Settle let the pearls drip through her fingers. The Ship’s groan of horror was so deep that the Captain lost her grip as well. Settle yelled as air and gravity separated her from the beautiful Captain. She floundered for a few seconds, then plunged downwards with the pearls, into the churn below. The Ship’s stem clipped her and she fell on through the water, her wits slipping, her only wish that if the great white things in the water came to her now, they would swallow her whole.
But the cold was its own shock and Settle gagged for breath and kicked away from the drag of the Cruel Ship’s passing. The tow tossed her playfully and her lungs were swollen to bursting but she kept scissoring and pulling towards the air. A huge shadow flew across her—the Ship’s rudder to her port, and then nothing, only a cloud of bubbles and a clear direction to the surface.
Settle gulped air and sea, coughed out both, took in air again, and again. When she looked up, she still wondered if the water was pulling her down again, so high was the Ship above her, the white speckle of the barnacled keel looming like a new night sky overhead. But Settle was not sinking—the Ship was rising.
There was something special about the pearls. The ship had fashioned them to break the anchor lodging it to the world, but had needed them to be discovered, won through adventure, prised from danger. And now, as they touched the sea, mixing with the medium in which the ship had vested its hopes, a miraculous reaction occurred. The pearls were still falling slowly through the air, vanishing into smaller and smaller winks in the world. But they were ascending too, up into the constellations, expanding in larger and larger globes until they sparkled in the night sky. All were joined in a single silver loop, a bright band of marvel that led to new worlds, inside and outside of this one.
The Captain held tight to the figurehead. “Where do ye want for yer honeymoon, my love, the foam or the void?” he cried out.
And she answered, “The stars!” and the crew cheered in approval.
The Ship snatched a wind hidden in the world. The sails blossomed out. The compass called out new directions. The Ship floated into the sky, tacking once before she pierced the low cloud floors. The band of pearls became a river and the Ship sped upwards, disappearing with a storm flash, another twinkle in the heavens.
When the sunspots cleared from her vision, Settle could not see the band anymore. The Captain was gone and she was alone in the sea.
But she knew the sea would not have her for long.
Within minutes, it glided towards her—the dark shadow of a wave thickening into a vessel, a sleek skulk across the water. A twenty-foot barque, a barbed anchor, its three masts supporting black sheets, the whole ghastly craft preceded by the fearsome figurehead of Poseidon. It scattered dread before it. It was her Ship.
A rope ladder over the edge invited her. She searched the ship—there was plenty of store, but the only trace of her Captain was the sneer on Poseidon’s face. It was the one sign that her ship had been concealed in the Captain’s dreams. Long Preston had said, stash a ship in the dreams of your true desire. Settle could not have named her true desire at the moment she chose to act, but her heart had known how and when to make the offering. Perhaps if the Captain had known Settle was invading her dreams, perhaps if Settle had been greeted the way that she had greeted Apple, Settle could have hidden not just her ship, but herself as well, the way she had hidden her boy. It mattered little. Her Captain was chasing meteors now with dreams that had no further place for Settle’s ship.
Apple. She would need help to sail this. Settle smiled to herself, closed her eyes. Within five minutes, Apple came forth and made her ship a fleet.
“My love!” he halloo-ed.
“My crew,” she commanded and Apple bowed his head.
But she would need more to pursue her new desires. When Apple’s schooner had been digested, they set a course for better-travelled waters to recruit a fitting crew for a cruel ship.
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Reasoning about the Body
Ted Chiang
Originally delivered as the Guest of Honor speech at Congrès Boréal in Quebec City, May 2010.
I’m here to talk about science fiction, but I want to begin by describing an idea that anthropologists use, called “folk biology.” Folk biology consists of naïve ideas about the biological world. For example, people used to think whales were giant fish because they have no legs and they live in the oceans. Then we learned that whales breathe air and have warm blood, so we realized that it makes more sense to classify whales as mammals. Another example is thinking of spiders as insects, because they look sort of like insects. But if you look more closely at spiders, you notice that they have eight legs instead of six, and they have two body segments instead of three, so it makes more sense to put them in a separate category.
Folk biology is interesting to anthropologists because misconceptions like thinking spiders are insects are not universal. They vary from one culture to another, and anthropologists can learn things about a culture by the way they think about the biological world. Folk biology is also interesting to psychologists because studying children’s ideas about the natural world gives us some insight into how our cognitive skills develop as we mature.
As for me, once I read about folk biology, I started to see examples of it everywhere; even when we are scientifically literate, we engage in folk biology on a regular basis, without being aware of it.
Let me offer some examples of what I’m talking about. At various points in history, people have said that if you wanted a strong body, you should eat meat instead of bread or potatoes. There have been all sorts of justifications for this, but one of them—even when it wasn’t explicitly stated—was the belief that you literally are what you eat. Eating muscles would make your body muscular, while eating soft and starchy foods would make your body soft and starchy. When people advise you to trim the visible fat from meat, they are implicitly using a similar argument: that the layer of fat on your steak will translate into a layer of fat on your body. Part of the skepticism about the Atkins diet was rooted in this; how could you lose weight without reducing your fat intake?
There’s an obvious flaw in this line of reasoning, which is that cows eat grass but beef isn’t anything like grass. Cows are able to create bones and muscles and fat without eating any of those things, and humans can do the same. There are some competitive bodybuilders who are vegetarians. And the Atkins diet does seem to work
; you can lose weight even with a diet high in fat. But the idea that what you eat translates directly into your body is still appealing to us; it’s easy to believe, it makes sense at an intuitive level, it’s something a child could understand. That is folk biology in action.
Doctors aren’t immune to this, either. For years doctors recommended that we limit our consumption of eggs because eggs are high in cholesterol, as a way of reducing the level of cholesterol in our blood. But more recent studies have shown that this doesn’t actually work. Our bodies make cholesterol out of saturated fats, so you can have high blood cholesterol even if your diet contains no cholesterol at all. But the reason that doctors told us to eat fewer eggs was that, at some level, they still believed that you literally are what you eat. They were engaging in a kind of folk biology.
Now, it’s true that some of what happens in our bodies can be understood in a simple mechanical way. But that fools us into thinking that everything in our bodies can be understood in the same way, which is what gets us into trouble. Because the reality is a lot of what goes on in our bodies is opaque. A lot of biology is highly non-intuitive, and can’t be understood by making analogies with mechanical systems.
Let me give one more example. We have blood flowing through our circulatory system. And when you’ve lost a lot of blood, replacing the missing fluid with someone else’s blood can save your life. That makes sense, intuitively. If your car’s engine is running low on motor oil or brake fluid, you can add a quart and get it working again. However, you cannot simply take blood out of one person and put it into another person arbitrarily. Doctors have tried that, and it didn’t work. It turns out that people have different blood types, and they aren’t compatible. And it’s not even the case that you can only transfuse blood between people with the same blood type; it’s actually more complicated than that. To understand who can donate blood and who can receive it, you need the concepts of antigens and antibodies, which are not at all obvious; these are not concepts that a child could understand. And this is my point: you cannot think of blood as a simple fluid like motor oil or brake fluid. You cannot use mechanical intuition when thinking about the human body.
Now, the example of folk biology that I really want to talk about is a little different, and it might take me a while to convince you that it’s folk biology at all: it is the idea that the brain is a computer. People routinely refer to the brain as a kind of computer, both in science fiction and outside of it. People have been doing this ever since computers were invented. You might almost get the impression that when we invented the computer, we finally understood what the brain really was. But that isn’t the case at all.
As many observers have noted, we always talk about the brain in terms of the most complex technology that’s available. In the Renaissance, philosophers talked about the brain as if it were a kind of ingenious clockwork mechanism. Freud talked about the brain as if it were a kind of steam engine, with pressures building up and needing to be released to prevent an explosion. In the 1940s, schoolchildren were taught that the brain was like a telephone switchboard. Nowadays, computers are the most complicated machines most people are familiar with, and so we compare the brain to them.
But that doesn’t mean that the current metaphor is correct while the previous metaphors were incorrect. The brain is not substantially more like a computer than it’s like a steam engine. And when we compare the brain to a computer, we’re saying more about our relationship to computers than we’re saying about the brain. Earlier I mentioned that anthropologists can deduce things about a culture by studying their folk-biology beliefs. The fact that we think about the brain as if it were a computer reveals something about our culture. It indicates that technology has so thoroughly saturated our world that we think of our very selves in technological terms.
We see this in science fiction more than anywhere else. Again and again, I read science-fiction stories whose premise is that the mind is software running on the brain’s hardware. The story might not state this explicitly, but at this point stories don’t have to; they can use it as a default assumption, and expect the reader to understand. It’s accepted as a convention. It’s so commonplace that it’s easy to forget that the distinction between hardware and software does not exist in biology. The brain is an organ in the same way that the liver and the pancreas are organs, and we don’t think about those in terms of hardware and software.
You may ask, if the computer isn’t a good metaphor for the brain, what is a better one? I don’t know; I don’t have a truly accurate metaphor to offer. The brain is more complex than anything else we know of, so there’s nothing else that we can compare it to that fully conveys its complexity. And that makes it hard to talk about the brain. One of the ways we understand new ideas is by comparing them to things we’re already familiar with, so it’s inevitable that we will use metaphors when trying to understand the brain. There’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. The problem is when we take the metaphor too far. When people thought about blood as a simple fluid that could be transfused between individuals, they were overestimating the applicability of their knowledge of mechanical systems. When we think of the brain as a computer, we’re doing the same thing: overestimating the applicability of our knowledge of computers.
The most egregious example of this is idea of the singularity, which is pretty explicit in equating the brain to a computer; singularity believers routinely assert that computing power is equivalent to intelligence, and that a computer capable of performing a certain number of operations per second would be equivalent to the human brain. This, I think, is going further with our technological metaphors than we ever have before. I’m not aware of people engaging in similar speculation when they talked about the brain using the language of steam engines; did anyone suggest that a steam engine containing a certain number of cylinders would be equivalent to the human brain? I don’t know, but I think one idea makes about as much sense as the other.
By the way, I’m not claiming that consciousness can only occur in organic tissue. I believe that Strong AI is possible, meaning that I think it’s entirely possible for computers to be self-aware in the same way that human beings are. I just think it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. The misconception that brains are just like computers makes people think that Strong AI will be easy.
I should also acknowledge that I don’t think this misconception that the brain is like a computer is impeding real scientific progress. It’s only people who don’t work in neuroscience that have fallen for this misconception; actual neuroscientists know better. What I’m concerned about is the way this misconception is limiting our imaginations, particularly in science fiction.
Now I’m going to rant a little bit about some of the science-fiction tropes that bother me because of they way they equate the brain with computer technology. The first one is the trope of uploading a person into a computer just by scanning their brain. So many stories depict this as being a simple procedure, but I’d say it is next to impossible. Here’s why:
When engineers examine a sample of a material to measure its physical properties, they make a distinction between destructive testing and non-destructive testing. Destructive testing means that the sample is rendered unusable by the test; for example, you test a material’s tensile strength by actually pulling it apart. Non-destructive testing means you perform some kind of examination that doesn’t damage the sample. For example, sometimes you can x-ray a weld and look for cracks that way.
When it comes to medicine, we have some non-destructive tests, like x-rays or ultrasound or MRIs. But the vast majority of tests are actually destructive. When the doctors take a blood sample to run some tests, they use that blood up; it’s gone, you can’t get it back. And think about all the conditions that require a blood test instead of an x-ray. Doctors can’t even tell if your kidney have stopped working without taking a blood sample. How likely is it that we’ll be able to read a person’s memories with less intr
usive technology? That implies that your memories lie closer to the surface of your body than the fact that you’re in renal failure. I would not say that renal failure is a subtle condition; it affects every drop of your blood, and yet we need destructive testing to diagnose it. Your memories are not printed on your skin like ink on a page, where they can be read by simple inspection. Your memories are extremely subtle, and deeply embedded in your brain, so the idea that we can read those with a non-destructive test is, I think, ludicrous. It might be possible one day to scan all of a person’s memories into a computer, but I’ll bet you that the process will be destructive. The person will be nothing but a cloud of pink mist by the time the scan is done.
Then there’s the idea that we can download new memories or skills, or even a whole new personality, into someone’s brain. We’ve seen this in movies like The Matrix and television series like Dollhouse, but there’s also plenty of written science fiction that assumes this is the next logical step after the ability to read memories is achieved. This drives me crazy. Even if scanning memories were easy, it doesn’t follow that you’d be able to write memories into the brain. This idea is purely a result of our familiarity with computers; as soon as you stop thinking in terms of computers, you realize how little sense it makes.
For example, let’s consider photographs. You can lay a photograph down on the glass plate of your Hewlett-Packard or Epson scanner, and it will read it down to a level of detail that is invisible to the naked eye. Photographs are just about the easiest things in the world to scan; everything that’s interesting about them lies on the surface, rather than on deeper layers. But do I expect that the next generation of scanner will let you change the imagery on the photos you laid down on the glass? Of course not, and it’s not because I lack faith in the ingenuity of Hewlett-Packard or Epson. It’s because rewritability depends on the material that the original photos were printed on, and that’s not something the makers of scanning machines have any control over. If we started printing photos on special paper using erasable ink, maybe we could have scanners that could rewrite those photos as easily as they scanned them. But our old Polaroids weren’t designed to be rewriteable, so your flatbed scanner is never going to be able to rewrite them.
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