Diaspora

1) "The conceptory was non sentient software, as ancient a Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty—formed partly in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all. In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to re-create the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the biochemical details in favor of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought through intact. Starting from a diminished trait pool, with the old DNA-based maps rendered obsolete, it was crucial for the conceptory to chart the consequences of new variations to the mind seed. To eschew all change would be to risk stagnation; to embrace it recklessly would be to endanger the sanity of every child."

2) "Yatima's clone started up in the gleisner body and spent a moment reflecting on vis situation. The experience of 'awakening' felt no different from arriving in a new scape; there was nothing to betray the fact that vis whole mind had just been created anew. Between subjective instants, ve'd been cross-translated from Konishi's dialect of Shaper, which ran on the virtual machine of a womb or an exoself, into the gleisner version which this robot's highly un-polis-like hardware implemented directly. In a sense, ve had no past of vis own, just forged memories and a secondhand personality... but it still felt as if ve'd merely jumped from savanna to jungle, one and the same person before and after. All invariants intact. The original Yatima had been suspended by vis exoself prior to translation, and if everything went according to plan that frozen snapshot would never need to be re-started. The Yatima-clone in the gleisner would be re-cloned back into Konishi polis (and re-translated back into Konishi Shaper) then both the Konishi original and the gleisner-bound clone would be erased. Philosophically, it wasn't all that different from being shifted within the polis from one section of physical memory to another—an undetectable act which the operating system performed on every citizen from time to time, to reclaim fragmented memory space. And subjectively, the whole excursion would probably be much the same as if they'd puppeted the gleisners remotely, instead of literally inhabiting them. If everything went according to plan."

3) "Twelve dimensions? Ve'd felt so besieged by the realist backlash that ve'd never even considered doing more than defending Kozuch's six against the charge of 'abstractionism.' Twice as extravagant? It certainly would have been in the twenty-first century, when no one knew how long wormholes really were. But now? Blanca shut down the avatar and began a fresh set of calculations. Kozuch herself had never said anything so explicit about higher-dimensional alternatives, but the avatar's educated guess turned out to be perfectly correct. Just as a 2-torus was the result of expanding every point in a circle into another circle perpendicular to the first, turning every point in a 6-sphere into a 6-sphere in its own right created a 12-torus—and a 12-torus as the standard fiber solved everything. The symmetries of the particles, and the Planck-Wheeler size of their wormhole mouths, could arise from one set of six dimensions; the freedom of the wormholes to take on astronomical lengths could then arise from the remaining six."

4) "'I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can't guide us. Evolution can't guide us. The C-Z charter says understand and respect the universe... but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all—and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it with out losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to 'conquer' Earth, to steal their 'precious' physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of 'competition'... as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do—knowing no better, having no choice. 'Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That's why we need to find another space-faring civilization. Understanding Lacerta is important, the astrophysics of survival is important, but we also need to speak to others who've faced the same decisions, and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.'"

If I had read this book 10 years ago (or even 5), it might have felt like a revelation. Reading it today feels like entering a cul-de-sac.

Looking around it helps me understand a couple of things, though: How hard sci-fi works (or why it doesn’t), for one; what makes transhumanism so repulsive (and profoundly boring), for another.

Hard sci-fi is more science than fiction – or at least it tries to be. Equipped with enough knowledge about math, physics or whatever science of choice to go above the reader’s head, but not enough to enter scientific discourse itself, hard sci-fi is, I think, best understood as playing with potential scientific theories without ever having to spell them out. As such it’s not so much an exploration of a few wild ideas but the exploitation of some narrow ones.

This can be very interesting (in Egan’s case, the idea of biological, i.e. physical computers “running” completely alien and hermetic forms of life existing in non-physical dimensions is really fascinating) or extremely boring (again in Egan’s case, using an imaginary fundamental physics based on wormholes just to stack trillions of universes on top of each other becomes really tedious really quickly).

But without a strong fiction component, the whole thing gets boring either way – whether we race through universes (Egan) or centuries (Vinge), whether there’s a mystery to understand or a puzzle to solve, the plots tend to be extraordinarily simple, the stories (and characters) extraordinarily flat.

And this connects to the problem(s) with transhumanism: Instead of embracing our socio-biological nature in all its random gore and glory as the source of meaning and purpose (and ideally exploring the contradiction inherent in this), it denounces everything biological as accidental and limited, just to get stuck with the abstract, ungrounded and thus limitless quest for some form of disembodied knowledge which we, limited creatures that we are, can’t ever reach.

The only way to justify this quest is to ignore the nature of complexity, and the only way to implement it is to remove the limits of time – hence the “rushing” (Egan) through eons and universes, enabled by consciousness uploads, nanomachinery and negentropic plot devices like fractal universes.

At the end of this race there’s primarily one thing: limitless boredom – not the readers’, in this case, but the protagonists’. And the few moments of happiness or fulfilment we glimpse are, oh wonder, when they give in to their “ancestral” nature and sacrifice themselves for others, fall in love, or just have some plain old fun. (All of which a true, fully implemented transhumanism would destroy.)

(That the nature of consciousness is the one question left open after the eons Diaspora’s protagonists spent rushing and researching is rather ironic: The best and easiest explanation, not only IRL, but also in the context of the story, would be that consciousness is part of the simulation the protagonists are running to make sense of the world – that it isn’t real, that there isn’t even a question to begin with. This is made more ironic by the fact that Dan Dennett, one of the most prominent proponents of such an “illusionist” account of consciousness, is one of the two sources on the topic named in the references.)

So I’ll rather stick with stories that explore ideas instead of exploiting them, expand my mind instead of enclosing it, let me empathise and be angry, laugh and weep, wonder and wander – and generally enjoy and suffer our limited and accidental existence, the source of and obstacle to all meaning.

As to Diaspora specifically: Egan was surely groundbreaking in establishing the by now well-known tropes of transhumanist fiction (uploads, nanomachinery, contempt for biology and fear of existential threats to humanity). But this not only comes at the cost outlined above, but also bypasses the opportunities for deeper ontological reflection (e.g. taking life existing in non-physical dimensions as a starting, not an end point) in favour of semi-weird physics and semi-abstract math.

Recommended as a historical document; as as work of art, not so much.

This early morning I had this dream where I was playing an old side-scrolling type videogame, a bit like Super Mario Bros. I was speed-running it, so I must have played the game many times before. The creatures I encountered were unusual, or at least unfamiliar. They were alien creatures. I must have gotten the inspiration for these creatures from this sci-fi novel I’m reading right now: Diaspora by Greg Egan. It’s an amazing book. So I speed-ran through all these weird creatures, just jumping and avoiding them. Then the perspective shifted to the first person. It was me jumping and avoiding these obstacles in this alien jugle setting. I remember falling back first onto this raging river. It was so intense I could feel the moment the water closed in on me. The next scene in the dream I’m talking with this academic guy. I think in the dream he wrote a book, I remember the title because I thought it was super-interesting: The Psycho-pathology of Ontology. He was explaining it to me, and I was really impressed and amazed. It explained so much, I thought in the dream, especially the current dilemma with PRRD.

I am about eighty percent finished with Greg Egan’s Diaspora. It’s an amazing book. This book has the vastest scale in a sci-fi novel I’ve ever read, time-wise and geographic-wise. It covers billions of years, and the geographic scope is so vast I can’t even explain it (I literally can’t. The science is too complicated for me). That’s another issue with this book: it’s hard science fiction, which means it uses actual scientific theories to explain things. It’s difficult to understand most of the time if you’re unfamiliar with the science, at least with me. Nevertheless it isn’t all science and explanations, there’s also character and pathos. I especially love how the concepts of consciousness and identity, psychology and personality are explored in the context of post/trans-human conditions. There were some really intense dramatic moments scattered all throughout. I love how time and memories play so much of a role in creating pathos. Overall, this book is definitely my best read of the year.