What I’ve Been Reading
Vancouver Noir by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw. This caught my eye while I was on a bookstore crawl and I bought it on impulse, mainly because it seemed to have some nice historical photos of Vancouver.
It’s pretty interesting – Vancouver has a somewhat seedy history that I was completely unaware of, but now that I’ve read it I can sort of see why some areas of the city are they way they are today. It was interesting to learn some historic events involving hotels that still stand today, and watch the evolution and motion of the downtown core.
One thing really annoyed me about this book – an apparent lack of editorial oversight. The words “discrete” and “discreet” were consistently confused in the few places they were used, and I have a feeling there were some past/present tense flip-flops going on though I didn’t pay close enough attention to explicitly note them.
Overall it was a fascinating read though, and the pictures are indeed interesting.
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Greg Egan: Axiomatic and Luminous
Being two short story collections, the first collected in 1995 and the second in 1998. I’ve liked all of Egan’s novels so far, but my biggest comment about these short stories is that they seem awfully formulaic. A lot of them follow the pattern of establishing a character who has some interest in the nature of mind, will or identity, then introducing a plot device that allows exploration of one of these themes, and then ending with some sort of ironic or otherwise revelatory twist that results. To be fair, this is partially symptomatic of the short story format, and since the stories were probably originally published at different times and in different fora, the similarities would not have been so apparent until they were collected.
There were a lot of good plot device concepts, such as a biofeedback device that would let you visualize your brain activity in real time, or a brain replacement that learns to be you by successive approximation over the course of decades.
There were also some bad plot devices – things that I could let slide as a concept to be explored as a story, but otherwise were pretty bad science. Like predicting the future by looking at a time-reversed image of the galaxy through a telescope. Or the claim that a simulated person could have experience during the construction of the simulation, before it was actually run – that’s just plain impossible, and the way it was written it almost seemed to be begging the existence of a supernatural “soul”.
A few of the endings were a bit predictable too, like where buying cheap knockoff products gives not quite the desired result. A couple of the stories were incomprehensible to me – I just didn’t get the point at the end – presumably because they were ones that touched on religious themes.
Some of the stories were good, and the common theme of exploring the nature of self and mind is very appealing to me, but overall I prefer Egan’s full-length novels.
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L.E. Modesitt, Jr.: The Eternity Artifact – Chosen because it sounded like exactly the sort of story I felt like reading at the time. Space opera with mysterious deserted alien cities to be explored and artifacts to be found and human enemies to be outwitted. The ending was not what I expected, but it wasn’t disappointing. Pretty decent read.
Modesitt chose to create a familiar political climate for this far-future story by creating a back-story involving a diaspora from Earth at a time when there were still strong national and religious groupings, so the major types of religions and political systems tended to end up controlling groups of proximate solar systems and then warring with each other the same way they did when they lived in countries instead of on entire worlds.
The author casts the descendants of Christian-like and roughly-Islamic groups as the major villain-groups of the story, which was a pleasing surprise. The secular protagonist civilization is questing after the first alien relics ever discovered, which are clearly from a much more advanced civilization, and the religious groups really don’t want this to happen, because either the relics are one of the biblical superweapons left by God or Satan, in which case they must either be secured by the righteous or sealed away forever, or they’re not, in which case Man is not God’s foremost creation – which is an idea is a major threat to the core beliefs of the pseudo-Christians especially.
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Robert L. Forward: Martian Rainbow – Seldom have I been so disappointed in a hard SF story. This one is unusually shallow and contrived, even for Forward, who has a tendency to produce what I call “tech demo” stories – hard SF that is even harder on the speculation and thinner on the characterization than usual. This is not to say that kind of writing is always bad – I’ve enjoyed most of Forward’s other books.
The story here is: Earth conquered by madman, Martian bases left to fend for themselves with insufficient resources, madman threatens survival of human race, Martians find self-replicating nanofactories left by original inhabitants of Mars, use them to save day for everyone and terraform Mars too.
The madman’s conquest of Earth through a cult of personality reinforced by masterful religious propaganda and political manipulation was way, way too fast and easy to be believable. Also the fact that the PR and technical wizards that enabled his rise to power were so fatally blind to his insanity. It basically boils down to “everyone loves the war hero and believes him when he says he’s God and lets him become dictator of Earth.”
The other side of it is the Martian tech that saves the day. These are mobile machines (initially mistaken for organisms) that can eat anything and manufacture almost anything, including diamond in any size and shape you want, while producing no harmful waste products. They can also produce more of themselves as needed, and multiply their computing power by linking up in a chain, and do so in order to learn human language overnight. How awfully convenient if your survival requires rapid terraforming of Mars and you also need to pull a miracle out of your ass to save Earth from destruction. But all this isn’t the part that bugs me. Many of Forward’s stories are contrived around biological or technological oddities. What bugs me is there’s no back story here. The interaction between the humans and Martians machines amounts to:
- Humans: “Here’s our language files.”
- Martians: “Hi. Excuse us while we get back to tending our plants.”
- Humans: “Hey, if you don’t mind, we could really use a hand converting your planet into something we can live on.”
- Martians: “OK.”
- Humans: “Just like that? Won’t this affect you?”
- Martians: “It’s unthinkable for us to refuse any request or interfere with your survival, and your request doesn’t contradict our masters’ orders.”
- Humans: “Where are your masters?”
- Martians: “They went away, and we’re not allowed to tell you anything about them.”
- Humans: “OK. Get to work.”
- (time passes)
- Humans: “Hey, that bunch of Martians is going to get themselves killed! We don’t want any of you dying for us!”
- Martians: “Even though we’re obviously intelligent and autonomous, we’re machines and not alive so it’s OK.”
- Humans: “Oh, carry on then.”
So basically there’s a tantalizing mention that some aliens built these extremely capable machines and then left them behind to do menial tasks, but there’s absolutely no attempt by the humans to weasel out more information about the aliens or find it by other means. There are just token gestures as to how humans are awfully nice and considerate even when in dire straits, and then the alien machines are used to bludgeon into the reader how powerful the concepts of exponential growth and molecular manufacturing are.
The ideas here could have gotten a better treatment if the book were twice as long, but it would still need these rough edges filed off.
What I’ve Been Reading: Velikovsky
Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky, 1950
Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky, 1952
Scientists Confront Velikovsky, Goldsmith, Sagan, Storer, Huber, Mulholland and Morrison, 1977
I occasionally like to consume the works of crackpots as a form of entertainment, and Velikovsky has a reputation as one of the greatest. Having found two of his three books (the third sounding relatively uninteresting, and I didn’t learn of it until too late) and a rebuttal by noted scientists, I read them back to back.
To sum up, Velikovsky contends that in historical times (less than 4,000 years ago), the planet Jupiter spat out a giant comet. On two occasions, around 1,500 BC and 700 BC, this comet made very close – perhaps even physically grazing – approaches to the Earth, and also knocked Mars around a bit, causing Mars to also have a close encounter with Earth. After all this, Mars settled down into its present orbit and the comet assumed a circular orbit and became what we now know as the planet Venus.
These close approaches to Earth caused the major biblical catastrophes; gravitational effects caused massive tides, accounting for a variety of flood myths around the world. Material falling from the comet’s tail became the “manna from heaven” of the biblical tale, and the rains of vermin also fell from the comet. The close contact also caused slippages of the Earth’s crust, causing its rotation to appear to pause or change direction, changing the length of the day, and moving many lands out of their accustomed climates, accounting for the flash-freezing of the Siberian mammoths, the massive anachronistic animal boneyards found in various places, and the misalignment of a few buildings that were notably constructed to have calendrical functions. Interplanetary lightning bolts and tidal effects caused the moon to melt and bubble, the bubbles being the cause of the visible circular scars we call craters.
There’s much, much more but these are the main features of his work. To back this up he cites a lot of mythology from around the world and points out selected geological oddities that he believes support his case. I’m not doing this part justice, but there are three books full of this stuff – it’s not easily dismissed, as the rebuttal shows.
(Edit: In the interest of not presenting things back to front, I should mention that I think Velikovsky’s intent was to reconcile a large number of historical and mythological catastrophes, and the planetary billiards theory is what he came up with to accomplish that purpose.)
In reading Velikovsky’s books, I found his list of geological anomalies quite interesting and was fascinated by his recounting of relevant myths from around the world, and the exciting way he made connections between them. He’s quite a good author and gives the impression of having thoroughly researched everything he writes about. However, he did frequently make one mistake that is a personal bugbear of mine – he asserted things as proven that were not. Verbal handwaving crafted to flummox the credulous. There were also several claims made that I found laughably wrong, though they may not have been known wrong back at time of writing. If you weren’t watching for these things, you could easily be taken in – he writes like a popular scientist, has footnotes and references and all that. By the end there was such a long laundry list of doubts in my mind that I had taken to reading it as an amusing alternate universe history text – a work of fiction – rather than a serious attempt at science.
But it was apparently a serious attempt at science, and it became an interesting phenomenon that drew the attention of serious scientists not because of its content but because of the way things went down. Velikovsky was rightly laughed out of all real scientific publications, so instead published his work himself, as these books. They became popular with nonscientists, and over time quite a hubbub arose over how this outsider with a good theory was being ignored by the ivory tower scientific establishment, who don’t like to admit error – this in itself a sore point of public misunderstanding about how science works. History is full, they said, of outsiders who were later proven right, therefore Velikovsky must be right – PLUS, his work makes the Bible and a lot of other mythologies all work out! Surely that’s of great value and shouldn’t be ignored.
Goldsmith, Sagan and the others organized a conference and invited Velikovsky and his supporters to present papers in support of his work, and also themselves presented papers that demonstrated how some of his key claims could not possibly be true. The major works against are presented in the third book on my list above, and they’re pretty soundly damning. For example, actual math demonstrating that even if somehow Jupiter could have ejected a mass the size of Venus, the amount of energy required to do so would have vaporized the mass in the process. And even if it didn’t, the probability of this mass having multiple near-collisions with Earth and Mars within a span of two thousand years is trillions to one against. And even then, there’s no known way to get such a body into a circular orbit afterwards, using what we know to have been present in the inner solar system at the time.
This should have put the last coffin nail in his theories, but he and his followers continued to try to shore up his crumbling edifice long after. It probably was the end of his general public popularity though.
An interesting comment made in the introductory material of the third book is that all of the astronomers etc. who reviewed Velikovsky’s work found his astronomical claims absurd but were fascinated (as was I) by his seemingly credible connection of many interesting worldwide mythologies, whereas the historians who reviewed his work found the history part worthless but thought the astronomy was credible. Velikovsky himself had scientific training, though neither as an astronomer, historian nor physicist. It just goes to show the importance of relevant expertise.
None of the papers in the third book really addressed the mythology – the closest was one that explained why his dates for some historical events couldn’t be right – and I would actually like to read a similar debunking of the mythology because I found it tantalizing.
Overall, entertaining reads on two counts: Reading the story of Velikovsky’s failed assault on the imagined “ivory tower” of science provided an interesting and unexpected perspective on the way we view science in relation to pseudoscience today, and secondly, Velikovsky’s works themselves are very entertaining if read as a history text that dropped out of a bizarre alternate universe.
What I’ve been reading
The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil – Wherein the author argues from 60 years of historical data about increases in computing power that commodity computers will exceed not only the processing power of the human brain but that of all living humans by the end of the 21st century.
Coupled with advances in sensing technologies such as MRI, we should soon be able to (either destructively or not) transfer human minds into computer simulations of working brains. Eventually the majority of human civilization will be in digital form and a staggering array of new kinds of interaction will become possible.
Naturally I hope he’s right, but I think his predictions are a little too optimistic in terms of timing.
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S. Andrew Swann: The Hostile Takeover trilogy (Profiteer, Partisan and Revolutionary) – Pretty good as political science fiction goes. An eclectic cast of non-stereotypical characters, set in an interesting universe that makes me want to check out some of his other books in the same setting. There are a couple of places between the halfway point and the end where things get a little too deus ex for my taste, but thankfully all that gets out of the way in time for the more conventional resolution.
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The Grand Design by Leonard Mlodinow (with Stephen Hawking’s name on the cover to boost sales). Basically it’s a science popularization book specifically about quantum theory, what it does and doesn’t do, and what we’ve learned from it. Short and easy to understand.
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The Complete Maus – My long relationship with this book has finally come to a close. I first noticed the series in the the college library when I was in my mid-teens. Leafing through it, I could tell that it contained good storytelling and told an important tale, but at the time I had little interest in history, so I shelved it with a note to read it through later. More than 20 years later, that “later” has finally arrived thanks to someone at work selling the compilation at a good price. Well, having read it, I have to say it was rewarding. It’s riveting in the way all tales told by survivors of major events are riveting. Not much more to say than that; go read it.
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Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham – How rare, a pro-immortalism story with a happy ending. It’s a short and easy read, and well done. It mostly concerns means of manipulating the masses into accepting longevity advances, something individuals are strangely resistant to and institutions actively resistant to. Recommended.
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Fleet of Worlds by Edward M. Lerner and Larry Niven – a very enjoyable Known Space story that reads like a classic Niven. There are a couple of flaws with the setup and teardown; the ending, first off, seems to conflict timing-wise with established canon about the fleet in other Known Space stories. Secondly, I have trouble reconciling the setting for the story (a human colony on the fleet) with known behavior of the Puppeteers – it’d be a real stretch for them to do what the backstory claims they did.
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Year Million edited by Damien Broderick. It’s a collection of essays by a variety of authors, most of them scientists, ostensibly about what they think our destiny over the next million years is likely to be like. Many of them go straight for the big picture though and talk about all of the future.
My favorite part is this quote by Steven B. Harris, who articulates something I sort of unconsciously knew all along but am excited to see revealed clearly: “Homo Sapiens Sapiens is now largely a software species, perhaps the first, governed mainly by epigenic factors (outside the genome), some of which are extrasomatic (outside the body). Much of what makes us special as a species is stored not in genes or brains, but in libraries, laws, traditions, and songs.”
This is so true. Obviously our genes are somewhat important because they give us the hardware capable of running the minds we’re so proud of, but the hardware by itself is useless; a child by itself does not grow into a human being, nor can it be made into one after it has grown on its own past a certain point (as I believe is demonstrated by studies of feral children). Everything we consider important about ourselves as individuals and as a species is programmed into us after we’re born by those who teach us. And the continual improvement of that programming is what has enabled us to improve our lot at an exponential rate.
The rest of the book I found rather depressing though, for two reasons.
First, many of the authors keep coming back to Matrioshka Brains, and collectively they make the case that building such devices is the logical way to squeeze the most living out of the universe in its present form (ie while there are still stars), and that the drive to maximize life will ultimately compel all sentients to build such things. I can’t disagree, but I don’t like it either – it’ll make the universe a boring place. Suppose we were to build an M-Brain for ourselves. We could have trillions and trillions of humans living it in happily for billions of years or more, but to build it we’d have to disassemble the rest of the solar system – there’d be no other places to live or to explore. We would basically turn inward, living in simulated universes of our own devising instead. That’s not for me – I want to explore the real universe. So we’d probably end up with an expanding shell of people like me, moving outward to explore real places while they still exist, and behind us the stars would be going dark as more and more of them are wrapped in minds or their energy redirected to power minds elsewhere.
But then again, stars (and matter itself) won’t last for ever, which brings me to the second depressing part. Recent discoveries suggest that not only is the universe expanding, not only is it not likely to contract again, but the rate of expansion is actually accelerating. These measurements still need to be confirmed, and the baffling question of how this can be happening could use a good answer, but for now let’s assume it’s true.
One consequence of this is that the observable universe will shrink over time – the furthest galaxies will fade away as they accelerate to the point where even the light they shine directly at us isn’t fast enough to outrace the expansion of the space in between. Superclusters of galaxies may stick together, but the gulfs between them will get larger, and that means the limit of the amount of interesting places we can explore gets smaller with time, even though the universe itself is getting larger.
Another is that the majority of time in this universe – basically all of it – will be spent in an uninsteresting state where there is no matter and almost no energy, and less energy all the time. We’re living on the slope of an exponential downward curve in the abundance of energy gradients (which are necessary for any kind of thought). Eventually the stars will go out and stop being born. Then the black holes will evaporate. Then, assuming we’re correct in our belief that protons can decay, all matter will evaporate into subatomic particles and the universe will contain only energy, radiating out in all directions and thus becoming more diffuse. The temperature of the universe will become more and more uniform and will continue to drop towards absolute zero – but will never actually get there. It’s impossible. So there will always be some energy gradient around – always less and less, but some. And this process will continue for ever.
Imagine then that we can devise some way to survive the death of matter – say we can create a cloud of particles that can compute thought and do so using any available energy gradient (though of course it’ll have to compute more slowly as less energy becomes available). Now we could live forever, but it would be, to me, a very claustrophobic existence because there would be nothing to do but live in simulations – navel-gazing in our memories, or trying out randomized simulations for all eternity. (Perhaps we’re actually living in one of these right now and have deliberately forgotten, to make it interesting). Because this environment would have to compute more slowly as the available energy dissipated, the ratio of real time to simulation time would increase. At first perhaps we might think faster than real time, but after a time it would get to the point where the components of our immaterial computer might only exchange a photon of information every trillion years, because there isn’t that much to go around. A hypothetical person inside the simulation watching a clock count off the real-time years would see the number rising faster and faster all the time, then the number of digits in the year would start rising faster and faster, and so on. But other than that one indication, the rest of us would never know.
I find this depressing and really hope we can engineer a better solution for our long-term destiny, though in a way this is still better than a Big Crunch because it means an infinite existence of a sort is possible.
But, all of this is still a ways off. We’ve got half a billion years or more to enjoy Earth, then perhaps five billion years with the solar system in its current form, and hundreds of billions until the stars in general start to fade. I hope that’s enough time to come up with some answers to these pressing problems.
Book report: “The Mind’s I” by Hofstadter and Dennett
The nature of the thing called “I” is something I frequently ponder. It’s an important question to me as someone interested in uploading, artificial intelligence and immortality in general. For these reasons I’m always eager to tackle a philosophy book on the subject of the nature of consciousness.
This one is a collection of essays and excerpts from other works, followed by comments and analyses by Hofstadter and Dennett. Since publication, I’m given to understand that some of the essays have been soundly criticized by others in the field, but that doesn’t apply to all of them, and they still make an interesting read.
There are some insightful stabs in various directions, some nice thought experiments, and some decent arguments that minds like ours do not necessarily have to be implemented in meat.There’s also an entertaining dialog with God by Raymond Smullyan that gesticulates at my feelings on determinism versus free will, perhaps better than I can.
I didn’t really gain any deeper insight into the core question of consciousness though. What I really gained from reading this is an appreciation that philosophers tend to pick a direction of argument and run with it a ways, and collectively they’re sketching out a big circle around the problem. In other words, there’s a lot of collective tail-chasing going on.
Book report: “Resentment Against Achievement” by Robert Sheaffer
Reading this book helped me gain some perspective on some aspects of western society that have always bothered me, namely the seeming antagonism between the rich and the poor, the ambitious and the lazy and the smart and the stupid, the nature of public education, and the tradeoff between government theft (“taxes”) and the need for economic safety nets for individuals.
Despite its narrow focus, there’s too much meat in this book for me to summarize and I’m not sure I could do it justice. I really recommend reading it if you are bothered by anti-intellectual or anti-progress attitudes. I’ll cover a few of the main threads with some quotes I appreciated.
Sheaffer ties together several self-defeating societal problems and reminds us that they have defeated societies before. The French Revolution was one example, and he makes the case that the Roman Empire fell because the emerging Christian cult (which was very different then than it is now, not that that excuses the present incarnation) weakened it by changing many of its highest achievers into anti-achievers.
One problem is education, and the way our public educational system is weakened by its mandate to treat everyone identically. Achieving success is usually fairly easy for those well-educated in a well-chosen profession. But for many – especially the lower classes – getting a good education is not easy. Youth who value things like “being cool” over being accomplished are allowed to disrupt the education of those children who actually would like to be someone, through bullying, disrupting classes, promotion of their failure-oriented values and lowering of testing standards so “no child is left behind” despite the fact they should be. Anyone familiar with the classic struggle of nerd versus jock will understand this. As a result of frustration or trying to comply with these pressures, children who might otherwise be someone become failures and often adopt the pro-failure resentful attitude that caused the problem in the first place, and may pass it on to the next generation.
… we cannot claim to love our culture, our accomplishments, our arts and sciences, or any of civilization’s fine achievements when we say it is as acceptable for students to fail as it is for them to succeed. No, we must admit that it is better to succeed than to fail, or else it is a waste of time and effort to even try to educate anyone. Having admitted this, we must conclude that we are right to accord special honor and recognition to those who have disciplined themselves to succeed. We must likewise admit that those who succeed in education are for the most part justified in their expectation of enjoying greater economic rewards than those who do not; for if all must be equal, then why should anyone ever strive to succeed? And if no one strives to succeed, then what becomes of civilization?
In another section, he goes on at length about how socialism and Christianity are counter-productive ideologies in that they are both designed to prevent people from achieving anything.
The notion that people are themselves in any way responsible for their own well-being, or lack thereof, is poisonous to Christian and socialist values alike; for once we admit that the affluent have earned their wealth, we have no justification for envy of them. Therefore, the resentful must pretend that there was no choice, that they are not themselves to blame for their own failures.
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Like an entirely Christian society, an entirely Marxist society is in open conflict with reality. For reasons of doctrine, it must be in perpetual war against achievement because the fruit of achievement is wealth, and wealth is equated with sin. Nonetheless, in order for that society to survive and remain to some degree competitive with the more humane and rational societies of the world, achievement must be encouraged.
He also gives an example of how deeply and subtly integrated resentment is in our society: There are African-American studies and women’s studies programs in universities. Both are historically oppressed groups with justified grounds for resentment. But there are no white-people studies or men’s studies programs. Why this lack of equality? Not because there is nothing of value to be studied, but because the resentful forbid it. They do not want equality, they want revenge. And what gets studied in these existing programs? Why, that history of oppression of course, which serves to nurse that resentment across more generations. That in itself is a kind of revenge.
On taxation and welfare:
When something is taxed, you get less of it; and when something is subsidized, you get more of it. Presently, we place a heavy tax on achievement but subsidize the resentful, who reject the need for learning and the discipline of work. This causes a decrease in achievement and an increase in resentment, in proportion to the size of the income transfer. It is not difficult to see how to diminish resentment to very low levels: Simply stop giving free lunches to angry failures.
He also discusses the mechanisms of guilt and continual browbeating that the resentful use to try to keep achievers under their thumb. This is the sort of thing that leads to lowered educational standards, overshot political correctness and tolerance for handouts to people because of who they are, not because of any actual need for it.
What can we do about all this? Private education. Continued reward for accomplishment. Lessened reward for failure, hopefully without cutting off motivated folks who need help. Work to change our own attitudes, and by doing so influence the attitudes of others.
As achievers quicken their pace, assisted by marvelous future inventions that today [1988] are not yet even conceived, those who sit and wallow in resentment will be left farther and farther behind. Inevitably, a tremendous roar will go up, hollering that the rapid progress of technology must stop, and that the resentful must be respectfully carried along on achievers’ shoulders. When we hear this ferocious roaring, we must not bow down before it as if it were a lofty moral statement, for it is mere flatulence. Let us instead greet it with contempt and even dare to laugh courageous laughter, taunting those roaring with rage to get up out of the mud and try to run alongside us. If they try to, but stumble, let us compassionately hold out our hand to catch them and help them try to become runners like us. But should they curse us for our speed as we run by, let us give them no further thought, leaving them to fend for themselves without our handouts. They will tire of that very soon.
My opinion of Sheaffer’s overall message varies from day to day. Some days I think of the fantastic continued growth of science and technology and think he’s being a bit pessimistic about the ability of any disenfranchised group to bring that down. Other days (days when I pay attention to news) I get annoyed and depressed at watching the forces of active, hostile ignorance try to erode that progress (usually while enjoying the benefits of it) and I think he may be right.
Sheaffer also helped me debug some traces of resentful thinking in myself. Although I don’t recall my family ever expressing the attitudes Sheaffer calls “resentful”, somewhere along the way I did pick up a general mistrust for the wealthy and powerful, and an assumption that great wealth is unearned. While that is true in many visible situations in our society, it is also true that great wealth can be earned and success generally comes with effort.
The book also helped me start to solidify my uncertain position on taxation and social programs (well, that and now being employed and seeing half my pay forcibly taken by the government). Before you ask, no, I don’t have any answers. But I do know I’m less satisfied with our current solutions than I used to be.
It’s not a long book. Go read it.
