GENESIS

I am back from London where I heard Jeremy Corbyn speak after his election victory. When I am away from this laptop for a few days, I think of something longer to post although it might wander away from Poul Anderson's works, then return to them.

We have noticed Anderson's many Biblical references and maybe the last of them is simply the title of his last sf novel, Genesis. 

"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." (Gen. 1:1)

My commentary: "God" is personified reality. Reality creates appearances. However, reality does not consciously create anything. Instead, it becomes conscious of itself by appearing to itself. It "creates" appearances which are not identical with reality but are appearances of it: different appearances for different sense organs, e.g., our five senses and a bat's echolocation differently perceive the same reality.

Gen. 1:1 does not describe the earliest moment of consciousness. That would have been the first bodily sensation in a mobile marine organism. A sufficiently complex and sensitive organism that needed sustenance began to experience hunger, to feel hungry. A need for sustenance is objective whereas experience and feelings are subjective. The emergence of consciousness is the qualitative transformation of sensitivity into sensation. Similarly, an organism that was becoming harmfully hot or cold began to feel uncomfortably hot or cold. Thus also, conscious motivations began to replace automatic responses.

Long after bodily sensations, came visual perceptions. There is the appearance of a sky above and a ground below, "the heaven and the earth." Sky and ground are separated by an apparently empty space which is really full of air, electromagnetic and cosmic radiations, the gravitational field and any other forms of energy. Reality is continuous although heterogeneous and mostly invisible to itself. As an invisible subject of consciousness, it is an omnipresent "spirit," although not perennially conscious.

(In the Biblical Genesis, creation consists of separating the waters above from the waters below, then moving the waters below to one side so that the dry land appears.)

In Anderson's Genesis, the Terrestrial AI, Gaia, creates within herself "emulations," conscious simulations of past or alternative timelines. Within each such emulation, many conscious subprograms of Gaia experience themselves as individual human beings living entire lifespans in England, Greece or North America etc in particular historical periods. Gaia consciously creates appearances whereas reality unconsciously creates them.

Gaia also re-creates extinct humanity on the Terrestrial surface and communicates with them in the forms of gods. Rightly is this novel entitled Genesis although Gaia's creativity occurs billions of years in our future.