COGNIITIVE CHAINS PT. 2

 This essay is loosely related to the 2018 essay through this statement therein:

For me, man is "free" only in the sense that he can imagine any number of situations that may (or may not) contribute to his real freedom. The same man is "in chains" because he will always be faced with circumstances arising from simply being a corporeal entity subject to all sorts of realistic limitations.

The initiating subject of this essay, however, is a passage from a 2022 science fiction novel I don't intend to review, one which has nothing to do with the earlier essay's assertions on Rousseau, though I have a feeling that author Ray Nayler would be generally receptive to Rousseau's concept of freedom, rather than mine.

THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA is the "zoomer" version of a 1930s SF-lecture novel, in which the author uses the bare bones of a fictional conflict as a means of illustrating said author's theories on science, philosophy, history et al. I was not engaged enough by MOUNTAIN to get more than a general overview of the story, which I blame on the fact that the author's characters are little more than sounding boards for his lectures-- a failing I detect in most of the modern SF-books I've attempted to read. So I will not attempt to move this MOUNTAIN with any analytical review. But in the one passage I mentioned, Nayler does make a statement about the human imagination that I found loosely comparable with the one I made above.

In the lecture about to be cited, female biologist Ha Nguyen has just witnessed an intelligent android, name of Evrim, rage against a third party who regarded Evrim as a "robot," which offended Evrim deeply. Ha seeks out the android to explain her take on language and humanity.

Language doesn't just allow us to describe the world as it exists. It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider. Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become. Imagining what is not there is the key to our creativity. It is what no non-linguistic animal has. With that power, we are so much freer to act in new ways-- to innovate, to invent, to view our situations from a thousand angles and find a new way out. But we can also come up with a thousand absurdities, out of line with the truth. 

After going on a little longer about things Ha considers "absurdities," she pronounces Evrim to be human despite his artificial origins.

You're more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn't matter what you are made of, or how you are born. That isn't what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world.

This is certainly a more sophisticated argument for the sentience of the many artificial life-forms that have appeared throughout science fiction from Adam Link to Hal-9000 to Data from STAR TREK, none of which, as I recall, seek to bestow humanity on human-looking robots because of their ability to participate in "the human symbolic world" in all its ambivalence. In fact, the argument has more potential complexity than the main point of the novel, in which biologist Ha seeks to find out if Earth's seas harbor a species of intelligent octopus. 

Now, because the speaker is a scientist, it's a given that her character will not consider a number of "absurdities" that a pluralist like myself would consider. That said, the list of three "impossible things" cited by Ha surprisingly does not include religious belief, which as I recall is barely referenced in MOUNTAIN. But the list of absurdities DOES include such ideas as (1) we live in a computer simulation, (2) consciousness is an illusion, and (3) that Holy Writ of Atheism: "we are nothing more than blind chemical reactions without any 'real' awareness or free will." I imagine I would have found it more interesting had Nayler chosen to explore his concept of free will, rather than spending most of the novel noodling over his intelligent race of octopi.

As authorial lectures go, this one is one of the best I've read in a long time, much better than anything in another "Big Thoughts" novel I reviewed here the same year I wrote COGNITIVE CHAINS: Kim Stanley Robinson's 1985 MEMORY OF WHITENESS. (The word "whiteness" in the title related to a science-fictional "white energy"phenomenon, as opposed to its current reverse-racist connotation.) 

So even if I didn't feel like the MOUNTAIN was worth climbing, I did esteem one of the author's intellectual "foothills." But I also have some cavils against one of Nayler's applications of his symbolic world in terms of his implied political stance-- cavils I'll detail in the upcoming post.