Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

by Peter Watts

  There could be a sort of psychiatric Sturgeon’s Law at play here, though; the fact that 90% of such studies are crap doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them are. Brain scans of “possessed” DID bodies show distinctly different profiles than those of professional actors trained to merely behave as though they were: the parts of the brain that lit up in actors are associated with imagination and empathy, while those lighting up in DID patients are involved with stress and fear responses3. I’m not entirely convinced—can actors, knowingly faking a condition, really stand in for delusional people who sincerely believe in their affliction? Still, the stats are strong; and it’s hard to argue with a different study in which the visual centers of a sighted person’s brain apparently shut down in a sighted person when a “blind” alter took the controls.

  Also let’s not forget the whole split-brain phenomenon. We know that different selves can exist simultaneously within a single brain, at least if it’s been partitioned in some way.

  This is the premise upon which Kastrup bases his model of Reality Itself.

  You’ve probably heard of quantum entanglement. Kastrup argues that entangled systems form a single, integrated, and above all irreducible system. Also that, since everything is ultimately entangled to something else, the entire inanimate universe is “one indivisible whole,” as irreducible as a quark. He argues—let me quote him here directly, so you won’t think I’m making this up—

  “that the sole ontological primitive there is cosmic phenomenal consciousness . . . Nothing exists outside or independent of cosmic consciousness. Under this interpretation one should say that the cosmos is constituted by phenomenality, as opposed to bearing phenomenality. In other words, here the perceivable cosmos is in consciousness, as opposed to being conscious.”

  Why would he invoke such an apparently loopy argument? How are we any further ahead in understanding our consciousness by positing that the universe itself is built from the stuff? Kastrup is trying to reconcile the “combination problem” of bottom-up panpsychism: even if you accept that every particle contains a primitive conscious “essence,” you’re still stuck with explaining how those rudiments combine to form the self-reflective sapience of complex objects like ourselves. Kastrup’s answer is to start at the other end. Instead of positing that consciousness emerges from the very small and working up to sentient beings, why not posit that it’s a property of the universe as a whole and work down?

  Well, for one thing, because now you’ve got the opposite problem: rather than having to explain how little particles of proto-consciousness combine to form true sapience, now you have to explain how some universal ubermind splits into separate entities (i.e., if we’re all part of the same cosmic consciousness, why can’t I read your mind? Why do you and I even exist as distinct beings?).

  This is where DID comes in. Kastrup claims that the same processes that give rise to multiple personalities in humans also occur at the level of the whole Universe, that all of inanimate “reality” consists of Thought, and its animate components—cats, earthworms, anything existing within a bounded metabolism—are encysted bits of consciousness isolated from the Cosmic Self:

  “We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the revealed appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the revealed appearances of other dissociated alters.”

  And what about Reality before the emergence of living organisms?

  “I submit that, before its first alter [i.e., separate conscious entity] ever formed, the only phenomenal contents of cosmic consciousness were thoughts.”

  In case you’re wondering (and you damn well should be): yes, the Journal of Consciousness Studies is peer-reviewed. Respectable, even. Heavy hitters like David Chalmers and Daniel Dennet appear in its pages. And Kastrup doesn’t just pull claims out of his ass; he cites authorities from Augusto to von Neumann to back up his quantum/cosmic entanglement riff, for example. Personally, I’m not convinced—I think I see inconsistencies in his reasoning—but not being a physicist, what would I know? I haven’t read the authorities he cites, and wouldn’t understand them if I did. This Universal Split-Brain thing reads like Philip K. Dick on a bad day; then again, couldn’t you say the same about Schrödinger’s Cat, or the Many Worlds hypothesis?

  Still, reading Kastrup’s paper, I have to keep reminding myself: Peer-reviewed. Respectable. Daniel Dennet.

  Of course, repeat that too often and it starts to sound like a religious incantation.

  To an SF writer, this is obviously a gold mine.

  Kastrup’s model is epic creation myth: a formless thinking void, creating sentient beings In Its Image. The idea that Thou Art God (Stranger in a Strange Land, anyone?), that God is everywhere—that part of the paradigm reads like it was lifted beat-for-beat out of the Abrahamic religions. The idea that “The world is imagined” seems lifted from the Dharmic ones.

  The roads we might travel from this starting point! Here’s just one: at our local Earthbound scale of reality DID is classed as a pathology, something to be cured. The patient is healthy only when their alters have been reintegrated. Does this scale up? Is the entire universe, as it currently exists, somehow “sick”? Is the reintegration of fragmented alters the only way to cure it, can the Universe only be restored to health only by resorbing all sentient beings back into some primordial pool of Being? Are we the disease, and our eradication the cure?

  You may remember that I’m planning to write a concluding volume to the trilogy begun with Blindsight and continued in Echopraxia. I had my own thoughts as to how that story would conclude—but I have to say, Kastrup’s paper has opened doors I never considered before.

  It just seems so off-the-wall that—peer-reviewed or not—I don’t know if I could ever sell it in a Hard-SF novel.

  1 Bernardo Kastrup. “The Universe in Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25, No. 5–6, 2018, pp. 125–55.

  2 See: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/070674370404900904 and http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/070674370404901005

  3 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0098795

  The Limits of Reason

  Blog Feb 19 2012

  We are broken as a species.

  I encountered my first evidence to this effect back in 1986, although I didn’t have the wit to realize it at the time. A pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses appeared at my door, bursting with good news about Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior. They took a literal view of scripture and a dim view of Darwin: evolution was a lie, they said, and not a very convincing one.

  It was the moment I’d been waiting for.

  I was trying out a new technique, you see. Rather than lecture these misguided souls—rather than explaining Natural Selection and molecular genetics—I would use their own arguments against them. I would grant them their claims, and see where it took us.

  “Well,” said I, “I guess that pretty much wraps it up for Noah as a righteous man, doesn’t it?”

  They frowned, and asked why I would say such a thing.

  “Well, we know there are dozens of sexually-transmitted disease that exclusively infect humans and no other species,” I explained. “And if evolution is a lie, then all those STDs must have existed since creation—and the only way they could have survived the Great Flood would have been inside Noah and his family. So logically, Noah’s whole brood was more rotten with the clap than the lowliest hooker in Gomorrah.” The logic was inevitable. There was no way on earth these bible-thumpers could avoid it. I had them.

  It didn’t even slow them down.

  “No,” one of them explained patiently, “God afflicted us with those diseases to punish women for the Original Sin. God can do whatever He wants.” (Did I mention that both of these missionaries were female?)

  I realized, at that point, that you just can’t reason with so
me people. It wasn’t until much later that I began to understand why this should be so. I think it comes down to the oft-revisited theme that natural selection has shaped our brains not for logic but for inclusive fitness. We can use logic when we want to, of course. We have tools of reason at our command; but according to at least some experts1 we have those tools not to glean truth from falsehood but to help us win arguments; to make others do what we want; to use as a weapon. It’s rhetoric and manipulation that evolution selected for: logic just tagged along as a side effect. Sweeping oratory, rational debate, it’s all just a way to bend others to your will.

  In that light, it shouldn’t surprise us that our brains have developed countermeasures to so-called reasoned argument. A seemingly-endless list of cognitive glitches compromise the brain’s inability to perceive reality—but maybe they aren’t so much glitches as adaptations, meant to counter the pernicious effects of the silver-tongued. Confirmation bias, for example, leads us to cherry-pick facts which support our own beliefs; the Semmelweis reflex makes us automatically reject findings that contradict our expectations. And perhaps most radically, the Backfire Effect. You’d think a rational person, confronted with evidence contradicting their beliefs on a given subject, would at the very least grow less confident in those beliefs. In fact, such contrary evidence often reinforces the very belief being undermined.

  These adaptations, if that’s what they are—these defenses against social manipulation—would make rational discourse difficult enough. But it gets worse. We know from the work of Kruger and Dunning2 that not only do people tend to overestimate their own smarts, but that this effect is especially pronounced among the incompetent. Furthermore, incompetent people tend not only to regard themselves as smarter than everyone else, they tend to regard truly smart people as especially stupid, even when shown empirical proof that they are less competent than those they deride.

  It explains so much, these counter-rhetorical biases. It explains why climate-change deniers dig their heels in even deeper with each new study confirming the reality of climate change. It explains the ease with which religious fundamentalists dismiss the mountains of evidence supporting evolution in favor of unsubstantiated and idiotic creation myths. It explains the prevalence of bumper stickers proudly proclaiming “God said it. I believe it. That Settles It.”, the profound distrust of education so endemic among the North American conservative movement. We’re even starting to see how such hardcore closed-minded types can have such a disproportionate influence on society at large: network analysis by Xie et al3 suggests that a belief held by as few as 10% of a population can, over time, become the societal norm so long as that original 10% is sufficiently closed-minded and fanatical. (It’s a ratchet effect, basically: the more open-minded you are, the more willing you are to entertain the notion you could be wrong. So when a fanatical believer tries to sway an open-minded nonbeliever, the latter is more likely to give ground—which increases the proportion of believers in the population. Which increases the frequency with which open-minded nonbelievers encounter believers. You get the picture.)

  Of course, no one’s immune to these biases; I’ve caught myself cherry-picking data on more than one occasion. To that extent we all live in glass houses. But there are ways of error-checking yourself, if you care to use them. The scientific method, at its heart, is a set of tools explicitly designed to break through bias and shine a light on the empirical information underneath. Recognizing our prejudices, we can overcome them.

  But one thing we cannot do—and it has taken me so very long to realize this—is reason successfully with those who reject such tools. Logic doesn’t matter to a Jehovah’s Witness. Fossils mean nothing to a creationist. All the data in the world will not change the mind of a true climate-change denier.4 You cannot reason with these people. You cannot take them seriously. It is a waste of energy to even try.

  All you can really do is mock them. All you can do is subject them to scathing and intense ridicule, publicly if possible. So the next time you see some idiot waving a picture of a fetus in front of an abortion clinic, or pass some bible-thumper screeching that God Hates Fags—don’t engage them, but don’t ignore them, either. Toss them a peanut and make monkey sounds. Take their picture and laugh. Speak amongst yourselves in loud stage whispers, use them to illustrate to your children what inbreeding looks like, mention that you hadn’t realized that research into human-animal hybrids had progressed nearly this far. You will never win them over; but at least you can have some fun at their expense.

  It took me far too long to realize this consciously. But I think my subconscious had the right idea even back in 1986, when the missionaries at my door accused me of thinking I was smarter than God. “Oh, I don’t think I’m smarter than God,” I blurted out, without really meaning to. “I just think I’m smarter than you.” Granted, it was a low bar to clear.

  Have fun with them, while you still can. Because they’re winning. And if Xie et al are right, time’s running out for the rest of us.

  1 Cohen, C.: “Reason seen more as weapon than path to truth.” New York Times, June 14, 2011.

  2 “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 77(6), Dec 1999, 1121-1134.

  3 “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.” Phys. Rev. E 84, 011130 (2011)

  4 As opposed to professional climate-change deniers, who simply espouse whatever Exxon and the Koch Brothers pay them to regardless of their own opinions on the subject.

  Changing Our Minds: “Story of Your Life”

  in Print and on Screen.

  Blog Nov 30 2016

  We share a secret prayer, we writers of short SF. We utter it whenever one of our stories is about to appear in public, and it goes like this:

  Please, Lord. Please, if it be Thy will,

  don’t let Ted Chiang publish a story this year.

  We supplicate thus because whenever Ted Chiang does put out a story—not all that often, thankfully—it’s pretty much guaranteed to walk away with every award that’s lying around, leaving nothing for the rest of us. More often than not, it deserves to. So it will come as no surprise to learn that the first movie to be based on a Ted Chiang story is very smart, and very compelling.

  What might come as a shock—and I hesitate to write this down, because it smacks of heresy—is that in terms of storytelling, Arrival actually surpasses its source material.

  It’s not that it has a more epic scale, or more in the way of conventional dramatic conflict. Not just that, anyway. It’s true that Hollywood—inevitably—took what was almost a cozy fireside chat and ’roided it up to fate-of-the-world epicness. In “Story of Your Life,” aliens of modest size set up a bunch of sitting rooms, play charades with us for a while, and then leave. Their motives remain mysterious; the military, though omnipresent, remains in the background. The narrative serves mainly as a framework for Chiang to explore some nifty ideas about the way language and perception interact, about how the time-symmetric nature of fundamental physics might lead to a world-view—every bit as consistent as ours—that describes a teleological universe, with all the Billy Pilgrim time-tripping that implies. It’s fascinating and brow furrowing, but it doesn’t leave you on the edge of your seat. Going back and rereading it for this post, I had to hand it to screenwriter Eric Heisserer for seeing the cinematic potential buried there; if I was going to base a movie on a Ted Chiang story, this might be the last one I’d choose.

  In contrast, Arrival’s heptapods are behemoths. What we see of them hints at a cross between the proto-Alien from Prometheus and the larger members of that extradimensional menagerie glimpsed in The Mist. While the novella’s spaceships remained invisibly in orbit, the movie’s hang just overhead like asteroids pausing for one last look around before smashing the world to rubble. The novella’s geopolitics consist largely of frowning uniforms, grumbling inef
fectually in the background; in the movie, half the world’s ready to start lobbing nukes. Armageddon hinges on whether the aliens really mean “tool” when we read “weapon.”

  All standard Hollywood Bigger-Is-Better, and—for once—done in a way that doesn’t betray the sensibility of the source material. For the most part I preferred the more epic scale—although I was irked by the inevitable portrayal of Murricka as the calmer, cooler, peaceful players while Russia and China geared up to start Interstellar War I. (The portrayal of the US as the world’s most pacifist nation is probably the least-plausible element in this whole space-alien saga.) But I’m not just talking about the amped-up levels of jeopardy when I say I prefer movie to novella: I’m talking about the way different story elements tie together. I’m talking about actual narrative structure.

  “Story of Your Life” presents a number of elements almost in isolation. We know that Louise will marry, have a daughter, get divorced. We know that the daughter will die. We know that the heptapods leave, but we never know why—or why they showed up in the first place, for that matter. (When quizzed on the subject they say they’re here to acquire information, which would have a lock on “Most Maddeningly Vague Answer of the Year” if such an award actually existed.) (If it did, of course Ted Chiang would win it.)

  Arrival ties all these loose ends together, elegantly, satisfyingly. The aliens are here to give us a “weapon/tool”—or more accurately a gift: to teach us their teleological mindset, uplift us to a new worldview. They are here to literally change our minds. Louise makes that conceptual breakthrough, uses the new paradigm to head off nuclear war in the nick of time. Her divorce—years after the closing credits—is not just something that happens to happen; it occurs when her husband learns that she’d known in advance (thanks to her new precognitive mindset) that their daughter would be doomed to a slow, painful death at a young age—and yet went ahead and birthed her anyway (not that choice had anything to do with it, of course). It’s not belabored in the screenplay—a couple of oblique references to Daddy looks at me differently now and I made a decision he thought was wrong. But the implicit conflict in the moral algebra between two people who love each other—We can at least give her a few glorious years vs. You’ve sentenced her to agony and death—is heartbreaking in a way that Chiang’s Kubrickian analysis never managed.