The Mountain in the Sea
Highlights
The is no silence in the living nervous system. An electrical symphony of communication streams through our neurons every moment we exist. We are built for communication. Only death brings silence.
We come from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.
We understand the encoding of genetic sequences, the folding of proteins to construct the cells of the body, and even a good deal about how epigenetic switches control these processes. And yet we still do not understand what happens when we read a sentence. Meaning is not neuronal calculus in the brain, or the careful smudges of ink on a page, or the areas of light and dark on a screen. Meaning has no mass or charge. It occupies no space—and yet meaning makes a difference in the world.
I remember Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan saying she couldn’t tell whether they were a nation-state, a religion, or a corporation—but that they certainly known how to operate like all three, using whichever rules and laws are convenient to get their way.
This was why the world would never build another humanoid AI. The smile was perfect. Sincere, unaffected. Full human. And because of that, the smile was like the shadow of your own death. Evrim’s existence implicated yours. It implied you, too, were nothing more than a machine—a swarm of preprogrammed impulses iterating endlessly. If Evrim was a conscious thing, and made, then maybe you were made as well. A construct made of different materials. A skeleton walking around, sheathed in meat, fooled into thinking it has free will. A thing that had occurred by accident. Or a thing made on a whim, to see if it could be done. …”The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”
In an aquarium, it’s often only the dolphins, otters, and octopuses that get named by volunteers. Two mammals, which is understandable, as they are species relatively close to our own—and a cephalopod, a species so different from us that our last common ancestor was five hundred million years ago. Why? People name octopuses because, no matter how different they are from us, we recognize something in them. Something we have in common.
Communication is not what sets humans apart. All life communicates, and at a level sufficient to its survival. Animal and even plant communications are, in fact, highly sophisticated. But what makes humans different is symbols—letters and words that can be arranged in the self-referential sets we call language. Using symbols, we can detach communication from its direct relation to things present around us. We can speak with one another about things not here and now. We can tell stories. Tradition, myth, history, culture—these are storage systems for knowledge, and they are all products of the symbol. And the use of symbols is something we have not seen outside our own species.
When we avoid behaviors that would instigate a shark attack, we are recognizing the shark has a mind capable of reading our signs and responding to them. Like it or not, we are in communication with them. If we accidentally send out signs to a shark that indicate we are prey (if we look too much like a seal in our wet suit, or we produce vibrations in the water like a fish in distress), we know we may instigate an attack, despite the fact that the shark does not typically prey on humans. We can cause the shark to misinterpret the world’s signs and make a mistake—a mistake which may be fatal to us. How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters.
Every octopus we encounter has survived adventures and trials unimaginable to us. The octopus who has lived to adulthood in the dangers of the sea will be an Odysseus, a “man of twists and turns,” a heroically clever artist of battle and escape. How many arms will it have lost and regrown? How many forms will it have taken on to hide and stalk its prey? How many deaths will it have escaped? And what will it know of us, this hero of the sea? Has it hidden in a nineteenth-century diving helmet lost by our early explorers of the deep? Slipped from a fisherman’s net? Peered at us from the edge of its home as we walk upon our beaches? Handled the skulls drowned in our submarines? What will we be to it? Gods? Monsters? Or nothing that can signify to it at all?
In the octopus we see opportunism, exploration, creativity—the qualities we associate with consciousness in our own mental life. We think we recognize a mind like our own. But this creature is nothing like us. The majority of an octopus’s neurons are in its arms, connected via a neural ring to a brain that can override, but does not always control, its maverick appendages. As I watch this quicksilver being moving through its environment, I ask myself: How does this animal, who has more neurons in its limbs than in its brain, who tastes with its grasp, whose skin can sense light, see the world? And could we ever hope to understand such a point of view?
This was what talking to Kamran did for her: allowed her to sort her thoughts, prepare for her interactions with others. Without him, her thoughts were circular, insular. He helped her shape and control them, gave her new input, allowed her to modulate her output. To translate it, make it understandable to others.
Is this what AI journaling can do for us?
Death is a part of us. It shapes our bodies from the very beginning. You might think your fingers are formed by the division of cells in the womb—but that is not the case. Fingers are chiseled out of a paddle of flesh by the death of cells, the same way David was chiseled by his sculptor from a block of marble. Without death, life would have no shape at all.
No matter how good you are, you can only be as good as the data you are given. The input. If something essential is missing, if the input is off from the start, there’s no solving the problem.
It is not just the symbols we use in our language that are arbitrary—it is what we choose to signify with them. We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place. In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside this pattern, this semiotic cosmos.
…it’s about more than that: it’s intelligence is strongly attached to curiosity and exploration. And one of the most intriguing things about the octopus is that much of that curiosity may, in fact, reside in its arms.
…it felt as if she were about to dive off the end of the earth, into another world. This was the way she always felt before diving, especially if she had been away from it… …it wasn’t a feeling of alienation that took hold of her, underwater. It was homecoming. She always felt she was in the place she was meant to be. “The world goes away,” she had once told Kamran. “A new world replaces it. When you dive, there is only the here and the now: no past, no future. You don’t think about plans for the next experiment, about grants and laboratory equipment purchases. You think about the world in front of your mask. There are so many times in life when you just aren’t there. When you are elsewhere, drifting through schemes for this or that, remembering slights and injuries, shortcomings and faults. But not when diving. Down there, there is only now.
YES.
That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.
Similar principles as in “Stolen Focus.”
“We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us, who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us—we fear it won’t. We fear we will continue to degrade life on this planet until we destroy ourselves. And we will have no one to blame for what we have done but ourselves. So we invent this nonsense about conscious AI.”
When the brain stores long-term memory, it changes the memory from activity to structured connections. Imagine it like this: You are trying to remember a phone number. At first you have nowhere to write it out. So you say it to yourself, over and over. That is activity. Then you find a terminal and write the phone number out, converting activity to physical structure. These persistent connections, filed away as structures in the brain, form the more permanent self. The momentary activity is the fleeting “you”—such as the “you” reading these words in this exact moment. If you recall these words of mine later, it will be because they have, in a sense, been written down in the neural connectome of your brain, taking up a physical presence inside you. This is why it can be so difficult to overcome trauma: Memories are inscribed in us. They are etched into our physical being.