The Slow and The Quick
"The Quick" designates all species of sentient beings who experience life at around the speed human beings experience it, in contrast to "Slow" species, who experience life at a much slower temporal rate. Represented as the 'Slow' primarily in this book are Dweller individuals who inhabit gas giants akin to Jupiter and live for millions of years, and the species has existed for billions.
A central theme in the novel is the issue of interference by "progressive" societies in more "primitive" societies - as is the influence of interstellar travel mechanisms in shaping space-faring civilizations and the mutual adaptation of artificial intelligences and biological species. Each of these influences acting factorially to catapult them forward.
To effect, the reader is presented a "future" where many species and civilizations, it would appear, have reached something akin to Kurzweil's 'singularity' either technologically, biologically and in some instances, spiritually.
A point is made through the narrative that the exponential approach to a 'singularity' might not always be the utopian state promised. As with our own human experience here on Earth, civilizations - predominantly represented by those considered the 'Quick', come undone, usually by their own undoing when wielding immense technological and biological power, near to or as illustrated past the point of singularity. The seemingly irrevocable condition of avarice is at blame.
Contemporaneous to the avarice of the 'Quick' is the existence of the 'Slow' who have had a much longer journey to the point of singularity and seemingly mastered the ability to maintain that state without disaster. Their existence, measured by time as the Quick experience it, is magnitudes slower. And while they have mastered space and time, biology and spirit, it appears they are just as doomed from a different machination. Eccentricity.
The Slow, living for millions of years, have collectively become so eccentric as to be beyond reasoning by even the broadest scale. Their minds having been addled by the luxury of extraordinary immense amounts of time to wander.
Something tells me that in Banks weaving this story he has touched on something more profound. Be careful what you wish for. To me it seems inevitable that we are heading towards a singularity, whatever form it takes, it will happen. But more of a concern to me is that very close to, and most definitely after that point of singularity, avarice and eccentricity could be rife. Both ultimately doomed states. One that ends in ultimate destruction from wanton desire, the other in a technological and biological nirvana with nothing left to do.
Where are we on the curve? At the very broad and flat end, if my imagination is but the measure to go by. in a sense I'm glad, because my imagination is a worthy companion. If there is nothing left to dream, to conceive, to want for, to work for, to understand - then where does consciousness go?
Would consciousness develop after the post singular state? Could it?
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Permalink Reply by Anders Claassens on -
"In the province of the mind, what the mind believes to be true,
either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found
experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to
be transcended. In the mind there are no limits."
- John Lilly
Thanks Damo,
I found your overview of the ideas contained in The Algebraist thought-provoking, and suspecting that this is a book for the seasoned Banks fan, what would you suggest as good first-reading for a novitiate like myself? Banks' ideas about the concrescence of information and the respectively Quick and Slow subjective experience of its implications seems completely in the spirit of the blog. And as with most questions poised about the evolution of consciousness post-Singularity, there really are no answers at all, there are only choices.
So would consciousness continue to develop post-Singularity?
All we can know about The Singularity is what we perceive to be "in it", but because it is a Singularity, no-thing can be "in" it, all things must be "of" it. There cannot be anything that is not The Singularity, so everything 'is' The Singularity.
Since the only thing we can be certain of is 'We exist', then 'We' do not exist 'in' The Singularity, we are not a part of The Singularity. We are The Singularity.
And since we exist as The Singularity anything we can ascribe to ourselves must by default be an attribute of The Singularity.
From your overview, it seems that Banks has created the 'Slow' with their "extraordinary immense amounts of time to wander" as a literary conceit - and an excellent one. The 'Slow' become our object of comparison because it seems obvious that the 'Quick' in Bank's tale would betoken ourselves and the reality of our current situation.
We know that Nature, without the technological and cultural forms of epigenetic evolution to which we find ourselves bootstrapped, proceeds on an evolutionary wanderlust of aeons, and if we look to her forms (think of the elephant, the pangolin the jellyfish) we see that Nature is the eccentric-made-manifest par excellence.
But long noses, plate-like scales and bioluminescence aside - her eccentricity reaches its apogee in human culture.
So to me, what your question seems to be about is that from the time of our first conscious awareness until the resolution of the apocalyptic potential, there are roughly one hundred thousand years. This would place us firmly within Banks' archetype of the 'Quick'. In biological time, this is only a moment, yet it is ten times the entire span of history. In that period, everything hangs in the balance, because it is a mad rush from hominid to starflight. In the leap across those one hundred thousand years, energies are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all of these concerns that control power with greater and lesser degrees of ethical constancy appear. Ever present is the possibility of aborting the species' transformation into a hyperspatial entelechy.
But again to your question, as we approach the technological Event Horizon, be it 2012, 2045 or... whenever, what is to be made of the crisis of consciousness that ensues?
If you ask me - we are now, there can be no doubt, in the final historical seconds of that crisis - a crisis that involves the end of history, our departure from the planet, the triumph over death, and the release of the individual from the body. We are, in fact, closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter - the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter. The old metaphor of psyche as the caterpillar transformed by metamorphosis is a specieswide analogy. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum of the historical forces already set in motion.
Evolutionary biologists consider humans to be an unevolving species. Some time in the last fifty thousand years, with the invention of culture, the biological evolution of humans ceased and evolution became an epigenetic, cultural phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve, but the human somatotype remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very much like people of a long time ago. But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do.
I believe the Singularity has something revelatory in-store for the evolution of consciousness. And instead of us hitting the wall and handing higher-order sentience over as a legacy to our children, the Machines, I think instead we will see consciousness actualized in AI as our symbiot, and this we will be our clarion call. We will have understood that there is no dichotomy between the Newtonian universe, deployed through the light-years of the three-dimensional space, and the interior mental universe of our consciousness.
They are adumbrations of the same thing.
In other words I believe that The Singularity will be the event to reveal consciousness to be of evolutionary infinitude.
Each person to experience The Singularity will undergo a mini-apocalypse, a mini-entry and mapping into hyperspace. For society to focus in this direction, nothing is necessary except for this experience to become an object of general concern.
Call it Consciousness 2.0.
As an aside, as it's clear we represent Banks 'Quick', an interesting analog for his 'Slow' for us in reality, I think, would be plants.
Plants are so unlike people and operate on such different timescales that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have - have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say that one of us is more 'advanced' really depends on how you define that term, on what 'advances' you value. Naturally we value abilities such as toolmaking, language and our beloved consciousness, but only only because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey thus far. Plants have travelled all that distance and then some - they've just travelled in a different direction.
Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose. So again be it Slow or be it Quick, I know that when it comes to the Singularity, the evolution of consciousness will stick.
Thanks for a wonderful topic, I look forward to others sharing their ideas.
"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."
- John Stuart Mill
"You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds."
- Henry David Thoreau
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Permalink Reply by Aaron Claassens on -
These are very important questions concerning the nature of the Singularity and Post Singularity. Having read The Algebraist myself, it was evident that Banks had done his research when trying to conceptualize what a civilization of immense deep time, the Nasqueron Dwellers would be doing? Banks refers to them as hoarding data without order, which as you mentioned is an example of there eccentric nature. We seem to be well on our way. According to EMC by 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.
Many versions of the Singularity are popular today, however I've a deep fondness for Vernor Vinge's original essay "The Coming Technological Singularity". He leaves the door shut when trying to imagine what's on the other side. Just as modern physics breaks down when trying to decipher what goes on in the singularity of a real black hole, so too does our imagination break down when trying to imagine what a post singular world would be like. The 'event horizon' is opaque, a barrier to conceptualization. Our imaginations are not wild enough! Vinge's future is far weirder than any science fiction, a difference-in-kind that goes beyond amazing shiny gadgets. During a recent conference Vinge was asked to elaborate on his thoughts regarding the post singular world. Although hesitant to make any specific prediction about one technology he found it useful to just think of the post singular world as the Cambrian explosion, a rapid appearance of complexity.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, a research fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligences states "To know what a superhuman intelligence would do, you would have to be at least that smart yourself". Although other transhumanist thinkers like Kurzweil have made serious attempts to contemplate the Singularity, a lot of hand waving is involved. My main point is no science fiction can do true justice to depicting the post singular world.
Your other concerns are very scary. One is avarice the other stasis. It is a very real concern that true AI could be that last invention man ever make. Not in the positive sense of lifting the work load but through the extermination of the human race, the T2 scenario. Wether AI is kick started through the reverse engineering of the human brain or bootstrapped into existence from some Google like network in 2025, we as a human race must start now by endowing these AI systems with a moral framework in which to protect humanity. There are many AI researches that are doing just that. Finding ways to ensure AI is friendly and will find value in the human race if these 'minds' become far superior. If successful our world would be the reciprocal merger of human-machine intelligence which Kurzweil espouses in "This Singularity is Near". Let’s hope they get it right because AI is coming but what type of AI remains an open question of hot debate.
It's easy to look into the future and be terrified. What world is this of brain doping, intuition networks and artificial minds? It may be very banal. Not from our present perspective. If you do make it to say 2040 you will have lived every moment from now until then. You would not have jumped into the future so these changes the Singularity promises may not be so jarring. Instead they may come incrementally giving as time to adapt. All the mind bending high technology promised to us from the future may blend into a flow of inevitability.
What can be said of stasis? This is hard question. I take inspiration from one the most profound discoveries of 20th century logic, the Gödel incompleteness theorem. Basically the theorem proves through pure logic that the realm of mathematics contains an inexhaustible supply of novelty. If the universe is mathematic in the sense of its underlying physical laws, perhaps there is infinite scope for progress in what emerges from those laws such as art, music and science. If the universe is capable of achieving an infinite number of states, then there will be an inexhaustible supply of possibilities awaiting our machine-human civilization.
© 2012 Created by Aaron Claassens.
