Peter Watts

The Island

Mundy Otto Reimer

Super glad my last book in the Sunflower Cycle 🚀🌻 left me with Watts' signature philosophical taste on my lips. The short story can be found for free here. In case you are reading this without having first read all the other shorts in this series, you might want to instead check out Hotshot and then move on to the recommended reading order of The Freeze-Frame Revolution -> The Island -> Hitchhiker -> Giants. With that said, the order doesn't matter much as a few of the stories take place from the POVs of different characters and there is kind of a running mystery theme of trying to piece together events, so if you do happen to consume it out of order, you might even enjoy the meta-immersion granted by a bit more personal confusion like I did. By the way, I'm giving a ***spoiler warning*** that what I'm about to talk about might ruin some of the mystery for you.

The title of this short story, The Island refers to our main character's name given to the Other in our first-contact scenario. Our alien entity happens to be this giant photosynthetic flesh-like Dyson sphere feeding off the star of which it encapsulates and the surrounding molecular cloud-like soup that it filters from in space. Following the same overarching plot from the rest of the series, our main character Sunday finds herself with her intelligent ship hurtling through space at a fraction of light speed building one worm-hole gate after the next. And in this upcoming star system, she witnesses an entity apparently attempting to communicate with her by blinking itself on and off, almost like a band of shadow propagating across the surface of its giant blob-like alien body undergoing an enormous wink, or perhaps something akin to the strobing effect produced by the chromatophores of our real-world cephalopod friends. 

Sunday interprets this strobing activity as a sign of intelligence, and furthermore, because of its speed of propagation across the surface, a sign of a singular Consciousness. From Watts:

"The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin— when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B— the system, well, decoheres. The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves. I shatters into we. It's not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an Earthly one. It's a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we've yet to meet as it did to those we left behind. Fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second, the chimp says. How far can the signal move through that membrane in a tenth of a corsec? How thinly does 'I' spread itself across the heavens?" 

Watts is basically saying that the speed at which a system can properly synchronize into an identity that possesses a *singular* Consciousness is rather limited and time-dependent since some area X needs to coordinate a line of thought with another area Y within a small enough span of time for it to be considered a "cohesive thought". 

Because I'm in a philosophical mood at the moment, let's take this concept to its logical limit. If the first-person *I* part of consciousness is indeed a time-dependent phenomenon like this (which as someone who is neuroscientifically-trained is a claim that is within the realm of plausibility), then does this imply that if we were to simulate a human brain on a computer and slowed-down time in our simulation to enough fine-grained granularity / "zoomed in" (or alternatively sped up our external observer reference frame relative to the computer doing the simulating) to observe subsets of the entire network (where these subnetworks can communicate with each other much quicker due to their proximity to each other), would we witness something more like a *community of selves* coinhabiting that same brain, rather than a singular unified Self? Maybe something like a bunch of miniature selves all vying/voting for control of the entire bodily system, both cooperating and competing, forking and coalescing whorls of individual self-patterns like the beautiful swirls of color created when water meets an oily pavement? 

Could this line of reasoning then be taken to its extreme on the opposite side of the spectrum? Some philosophers propose that maybe even systems such as whole countries like the United States of America might even be conscious given that it possesses the necessary material and functional processing capabilities to be granted such. If indeed the United States is a Conscious entity, might we just be unable to recognize it as such because the time scales at which a country enacts its thoughts and behaviors do not match our individual human time scales? (on a similar note, have you heard of something called an Egregore?) 

Furthermore, would any individual component or subset of some system not be able to recognize the Singular Agency that it is part of if the timescales of information propagation are so vastly different? Darwin once commented something along the lines that a plant is just an upside-down animal, with its sense organs buried underground and its sexual organs exposed up on top. Might we not even be able to recognize the consciousnesses of other entities like trees just because they live their experiences and inner mental lives painted across such broadly encompassing and vast time scales that render them practically invisible to us, versus us humans and our comparatively short lives as mere fruit flies to them, living, breeding, and dying within a subjective blink of a tree's eye?

Going back to the story, our main character extrapolates out the size of this entity that seems to encapsulate its sun and estimates that the intelligence behind this massive behemoth must be on par with that of a god. She further speculates and looks forward to a possible communion with a much greater, more angelic and ethical mind, 

"I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity."

Sunday goes further to imagine that this vast intelligence is also one that is pure and good because it does not develop on a planet where resources come in gradients with more stuff there and less stuff here, or in other words, the "zero-sum mentality" cannot be baked into an entity which never had to struggle given its infinite supply of resources gained by surrounding a star in a near-perfect spherical bubble with a homogeneous distribution of energy.

"I acquaint myself with phenotypic plasticity and sloppy fitness, that fortuitous evolutionary soft-focus that lets species exist in alien environments and express novel traits they never needed at home. Perhaps this is how a lifeform with no natural enemies could acquire teeth and claws and the willingness to use them. The Island's life hinges on its ability to kill us; I have to find something that makes it a threat. But all I uncover is a growing suspicion that I am doomed to fail — for violence, I begin to see, is a planetary phenomenon. Planets are the abusive parents of evolution. Their very surfaces promote warfare, concentrate resources into dense defensible patches that can be fought over. Gravity forces you to squander energy on vascular systems and skeletal support, stand endless watch against an endless sadistic campaign to squash you flat...Take one wrong step, off a perch too high, and all your pricey architecture shatters in an instant. And even if you beat those odds, cobble together some lumbering armored chassis to withstand the slow crawl onto land— how long before the world draws in some asteroid or comet to crash down from the heavens and reset your clock to zero? Is it any wonder we grew up believing life was a struggle, that zero-sum was God's own law and the future belonged to those who crushed the competition? The rules are so different out here. Most of space is tranquil: no diel or seasonal cycles, no ice ages or global tropics, no wild pendulum swings between hot and cold, calm and tempestuous. Life's precursors abound: on comets, clinging to asteroids, suffusing nebulae a hundred lightyears across. Molecular clouds glow with organic chemistry and life-giving radiation. Their vast dusty wings grow warm with infrared, filter out the hard stuff, give rise to stellar nurseries..."

However, similar to before, could we perhaps follow Watts' logic even further? Could Consciousness with an individual first-person view even develop in the presence of a near-ubiquitous and homogenous energy source with no other competing agents to begin with? We can maybe reason that with a homogenous or absolutely even distribution of resources, there is no such evolutionary need for a notion of direction. This then implies that there is no such need for cephalization or central processing of incoming sensory data to coordinate movements to get from one place to another, because for one thing there is no real difference in sensory data (there's food and light coming from everywhere) and two, there's no need to move anywhere else (we get all the food we could ever want just by sitting here)! Granted, there are probably non-homogeneous distribution of resources due to solar events that flux, as well as an inherent resource gradient in the orthogonal direction of the sphere when considering the inside of the bubble versus outside, but compared to the evolutionary demands when placed on a planet, this alien entity is more similar to a singular cell living in nutrient-rich broth but just all inverted inside-out. We can perhaps speculate that the inner life of such an entity just consists of a value-axis corresponding to inside vs. outside qualia. 

With that said, maybe we could try to bring in some of Watts' thoughts regarding the nature of the Self from his other books like Blindsight. If we adopt Watts' view that the singular self or 'I' might just be a parasitic subroutine that randomly got its chance to bootstrap itself into existence and then eventually take over the entire host brain/system from which it came from (in his other books like Blindsight, Watts speculates that you can have intelligent entities which don't have to be bogged down with the recursive processing power that Conscious entities demand, i.e., what's known in philosophy as p-zombies). We can then maybe question how this parasite would even come about in the presence of near-ubiquitous resources since there is no competition and hence a super-relaxed form of evolutionary pressure shaping the forces within. For example, if one guy evolves the ability to eat 10x as much food as another, why even bother if we all get infinite amounts of food to begin with? We're all abundantly fed in the end so what's going to kill some other random person off in favor of that guy? What edge does he have? In other words, there's no evolutionary pressure selecting him over another. Similarly, we can ask why would a singular conscious 'I' even evolve to begin with, and moreover, why would it possess an angelic morality?

So doing something like a proof-by-contradiction, let's assume the opposite. Let's assume that we accept that this ginormous flesh-bubble blob that winks at us has a singular Consciousness 'I'. In Watts' view this means that it had to have evolved by some means or developed like a parasite that eventually took over its host. Either way presupposes a selection mechanism favoring the singular 'I' versus no singular 'I'. Because of this selection mechanism, there is competition occurring and hence a 'zero-sum' mindset gets baked-in as a corollary. We thus have means to believe that this zero-sum mentality serves as a potential contradiction to also assuming an angelic, innocent morality. And because this chain of deductions led to a contradiction, one or more of our premises must be false. QED. In other words, there is no such thing as *solipsistic friendly individuals* (because that's self-contradictory!) No Island. And thus we must assume that either there are either multiple entities making up that island or that that Island is really Islands plural! And again by just strict deduction, we must assume a zero-sum game is being played out and that we might be duped and manipulated in our apparent first-contact scenario. 

As Sunday says, "I deified that which I could not understand...I still have so much to learn."

Feel free to check out my other reviews of this Sunflower Cycle, such as this one where I analyze the story's influence from the real-life historical Cybernetics movement and more specifically, W. Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety.

Also, if you enjoyed this brief philosophical discussion on Consciousness, feel free to check out my blog post On Thermodynamics, Agency, and Living Systems :)

Ashlyn

Reminiscent of Harlan Ellison if Ellison hadn't been an unapologetic misogynist and/or if Ellison had any amount of writing talent.