House of Suns: definitely not a review

Just finished this 'ere book by Al Reynolds.

Thoughts:

1) An alright 500 page book with a good 250 page book struggling to get out.

2) There is a lot of boring, pompous, non-political politics goes on in "the Line". I feel the concept of someone creating thousands of clones of themselves and sending them out to explore the galaxy is good, but Reynolds kind of let it go without thinking through how it would operate IRL.

3) I don't know if it's a style thing (Stephen Baxter does it as well) but none of the characters talk as people talk. Ken MacLeod is much better at this sort of thing.

4) The most interesting characters (the Doctor and the Spirit of the Wind) don't get nearly enough of the airtime that is instead given over to the unconvincing political pomposity.

That said I really enjoyed this book. It's not as good as Century Rain or Pushing Ice, but is considerably better than Prefect.

Against a Dark Background: not a review

I've finished reading Iain M. Banks' Against a Dark Background. Here are a few thoughts, bullet pointed, as this isn't a review:

• This is a wonderfully indulgent piece of science fiction. The scope of imagination is huge and the cinematic expanse of Banks' imagination lends a sense of wonder to the story.
• This is a profoundly humanist novel. The notion that people are truly alone and this life is all is explored through a variety of mechanisms and tropes. The Solipsists insistence that they are alone in their own universe, the finality of death and the transient nature of being are persistent themes. Also the nature of the System in which it the story is set.
• This is a dark novel. Lots of death and failure and despair and general unpleasantness.
• That being said Banks doesn't Pull the Nasty in the same way as he has done in The Algebraist and Consider Phlebas.

Well worth a read.

Thoughts on Feersum Endjinn and writing

This book has an immense span of imagination. Banks has an ability to create ideas that are just over the boundary of the absurd and yet implements them so that they seem almost homely and reasonable.

There is, in my limited experience of writing, a sort of mental crash-barrier between the familiar and comfortable and the strange and disturbing.

Great SF writers possess a kind of intellectual bravery in vaulting the barrier and hauling the strange into the familiar.

When writing I will pursue an idea as far as I can but there is always a part of me too willing to reject a plot or character or situation as too ridiculous for further exploration.

Feersum Endjinn starts superbly: with typical Banksian whimsy gradually revealing an immense canvas that (had I ever thought it) I would have immediately rejected.

There is a tendency towards dues ex machina in the plot: and the Bad Guys aren't as unpleasant as most Banks villains. However the story is compelling enough and the Good Guys interesting enough to follow through.

An excellent read.

The quantum leap intelligence problem: are posthumans ineffable?

There is an idea prevalent in transhumanism that when posthumans or strong AI finally develop they will be to us as we are to the beasts that perish. They will be so much more intelligent that we will be incapable of understanding them.

They will possess super-science mojo and will live in mathematically optimal blocks of matte computronium, and they will have awesome tech that we puny baselines won't be able to distinguish from magic. They will be ineffable and godlike and we simply won't be able to understand them or their motives.

(Aside: for the sake of brevity for the remainder of this post I will refer to "them and us" to distinguish baseline humans from posthumans - not because I don't buy into the whole Kurzweil machine-human merger, but just because it's easier to write about)

I disagree with this idea of posthuman ineffability.

The idea suggests that there are other ways of being intelligent (i.e. possessing a highly accurate model of the outside universe and a highly accurate model of yourself and your fellows, thereby enabling self-reflection, communication, and culture ¹) that are an entire quantum-leap above human intelligence such that we won't be able to comprehend them or their actions.

Michael Anissimov has written an interesting article making the point that human beings are dumb. In fact we possess only the bare minimum of intelligence required to create the civilization we have now.

Michael Anissimov makes some good points in this article on the current state of human intelligence:

Hey, human philosophers — I’ve got some bad news. It turns out that Homo sapiens probably isn’t the qualitatively smartest possible being.

...

How do I know? Well, most other members of the genus Homo had plenty of time to build agricultural civilizations, but they were too unintelligent to get off the ground. Homo sapiens was just barely smart enough to do the trick. And like a self-replicating machine that moves from 99.9% closure to 100% closure, the payoff was big.

I agree with this as far as it goes. All it took to develop complex social technologies like language and complex physical technologies like bows and arrows was a small increment in intellectual capacity.

We made that quantum leap from animal to human around 100 000 years ago: in the intervening period we haven't evolved a great deal (in fact, some say we've stopped evolving at all).

Ergo we are possessed of the bare minimum intellect required to sustain and develop technological civilization.

Anissimov uses this as an argument in favour of the idea that there there are many more superior modes of intelligence that we haven't yet developed or encountered, or in his words:

The apparent magnitude of our accomplishments, including those of Einstein, is merely a side-effect of how low our standards are. To another species on another world whose intelligence was crafted in the furnace of selection pressures more intense than ours, quantum mechanics is obvious from the get-go. The only thing funnier about how dumb we are to take so long to figure it out is our self-importance at having finally figured it out.

This is where I disagree with Anissimov. I think that the miniscule quantum leap between pre-human animals and human beings is a one-time event. Improvement is certainly possible, but to claim that there is some qualitatively and quantitatively different perspective on the universe that is definitively superior in every measurable dimension to human thought and would result in beings that we are incapable of understanding is incorrect.


Here's why:

1. Human knowledge and understanding does not progress wholly through deductive reasoning or pure cognition. In fact a large amount of human knowledge and understanding comes from what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls stochastic tinkering, and Eric Beinhocker calls deductive tinkering. Trial and error and accident has contributed enormously to the development of human knowledge. Presumably a posthuman would make mistakes: otherwise how would it learn? And if it doesn't learn how does it grow and develop?
   
2. I agree with Kevin Kelly that there is a fallacy in the idea of "thinkism." Thinkism is the idea that it is possible for a mind, completely ignorant of the workings of the physical universe, to consider a few small objects, like a rock, flower, a feather, and a model of a galaxy embedded in amber, and then use these items to deduce the workings of the physical universe without any recourse to experiment. It could well be that there are other universes with different physical laws that could generate those items and without recourse to experiment how would this mind know which universe it lived in?
   
3. We will share the same universe (they may go elsewhere, of course, but the chances are baselines will stay here): as such this posthuman entity will be subject to all the usual laws of entropy, conservation of energy, gravity and whatnot. As such this posthuman will need things and do things that are explicable to us. Only by creating a solipsistic alternate-reality computer bizarro world could a posthuman behave in a completely ineffable fashion: and even then a posthuman would still be subject to the axioms of a given logical or mathematical environment. N-incomplete problems would remain so.
   

Looking at point 1 "how does a posthuman learn" suggests an interesting counterargument: "posthumans develop in a way that doesn't involve learning, they use something different and ineffable."

The problem with this counterargument is that what I'm arguing is empirically refutable: the existence of a truly ineffable posthuman entity is something that is observable, so my point can be refuted by the observation of one posthuman entity whose motives and actions we do not understand. However transhumanist thinkers can continue asserting that true posthumans are by definition ineffable until the end of time. I predict that as posthumans emerge and their actions are studied they will eventually always be found to be explicable by baseline humans (if weird and peculiar - see below).

I agree that there are almost certainly better modes of intelligence, but I disagree with the idea that these modes of intelligence will ever be wholly incomprehensible to baseline humans.

They may be faster, cleverer, wittier, more attractive, stronger, longer-lived, instatiated within superior hardware, and better at poker - but it doesn't mean baseline humans would be incapable of understanding them.

The distinction between what I'm arguing and what Anissimov implies in his article is fairly subtle, and I could be accused of nit-picking, but I think it's important that we realise that there is no reason to assume posthumans will be completely and utterly ineffable to us, at least not if they want to survive IRL (which they may not).

That humans have accomplished what we have says more about the power of the evolutionary methods of stochastic tinkering combined with occasional deductive reasoning than it does about the brilliance of human intellect: and this is exactly what Anissimov is saying and why I agree with the premise of his article.

But once you possess culture (what Ian Stewart and Patrick Cohen call extelligence, or what Richard Dawkins might term "a memetic environment"), and a reasonable means of manipulating the universe it doesn't matter how "smart" you are. Trial and error and learning and robust heuristics take care of the rest.

I believe that some posthumans will be pretty weird, some may be charismatic, some may be frightening. But we can get to where they are, they are post-humans and they took a path we will be able to follow. Because of this and for the reasons given above I don't believe posthumans or posthuman civilization will ever be truly ineffable.



1: In fact it could be that this superior intelligence works on a completely different basis to creating a highly accurate model of the universe and the self, and works on some other basis that we can't comprehend. This non-intelligent "intelligence" would be truly ineffable and would completely disprove my point if it actually was superior in every possible way to human intelligence.

Further reading: if you do understand precisely what I'm trying to say I should mention that it isn't original, Greg Egan argues something similar in the opening chapter of Schild's Ladder.

Charles Stross and politics

Crooked Timber have been doing a big Charles Strossian seminar, featuring Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman and fellow Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod:

Shamefully, I have yet to read Saturn's Children, Halting State, and I'm only one book into the Merchant Princes series - all books the victim of a moratorium on book-purchases until I manage to cut down on my book hoarding.

Nevertheless I still read Stross' excellent weblog (it passes the nolinkvisit rule of worthwhile Internet stuff) and I've always been struck by his yen for taking ideas that I find difficult to articulate in the most basic terms and expressing them concisely and wittily.

And so, in the Wildean sense that most people's opinions are actually the opinions of others, this is what I've been struggling to articulate to myself about the current state of politics in the EU:

Old certainties have been eroding: family, religion, gender roles, race, the hopelessly compromised multinational news media, politicians mired in the megaphone era and trying to grapple with ubiquitous information overload at the same time that they’ve been systematically stripped of actual power by the trade treaties of Empire. And so the existing establishment figures shout louder to drown out the noise, and foment moral panics and pass increasingly draconian laws just to be seen to be Doing Something. And something is done: anti-terrorism laws are applied to fly-tippers, bugging facilities are used to see that parents aren’t conspiring against the interests of the state by sending their children to the wrong school, and the unforseen complications of the disconnect between authority and real power multiply exponentially.

[from this article at Crooked Timber]

The perfect job?

Jason Stoddard writes of the difficulties of being a science fiction writer in 2008 [via Futurismic] and describes what sounds to me to be pretty much my ideal job:

To write fully believable, near future science fiction today, you almost need to be voracious antisocial polymath, deeply conversant in half a dozen technical fields, as well as familiar with ongoing social, economic, and environmental change.

...

And that’s the burden of the modern science fiction writer. If you want to write believable near-future fiction, you can’t choose a single point of advancement. You need to have a good understanding of advances in many different fields, and you need to be able to imagine how these can come together, for good or for bad. And to be really believable, you’ll need to know more than you ever wanted to know about how the world works, economically and socially, as well as where the trends are heading.

This is actually pretty close to being my ideal career - a sort of polymath technocrat who spends half his time researching and half his time writing stories. Jeremiah Tolbert disagrees [again via Futurismic], saying that:

I take exception to is the notion that you need to be deeply conversant in anything. I think you just need to do research to the point where what you have to say doesn’t break the suspension of disbelief and I think that’s a long ways from being a polymath. You don’t need to be an expert on anything but people.

Well I agree with this as well. I wouldn't be adverse to doing the whole bleached-skin, eccentric-reclusive paranoiac thing (like Neo in the first Matrix movie or the oil rig dude in The Star Fraction) but I would like to get out sometime.

Discussion of ethics, capitalism, the environment, and what I should do with my life

I have been reading The Business by Iain Banks. It is an engaging read, despite the treacle-slow plot, and has plenty of the kind of feats of imagination that I like about Banks’ writing.

The main protagonist is a mid-to-high-level manager in “the business” – a generation-spanning organisation that supposedly bought the Roman Empire (but only for 66 days), owns several sets of crown jewels, and is as ubiquitous as it is unnoticed.

The internal set-up of the business is explored in some detail; it is vehemently rationalist, secular, meritocratic, and organised to avoid corruption, nepotism, and dynasty-building as these things are seen to get in the way of effective money-making.

As ever Banks’ imagination and prose add a great deal to the story, and his politics shines through as clearly as usual. Several pages are given over to debates about inequality, opportunity, capitalism, and the pros and cons of free markets and the state.

I am currently at 312/392 pages. I don’t know if there will be a twist at the end or not, but the book has already given me food for thought on a subject that has been worrying me for some time now.

I am currently 19 years old and in the very fortunate position of being able to choose how, where, and in what manner I wish to live my life. This is not a choice most people are offered. As such, I have been vacillating over the appropriate direction to take. Do I want to dedicate my life to the service of some greater good, or do I want to pursue my own aims and personal ambitions?

Reading A.C. Grayling’s The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty, and the Good Life in the 21st Century has helped a little. In the book Grayling argues that the idea that we have to choose whether to devote our lives to vice or virtue is a false one. At the same time H.J. Blackham’s Humanism suggests that I have a responsibility to myself, and a responsibility to everyone else by virtue of our common experience of humanity. Balancing the two is addressed by Grayling quite well in his book.

In any case the real cause of my concern over what path to take stems from the ideas explored in The Business. Is acquisitiveness good? Is greed good? Is it better to seek to grow and expand your wealth or persue other interests entirely?

Quite often this argument is subsumed by other arguments about capitalism vs. socialism; of free markets vs. state control; traditional morality vs. human nature; and arguments over the best way to raise people out of poverty and end tyranny and bloodshed.

These kind of political, economic and social arguments devolve to deciding whether or not our current system of liberal democratic capitalism (as typified by the USA, Japan, and the EU) is the best resource/scarcity-allocating system.

The definition of “best” is open for debate as well. Anyone asking for my beliefs on what is best should read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then read up on utilitarian philosophy and the golden rule. For the purposes of the rest of this essay I will assume “best” means that all resources are allocated in a manner which leads to an ending of human poverty ASAP, an ending to war, and provision for ensuring sustainable use of finite resources (read: avoiding anthropogenic climate change, preserving and enhancing biodiversity, repairing some of the damage we have already done to the environment and ensuring that in the long run human activity has a neutral effect on the environment).

This is a tall order for any prospective resource-allocation system, but I am confident it can be accomplished. The best book I’ve read on the subject of ensuring continuing and growing prosperity for all whilst maintaining the environment is The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future by James Martin. In the book Martin argues for something called “eco-affluence.” Martin believes that with a combination of freer markets, more education (especially for women), and advanced technologies (most notably extensive use of genetic engineering, nuclear power, and hydroponics) we will be able to simultaneously solve our environmental and humanitarian problems. He makes an excellent case for the fact that they are one and the same problem, and that attempting to solve one whilst disregarding the other will end up exacerbating both.

From an objective perspective it is clear that if a better resource/scarcity-allocating system than liberal democratic capitalism ever emerged then we should immediately adopt it. Some might point to China’s model of state capitalism as an alternative solution, but they miss the point that what matters is quality of life. Most evidence suggests dictatorships are simply institutionally incapable of behaving in a benign manner.

Can you do good simply by aiming to become rich? You create jobs, you increase public tax revenues and hence the amount of money spent on welfare, hospitals, schools, etc. If you do it properly you create an environmentally sustainable business that provides people with a good service. You will probably have a lot of fun once you acquire wealth and then you can give it all away before you die.

There are a couple of ways of looking at problems in the world. One argument would be to say that the problem is corporatism. Whenever the needs and desires of an abstract collective are put above the needs and desires of individuals you get problems. An example that springs to mind is that of environmentalism. Environmentalists have an unfortunate habit of treating people as “the problem” rather than the only reason it is worth solving the problem.

In The Business “the Business” is a mechanism for allowing the flourishing of individuals – or is it a controlling corporate regime?

John Marnard Keynes, the economist whose theories of fiscal stimulus are currently being implemented by our politicians saw capitalism as a means to an end, a multi-generational project for creating wealth, growth, and technological innovation. His concept of capitalism was that it is a necessary evil; a mechanism for creating a greater good.
In his essay The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren Keynes writes that:

The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

It could be said that Keynes is too utopian – and that he doesn’t realise that humanity is inherently acquisitive and irrational. Maybe markets emerge naturally in all human societies?

To return to Iain Banks – A Few Notes on the Culture is well worth reading on the subject of what (I hope) a post-scarcity civilisation looks like.

And also (via Ken MacLeod) this libertarian commentary on the idea of "success" from Brian Micklethwait.

And finally, because this is a blog after all, what about me? What should I do? Start a business? Go study bioinformatics? Go study economics? Go study systems engineering? Write novels?

On writing

My basic problem as regards writing is that I don't have anything to write about.

I'm 19 years old, what experiences have I had to contribute to a book? What do I know about enough to write about.

Even this blog is problematic. I basically write about what I read, and ask questions about it.

I need to go out in the world and experience things. I need to start a business. In fact I need to do all the things Heinlein describes in that quote.

I've got to do all these things before I can write:

A human being should be able to:
change a diaper,
plan an invasion,
butcher a hog,
conn a ship,
design a building,
write a sonnet,
balance accounts,
build a wall,
set a bone,
comfort the dying,
take orders,
give orders,
cooperate,
act alone,
solve equations,
analyze a new problem,
pitch manure,
program a computer,
cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently,
die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

Robert Heinlein

Steal from the best

Because I'm tired and thought this collection of quotations was fun:

A human being should be able to:
change a diaper,
plan an invasion,
butcher a hog,
conn a ship,
design a building,
write a sonnet,
balance accounts,
build a wall,
set a bone,
comfort the dying,
take orders,
give orders,
cooperate,
act alone,
solve equations,
analyze a new problem,
pitch manure,
program a computer,
cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently,
die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

Robert Heinlein

Freeconomy

This is brilliant.

From the BBC website:

"A man has started a two-and-a-half year walk from Bristol to India without any money - to show his faith in humanity.

Equipped with only a few T-shirts, a bandage and spare sandals, former dotcom businessman Mark Boyle is set to cross Europe and the Middle East."

The ideas of the "freeconomy" sounds a lot like anarcho-socialism promulgated in Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division and Charles Stross' Accelerando (also available as a download here).

These are brilliant books, but the fact that someone is willing to experiment with a real Manfred Macx lifestyle is excellent.

Later:

After having thought about this for a while I realise why I am a filthy capitalist and why what Mark Boyle is doing is admirable but ultimately less-than-optimal.

Human beings will always trade and exchange goods and services. All money does is create a communal illusion of the value of a piece of paper or plastic that allows transfer of goods and services to be more efficient.

As a reformed Catholic I am also tempted to point out that freeconomy falls foul of the general question: "what if everyone behaved like this?"

In other words, if everyone decided to up sticks and travel across Eurasia with nothing but a pair of sandals and a can full of B.O. then pretty soon civilization would collapse and millions would starve as a result.

This is why anarcho-communism/syndicalism/socialism doesn't stand a chance. As a very general rule co-operation tends to be of a self-interested nature.

The ethic of reciprocity works. There may be an evolutionary basis for morality. This is heavy stuff.

Anyway good luck to Mr Boyle. I imagine he will be treated as a sort of mendicant monk.