Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor

by Peter Watts

  I gotta say, I found it refreshing. So many of these self-proclaimed Nazi-punchers don’t seem to have a clue.

  It’s not that I have anything against violence per se. I’m no principled pacifist: I’m the guy who openly muses about shooting heads of state and selecting random cops for assassination. If anything, I’m more into the healing power of cathartic violence than most. But even I had to roll my eyes when I saw so many of those same would-be Nazi-punchers retweeting the most popular tweet of all time, courtesy of Barack Obama—a quote lifted from Martin Luther King Jr:

  No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

  As far as I could tell, all the likers and retweeters weren’t even doing this ironically. They actually didn’t seem to grasp the contradiction.

  It only got worse when a bunch of right-wing 4channers repurposed a handful of domestic-violence posters, hoaxing up a fake Antifa campaign that took the Punch-a-Nazi meme and ran with it2. Servers across the globe are still smoking from the outrage engendered by that little prank.

  And yet—once you get past the fact that those images originated not from the left, but from right-wing trolls impersonating them—the hoax does not, in fact, misrepresent the position it’s trolling. It would utterly fail as satire or parody; it doesn’t even exaggerate for effect. It pretty much just echoes what the whole Nazi-punching brigade has been going on about these past weeks, using attractive females instead of homely males to represent the Nazi Other. And yet, people got really pissed about it.

  What’s the take-home message here? That it’s only okay to punch Nazis if they’re male, or unattractive? (A couple weeks back I actually asked this on one of the Facebook threads that was spluttering indignantly about the whole thing; so far, no one’s answered.) Or is the take-home, rather, that what’s said doesn’t matter so much as who’s saying it? When you get right down to it, is this just a matter of skin cream vs. gun control?

  I guess that last reference could use some context.

  It relates to a 2013 study out of Yale by Dan Kahan et al3, a study for which I conveniently happen to have some illustrative slides because I mentioned it in a recent talk at Concordia. Kahan et al showed data to over a thousand people—some right-wingers, some left, some statistically savvy, others functionally innumerate. Sometimes these data showed that a particular skin cream helped cure a rash; sometimes they showed the cream made the rash worse. Sometimes the data showed clearly that gun control reduced crime rate; other times, it showed the exact opposite.

  Here’s the trick: it was all exactly the same data. All Kahan et al did was switch the labels.

  What they discovered was that your ability to correctly interpret these data comes down to how statistically smart you are, regardless of political leanings—but only when you think you’re dealing with rashes and skin creams. If you think you’re looking at gun control data, suddenly politics matter. If you’re a numerically-smart conservative, you’ll have no trouble parsing the data so long as they show that gun control results in increased crime; but if they show that gun control reduces crime, suddenly your ability to read those numbers drops to the level of a complete innumerate. You’ll only be able to interpret the data correctly if they conform to your pre-existing biases.

  Smart liberals are just as stupid as smart conservatives, but in the opposite direction. Show a numerically-savvy left-winger that gun control reduces crime, they’ll be all over it; show them the opposite and, once again, their performance drops to the point where they might as well not have any statistical smarts at all.

  Note that this is not a case of people rejecting a pattern they don’t agree with. This is more subtle, and more pernicious: this is people literally not being able to perceive the pattern to begin with, if it’s too threatening to their beliefs.

  Ideology compromises your ability to do basic math.

  You’ve seen this story a dozen times in a dozen guises. Fitting in with the tribe has more fitness value than independent thought. Conformers leave more genes behind than independent loners, so our brains evolved in service to conformity. In fact, we’ll be lucky if reflexive conformity is as bad as the malfunction gets: recent machine-learning research out of Carnegie Mellon hints that we may actually be wired for genocide4.

  Tribalism Trumps Truth. ’Twas ever thus; a smaller, pettier iteration took place not so long ago in our own so-called SF “community”.

  God knows I’ve no sympathy for Nazis. I have enough trouble keeping my lunch down when I reflect upon the Tea Party. I do have doubts about the effectiveness of Nazi-punching as a coherent strategy, but I’ve never been one to rule out violence as a tool in the box. And as for my friend, she’s on firm footing. She’s not only punched Nazis, she’s punched female ones, and she doesn’t compromise the integrity of her position by retweeting any love-is-the-answer pablum from Obama or anyone else. She’s cool, at least. She knows which side she’s on.

  But all those other incoherent people ranting on Facebook? I just can’t bring myself to line up with people so resistant to cognitive dissonance that they honestly don’t seem to realize they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time.

  I swear to God. It makes me want to punch someone.

  1 See: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/charlottesville-violence-prompts-aclu-change-policy-hate-groups-protesting-guns/, https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazis-charlottesville, https://theintercept.com/2017/08/13/the-misguided-attacks-on-aclu-for-defending-neo-nazis-free-speech-rights-in-charlottesville/, and https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/nyregion/aclu-free-speech-rights-charlottesville-skokie-rally.html?mcubz=0

  2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-41036631

  3 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992

  4 http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/is-tribalism-a-natural-malfunction

  Ass Backwards

  Nowa Fantastyka Dec 2011

  This won’t come as a big surprise to anyone who’s familiar with my fiction: I spend a fair bit of time thinking about consciousness, and what it’s good for. I poked at that question for years while I was trying to get a handle on Blindsight; I entertained and discarded any number of adaptive functions in search of that grand thematic punchline that would end the book. Yes, my protagonist would realize, self-awareness is absolutely essential because of X. The problem was, I couldn’t find an X that stood up under scrutiny; and it took me far too long to realize that Consciousness is good for nothing at all was the scariest and most existentially gut-churning punchline imaginable. It was only a what-if scenario for story-telling purposes. I didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. I’m no expert; I figured that consciousness served some essential function that was blindingly obvious to anyone who actually knew what they were talking about.

  I was as surprised as anyone to discover that this wasn’t actually the case.

  David Rosenthal’s 2008 paper in Neuropsychologia concluded that consciousness was merely a side-effect of brain function, with no useful purpose. A couple of years earlier Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues published a paper in Science showing that consciousness actually impairs complex problem-solving. There were other examples, enough of them to warrant a review article in Discover in which author Carl Zimmer wrote “A small but growing number of researchers are challenging some of the more extreme arguments supporting the primacy of the inner zombie.” Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, the irrelevance of self-awareness had become the mainstream view: those who challenged it were merely a “small but growing” number of researchers, a plucky band of rebels going up against conventional wisdom.

  The issue remains unsettled. In 2008 DeWall et al presented “Evidence that logical reasoning depends on conscious processing”; in 2005 Ezequiel Morsella made the wonder
fully elegant argument that consciousness evolved not for art or science or complex reasoning, but simply to mediate conflicting motor commands sent to the skeletal muscles. (It’s a great, thought-provoking article that I don’t have space to go into here; but you can find it in Psychological Review, 112(4): 1000-1021). Blindsight notwithstanding, I hope these guys are right; I don’t like regarding myself as a wetware parasite in a brain that would be better off without me. I’d welcome grounds to believe otherwise.

  Whenever I’m confronted with the argument that consciousness exists to fulfill a specific function (say, complex problem-solving), I ask myself one crucial question: is it possible to conceive of a system that performs the same function nonconsciously? An affirmative answer doesn’t mean that we don’t use consciousness to perform vital tasks, but it does suggest that there are other ways to get those tasks done. Which makes consciousness not something that evolution produced for a specific purpose, but something evolution used because it just happened to be lying around. Something else could have done the same job just as well, or better. And if there are other ways to get the job done, then consciousness by definition is unnecessary.

  The thing is, when you put it that way, it starts to look as if a lot of these guys are asking the wrong question. Because when it comes to evolution, asking Why did consciousness arise?—asking Why did anything arise?—is meaningless. It implies that evolution allows organisms to adapt to changing needs and conditions. And while that view is very widely held, it is also completely ass-backwards.

  In fact, adaptations show up before the environment changes. They pretty much have to.

  Say you’re a fish in a shrinking pond. Evolution does not say Oh look, the pond is drying up; I guess I’d better grow that fish some lungs. It says Oh look, the pond is drying up. Lucky for that fish over there that he already happens to have a perforated swim bladder; it just might let him breathe air while he humps overland to the next pond. Shame about everyone else.

  Natural selection doesn’t build things from scratch; it selects from pre-existing variations (which, in turn, arise via mutation and genetic mixing). It has to work with what’s already there. So it’s not that the environment changes and evolution catches up by pumping out all these new models; rather, evolution has already produced a range of models before the environment changes, and by chance a couple of them fare better under the new conditions. Those are the models that prosper. It’s not foresight. Evolution is utterly blind and completely stupid; it can neither see the future nor plan for it. It’s just that biological copying mechanisms aren’t perfect, so individuals differ within a clade purely by chance. Those variations act as a hedge against future change.

  When you think in these terms, all the arguments about what consciousness is good for almost seem beside the point. Maybe evolution was looking for some way to manage the skeletal muscles, and repurposed self-awareness for the job the same way it repurposed those thermal-insulating things called feathers for flight. Maybe, if consciousness hadn’t been available, evolution would have used some other approach. Or maybe Rosenthal is right and self-awareness just kind of sits there without serving any useful purpose whatsoever. In any case, these are all questions that become meaningful only after consciousness has already arrived on the scene. Which begs the question: if self-awareness appeared prior to serving any actual function, how did that happen?

  I’m working on that one. Stay tuned.

  And Another Thing (The Thing, 2011)

  Blog Oct 23 2011

  I went to see The Thing the other day, and was treated to perhaps the sharpest slice of satire on democratic capitalism I’d seen in years. It’s the tale of three vacuous charismatic twentysomethings who go to a movie. They line up in their chairs with Cokes in hand, and—well, see for yourself: https://youtu.be/SJ2DoZnQtZI.

  I couldn’t have shown it better: the world transforming itself into a magical place full of wonder and enchantment while these bubbleheaded morons suck back their Big Gulps and stare slack-jawed at a corporate logo in the sky, utterly oblivious to the world-changing events unfolding around them. I don’t think there could be a more scathing commentary packed into such a short span of seconds. The fact that it was most likely inadvertent1 only adds to the tingle; and the fact that no one else in the audience seemed to get it only sharpens the point.

  Too bad the main feature didn’t live up to the short.

  To be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect from this Thingquel. The official reviews were pretty crappy—given my recent overdrive head-down push to get this damn novel done by the month’s end, I seriously considered skipping it entirely—but then again, Carpenter’s 1982 version was savaged by the critics upon its release, and is today recognised as a classic. Also, as most of you know, I have a certain emotional connection to the franchise. So I put the back end of Dumbspeech away for the afternoon, braced myself with a couple of pints, and headed into the multiplex.

  To start with, it’s not as terrible as some folks are saying. There’s a moment or two of something approaching true pathos on the journey. The variation on the blood-test scene, while not as dramatic as in the original, makes sense. One scene near the end contains either a nice moment of deliberate ambiguity, or a memo from the producers to the effect that the production was going over budget and they’d have to scale back the CGI on that last bit (I’m talking about the earring scene, for those of you in the know). And speaking of CGI, I’m not on board with those who decried its use here; had Rob Bottin had access to that technology back when he was doing Carpenter’s film, you can be damn sure he would’ve gone to town with it. The ending of the movie does bolt quite nicely onto the beginning of the ’82 film; and at least I was never bored.

  But the fact is, when I first saw The Thing back in 1982 I came away thinking that I had seen a classic. I didn’t care how many critics shat on it; I knew what I’d seen, and I thought it rocked, and in the three decades since my view has remained unshaken. This movie? No fucking way.

  For one thing, there are just too many similarities between the two films for me to accept that this is truly a prequel and not just a remake. This goes beyond the fact that both films feature camps mysteriously well-equipped with flamethrowers. Too many plot elements have been cut-and-pasted from one to the other; the direction and cinematography of too many 2011 scenes seem to have dropped through a wormhole from 1982. In both movies, characters under suspicion are locked in the shed; in both, they escape by digging through the floor. Both movies feature scenes in which a group of increasingly-paranoid characters bicker and argue over what to do about the potentially-thinged cast members trapped outside in the storm, and in both cases the argument is cut short when said potential-thingers break into the main building through a window. The 2011 Thing has a scene in which parka’d survivors cluster in the dark around a pile of thingly remains, lit from behind by the lights of their snowcats and wondering how to tell human from imitation; even the framing of that shot was so spot-on that for a moment I actually wondered if they hadn’t just spliced in footage from the ’82 version as a cost-cutting measure.

  Some of this may have been unavoidable. After all, there’s a logistical limit to how divergent scenarios can be when both involve the same shape-shifting alien infiltrating isolated Antarctic research stations. And remakes are not in and of themselves a bad thing; except in this case the director is on record as explicitly stating he didn’t want to do a remake because the original Carpenter movie was “perfect.” There’s no point in redoing something unless you bring a new perspective to the material. Eric Heisserer’s script gives us nothing that Carpenter didn’t do better.

  There are other problems, deriving not from the use of CGI in principle so much as from the temptations that result when such technology is too easily invoked: the desire to show cool squick trumps basic storytelling logic. For example, we are shown early on that the Thing can fragment at a whim. An arm will drop off, sprout centipede legs, race across the
floor and hump some poor bastard’s face like the facehugger from Alien. Pieces chopped in half will skitter autonomously across the wall, meet up again after work at Starbucks, and reintegrate without a second thought. Given that, we should never see a scene in which the protagonist finds refuge in a space that’s too small for the alien to follow her into; all the Thing has to do is split into smaller pieces. Except we do, and it doesn’t.

  I’ve also spent the past thirty years assuming that the burned monstrosity MacReady found at the Norwegian camp had been killed in the process of transformation: an alien caught with its pants down and dispatched before it had a chance to zip back up. Now we find out that that wasn’t the case at all. The Thing morphed into some weird deformity with two upside-down, half-fused faces, a variety of spliced-together bug/human limbs, and a gait so awkward the damn thing could have been a poster child for spinal meningitis—and it just kinda leaves itself like that, spending the next ten minutes stalking redshirts through the halls. I mean, isn’t the whole point of the Thing that it blends in? And even if it did decide that the whole imitation riff had run its course and it was time to come out fighting, wouldn’t it choose some kick-ass predatory phenotype that was, you know, integrated? Why choose an ill-fitting hodgepodge of twisted body parts that wouldn’t be caught dead together outside some cheap carnival freak show?

  Well, obviously, because it looks cool.

  Leaving the theatre, I didn’t feel that I’d completely wasted my money—but only because I can write the ticket price off as a tax deduction. I cannot in honesty recommend this film to anyone without the same option. That said, though, I retain a certain fondness for van Heijningen Jr.’s vision; it may tank on its own merits, but it’s certainly rebooted interest in my own take on the story2. io9 posted a glowing piece on “The Things,” calling me a “master of scifi mindfuckery”3. Simon Pegg tweeted its praises. When the movie actually premiered, the twitterverse filled up with don’t-waste-your-time-on-the-remake-read-Peter-Watts’s-story-instead messages, a signal boosted by folks ranging from a World Federation Pro Wrestler to the front man for Anthrax. Last I heard it had even landed on the front page of IMDB, which presumably gave Clarkesworld’s hit count a nice boost.