Downloading

Poul Anderson, Harvest Of Stars, 3, p. 45.

Poul Anderson describes how a personality might be downloaded:

the subject lies semi-conscious under "electrophasing";

special artificial molecules invade and pervade his bloodstream and cerebrospinal fluid;

they examine him cell by cell;

resonances with external fields recover the data;

hypercomputers interpret and order the findings;

the subject is treated to rid him of the artificial molecules and to return him to normal;

designing, testing, redesigning and retesting produce a program or download of the subject's memories, inclinations, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, outlook, thinking style and awareness;

the download is mapped into the software of a neural network which in turn maps the subject's unique brain.

Although some computer language is used, it is clear that the neural network is an artificial brain, not a digital computer, and that the download is a duplicated personality, not a computer program.

Unconscious Artificial Intelligence

I have been misunderstanding something. Computers can be called "intelligent" if they play chess, invest money, control air traffic, fly drones, drive cars etc. I called such computer operations the simulation, not the duplication, of intelligence because I associated intelligence with consciousness, in particular with reflective self-consciousness. However, intelligent organisms are conscious whereas so far "intelligent" artifacts are not.

But science fictional AIs, e.g., in Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars Tetralogy and Genesis, are conscious. Sometimes Anderson refers, inappropriately I think, to consciousness-level computers. At other times, he recognizes that a conscious artifact would have to be (something like) an artificial neural network, not a computer. Meanwhile, in the real world, artificial intelligence advances without becoming conscious. The sf identification of AI with consciousness, indeed with superhuman consciousness, seems to be a mistake.

Identities

Neuronic events generate mental events. This has become a cliche but in fact is a very recent scientific discovery. Electrically firing neurons generate sensations which would not otherwise exist. Complicated electrochemical interactions between electrically firing neurons generate thoughts and personalities which would not otherwise exist.

(i) If person A's brain duplicated the interactions in person B's brain, then A would think that he was B, complete with B's memories, motivations etc. 

(ii) If an artificial neural network duplicated B's neuronic interactions, then that network would reproduce B's consciousness and sense of identity.

(iii) If some other technology exactly duplicated the effects of neuronic interactions, then that technology would generate self-conscious individuals maybe thinking that they were living on Earth in a particular historical period. 

(i) happens in Tim Power's The Anubis Gates. 

(ii) happens in Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars.

(iii) happens in Anderson's Genesis.

In The Anubis Gates, a character seeks immortality by repeatedly projecting his personality into someone else's body while at the same time displacing that person's personality into his own abandoned and soon-to-die body. 

The idea that personalities can be generated and duplicated in these ways links these three novels.

Demetrian Economics And Ecology

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars (New York, 1993):

"A phone chimed. Every room had one; the colony was glutted with nanotech and assembly-complex wares, including robot workers. Kyra sometimes wondered if any commercial enterprise would evolve on Demeter." (p. 437)

Commerce might or might not evolve although it seems that there is no need for it. The founder of the Demetrian colony, Anson Guthrie, was born in 1970 (so he is 42 as I write), an era when he was able to express himself freely as an individual by becoming an entrepreneur and founding what eventually became an interplanetary company, Fireball.

Later, not the biological Guthrie but his personality downloaded into an artificial neural network controlling a succession of robot bodies is no less a free individual as it cooperates with hundreds of human colonists to terraform the extrasolar planet Demeter. Helped in this planetary enterprise by nanotech and robots, they need not revive commerce in order to produce and exchange, eg, buildings, furniture or telephones.

Accepting such artifacts as given, they can instead operate not economically but ecologically. The equivalent of a planetary nervous system emerges when chemically, electronically, photonically and mechanically interconnected symbiotic molecular structures with self-revising programs directed by a central artificial intelligence have had time to grow within exogenetically born organisms that had been transported across space as frozen seeds or genome maps, then seeded in soil ground from Demetrian rocks by nanotechnology.   

Artificial Consciousness

At some evolutionary stage, an organism lacking nutrition began to feel hungry and an organism that was hot began to feel hot. Inchoate discomfort affected action. A hungry organism was more likely to ingest. A dangerously and uncomfortably hot organism was more likely to withdraw from the source of heat. Hunger and hotness are bodily sensations. Hunger is internal. Hotness is on the surface. Brains also organize visual and auditory sensations into perceptions of discrete objects. Organisms with central nervous systems become conscious at every point of their interaction with an environment and their experience is affected by their own internal processes. 

I think that the most fundamental qualitative differences are those between existence and nonexistence and between consciousness and unconsciousness. The two most important turning points were the beginning of the universe and being becoming conscious. However, there are also qualitative differences within consciousness: sensation; perception; conceptualization; abstraction; reflection; contemplation. Even if an artificial neural network becomes conscious, will it be able to duplicate every aspect of organic self-consciousness? See the combox here.

Two Kyras

This post will loop back to an Andersonian issue although it kicks off elsewhere.

A Romany fortune teller told me that I will live for another twenty-three years. (Given my present age, that is not bad.) However, despite her apparent certainty in this matter, I cannot be sure that I will live longer even than the next twenty-four hours. But of one thing I am certain. If I do survive for any length of time, then I will do so as a single spatiotemporally continuous self-conscious individual. In other words, there will be only one person tomorrow (or the day after) who will remember having been me today. Obvious, you might think.

But suppose that there were going to be two people, A and B, each equally possessing all of my memories and sense of identity. (Either I split in two or I am perfectly duplicated so that there is no detectable difference between the original and the duplicate.) Would it make sense for me now to ask, "Which will I be, A or B?" No. I would become both although neither would be the other. If A and B inhabit divergent parallel universes, then there is no problem whereas, if they coexist in the same universe, then some issues arise.

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars, the organic Kyra Davis living on Earth:

knows that her personality will be recorded and downloaded into an artificial neural network;

knows that, after the downloading, she will continue to live on Earth while at the same time a self-conscious artificial intelligence with her memories and sense of identity will begin an interstellar voyage;

illogically thinks that there is a fifty-fifty chance that she, the pre-download Kyra, will be the version of Kyra that remains on Earth, knowing that she has done something worthwhile by donating her download to an extra-solar colony.

There is not a fifty-fifty chance but a 100% certainty that the Kyra who is on Earth will be the version of Kyra that remains on Earth. However, the download in the spaceship remembers thinking that there was a fifty-fifty chance... She, the download, is not the one who did something worthwhile but the one who must fulfill the vow to remain in existence long enough to help found the extra-solar colony.

AI But No Immortality

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars (New York, 1993), a downloaded copy of Anson Guthrie's mind is kept in an artificial neural network after his death. Downloads are rare because most people would not like to be a machine, therefore know that their copy would not like it either. A character comments on downloads:

" 'No deliverance from personal death.' No deliverance anywhere in sight, after it turned out that aging was built into the human genome. You could improve matters only up to a point." (p. 161)

Thus, in this imaginary future there will be neither mutant immortals (see Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years) nor antithanatics (see his World Without Stars) but there could be anti-senescence (the same author's History Of Technic Civilization). As I suggested  in an earlier post about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Anderson almost systematically explores every possible answer to a question and every possible implication to be derived from an sf premise.

Guthrie the download is sceptical about the prospect of AI although he realises that hardware programmed to operate like a downloaded personality would be AI and the latter does come onstage later in the novel but I have not reread that far yet.

So this novel's answers are yes to AI but no to bodily immortality.

The Serendipity Computer

See "Falkayn's Interview With The Serendipity Computer," here.

I said that certain processes:

electrons;
quanta;
charges;
absence of charges;
distorted molecules;
fields -

- are not conscious. Two questions that come up are:

(i) How do you know that they are not conscious?
(ii) What is conscious?

(i) We do not have to prove a negative. Anyone asserting a positive proposition has to state reasons for it. I confidently assert that an inanimate object is not conscious first because there is no reason to suppose that it is and secondly because every property of the object can be adequately described without ascribing consciousness to it. In practice, we assume that a chair is not conscious - until we start discussing philosophy. We can make up a story about a clockwork toy soldier obeying the order to march to war but we know that that story is a fiction because every movement of the toy can be fully explained without any reference to consciousness within the toy itself. Every statement that we make can be revised in the light of further evidence. Thus, if a chair begins to complain when it is kicked, then I will start to revise my opinion that it is not conscious.

(ii) Interacting neurons somehow generate consciousness. Thus, if artificial neurons exactly duplicate the functions of organic neurons, then they too will be conscious. The computing process is long lists of 0's and 1's, offs and ons, not an artificial neural network.

"Going To And Fro In The Earth"

Poul Anderson is perfectly capable of slipping a Biblical phrase past us without our noticing it although the grandeur of the language makes its impact, nevertheless.

"Once in his drifting to and fro across Earth, Jesse Nicol found a quivira left over from olden times."
-Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire (New York, 1997), Prologue, p. 9.

"Trouble is loose, and again there is need for me to go to and fro in the world."
-op. cit., Chapter 1, p. 33.

And the LORD said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
-copied from here.

First I noticed that the phrase used of Jesse Nicol at the beginning of the Prologue was immediately re-used of our old acquaintance, Venator, at the beginning of Chapter 1, then I thought that it sounded familiar...

And, in this Biblical context, is the name "Jesse" significant?

Nicol drifts to and fro because he is aimless, or at best seeking an aim, whereas Venator will go to and fro purposefully because he wants to:

"...do my work as soon as may be and return to the Oneness." (ibid.)

Nicol appears in this one volume whereas Venator had been in the previous volume but is now biologically dead and will have to go to and fro as a human personality downloaded into an artificial neural network in a robotic body. Each future history series carries its own background material informing later installments.

A Philosophical Basis For SF?

A theory of history is useful when writing a future history series. Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization refers to a cyclical historical theory propounded by John K. Hord.

A theory of human nature is useful when speculating about human capabilities and prospects on a cosmic time-scale. Anderson's Harvest Of Stars future history presupposes that the memories and sense of identity of a human personality can be reproduced either in an artificial neural network or in a newly grown organic body, thus that consciousness is materially based, thus further that personal identity is not dependent on any unique immaterial soul.

Science fiction is about change. An sf writer should not merely project past or future societies into future periods - unless he can present a good reason to do this. And, even then, many details at least should differ.

I think that we can say more about human consciousness than just that it is materially based. Human beings are differentiated as a species by the fact they have changed their environment with hands and brain and have changed themselves in the process and continue to do so. They have changed themselves into homo sapiens through labor, language and abstract thought. This species can either destroy or transform an entire planet. Human beings are dynamic and plastic, not static. "Human nature" means the nature of humanity but should not imply any unchanging essence although it is commonly used to mean the latter.

With technologically produced abundant wealth, there will no longer be any need to accumulate, hoard, compete, fight or steal any more than we currently fight for the air that we breathe whereas, if even air comes to be in short supply, that will be a different matter. At present, poverty and deprivation cause violence which is ideologically rationalized in terms of received beliefs that otherwise would be of merely historical interest.

So what do I expect for the further future? Either extinction or a very different and much better world. However, I am not an sf writer so meanwhile I commend Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars and Genesis.

Addendum: People born into a completely different culture and brought up to live in a completely different way will not be people as we know them now. Those who are used to peace and prosperity have no reason to resort to crime or terrorism. 

Forms Of Intelligence

Intelligence, in two senses of the word, proliferates in different forms even if it does not originate on different planets.

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, a Chereionite spies on Terrans for the Merseians and an Ythrian spies on Aeneans both for his own Domain and for the Terrans (Terrans and Aeneans are the same species) whereas, in Anderson's Harvest The Fire, a download spies on an Intellect, a Terran and three Lunarians for the cybercosm but, in the latter case, the various entities share a common origin because Intellects and Lunarians are metamorphed Terrans, the download is the personality of a dead Terran preserved in an artificial neural network and the cybercosm is a global AI created by Terrans.

Thus, in the second scenario, diverse forms of intelligence emanate from a single planet. In fact, might genetic engineers create organisms corresponding to various extraterrestrial species as described in works of sf?

The Future Begins

Poul Anderson wrote so many "future histories" - several series and one single novel - which in turn can be favorably compared with so many similarly themed series or single works by other authors that a reader's attention can be diverted from Anderson's vast canon of works as such to the literary genre of future histories in general. See, on the Science Fiction blog:

Future Histories
Future Histories II
Four More Future Histories

Returning to Volume I of Anderson's four volume Harvest Of Stars future history, we find that Chapter 10 Database is a flashback to Anson Guthrie's bodily life before his personality was downloaded into an artificial neural network.

Since Guthrie was born in 1970, he would have been forty eight in 2018 so I will reread this chapter with interest while looking out for any clues as to Guthrie's age. Although most of this series is set centuries in our future, the life of its leading character overlaps with ours. Yet again, the future begins now. (Wells' Time Traveler tells his dinner guests how he traveled into that strange territory, "tomorrow.")

"Fenn Woke"

Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars (New York, 1997) ends with a two word chapter: "FENN WOKE." (p. 403) What does this mean?

Fenn has been shot dead but his brain has been preserved and its contents will be downloaded into an artificial neural network that will be carried at sub-light speed to an extrasolar colony where technology will allow Fenn's personality to be re-incarnated in a newly grown human body. Does "FENN WOKE" mean that all this has happened or just that the download has been activated? I think that the former is implied but the latter is possible.

Does the conclusion of The Fleet Of Stars feel like a double anticlimax? The reported galactic civilisation does not, after all, exist. Further, not only has the cybercosm tried to deceive the entire human race but its attempted deception has been exposed quite quickly. Not that I wanted it to succeed but the cybercosm is now revealed to be both dishonest and incompetent. This means that:

I do not think that it lives up to its self-description of "pure intellect" - surely deception should be as unacceptable to it as violence?;

Anderson had carefully preserved a moral ambiguity about the cybercosm's interaction with human society but the question is now answered decisively - the cybercosm has become manipulative, therefore harmful, unless, of course, it is obliged to return to its original role of merely helping the majority who "...want to keep on in their familiar lives." (p. 401)

Download Guthrie calls the attempted deception a "...conspiracy." (p. 396) Chuan, a man who interfaces and communes with the cybercosm, replies that "conspiracy" is "...an ugly word..." (p.396) It is accurate. Chuan also describes "...organic beings..." as "...limited, fallible, reckless, greedy, often hideously cruel -" (p. 396) We need not remain so. Indeed, "greedy" is a one-sided cliche when we consider that cooperation is basic to humanity and that people, as Anderson shows, are capable of generosity, love and forethought.

Such organic beings, according to Chuan, "...should not run loose in the universe." (p. 397) But they have wrought wonders at Proserpina and beyond. Chuan refers to "...warriors, hunters, butchers, bandits, carousers, criminals, grovelers in superstition, blood sacrificers...leftover animality." (p. 399) Again, one sided. Humanity can certainly transcend superstition and blood sacrifice!

The outcome is favourable from Anderson's point of view. Observation of the galactic centre has not revealed life or intelligence but has shown that the cybercosm's theory of everything was incomplete so there is more to be learned. Some people will go back into space. The Lunarians will be able to negotiate enough antimatter to fuel interstellar journeys. (The Lunarians are unpredictable but that cannot be helped.)

Reshaping

"The Sensitive Man," IX.

The captured villains will be imprisoned for kidnapping. When Elena, the FBI agent, discusses this outcome with Dalgetty, she wants them to be imprisoned but:

"Her eyes rested on him, unsure, a little frightened. 'Federal prison psychiatrists have Institute training,' she murmured. 'You'll see that his personality is reshaped your way, won't you?'

"'As far as possible,' Simon said." (p. 154)

No! Imprison kidnappers and offer them voluntary rehabilitation programs but otherwise respect their mental integrity. If imprisoned, I would want to be helped, educated and trained but not reshaped. The UN Secret Service and the Institute operate on an "the end justifies the means" basis that will be their undoing.

In Anderson's Harvest of Stars, Anson Guthrie exists only as a personality recorded in an artificial neural network. One of the most reprehensible crimes of Guthrie's enemies is that they produce extra copies of Guthrie loyal to them! Fortunately, these do not last long.

In Media Res

After an "EPILOGUE," unaccountably presented first, on pp. 1-2, Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars plunges into the midst of Andersonian action which then consumes most of the novel - although it is eventually transcended. Was this the right place to start?

For over a century, the Fireball company has been led not by its long dead founder, Anson Guthrie, but by his personality downloaded into a mobile artificial neural network. When the Avantist government occupies Fireball's North American headquarters, the company smuggles the download into the country so that he can mastermind strategy, using secure local lines. However, a Fireball man, Washington Packer, Director of Kamehameha Spaceport, learns of an imminent second crackdown that will occupy all company premises. The Security Police even have a list of half a dozen places where the download might be. Packer, not knowing where Guthrie is but working from the same list of possible locations, sends one employee to each of the locations. Kyra Davis becomes the one who must carry Guthrie in a daypack back to the spaceport. This plot premise generates many pages of hide and seek. I prefer the later parts of the novel. 

Rich Men

How do very rich men conduct themselves, particularly in public? To answer this question, we consult the news and whatever fiction we happen to be reading so my answers are -

current news: Musk and Trump (stranger than fiction);

Jane Austen: Mr. Darcy overcomes his pride and prejudice to propose to Elizabeth Bennet;

Ian Fleming: Hugo "Temerity" Drax writes to the Queen about national defence whereas Auric Goldfinger keeps in the background;

Poul Anderson: Nicholas van Rijn has a high public profile, leads the Polesotechnic League independents and becomes both a legend in his own lifetime and a folk hero or villain on many planets for centuries afterwards.

Quite a mixed bag.

Second Thoughts Department: Bob Kane's Bruce Wayne became a costumed vigilante, Robert Heinlein's DD Harriman sold the Moon and Poul Anderson's Anson Guthrie had his personality preserved in an artificial neural network - more rich men doing strange things.

Guthrie In The Bionet

Harvest Of Stars, 54.

Nero Valencia has rescued Kyra Davis's son, Hugh, from drowning and awaits rescue in their wrecked boat. A new voice addresses and advises Valencia on the radio. Download Anson Guthrie, spending time in the bionet, had been in tune with a nearby tree when he heard Valencia's emergency call. Guthrie has been a man, then a personality downloaded into an artificial neural network using robot bodies and now experiences life in a new way. The Demetrian ecology has become a single organism sometimes directed by consciousnesses like Guthrie's. He has moved even further away from his human origins. Some sf characters live indefinitely in their original bodies whereas others, like Guthrie, find alternative ways to survive.

Bodiless Brain And Mental Man

See Scientific Survival.

CS Lewis: a guillotined head kept alive by scientific apparatus;

James Blish: a brain kept alive in a case;

Poul Anderson: a personality downloaded into an artificial neural network.

First the head, then the brain, then the personality.

Julian May adds another brain. Jon Remillard's cancerous body must be systematically amputated until all that is left is an artificially maintained brain, communicating telepathically. Then that brain psychokinetically creates a body around it. Jack is a prochronistic Mental Man. I should have included him in "Scientific Survival."

"Let Words Stand In"

Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire, Chapter 1.

It is thirty years since Venator died, thus not very long after the events of the previous volume, The Stars Are Also Fire. Having been returned to individuality, Venator must already have been re-downloaded into an artificial neural network if not yet into a robot body?

By direct linkage, he converses with an aspect of the central intelligence. That aspect:

can merge with many other minds as necessary;

is what it is now only because this is deemed sufficient for the present purpose;

is distantly joined to the apex of the Teramind "...through nodes of ascending power..." (p. 34) like a finger joined to an arm and thus to a body.

The cybercosmic perception of transient, variable individuality might be similar to that of the Didonians?

The omniscient narrator informs the reader that Venator and the aspect do not really speak but exchange information and thoughts at nearly light-speed. Then, rather awkwardly, in my opinion, this narrator descends from his omniscient status to become one of us when he advises:

"But let words stand in for that lightninglike discourse. It is not altogether a false analogy." (p. 35)

But it is an analogy. The narrator, instead of remaining as far as possible invisible is directly addressing his audience in the imperative mood and making us realize that the verbal exchange that we are about to read does not really happen. In order to differentiate it from audible speech, the words are not enclosed inside quotation marks ("...") but preceded by a dash (-...).

Raising The Dead

Text on pages 141-145 of Poul Anderson's fantasy novel The Broken Sword (London, 1977) has, very different, features in common both with his fantasy novel A Midsummer Tempest and with his science fiction novel The Stars Are Also Fire.

The feature common to A Midsummer Tempest is that in this passage the dialogue becomes blank verse, although here it is laid out as such, not disguised as prose. Further, this verse is particularly powerful. I found it to be so on a first reading and have confirmed that it is so by rereading. The scene is a difficult, bitter family reunion at a howe or burial mound.

The living characters are:

the hero of the novel, Skafloc;
his mother, Aelfrida;
his sister, Freda (although, until this point in the narrative, Skafloc and Freda have been lovers, not suspecting their close kinship).

The dead characters are:

Skafloc's father, Orm;
his brothers, Ketil and Asmund.

The dialogue, extracted from its prose narrative, can be re-presented as drama. I can convey its poetic power only by quoting it in full.

Skafloc:

Waken, chieftains,
Fallen warriors!
Skafloc calls you,
sings you wakeful.
I conjure you,
come on hell-road.
Rune-bound dead men,
rise and answer!

Grave shall open.
Gang forth, deathlings!
Fallen heroes,
fare to earth now.
Stand forth, bearing
swords all rusty,
broken shields,
and bloody lances.

Orm:

Who dares burst
the mound, and bid me
rise from death
by runes and song-spells?
Flee the dead man's
fury, stranger!
Let the deathling
lie in darkness.

Skafloc:

Terror shall not
turn my purpose.
Runes shall bind you.
Rise and answer!
In your ribs
may rats build nests,
if you keep hold
on what I call for!

Orm:

Deep is dreamless
death-sleep, warlock.
Wakened dead
are wild with anger.
Ghosts will take
a gruesome vengeance
when their bones
are hailed from barrow.

Ketil:

Gladly see we
gold-decked woman.
Sun-bright maiden,
sister, welcome!
Ashy, frozen
are our hollow
breasts with grave-cold.
But you warm us.

Orm to Aelfrida:

Dreamless was not
death, but frightful!
Tears of yours, dear,
tore my heart out.
Vipers dripped
their venom on me
when in death
I heard you weeping.

This I bid
you do, beloved:
live in gladness,
laughing, singing.
Death is then
the dearest slumber,
wrapped in peace,
with roses round me.

Skafloc to Ketil:

Speak forth, deathling.
Say me whither
Bolverk giant
bides, the swordsmith.
Tell me further,
truly, warrior,
what will make
him hammer for me.

Ketil:

Ill your searching
is, you warlock!
Worst of evil
will it fetch you.
Seek not Bolverk.
Sorrow brings he.
Leave us now,
while life is left you.

North in Jotunheim,
nigh to Utgard,
dwells the giant,
deep in mountain.
Sidhe will give
a ship to find him.
Tell him Loki
talks of sword-play.

Asmund:

Bitter, cruel -
Brother, sister -
fate the Norns
made fall upon you.
Wakened dead men
wish you had not
wrought the spell
that wrings the truth out.

Law of men
is laid on deathlings.
Hard it is
to hold unto it.
But the words
must bitter leave me:
Skafloc, Freda
is your sister.

Welcome, brother,
valiant warrior.
All unwitting
are you, sister.
But your love
has broken kinship.
Farewell, children,
fey and luckless!

Freda must leave Skafloc just as Gratillonius in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King of Ys cannot marry his daughter. The Christian and Mithraic law against incest overrides both elven fecklessness and the heathen gods' decrees.

In The Stars Are Also Fire, Dagny Begnac, a Lunar political leader, allows her personality to be recorded or "downloaded" in an artificial neural network - like becoming a conscious computer. Thus, her leadership outlasts her biological death although she wants the download program to be wiped when her task is completed. Instead, her son merely switched the program off. Many years later, it was reactivated to mental confusion but answered a question and was then granted permanent oblivion: an uncanny technological echo of Skafloc's spell to raise the dead.