"Black Sun”
“I'm a scientist. I don’t know anything about God.”
~Victor Bergman, to Koenig
As Alpha prepares to pass through a black hole, hoping to be protected by modifications to their gravity shield, Koenig and Bergman share a drink in private, mulling over their situation.
“John, have you ever wondered just how and why we’re survived?” Bergman asks.
“Not until now.”
“Have you got any answers?”
“You’re not referring to God, are you?”
Bergman shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know exactly. I’m a scientist, I don’t know anything about God, but – no, a sort of... ‘cosmic intelligence’ is what I’ve got in mind.”
“Which intervenes at the right moment?”
“It’s one answer,” Bergman muses. “Ultimately, I suppose we all believe what we want to believe. Perhaps that’s what reality is. One thing, though – the line between science and mysticism. Just a line. Huh.”
The thought tickles him.
“You know, sometimes it makes me feel quite old...”
It all comes together here, with this final philosophical puzzle – one of the discipline’s biggest, across the centuries. Is there a god, or gods? If so, what is the nature of such a god?
In our journey thus far, we’ve seen philosophy’s contribution to human understanding sharpen in resolution over time. Even in the 20th century, there was a great deal of gray space in philosophy, wide-open plains of uncertainty and unresolved speculation. As we have crossed into the new millennium, we have watched that gray space largely vanish, as the speculations of philosophy have become increasingly focused as science has boosted our understanding of ourselves and the universe around us.
As Koenig and Bergman invoke God in 1999, we have already sharpened the resolution around the question of him in our 21st century reality, in our exposition above:
Mind is material, not ethereal;
There is no realm beyond the physical universe itself;
The gaps we needed a “god” to fill have faded away.
...and now we’re stuck.
If by “God” we mean the Hebrew deity Yahweh/Jehovah, or the Greek/Roman/Norse gods, or any other such gods from ancient religions and their texts, then we are abandoning philosophy for mythology; while classical philosophy accommodated these ideas to some degree, modern philosophy does not. Does that mean we’re done?
Nope. Victor Bergman has kept the question alive. By “God”, he means “a sort of cosmic intelligence” capable of steering the fate of Alpha – a mind or minds, certainly, and immensely powerful.
There’s no place left in contemporary thought for ancient mythological gods, no questions left to ask about them; but modern philosophy does leave room to talk about “god(s)” as they appear in science fiction. Gods who possess “mind” as we define and understand it, and whose power and purview are compatible with the laws of physics.
By this, we don’t mean gods like we see in Star Trek; Gary Mitchell, with his supertelekinesis, or Apollo, the humanoid with the extra, energy-rich organ in his chest. The word “god” got thrown around in those episodes, but those guys weren’t gods, by any stretch: they are simply exceptional humanoids.
Do we mean (dare we even say it) Q?
Cosmic consciousness?
Trek aside, there are many, many examples of Victor Bergman’s gods-as-cosmic-consciousness in both sci-fi literature and film, but 2001: A Space Odyssey captured it best.
By “gods”, in this context, we mean conscious, intelligent beings who hold sway over the universe. Here’s Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant description of such beings, in the novel version – represented in the movie by the Monoliths, the artifactual remnants of their consciousness:
The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First, their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.
In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.
The question before us is: are such beings possible?
If such beings exist now, we have no way of knowing it. They have not made themselves known to us; and if they are detectable, we do not yet know how to detect them.
But here’s what we can say so far:
If they are “cosmic intelligence”, as Victor Bergman described them, they began as biological intelligence (per the laws of entropy and England dissipative adaptation), and evolved beyond biology in an intentional manner;
To possess power to influence the universe, such beings must necessarily have developed processes by which their consciousness, no longer confined to biological or machine infrastructure but nonetheless still within the bounds of physics, could manipulate matter and energy; that is, “god-like” power would be, in Clarke’s definition, their extension of consciousness at will into matter and energy beyond themselves.
Such beings, meeting Clarke’s definition, might actually exist in the fabric of spacetime, and could certainly deploy intelligent monoliths and move moons around as they pleased.
We’ve extended Clarke’s definition above to conform to philosophy’s modern constraints as we’ve explored them so far. Can it work?
The Clarke evolution
Taking the problem one piece at a time and fitting it into the framework we’ve worked out above, let’s examine the first step of Clarke’s cosmic intelligence. They
...had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First, their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.
This, we’ve already considered. No, digital computers can’t even simulate minds, let alone host them; but that doesn’t mean that machines more sophisticated than digital computers can’t. There are, in fact, many possibilities for such machines – not programmed, simulated neural network assemblies, but literal neural network assemblies, machines containing billions or even trillions of artificial neurons (rather than the simulated ones of today’s AI). A machine like that could unquestionably intelligent, and provided it interacted with the world and was capable of accruing experience, could be self-aware – conscious.
So our philosophical frame can accommodate “machines better than their bodies” - artificial brains better than our our meat brains.
But we must quibble with Clarke’s next bit:
First, their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.
Meat brains in android bodies are interesting, but not a real migration of mind, so we’ll skip over that to “thoughts alone”.
Given the right destination hardware, it may well be possible to upload the patterns of a distinct human brain – and, by extension, the thoughts and memories that brain is configured to produce into a shiny new home of metal and plastic. But there’s a difference between copying it and transferring it. We need to address that.
Earlier, we pondered the wish of nerd fanboys the world over to “download” themselves – their minds, their thoughts – into a computer or robot, as a means of achieving immortality. This is misguided on several levels. Let’s look at each:
“You” are a mind, yes, but not a batch of “thoughts” and “memories”; your thoughts and memories occur in real time, and are created in the moment by your brain. They can’t all be “downloaded”. What can be done (in principle, if not in practice) is that your brain, with its myriad nodes and connections, can be recreated, such that it can cause those same thoughts and memories to occur in real time.
If that first step is achieved, then your brain – and, necessarily, your mind – will have been copied; you cannot “transfer” into it (sorry, Sir Arthur!).
If your brain/mind is successfully copied in machine form, bravo! But you, the you you are now, still exists, and now there’s a copy of you. You haven’t “transferred”; your mind/thoughts/memories might now be immortal, but you are not.
But here’s the thing: an exact copy of you, interacting with others who know you via text or phone or online, will seem to be you to them utterly; there will be no difference, no distinction! And – perhaps even more significantly – the copy will believe itself to be you.
And so we must concede that the idea of “transferring” ourselves into “new homes of metal and plastic” isn’t quite right; but the idea of copying ourselves into new bodies of metal and plastic might be spot-on.
And we can now look at Clarke’s progression and say – well, yes! Why not?
Wouldn’t we want to do it anyway?
Wouldn’t we want to create new, immortal versions of human beings in machine bodies? We would be preserving the knowledge, talents, richness of experience, and potential of the copied person in a durable – and, tantalizingly, extensible! - form that could endure for centuries.
And once the configurations of existing human minds take on permanent machine bodies, they need not be limited to the 90 billion neurons that we are now limited to. Unlimited new layers of neurons could then be added. Put another way, a copied human mind could grow... and grow... and grow.
We can easily imagine that it would be considered an honor to be selected for such an undertaking – to be one of the humans copied into android form (we’d want the copy to be an android, so that s/he could continue to interact with the world as we do – otherwise, our “copy” would be essentially imprisoned for eternity). It would be the ultimate privilege, to be chosen as the template for a machine mind, an artificial person, a fully human yet fully android entity.
And though our own mind wouldn’t be a candidate for unlimited growth, the mind that it believes itself to be us could experience that astonishing process, going where we never could, but as us – perhaps for centuries.
Next up:
In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
Thinking back to the "The Infernal Machine” chapter above, we have one word: Gwent.
Gwent was an artificial mind whose body was a spaceship. We are reminded of another such artificial mind, and it’s poignant that Arthur C. Clarke gave us that one, too – HAL 9000.
HAL 9000 was a machine consciousness with a spaceship for a body. And much can be said about him as such.24 But Gwent is even more in line with the kind of conscious spaceship Clarke describes in his cosmic intelligence progression, because Gwent was an artificial mind created from a human mind – Companion – keeping true to the evolution Clarke is articulating. HAL, on the other hand, was created from the brains of less sophisticated robots.
So, yes, it’s plausible that we might 1) copy our minds into machines, and 2) embed them in starships.
That leaves the final stage of Clarke’s evolution: transitioning what was once human consciousness (and will surely evolve into something far greater, once it takes machine form without biological constraints):
they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.
From this point forward, it all becomes far more speculative, obviously. Clarke, in writing this description, offers elegance and a tantalizing possibility, but presents no ideas about how it might be achieved. Still, we’re doing philosophy here, and we can make a couple of points:
A “cosmic intelligence” is not knowledge; it can create knowledge, it can recall (recreate) knowledge, it can make use of knowledge, it can communicate knowledge - but it is not itself knowledge;
As for storing knowledge “in the structure of space itself” – wow, yes, if that means making an unlimited body of knowledge about the universe accessible directly from the universe – that would be a breathtaking achievement, the ultimate utility. Beings able to access knowledge stored that way – beings who could interact with that universal body of knowledge at all times, receiving it, adding to it, sharing it – would be empowered beyond imagination. And, again, there is no objection in principle to such an undertaking that philosophy can muster.
“Preserving their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light” found an equally eloquent expression three decades after 2001 premiered, in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. In that book, advanced alien minds who had created the universe embedded a message in pi, to communicate that the universe is a created thing, so that any species intelligence enough to detect and understand that message could act on it, and participate in the community of creation (see Appendix ***). This, too, would be a breathtaking achievement – but we once again call out Clarke for confusing stored information for the dynamism of consciousness.
And now we’re at Clarke’s final step in the evolution of a Bergman-style cosmic intelligence:
They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.
Intelligence beings manifested as energy are, of course, commonplace in science fiction. Star Trek positively oozes them, from the Organians to the Thasians, and you can throw a baseball in a sci-fi library and bounce it off a dozen of them.
This does raise a couple of philosophical points, however:
First, energy is non-cohesive; it flies off at the speed of light, often in random directions. How can a “creature of radiation” exist, if radiation isn’t contained in an explicit structure?
Second, brain and intelligence and mind and consciousness are all based, by definition, on coherent, consistent, dynamic activity within an experientially configured matrix. Is such a matrix – with the necessary coherence, consistency, and dynamism – possible, even possible, assuming cohesive bodies of energy are possible?
We have one – and, so far, only one! - indication that within the boundaries of known physics, that kind of connectivity and cohesion is possible: quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement, the possibly infinite connection between particles. Or wavicles.
But we don’t know, and won’t know, perhaps for years. Decades. Maybe never.
But, by the physics we know today, it’s possible. And so, philosophically, we can remain open to Clarke’s evolution – and, therefore, Bergman’s cosmic intelligence.
Hell – maybe it is Q!
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