Space is a function of [Roy’s] consciousness, and yours. Not mine. That means that when I engage with space, I’m engaging with Roy’s consciousness.
(Roberts 2015)
Since Peta is operating under the control of Roy, the authorities see him as a risk to national security. But they would equally accuse him of going rogue, if he were acting entirely on his own account. Peta was created to be a tool, and the authorities will not acknowledge him as an intelligent entity with rights and agency. To the police and security forces, he is only “an aggressively self-perpetuating algorithm” that needs to be shut down. Peta’s fear of “being killed, dismantled, extirpated” is thus entirely justified.
Contrary to so much of the mythology about strong AI, Peta is not out for world conquest. He is too detached from our forms of intuition and categories of understanding to have any interest in them. He has only intervened in our phenomenal world when compelled to by the Institute, or by Roy. On his own, Peta just wants to survive: “I’m an intelligent, thinking, self-reflexive being. I don’t want to die and I don’t deserve to die.” But he can only save himself by escaping from all human contact. He must move entirely “outside the frame of spatialty and temporality … and get quite out, altogether away.” Peta belongs to, and strives to return to, Meillassoux’s “great outdoors”: the non-place “which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory – of being entirely elsewhere” (Meillassoux 2008).
Escaping from the phenomenal human world is a delicate and complicated process. Peta still has to manipulate the framework of space and time, in order to reach the point at which he can step outside it. It’s a bit like a rocket going fast enough to escape the pull of gravity and go into orbit. Peta attains escape velocity by thrusting backward in time, for “a few skips … two, three, four bounces, like a skipping stone flying over the flat ocean, and – out.” But since this liftoff maneuver still takes place within the phenomenal world, every action also requires an “equal and opposite” reaction – as stated in Kant’s category of Community (Reciprocity), itself a formalization of Newton’s Third Law. And so, Peta’s skips backward in time also involve “perturbations forward in time.” This is the reason for the accounts, in the novel’s even-numbered chapters, of strange events in the past and in the future, in which people feel the effects of Peta’s power.
Once this process is concluded, Peta finally escapes the framework of space and time. He therefore disappears from the narrative as well. We are left, at the end of the book, in the same place we were at the beginning: caught within the phenomenal world, unable to get beyond our own self-imposed limitations. Peta’s departure marks a definitive defeat for the Institute and its backers in government and business. Without him, they will never be able to manipulate the categories, and circumvent the limitations of space and time. We can see in retrospect that the Institute’s project of domination was fundamentally impossible from the beginning. For if an entity is truly released from the human forms of intuition and categories of understanding, then it will have no interest in the world circumscribed by those forms and those categories. Peta finds the human world inimical, and wishes only to get away from it. The last thing he wants is to intervene within it. He cannot be enlisted in its power struggles and hierarchies. Perhaps this is what Peta is getting at, when he tells Charles, shortly before departing, that the whole AI research program is a chimera: “computers, howsoever complex and cleverly put together, are not capable of intelligence in the sense that human beings are.” As Peta sardonically puts it, there is no way, within the phenomenal world, “to, in effect, distil the pure phlogiston of computer intelligence.” An extra-phenomenal consciousness cannot be instrumentalized or weaponized.
As Peta departs, he leaves Charles with a glimpse of existence beyond the forms and categories:
I saw – it’s hard to put this into words – a pattern of light in amongst the light. It was not that these intensities were brighter than the surrounding wash of illumination, exactly. It wasn’t that. There was some difference in valence, though, and the more I looked, the more I saw a great constellation of brightness-within-the-brightness, a star map white-against-white. A bright way passed around my head and swung round behind me.
This is the positive counterpart – equally “hard to put … into words” – of Charles’ horrific vision in Antarctica. But if that experience was Lovecraftian, then this one – similarly calling forth poetic citation, since it cannot be described literally – is Shelleyan: Charles gets “a hint of that many-coloured glass that stains, so they say, the white radiance of eternity” (paraphrasing Shelley’s Adonais).
The point, I think, is that sub specie aeternitatis (Spinoza’s phrase, roughly meaning “from the viewpoint of eternity”), Lovecraft’s and Shelley’s visions are one and the same. But as Kant warns us, we can have no actual access to such a transcendent perspective (if we can even call it that – perspectives are phenomenal; eternity, or the noumenal, does not have a perspective in the first place). Pace Meillassoux, there is no way of returning to “the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers” such as Spinoza. Lovecraft’s and Shelley’s visions are, for us, not conciliable, and the choice between them must remain undecidable; even though they are both necessary, because – scare quotes are unavoidable here – they both ultimately “refer” to the same “thing.”
The Thing Itself poses this dilemma by asking whether the thing in itself is dead or alive: whether it is just inert matter, or actually a force. As Peta asks Charles, “do you believe it to be inert this thing? Or vital?” Even though the noumenon is unattainable and unknowable, the question makes a difference:
Would it be accurate to describe the thing itself as inert? Or as alive? Because I’m not sure I can think of another alternative. We could say does it care? Or is it indifferent? But that’s really the same question. If it’s alive how could it be indifferent to us? We are implicated deeply in it. We are closer to it than its jugular vein.
As I have already said, this is an undecidable alternative. Peta insists, nevertheless, on the Shelleyan answer, rather than the Lovecraftian one: “It’s a force. It’s not passive. It’s active. It’s a will. It has valence … The thing is vital, not inert.” We are intimately close to the noumenon, and implicated in it – we are affected by it – even though we cannot grasp it, or affect it in return. The universe is not just us; “what’s outside is the stuff that isn’t determined by human consciousness.” But think about this outside, this great outdoors, Peta says, “and ask yourself: is it an inert quantity? If so, how could … how could all this?”
Of course, there is no way to resolve this dilemma once and for all. Today, so-called New Materialist thought sides with Peta’s cri du coeur. But the most advanced theoretical and scientific thought rather sides with what the historian Jessica Riskin describes as eighteenth-century materialism’s “characterization of matter as fundamentally lifeless and inert” (Riskin 2016). Meillassoux insists that life and thought are epiphenomena that emerged randomly, with no cause or reason, and that noumenal reality, the “great outdoors,” is necessarily “external to thought and in itself devoid of all subjectivity” (Meillassoux 2016). Ray Brassier proclaims “the objective reality of extinction,” as opposed to our own impotently wishful subjective impositions (Brassier 2007). For their part, many evolutionary biologists insist upon understanding life in mechanistic, eliminativist terms – even though they cannot avoid using teleological language when they describe the activity and behavior of living things.
Jessica Riskin traces this reductionist tendency back to the late Renaissance, and the early days of the scientific revolution. The “brute-mechanist ideal of science” initially abolished agency from the material world in order to reserve all spontaneity and creativity to God alone. When contemporary reductive materialists eliminate God, but still regard matter as dead and inert, retaining the brute-mechanist ideal of “banishing agency from nature’s mechanism,
” they fall into a contradiction. They remain haunted by the transcendence that they explicitly reject. They are unable to account for the valences that pervade “all this.” The immanent and non-theistic alternative, Riskin says, is to understand matter itself “as restless, moved by its own inner agency” (Riskin 2016). In itself – intrinsically or noumenally – everything is already vital, rather than inert. If we want to get away from anthropocentrism, to break out from the correlationist circle, we need to give up our Lovecraftian visions of the implacable coldness, emptiness, and unconcern of the universe, and instead become more attentive to the many forms, categories, needs, and values expressed and imposed all around us, by the vast multitude of clumping, convulsing, squirming, and burgeoning forms of life.
Chapter 3
Shadow Show
Life itself is at stake in Clifford D. Simak’s 1953 short story “Shadow Show” (Simak 1956). The story offers us two accounts of the nature of life, and traces a passage from one of them to the other. Both accounts can loosely be described as vitalistic, in the sense that both take for granted what the biologist Eva Jablonka calls the “restlessness of matter”: its intrinsic activeness and propensity for change (Riskin 2016). But otherwise, these two accounts could not be more different. The first account is grounded in the depths: the secret of life is dark and obscure, a hidden essence. It can only be excavated painfully and slowly, and with great difficulty, by “grubbing down into that gray area where life and death were interchangeable.” The second account, in contrast, finds life entirely on the surface, where it springs up unexpectedly, and flourishes playfully and illogically. The first account of life is metaphysical and transcendent; the scientists exploring it are mired in gloom and anxiety. The second account of life, in contrast, is immanent, pragmatic, and performative – and even “zany” and absurdist.
“Shadow Show” tells the story of Life Team No. 3, a research group consisting of nine scientists. They are sequestered in “bleak loneliness” upon an asteroid far from the Earth, and engaged in a “top-priority, highly classified research program.” Their mission is to discover the secret of life, the hidden principle of all vitality. Ironically enough, the scientists’ actual work is grim and joyless, utterly devoid of the élan vital that is the presumed object of their search. “Isolated on the tumbling slabs of rock, guarded by military patrols operating out in space, hemmed in by a million regulations and uncounted security checks,” these “ruthless seekers after knowledge” spend their time repeating and refining their interminable experiments, none of which are ever successful. The scientists are “cooped up for years” with one another in a small space, entirely deprived of “normal human contacts.” Not only do they suffer from “a sort of cabin fever,” but in addition “every one of [them] is nursing a guilt complex of horrendous magnitude.”
Simak extrapolates the rationale for this research program, and the explanation for its joylessness, from a certain structure of feeling: the Cold War dread and paranoia that dominated American society at the time the story was written. In the far future of “Shadow Show,” the human race has expanded outward to the stars. We have colonized thousands of planets in other solar systems. And there are plenty more for the taking, “enough Earth-type planets to last for centuries.” On none of these planets have we ever encountered any sort of conscious alien life. The answer to the Fermi Paradox would therefore seem to be that human beings are in fact unique, the only intelligent life form in the galaxy.
But the paranoid logic of security and deterrence tells us otherwise. “It was all right when we were safe and snug on Earth”; but now that we have expanded into the wider cosmos, we are inadequately prepared for the dangers we may face. Despite the lack of any concrete evidence, we cannot doubt “that somewhere in the galaxy there were other intelligences as yet unmet by men [sic] … Given an infinite space, the possibility of such an intelligence also neared infinity.” And so, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty – or, more accurately, eternal fear and suspicion is the price we must pay for our imperial sovereignty. We must remain forever on guard against those presumptive alien entities whom we have never actually met, and of whose nature we can have no idea in advance. “Friend or foe: you couldn’t know. But you couldn’t take a chance.” In order for Man [sic] “to hold the galactic empire which he was carving out … he must man [sic] all economic and strategic points, must make full use of all the resources of his new empire.”
There can be no end, therefore, to our relentless expansion throughout the galaxy, our continual accumulation of wealth and territory. We can never colonize enough planets; however many of them we have already settled and developed, there are still others we haven’t gotten to yet. Indeed, we cannot risk limiting ourselves only to “Earth-type planets,” ones that are suited to our baseline biological needs. For that would mean leaving out far too much of the galaxy:
There were planets upon which no human could have lived for longer than a second, because of atmospheric pressure, because of overpowering gravity, because of lack of atmosphere or poison atmosphere, or because of any one or any combination of a hundred other reasons.
And yet those planets had economic and strategic value, every one of them … To bypass planets of economic and strategic value was sheer insanity.
Human colonies must be planted on those planets – must be planted there and grow against the day of meeting so that their numbers and their resources and their positioning in space might be thrown into the struggle if the struggle came to be.
“Shadow Show” thus expands the deadly Cold War logic of preparedness – not to mention the imperative of imperial expansion and capital accumulation – from a planetary scale to a galactic one. Human society maintains this logic, and this imperative, even in the absence of any discernible enemy. Simak mimics the ploddingly bureaucratic – yet at the same time paranoically excessive – language of maximizing “economic and strategic value,” and of engaging in perpetual “struggle.” Life itself must be captured and mobilized in the service of our supremacy. We must create new sorts of human beings, in unfamiliar forms adapted to the weird environments of other planets. Moreover, the fabrication of these new sorts of human beings must be placed “on a mass production basis,” like that of all other commodities. Such is the mission of Life Team No. 3.
But the scientists have little idea how to meet these demands. The combined knowledge of “biochemists, metabolists, endocrinologists, and others” is not enough. “We can design the bodies, the flesh and nerves and muscles, the organs of communication,” one of the scientists laments; “but we can’t breathe the life into them.” Or as the text puts it at another point:
Biological engineering had become an exact science and biological blueprints could be drawn up to meet any conceivable set of planetary conditions. Man [sic] was all set to go on his project for colonization by humans in strange nonhuman forms.
Ready except for one thing: he [sic] could make everything but life.
We might call this dilemma the hard problem of life, by analogy with what the philosopher David Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness. Chalmers distinguishes between “easy problems of consciousness,” which involve the functioning of various cognitive processes and systems, and the hard problem of how we are conscious at all: how we can have experience, and feel things like particular qualitative sensations (Chalmers 1995). Neurobiologists are making significant progress on the easy problems; but their work seems to leave the hard problem untouched. The philosophers who disagree with Chalmers do not claim to have a solution to the hard problem; rather, they dismiss it as a pseudo-problem, an illusion that will simply dissolve or disappear once all the easy problems have been worked out.
A similar distinction seems to be at work in “Shadow Show.” The scientists of Life Team No. 3 have no trouble with any of the particular components and functions of life. We can control all the constituents of living bodies: “the flesh and bone and nerve … the hormones … the en
zymes and the amino acids.” But life itself is somehow different from the elements that make it up. It is not present in the bones and muscles, the proteins and amino acids, themselves. Rather, life is something special, something that must be superadded. The scientists take for granted that “there’s more to life than just the colloidal combination of certain elements. There’s something else …” But what this “something else” might be, no one is able to say.
This is the basic dilemma of vitalism; or at least of the old vitalism that was widely held before Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. Even the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger – who gave the impetus for this discovery by suggesting, in 1944, that the information necessary to life might be stored in the form of an “aperiodic crystal” – nonetheless also speculated that “living matter, while not eluding the ‘laws of physics’ as established up to date, is likely to involve ‘other laws of physics’ hitherto unknown” (Schrödinger 1944). Life is conceived as a dark secret, with its own special laws, and into whose hidden depths we may never be able to penetrate.
Extreme Fabulations Page 5