FoesOfReality Interview: Part I: Digital vs Analog Intelligence, Role of Deterministic Chaos, “Programming” and Emotions.

FoesOfReality Interview: Part II: Neural Darwinism, “Remembered Present,” Memory and Identity.

“How does it feel — to be a ray of light? You’re cutting through the plasma of the solar wind at nearly the speed of light in a vacuum. The distances have shrunk. You’re a pulse of signals, ones and zeroes. A frozen state of mind.” (Suggested soundtrack)

Does that turn you on? Then drop out and tune in to Leonid Korogodski’s Pink Noise. He will take you down the rabbit space tube to land in the psyche of a transhuman doctor charged with healing a young girl in a coma. Let me disabuse you of any notion you might have that the novel takes place in a pink landscape of sugar and spice and everything nice. There is a battle afoot for the control of Mars, and this girl is the key.

You can find the rest of the review here: http://foesofreality.com/review-pink-noise

Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale by Leonid Korogodski is a mind melting tale of the future. The humans have made it to Mars and have also discovered immortality. They download their brains into the “e-World,” calling themselves “posthuman.” The story follows Nathi, a Zulu born on Mars. He is a posthuman healer who has been assigned to restore the brain of a young girl in a coma so that she may be downloaded into e-World. He is aware that she is of importance, but does not know her identity. He discovers that the only way to repair her damaged brain is to load himself directly into her brain and fix it from the inside. While inside Nathi gets glimpses of her memories and of who she really is. The story takes a few twists and turns from there but gets quite exciting.

You can find the rest of the review here: http://sheneverslept.com/newsandreviews/archives/9470

Thursday, August 30, 4:30–6:00pm
Hive Minds, Real and Fictional
Hive minds are a commonly used trope to make aliens more foreign. What do hive minds look like in reality and how do they compare to the depictions in fiction?
Carl Fink (moderator), Leo Korogodski, Ramez Naam, Tanglwyst de Holloway

Friday, August 31, 10:30am–12:00pm
Transhumanism and Space Exploration
Discussion about how humanity can evolve in order to explore space.
Geoffrey A. Landis, Karen Burnham (moderator), Leo Korogodski, Nancy Fulda, W A (Bill) Thomasson

Friday, August 31, 1:30–2:00pm
Reading: Leo Korogodski

Sunday, September 2, 3:00–4:30pm
The Future of Wetware
Are our brains really inferior to digital computers? Will the “wetware” become obsolete after the technological Singularity? Or are analog components, in one form or another, actually necessary for the ‘higher mind’ to develop?
Dale Cozort, Jonathan Stars, Katy Stauber, Kendall F.Morris, Leo Korogodski (moderator)

Sunday, September 2, 6:00–7:30pm
Galaxies in Plasma Lab
It was by looking at the spiral shape of galaxies and the rotation speeds of stars in them that astrophysicists suggested the existence of the so-called “dark matter,” which has so far eluded detection. Yet the evolution of galaxies has been successfully reproduced in plasma lab and subsequent computer simulations. Come hear about a controversial way to experimentally test astrophysical hypotheses.
Leo Korogodski

Can Science Solve All Our Problems?

Not long ago, on my blog, I took a look at the subject of Optimism and Darkness in Science Fiction, arguing the benefits of progress from the perspective of the science of complex systems. That prompted the author Lynda Williams to pose this question to me: Can science solve all our problems?

Yes. And no.

It bears repeating the gist of my earlier argument first. You may be aware of the second law of thermodynamics: entropy of any closed system grows in time. The state of entropy maximum is that of undifferentiated chaos, where everything is the same: the same density, the same temperature, the same everything. When applied to the entire universe, this portends the Ludwig Boltzmann’s so-called “heat death” scenario. The second law of thermodynamics seems to lead to pessimism.

But Boltzmann was studying systems close to equilibrium (in essence, those that are “almost-closed”). Fortunately, Ilya Prigogine discovered that in open systems that are sufficiently far from equilibrium, entropy statistically goes down through the phenomenon of spontaneous self-organization. An open system can do that by exchanging entropy with its environment, thus satisfying the second law of thermodynamics within a greater whole.

This tendency to spontaneously self-organize is universal, constituting a generalized evolutionary principle that applies beyond biology—essentially, to everything. This is the origin of all structure in the universe, from clusters of galaxies to stars to planets to life to consciousness to social structures to technology—and to who knows what comes next. At every step of this spiral of self-organization, the systems become smaller and the energy flows in them faster, so that the smaller system could sustain itself within its environment. A galaxy has vastly more energy than a single star does, but it develops more slowly. The geological processes are faster still, but they appear to stand still next to all living things. And so on. The energy flows within a computer chip are the fastest that we know of—yet.

Although it is often stressed that evolution does not have intentions (it is, philosophically speaking, not teleological), the fact is that, through a variety of entirely unintentional processes, the ever-rising levels of complexity end up being achieved. One can’t deny that the variety of life now found far exceeds the original multi-cellular life in complexity. And this is a manifestation of the universal principle discovered by Prigogine. The only truly closed system is the universe itself; and if its entropy is infinite, then the spiral of evolution can keep rising ad infinitum, non-stop.

And that is grounds for some optimism.

The same principle, of course, applies to our society, for it too is a spontaneously self-organizing system. Although we often appear to titter on the brink of yet another catastrophe, we also seem to keep going forward in many ways. The more complex a system is, the higher is the potential for a catastrophe to take place. But if Prigogine is right, then the potential for improvement is statistically greater.

It’s like a child, growing from being an infant to adulthood, graduating from the smaller dangers to the ever greater ones: from having to cross a street to riding a bike to driving a car to going to college, and so on. But no sensible parents would lock their son or daughter in a prison just to keep them safe from life—because potential for the good is better still.

I often hear cries for us to go back to the earlier, more primitive ways. But must we keep our entire society in prison?

Life is an inherently complex process. Being in balance doesn’t mean a state of static equilibrium—which is the maximum of entropy and, basically, death. And so, every time that we step back or try to stop the progress, we necessarily bring death, in one way or another. Often, literally.

My first example is the problem of our dwindling energy sources. We keep consuming more and more—consistent with the picture I have just described, for the advances in complexity require ever greater flows of energy and entropy exchange. But what would happen when we run out of our current prime energy source—hydrocarbons (oil and gas)?

Some wax nostalgic for a more primitive life. But, in reality, going back—or even stopping to advance—would ultimately mean less food, less medicine, less services for everyone—translating into death for billions. If we are looking for a right solution, then we must be looking forward and not backward. The best minds of our planet are already looking for new, more efficient, longer-lasting sources of energy, by using science. And they’ll find them—and the next new sources, too, when these eventually run out. And so on, as long as we keep moving forward.

In another example, the modern agricultural approach seems to be reaching its limits. The drive for efficiency required automation, which ushered in the monocultures of today. But these unnatural environments required intensive application of fertilizers and pesticides, which in turn bred more resistant strains of pests, not to mention contaminating our environment (even killing the pollinator insects, such as honey bees) and deteriorating it in other ways.

Many now understand that the natural biomes have evolved the way they are for a good reason. The interlinked web of relationships within a biome works toward increasing the environment’s complexity, its health. Even parasites help the host species to evolve higher resilience by killing off the weak; too virulent parasites would kill off all their hosts and die off themselves. Contrast this with pesticides helping to develop more virulent forms of parasites.

But does it mean that we should stop the scientific progress and fall back on the old ways? It’s tempting to think that if it’s science that’s responsible for our scientific agriculture, then we should stop doing it.

The “go back to nature” calls sound appealing, but there is a rub: we wouldn’t be able to feed the current population if we just revert to a more primitive society. To stop would, once again, bring death to billions. Instead, we actually should invest more into science—although, perhaps, a somewhat different one. Until recently, our science limited itself to studying simple systems, isolated properties—which was, in fact, the science in its infancy. But lately, a new kind of science, the science of complex systems, has begun developing—or, shall we say, our science is maturing. We now know, for example, how those natural biomes actually work—or, at least, some of that.

So, once again, the key lies in increasing the complexity—in this case, in finding a way to grow our food in natural, complex biomes but on an industrial scale. Take the self-evolving natural biomes—and then help them evolve faster and be more efficient but without sacrificing their “naturalness” (which never means a static equilibrium but is a highly complex, dynamic process churning in the system).

It is not for nothing that I called the spiral of the generalized evolutionary process a “spiral,” because in many cases it revisits earlier states to improve on them. Indeed, in my second example of agricultural progress, the suggested way lies, on one hand, in using natural biomes; on the other hand, in doing this on a grand scale beyond anything seen in the past. It means more science, not less science. It feels right.

But does it mean that science can solve all of our problems? Probably not. After all, only the knowledge that can be tested experimentally is subject to science. Yet there are other kinds of knowledge, the kinds that one has to take on faith. A case in point: no experiment can prove or disprove the existence of God, in principle. Some basic assumptions about the universe must always be made. Even an atheist has to believe that God does not exist.

Ideally, one could argue that the domains of science, on one hand, and those of religion and philosophy don’t intersect: the former being those that are subject to experiment, the latter being those that are not. When either side try to step onto the other’s territory, that is when the conflicts between them arise—and only then. Unfortunately, that will probably keep happening, for the ideal can be never reached in finite time—or else, we wouldn’t have the room to go forward, then.

So yes, we’ll keep encountering some problems that cannot be solved by science. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to use it. At the very least, we must keep trying to go forward, fighting entropy. We mustn’t fall into a static equilibrium, which is abhorred by life, but mustn’t stray from harmony of a complex, dynamic process, rising in a spiral. Because any society that stops progressing will decay.

There’s something I’ve learned during the past few years. If you want to succeed as a writer, it’s not all about talent. It’s not about developing a thick skin. Rejections make you cry? Scream? Those are valid reactions sometimes. But what enables you to succeed is sheer stubbornness. You send the story out again.

Case in point: my story Red Dust and Dancing Horses.

From the time I wrote the rough draft, I knew this story was special. It hit me on a personal level. The tale is a horse story set on Mars, where horses can’t exist. It’s about a young Martian girl who has to accept that her deepest desire—to know horses—will likely never come true.

I was completely horse obsessed from the time I could walk and talk. I adored Rainbow Brite from age 3, but my biggest love was her horse, Starlite. I collected Breyer horses from age 4 (I wasn’t into My Little Ponies as much because they weren’t realistic enough). I read every horse book in the children’s section of the library, and if a new book came in the librarians told me. I knew the difference between a Shire and a Paso Fino, a forelock and a fetlock. My parents owned two acres of property, and I knew exactly where we could build a stable and corral. I took riding lessons. I knew exactly what my dream horse would look like and how his mane swayed in the breeze.

And at age 11, I finally had to accept that I would never have a horse.

I was mature enough to realize we were too poor. Money was tight. My riding lessons stopped as we couldn’t even afford the $10 for my riding lessons every two weeks. How could we afford a horse, or hay, or tack?

The dream died, but my love for horses didn’t.

That was the emotion I put into the story, only using a grittier Martian backdrop instead of a central Californian one. I posted the story on OWW. I revised heavily. I started sending it out to magazines. And this story I loved passionately was soundly rejected by almost every pro science fiction market.

Really, I could see why. It’s a horse story, on Mars. People don’t usually pair horses and sci-fi, much less horses from old westerns. But it still hurt. This was a story that I felt was not only one of the best things I had written, but it was also a story I loved.

But I loved it so much, I kept gritting my teeth and sending it out again. It had some close calls. It won an honorable mention in Writers of the Future for the 4th quarter of 2011. But it still didn’t have a home, so I sent it out yet again.

You know what? It has a home now, an amazing one. This is what the editor of Stupefying Stories, Bruce Bethke, said in the forward for this March issue:

I’m about out of space now, but would be remiss if I did not call special attention… especially to my personal favorite in this entire collection, “Red Dust and Dancing Horses” by Beth Cato. If this story doesn’t wind up on several Best of 2012 lists and on the short list for at least one major award, I will be disappointed.

While querying agents, the big mantra is, “It only takes one yes.” That’s true for short stories, too. Red Dust and Dancing Horses finally found its YES, and whatever happens from here, I’m happy, because the story finally found some other folks who love it just as much as I do.

The dream lives on.

Red Dust and Dancing Horses can be found in Stupefying Stories 1.5, on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

This is no mean feat to achieve. It helps that the plot resembles the familiar mold of private investigation stories. The main character, Grace Harper, is a private detective, who was once upon a time a member of the police force but now is blacklisted by the powerful Establishment. For many years (really, decades!) specializing on finding missing people, she’s asked to find no one less than the scientist responsible for the virus that had stopped aging 400 years ago.

During her investigation, she confronts the issues of the benefits and drawbacks of putting stop to aging. Herself a 130-years old woman, she looks like 25, as almost everyone in the world does, including her own mother. Her generation, like so many others, have forgotten what it meant to age, while facing the daily horrors of overpopulation. Although no longer aging beyond 25, the people still can die from violence, disease, or—as so many do—from hunger. Only the select few actually get to live to a ripe old age. The gulf between the rich and poor has increased by leaps and bounds. Driven by despair, many people beg to be taken into slavery to work the farms. Some are kidnapped and forced into slavery.

Deciding whether aging should be reintroduced is no easy thing. Predictably, Grace is immersed into power struggles between many forces, from the pro-immortality Establishment to the select rich trying to bring aging back while keeping themselves still immortal to the pro-death terrorists who bomb the crowds pretty much at random just to decrease population, as well as those bent on reunification of the States. But, poignantly, the big political issues are paralleled by very personal ones, as Grace struggles with the old and new loves, and with her decision never to have children.

Overall, I find the book to be successful. The world has a convincing mix of futuristic and throwback elements, the latter magnifying the sense of a decaying society while allowing to keep a sense of familiarity so far into the future. I see it as a problem, though, that Grace at times comes across as less than professional. In particular, I found it hard to believe that someone that had been seeking missing persons for something like six decades (!) had never visited a farm, whereas the farmers were notorious for kidnapping people (a fact that she still thinks is a rumor early in the story). At times, she exudes the “everyman” feel, which may be beneficial for grounding the reader in the story’s world yet clashes with her supposed image of a seasoned veteran.

That said, the pace picks up quickly and does not let out till the end, through many a change of fortune, as we get to visit all sorts of locales, from the futuristic city-state to the slavery farms to the terrorist underground. Personally, I was distracted at times by the fact that everyone seems to be after Grace while she doesn’t really know much at all. I kind of like the idea that she causes havoc not because of holding the keys to the humankind’s future but because all kinds of forces think she may. Moreover, the real key to the story lies not on the political but on the personal level. So, when Grace is tortured for information, it’s the fates of her loved ones that she truly holds in her hands, not the fate of the world, which remains to be resolved in a potential sequel that this story asks for.

Recommended.

By one of its many definitions, science fiction examines the impact of technology and progress on the human psyche and human society. So it is not surprising that we find the themes of optimism and darkness so sharply stated in SF, for they inhere in the phenomenon of progress itself. Anything growing displays this pattern: the potential for things to go wrong grows, yet the potential for the good grows as well.

When your son or daughter is born, the first concerns are medical—and though sometimes serious, in most cases they are light and manageable easily. As the child grows, though, as she learns to walk, there comes a chance of her getting lost. As she learns to bike, there comes a possibility for her to get seriously hurt. As she learns to drive, the danger goes higher still. She goes out in the world, leaves home, finds people to love… Every step of the way, the potential for things to go wrong grows. And although often we may feel we’d rather have her stop, we don’t. Because we feel that the potential for the good is greater.

Is it always, though?

What we see here is a battle of two major tendencies that fight it out everywhere in the universe. One is exemplified by the second law of thermodynamics: in any closed system, entropy statistically grows. The maximum state of entropy is that of death, because everything is uniform, with no differences: the same temperature, the same density, nothing differentiated. When he discovered this law, Ludwig Boltzmann grappled with the “heat death” scenario—what would occur when the entire universe ran down to such state.

Interestingly, Boltzmann arrived at such a pessimistic outlook while trying to do to physics what Charles Darwin had done to biology: to introduce the evolutionary principle into the picture. Unfortunately, the first pioneers in science often have to start with simple things, covering the basic, easily isolated scenarios. And so it was Boltzmann’s fate to study systems close to equilibrium. However, when several decades later Ilya Prigogine turned to studying systems far from equilibrium (and yes, there is a rigorous mathematical definition of what that means), he did successfully what Boltzmann had once failed to do.

Prigogine discovered (and received a Nobel Prize for that) that in open systems far from equilibrium, entropy statistically goes down through a variety of processes (depending on the system) that are all varieties of spontaneous self-organization. Since any closed system still obeys the second law of thermodynamics, this can only be possible if the open system exchanges entropy with its environment, giving more entropy out than it receives from the outside, increasing its internal order and complexity at the expense of its environment. This may appear to be coincidental in each case, but in fact the law is universal and it’s only its relatively late appearance that prevented it from being called the fourth law of thermodynamics.

This generalized evolutionary principle is the source of all structure in the universe: from formation and evolution of galaxies (with huge near-empty voids between them), to birth of stars, to planets and their geologic processes, to the appearance and growing complexity of life, to birth of consciousness (see also Neural Darwinism), to our society with its complex social structure, to the increasing growth of technology… The spiral of progress never ends but rises to the ever greater levels of complexity. Who knows what the next stage may be, for surely it will never end?

Yet in order to rise in order, to lower the entropy, complex adaptive systems must keep increasing their rate of energy flow with their environment, which also necessitates an increase in the number of energy pathways and their complexity. And in order to persist within their environment, they must become progressively smaller relative to the environment. Indeed, although galaxies and stars are huge, containing enormous energy; but the relative rate of flow of energy and entropy in them is way smaller than in our brains and in computer chips.

And here we come back to the potential for the good and the potential or the bad, the promise and the disillusionment, the optimism and the darkness. Close to the top of the observed spiral of progress, at the level of human societies, we have already faced them both. The higher the complexity, the greater both become. But does it mean that we must stop? No way. The message of the unnumbered “fourth law of thermodynamics”—the generalized evolutionary principle—is that, although things can certainly go wrong, the likelihood of them going well is greater, after all. This principle is universal. And even though any given child can die in infancy, more will survive. And even we may drive ourselves extinct, it is more likely that we won’t; even if we do, perhaps other intelligent species (if they exist—in fact, they must exist, although progressively more rare than life, planets, stars, and galaxies), they will survive. To stop, however, is to die for sure. Stopping the progress ultimately brings “heat death” (in all the many ways that one can die).

The potential for the good is greater. But being the creatures of survival that we are, we tend to focus on what could go wrong. Thus, much of our literature reflects less optimism than darkness. Science fiction is the child of the very latest loop of the evolutionary spiral (the technological progress). Even within SF, we see the focus shifting over time from physics to biology to sociology—like in a developing fetus going through the philogeny in its ontogeny, through the earlier evolutionary stages, in her mother’s womb, so does the literature of science fiction, in its own way.

This makes SF even more susceptible to darkness. But, paradoxically, this is for the best. After all, our very tendency to focus on the things that can go wrong is what makes the likelihood of our survival higher. The dystopias we write are warnings and perhaps one of the very mechanisms that actually raises the potential for the good. In this, perhaps, we see the evolutionary principle in action. So, when reading yet another dark thing, do remember that the good will ultimately triumph. Seek those rays of light in darkness. Smile.

One of the coolest, most well-designed and fascinating hard SF novels I’ve read lately is Leonid Korogodski’s page-turning Pink Noise (A PostHuman Tale). Have you perhaps never heard of the author? You have now. I believe Leonid will soon be one of today’s best-known science fiction personages.

You can find the entire review by clicking here.