Into Deepest Space And Poul Anderson's Works

In Into Deepest Space, Richard Warboys from Earth and a female spacefarer called Alcyone converse.

(i) Alcyone has found some biological material that is not dextro- but levo-rotatory. At least one biosphere in Poul Anderson's Technic History is dextro but which? Answer: Dido.

(ii) Warboys asks:

"'...why would a soft creature made more or less of the usual kind of polymerized biological molecules think in any different fashion than a computer made from hard metal?'"
-Fred Hoyle & Geoffrey Hoyle, Into Deepest Space (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1977), 12, p. 159.

Anderson points out more than once that a conscious organism responds with its whole body from the cells up, thus applying its entire evolutionary history, whereas hard metal interacts with the surrounding environment merely according to the laws of physics. A computer "thinks," if that term is appropriate, not with its entire being but only according to an inputted program.

(iii) Warboys almost immediately does state a reason why a computer might think differently:

"'A metallic computer might have properties I can't conceive of - if its brain were superconducting, for instance. But with the Yela we know that we're on familiar ground. It has the usual kind of brain.'" (ibid.)

(iv) Warboys continues:

"But god, what a brain - a thousand yards in diameter. No wonder the damn thing is able to outsmart us.'" (ibid.)

He assumes that a spherical Yela spaceship is not a crewed vehicle but the metallic body of a large organic brain, a flying cyborg.

(v) When Alcyone doubts whether a computer can think, Warboys assumes, and she confirms, that she thinks that:

"'...there is a law of nature which requires a structure to possess molecules of a certain kind before it can be conscious, before it can think...'" (ibid.)

They miss a point previously discussed on this blog in relation to Poul Anderson's works. The issue is not what kind of molecules a structure possesses but what it does with its molecules. Any structure, whether metallic or biological, that merely manipulates symbols according to programmed rules is conscious neither of the meanings of the symbols nor of anything else. It may be that only biological structures are able to transform unconscious sensitivity into conscious sensation but that is an empirical question.

(vi) Warboys hypothesizes intelligence on a pulsar:

"'I don't see why life shouldn't be based on nuclear properties as well as on chemical properties... It might be based on nuclear magnetic moments...'" (p. 166)

- as in Anderson's The Avatar. (Scroll down to "4th")