his environment by ways of his roots. He can extend his roots in new directions, and he does so for many purposes, whether exploring new terrain or connecting and communicating with other plants. He makes additional communicative efforts by generating smells, specific leaf patterns, or distributing chemicals through the production of fruit. His relationships with other plants are driven largely by need. And he has a great deal of patience.

When we think about the features of plants delineated above, this all makes a lot of sense. For example, the relatively long life span of plant species like bamboo – and the fact that they are situated in a single place – suggests that their temporal experience, and correspondingly their patience, would likely be different from that of humans. Moreover, because their situatedness means their only options for relationships are those nearby, we could reasonably expect that plant relationships would be different from human relationships. Here I’ll note that a related point is made by Brandon Sanderson in Cytonic, the third novel in his Skyward series. As a sentient alien from a (non-animal) crystalline species tells the human protagonist: “my species evolved as motionless individuals who would spend decades next to one another. It’s not in our nature to argue. Unlike motile species, we cannot simply walk away if we make one another angry.”

So, is there something it is like to be a plant? Maybe there is, maybe there’s not. Burke’s duology doesn’t really address this question. But in helping us understand something about what it might be like to be a plant if there were something it were like to be a plant, the books pave the way towards a better understanding of the standards we should use in attributing consciousness to other non-human entities. Thus, even if Maher is right that it’s currently indeterminate about whether the predicate “consciousness” should apply to plants, reflections on Burke’s extended thought experiment helps us to make progress in resolving the indeterminacy.

[image source]

Learning from Science Fiction

guest post by Amy Kind

Thanks to Eric for inviting me for to take a stint as guest blogger here at The Splintered Mind. I’ve been having a lot of fun putting together this series of posts, all of which will focus in some way on philosophical issues raised by science fiction.

Like Eric, and indeed like many philosophers, I read a lot of science fiction. I won’t try to sort through the many possible explanations for why philosophers tend to be attracted to science fiction, but I’ll highlight one such explanation of which I’m especially fond. As Hugo Award winner Robert J. Sawyer has noted, science fiction would be better known as philosophical fiction, as “phi-fi not sci-fi” (see the back cover of Susan Schneider’s Science Fiction and Philosophy). Kate Wilhelm, another Hugo Award winner, makes a similar point in her introduction to an edited collection of Nebula Award winning stories from 1973:

The future. Space travel, or cosmology. Alternate universes. Time travel. Robots. Marvelous inventions. Immortality. Catastrophes. Aliens. Superman. Other dimensions. Inner space, or the psyche. These are the ideas that are essential to science fiction. The phenomena change, the basic ideas do not. These ideas are the same philosophical concepts that have intrigued [humankind] throughout history.

In fact, we might naturally take these claims by Sawyer and Wilhelm one step further. Not only does science fiction concern itself with the kinds of issues and problems that are of interest to philosophers, but it is also thought to provide its readers with important insight into these issues and problems. By engaging with science fiction, we can learn more about them.

As intuitive as this idea is, however, once we start to think about it more closely, we confront a puzzle. After all, science fiction is fiction, and the defining characteristic of fiction is that it’s made up. So how can we learn from it? If we really wanted to learn about space exploration or robots or time travel, wouldn’t we do better to consult textbooks or refereed journal articles focusing on astronomy or robotics or quantum physics?

I suspect that some think this puzzle can be easily resolved. The way that science fiction enriches our understanding is by providing us with thought experiments (TEs). Just as we can learn from TEs presented to us in philosophy – from Jackson’s case of Mary the color scientist to Thomson’s plugged-in violinist – we can learn from TEs presented to us in science fiction. The question of how we learn from philosophical TEs is the subject of considerable philosophical debate: Are they simply disguised arguments, or do they function in some other way? But the claim that we learn from them is widely accepted (though see the work of Kathleen Wilkes for one notable exception).

In his recent book Knowing and Imagining, however, Greg Currie has called into question this resolution of the puzzle. Though he is focused on fiction more generally rather than just on science fiction, his discussion is directly relevant here. In the course of an argument that we should be skeptical of the claim that imaginative engagement with fiction provides readers with any significant knowledge, Currie takes up the question whether one might be able to defend the claim that we can gain knowledge from works of fiction by treating them as TEs. Ultimately, his answer his no. In his view, there are good reasons to doubt that fictional narratives can provide the same kind of epistemic benefits provided by philosophical or scientific TEs. Here I’ll consider just one of the reasons he offers – what might be called the argument from simplicity. I focus on this one because I think consideration of science fiction in particular helps to show why it is mistaken.

As Currie notes, the epistemically successful TEs found in philosophy are notably simple and streamlined. We don’t need to know anything about what Mary the color scientist looks like, or anything about her desires and dreams, in order to evaluate what happens when she leaves her black and white room and sees a ripe tomato for the first time. But even the most pared down fictional narratives are considerably more complex, detailed, and stylized than philosophical TEs. These embellishments of detail and style are likely to count against from the epistemic power of the TE presented by the fiction. A reader won’t know whether they’re reacting to the extraneous details or to the essential content. Philosophical TEs would get worse, not better, if they were elaborated and told with lots of panache. And that’s just what fiction does.

In response to this argument, I want to make two points.

First, though epistemically successful TEs are generally simple, they do contain some of level of detail, and those details might well sway readers’ reactions – as Currie himself notes. Someone who has bad memories of their childhood violin lessons, or who associates violin music with a particularly toxic former relationship, might react differently to Thomson’s case from someone whose beloved partner excels at the instrument. Dennett’s TEs in “Quining Qualia” include lots of cutesy details, and so does Parfit’s description of his well-known teletransporter case. But despite this, we nonetheless think we can learn from these cases. Currie is undoubtedly right that we need to exercise care when engaging with TEs, and we need to be guard against being swayed by extraneous details. But in philosophical contexts, we generally seem able to do so – perhaps not perfectly, but well enough. So why wouldn’t that be the case in fiction as well?

Second, and here’s where consideration of SF becomes especially important, it’s not clear to me that simplicity is always the best policy. The seemingly extraneous details need be seen as so extraneous. Consider Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, and in particular, the character Rocky. Rocky is a sentient and intelligent alien hailing from the 40 Eridani star system. Members of the Eridian species do not have eyes and navigate the world primarily by using sound and vibration. In many ways, Weir is presenting us with an extended thought experiment about what kind of civilization such a species would develop. What would their interpersonal reactions be like? How would they make scientific progress? How would they achieve space flight? Trying to understand what it’s like to be an Eridian is a lot like trying to understand what it’s like to be bat – something Thomas Nagel has claimed cannot be done. But trying to understand what Eridian society might be like is not similarly out of reach, and Weir’s discussion helps enormously in achieving this understanding. Here’s a place where more complexity was helpful, not hurtful. To gain the understanding that I believe myself to have gained, I needed the fuller picture that the book provided. Without the details, I’m pretty sure my understanding would have been considerably impoverished.

While this is just one example, I think the point extends widely across science fiction and the TEs presented to us in this genre. Perhaps in other genres of fiction, Currie’s argument from simplicity might have more bite. But to my mind, when it comes to science fiction, the complexity of the thought experiments presented can help explain not only why philosophers would be so attracted to these kinds of works but also why we can gain such insight from them.

[image source]