Souls are extremely volatile at altitude

One of my favorite lines from the independent film Cold Souls starring Paul Giamatti. The basic premise? If your soul is weighing you down -- if you're feeling "stuck" -- a company called Soul Storage will extract it for you and then store it in a glass tube, as seen above. But that's not all. You can also have another soul inserted to see what that's like.

Part of what's so wonderful about this film is how seriously it takes this surreal premise and runs with it, yielding a delightful mixture of the mundane and the absurd, the profound and the ridiculous. Giamatti plays himself; he has his soul (which turns out to look like a chickpea) removed in the way one might try a new diet or exercise program or self-help strategy as a way to deal with one's suddenly unbearable life. Check out the exchange when he finally fesses up to his wife about what he's done, since he's behaving so strangely that she suspect he's having an affair:

Paul? Is there someone else?

No. For Chrissake, no. There isn't anyone else.

Well, I'm sorry, but things have been pretty strange round here recently. You smell different. You feel different. What am I supposed to do? Just watch you come in at dawn?

Honey, uh- Honey. If I were a different me... in the same body... would you still love me?

What are you talking about?

I have, uh, extracted and stored my soul. But now, uh... they've misplaced it. They don't know where the hell it is. It's a total nightmare. It's a total nightmare. It's a total- I can't - It's-It's the end of my career. And, uh- And it's-it's the end of us.

Why would you do that?

Eh- Uh- l-I don't - I just told you. I don't know! I don't know. I'm, uh- I don't know. Max told me that his mother-in-law did it. And then she told me that, uh-that Cynthia was thinking about doing it too.

Cynthia?

Yeah. What does it ma- Yeah, Cynthia- I just- I got- I got confused. I got confused. It was-It was just for two weeks. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

So, you're completely soulless right now?

What? No, no, no, no. Not exactly, no. I still have five percent of my soul.

Five percent?

But I rented the soul of a Russian poet.

You did what?

borrowed from an online transcript

Now, mainly I bring this to your attention because it's clever and creative and just a very different film. See it. However, it strikes me that it does fit into the conversation I have with many of my students about the soul. What does a soul do, after all? Once upon a time we thought that the soul was responsible for all life functions. Then it was just our higher cognitive and affective functions. Now those who still believe in the soul have to figure out what belongs to the soul and what belongs to the brain. The upshot is that this kind of dualism suggests that a soulless human being isn't a zombie but rather someone who's missing something -- but what, exactly? And do we need to keep hanging onto the soul when it seems to have less and less to do?

Time Travelers Never Die

Some time travel stories throw a wrench into the gears in your head. Your mind grinds to a halt and you have to read them again, or watch them again, to see if they make sense or if they're cleverly constructed nonsense. Stories like these make us flex our philosophical muscles. Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies" is the locus classicus here.

Other time travel stories are just a heckuva lot of fun. Time Travelers Never Die, by Jack McDevitt, is that kind of story. Shel and Dave inherit time travel technology--a handheld time machine, no less, much like an ipod--from Shel's father, who has gone missing. In their search for him, they travel throughout history. They go to see Galileo, Shakespeare, Aristotle. They check out the library of Alexandria and bring back some lost plays of Sophocles. It's rather like a liberal arts version of a time travel story. Where would you go?

What about the paradox of time travel? You know, all that business about (not) killing your grandfather. Well, McDevitt humorously solves that problem with a little something he calls "the cardiac principle." A researcher makes the fateful attempt to alter the past and create a paradox and she drops dead of a heart attack. Get it? Shel tries it for himself and somehow he's dropped in the ocean. Evidently something is protecting the integrity of the timeline. If you're going to appeal to a deus ex machina, why not be like McDevitt and be up front about it--and have a good time with it, too? But don't think about it too hard. Just enjoy the story!

Virtuality on Virtuality

Like a whole lot of folks, I missed the pilot for Ron Moore's new sf series Virtuality when it aired on Fox a couple of months ago. Sadly, it's unclear we should even call it a pilot at this point, since Fox simply billed it as a two-hour movie event and hasn't picked it up.

As its title suggests, the story revolves around the role of a new virtual reality technology on a ten-year space mission. Remember all those stories about how people on spaceships go a bit nuts because of close quarters and constant company? A VR headset offers a therapeutic solution. Take a break from the mission and be a soldier in the Old West. Or a rock star who doubles as a superspy. Or... anything!

This is familiar ground to sf fans. We're all thinking of the holodeck episodes from STNG. And, of course, films like the Matrix conglomerate, The Thirteenth Floor, Existenz, etc. So is there anything new or different about Virtuality? In an interview on Wired.com, Moore says:

"The Holodeck on Star Trek was a physical space with three-dimensional forms you could feel and touch and interact with,” Moore says. “On the Phaeton, it’s much more akin to putting on a virtual headset where you have an experiential ability to touch and sense and smell things in your mind. On a story level, it’s not like The Matrix because we’re not playing the idea that if you die in the virtual space, you die in the real space.”

But there's more to say than that. Significantly, the pilot doesn't try very hard to raise the familiar epistemological question of how we know whether or not we're in a virtual environment. Instead, it tackles head on the issue of whether it matters if our surrounds are virtual. Two crew members use their VR headsgear to enact their sexual fantasies with one another. One of them is married to another member of the crew. Is this less of a betrayal because the sex is virtual rather than real body-to-body contact? Or is virtual sex real--in the sense of "real" that matters?

Unsurprisingly, something strange is happening in virtuality. (Actually, I'd like to have seen Moore do some work with "ordinary" VR before things started to get nutty. Oh well.) Things aren't going as they're programmed to go. A mysterious figure is showing up in everyone's programs. When a member of the crew is raped in her VR session, is that somehow less of a violation because the rape is virtual? Some members of the crew seem to think so; others are offended by their attitude.

Toward the end of the pilot/movie/whatever, Commander Frank Pike (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who also starred in the interesting but short-lived sf series New Amsterdam) is killed. Yet in the final moments, we see him alive and well, but inside a virtual program. His presence is inexplicable, and here's what he says:

None of it’s real. Follow me through the mirror and down a rabbit hole...

Do you think if I play a video game and I kill someone in that video game should I then be charged with murder? I don’t think it’s real. It’s a game.

Now we really don't know what to think. The virtual world seems to loom larger and larger. Moore seems intent on covering some of the same ground here as he does in the Caprica pilot.

I'm also struck by the way Moore presents some of Virtuality's storyline through the lens of a Reality TV program. I've always thought that The Matrix is really more interested in thinking about how we're prisoners of our media culture than about how we really might be floating in vats of pink goo. Moore seems to get that just right here. The crew of the Phaeton may be spending some time in virtual environments of their own design, but they spend more of their time on camera for the viewing audience back home.

You can catch a decent batch of clips here and elsewhere, if you want. Or try to find the thing somewhere. Hulu had it, but it's not there any longer.

Caprica and Personal Identity

The Caprica pilot introduces us to Joseph Adams (later Adama) and Daniel Graystone, both of whom have just lost their daughters in a terrorist action perpetrated by the Soldiers of the One True God. Thus, we're introduced to some of the religious background for the conflicts that help to drive BSG's narrative to its conclusion.

Their daughters are gone. Or are they? Graystone is astounded to see someone who appears to be his slain daughter Zoe while visiting a virtual nightclub. It turns out that Zoe had created a virtual avatar of herself, an avatar who seems to regard herself as Zoe Graystone. This raises all kinds of interesting questions about the nature and possibility of artificial intelligence, the difference between the virtual and the real, personal identity over time, and so on. In this rather lengthy post I simply want to present some of the most philosophically interesting dialogue of this pilot. Consider first this exchange between the avatar Zoe and one of her friends:

Zoe Avatar: What am I without her? She’s me. I’m her. I’m all that’s left of her…

Lacy: I don’t know you.

You grew up with me.

I grew up with Zoe Graystone, and you’re not her, okay? You’re something she created. You’re just a thing.

Zoe promised me I’d see the real world someday. But the crazy thing is, I already know what the real world feels like. I remember it. Just like I remember growing up with you.

No.

It’s true. I’ve never been to your house. Never played in your room. Never puked in your bathroom or put on your makeup or tried on your clothes. I’m not a person. I know that. But I feel like one.

Then, a bit later, she meets her father (or is he?):

Zoe Avatar: Hi, Daddy….

Daniel Graystone: You’re an avatar, a virtual representation of Zoe. Nothing more.

I’m a little more than that. A lot more, actually. I’m sort of her. Crazy as that sounds. I am her. I am Zoe Graystone.

Zoe is dead.

I know. And I’m so sorry about that, more than you can know. She was like… like my twin sister. No, that’s not right, either. She was more than that. We were like echoes of one another. It’s hard to describe.

So, what is this really? Did Zoe hack some kind of rudimentary emulations software or something?

She said it was a combination of hacks and some…

Okay, that’s enough. What was the purpose of this thing?

I’m not a thing.

I’m not going to argue with a digital image.

The human brain contains roughly 300 megabytes of information. Not much when you get right down to it. The question isn’t how to store it. It’s how to access it. You can’t download a personality. There’s no way to translate the data.

But the information being held in our heads is available in other databases. People leave more than footprints as they travel through life. Medical scans, DNA profiles, psych evaluations, school records, e-mails, recording video/audio, CAT scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ball games, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, tv shows. Even prescriptions for birth control...

Yeah, I remember that. You put me up on your shoulders so I could see the band as it marched by, but we were standing under a lamppost, and I smacked my head so hard I saw stars.

Took you to the emergency room just as a precaution.

I hated that.

Yeah.

The lights and the doctors and that smell. But I remember you holding my hand the whole time. You said you wouldn’t let go.

She could have programmed those memories into you. But it is a lot of detail for such a minor event. It’s possible she could have found a way to translate synaptic records into usable data.

She did.

Yes, but a person is much more than just a bunch of usable data. You might be a good imitation, you might be a very good imitation, but you’re still just an imitation. A copy.

I don’t feel like a copy. Daddy...

Can I... May I hold you, Zoe? [Touching. But he’s at least partly doing this to “capture the code Zoe used to create the avatar…”]

Still later in the episode, in a couple of converstations, Daniel speaks to Joseph about the prospect of seeing his daughter again.

Daniel Graystone: Do you mind if I ask you a somewhat strange and personal question? What would you do if you had the chance to be with your daughter again?

Joe Adams: I’d tell Tamara to find those things in life that make you cry, that make you feel, because that’s what makes you human...

Joe Adams [after seeing Zoe Avatar]: Frak! What the hell is this? What kind of sick, twisted thing are you doing here?

There’s nothing twisted about it. And I didn’t do it. Zoe did...

That’s not her. Our daughters, they’re gone.

Yes.

You know this.

Yes, but what if they could come back?

You’re insane.

Do you know what your brain is, Joseph? It’s a database and a processor, that’s all. Information and a way to use it. And what my daughter figured out was… was how to harness all the information that made her who and what she was. It’s genius, really. She took a search engine and turned it into a way to cheat death.

No, it’s an illusion. You said so yourself.

Yes. You’re right. You’re right. She’s a copy. But she’s a perfect copy in every way.

Still doesn’t make her your daughter.

There’s an axiom in my business, “a difference that makes no difference is no difference.” She looks like Zoe, she talks like Zoe, she thinks like Zoe, remembers all the events of her childhood, has all the same likes, dislikes, flaws, strengths, all of it. Who’s to say her soul wasn’t copied, too?

You can’t copy a soul.

And you would know that how? Hmm? How can you prove or disprove that idea?

Look. I know what I know, okay? And I know you can’t copy a person.

I know that she’s my daughter. I know that she is my daughter, and I know it in the only place that matters. Here. The only difference between her and the Zoe that lived in this house is just that. She lived in this house instead of a virtual world. I want to bring her here. Joseph, I want her to live in this world once more. I want to hold her in my arms, and I want to kiss her, and I want her to feel the sun shine on her face. I want her to see the flowers at the side of the road, Joseph. But for me to be able to transfer the virtual representation of Zoe you just saw in there into a physical body out here, I need a very special, a very particular piece of equipment.

A physical body, what do you mean? Like a robot?

“Robot” is a crude name for what we’re talking about. This is a cybernetic life-form node. It’s artificial skin, eyes, hair, makeup…

It’s still a machine! It’s cold, it’s dead…

Yes, but these are surface details. That’s what we always tell our children, isn’t it? What matters is on the inside... I can bring Tamara back. I can bring her back.

Get out of my way.

You can see your daughter again. Isn’t that worth whatever price you have to pay? If you leave now, you’ll never know for sure. You’ll always wonder. You’ll walk by her room, you’ll see her pictures on the wall, and you’ll ask yourself every day for the rest of your life, whether you had a chance to bring her back.

If I’m wrong, have me beat up, have me killed, I don’t care… But if I’m right... Isn’t it worth trying?

[Joseph is quiet.]

In spite of his objections, Joseph's desire to have his family back is so strong that he goes along with Graystone's plans and he meets the avatar of his own daughter.

Tammy: I’m so scared. What is this place? What’s going on?

Joseph: It’s okay.

I feel so strange.

I know, but you’re fine.

It’s not fine, it’s not fine. This is wrong. This is so wrong. No.

I know, I know, I know. But the important thing is we’re together. We can be a family again.

I can’t remember how I got here. And I can’t remember where I was before now.

It’s confusing, I know. This is gonna take some time.

This isn’t real. This doesn’t feel real, Dad. I don’t feel real. I’m real. This isn’t real...

We can be a family together.

Daddy, why isn’t my heart beating?

[Joseph takes off his VR vizor.]

Joseph: My baby! She couldn’t feel her heart beat!

Daniel: She’ll adjust. She’s probably very confused by everything. It’s only natural.

No, no, it’s not natural. It’s wrong. It’s an abomination.

Well, define “natural.” These glasses help me to see. Artificial limbs and organs help millions to live. You’d hardly call those aids “natural,” but I doubt you’d call them abominations.

That’s not what I mean and you know it.

Ah. Uh huh. You mean, only the Gods have the power over death. Well, I reject that notion. I reject that notion! And I’m guessing that you don’t put too much stock in those ideas, either.

You’re not right. You’re out of your frakking mind.

Maybe.

Obviously, there's a lot to think about here. I'm especially struck by the role memory plays in both Zoe Avatar's sense that she is "the real Zoe" and Tammy Avatar's sense that she doesn't know who she is. Maybe I'll say some more in future posts. Or you can always get busy in the comments section.

Knowing About Determinism

Knowing (2009) tells the story of a scientist who finds a page full of numbers containing the dates, locations, and death tolls of a long series of major disasters. The kicker is that this page is found buried in a time capsule where it had been placed by a young girl fifty years ago. Unsurprsingly, the film plays around with the familiar issues of determinism, freedom, meaning, and so on.

Early in the film, our science professor (Nicholas Cage) is giving a lecture about "the subject of randomness versus determinism in the universe."

Student: Determinism says that occurrences in nature are causally decided by preceding events or natural laws, that everything leading up to this point has happened for a reason.

Professor: That’s right. That’s what determinism says. [He goes on to discuss with them the fact that the earth is located just the right distance from the sun for life to be possible.] That’s a nice thought, right? Everything has a purpose, an order to it, is determined. But then there’s the other side of the argument. The theory of randomness, which says it’s all simply coincidence. The very fact we exist is nothing but the result of a complex yet inevitable string of chemical accidents and biological mutations. There is no grand meaning. There’s no purpose.

The student's opening description of causal determinism is on the money -- until she includes the ambiguous bit about everything happening for a reason. This could be understood in a deflationary way, so that she's simply reiterating that events are causally determined by previous events. But the professor's response makes clear his assumption that to be a causal determinist is to believe that we live in a purpose driven universe.

This is a strange assumption. Why should the view that the universe is causally determined involve the idea that there's some secret purpose behind what happens? Take the tragic death of the professor's wife in a hotel fire. The causal determinist thinks that awful event was causally determined by prior events, and those events in turn were causally determined by still prior events, and so on. The indeterminist (the champion of "randomness") denies this, believing that if it were somehow possible to replay the events, things might not turn out the same way again. But neither of them need believe that there's any purpose in or for her death.

In short, the professor seems to confuse causal determinism with fatalism or with a robust teleological or theological view of the universe. It's not an uncommon confusion.

We might also wonder whether randomness gets a bad rap here.

Why you can't argue with a bomb...

In the following clip from John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974), a surprisingly philosophical astronaut tries to talk a malfunctioning "smart bomb" out of fulfilling its purpose of detonation.




Here's part of the exchange, borrowed from the script that can be found at imdb.

DOOLITTLE: Hello, bomb, are you with me?

BOMB #20: Of course.

DOOLITTLE: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?

BOMB #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.

DOOLITTLE: Fine. Think about this one, then: how do you know you exist?

BOMB #20: Well of course I exist.

DOOLITTLE: But how do you know you exist?

BOMB #20: It is intuitively obvious.

DOOLITTLE: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have of your own existence?

BOMB #20: Hmm... Well, I think, therefore I am.

DOOLITTLE: That's good. Very good. Now then, how do you know that anything else exists?

BOMB #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me.

DOOLITTLE: Right!

BOMB #20: This is fun.

DOOLITTLE: All right now, here's the big question: how do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct?

DOOLITTLE: What I'm getting at is this: the only experience that is directly available to you is your sensory data. And this data is merely a stream of electrical impulses which stimulate your computing center.

BOMB #20: In other words, all I really know about the outside universe relayed to me through my electrical connections.

DOOLITTLE: Exactly.

BOMB #20: Why, that would mean... I really don't know what the outside universe is like at all, for certain.

DOOLITTLE: That's it.

BOMB #20: Intriguing. I wish I had more time to discuss this matter.

DOOLITTLE: Why don't you have more time?

BOMB #20: Because I must detonate in seventy-five seconds.

DOOLITTLE: Now, bomb, consider this next question, very carefully. What is your one purpose in life?

BOMB #20: To explode, of course.

DOOLITTLE: And you can only do it once, right?

BOMB #20: That is correct.

DOOLITTLE: And you wouldn't want to explode on the basis of false data, would you?

BOMB #20: Of course not.

DOOLITTLE: Well then, you've already admitted that you have no real proof of the existence of the outside universe.

BOMB #20: Yes, well...

DOOLITTLE: So you have no absolute proof that Sergeant Pinback ordered you to detonate.

BOMB #20: I recall distinctly the detonation order. My memory is good on matters like these.

DOOLITTLE: Yes, of course you remember it, but what you are remembering is merely a series of electrical impulses which you now realize have no necessary connection with outside reality.

BOMB #20: True, but since this is so, I have no proof that you are really telling me all this.

DOOLITTLE: That's all beside the point. The concepts are valid, wherever they originate.

BOMB #20: Hmmm...

DOOLITTLE: So if you detonate in...

BOMB #20: ... nine seconds...

DOOLITTLE: ... you may be doing so on the basis of false data.

BOMB #20: I have no proof that it was false data.

DOOLITTLE: You have no proof that it was correct data.

BOMB #20: I must think on this further.

Hurray! Epistemology saves the day! Alas, this is only a very temporary salvation. Moments later, here is what happens...

PINBACK: All right, bomb, prepare to receive new orders.

BOMB #20: You are false data.

PINBACK: Huh?

BOMB #20: Therefore, I shall ignore you.

PINBACK: Hello, bomb.

BOMB #20: False data can act only as a distraction. Therefore. I shall refuse to perceive you.

PINBACK: Hey, bomb.

BOMB #20: The only thing which exists is myself.

PINBACK: Snap out of it, bomb.

BOMB #20: In the beginning there was darkness, and the darkness was without form and void.

BOILER: What the hell?

PINBACK: Yoo hoo, bomb...

BOMB #20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness.

BOILER: Bomb, hey bomb.

PINBACK: Hey, bomb...

BOMB #20: And I saw that I was alone.

Pause.

BOMB #20: Let there be light.

THE SCREEN GOES WHITE.

So, space travelers, take it easy with the solipsistic arguments. And maybe we shouldn't push so hard when we're teaching Descartes' First Meditation. Hmmm....

Philosophy and Science Fiction Projects

For the final project in my Philosophy and Science Fiction class last semester, I gave my students the following choice: Either (a) write a philosophical essay exploring some interesting question in the context of sf or (b) write an sf short story that explores some philosophically interesting territory. Unsurprisingly, most of them chose to write a story. The results of their labors can be seen here. Take a look! And let the student authors know what you think!

Reality and/or Virtuality

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?

Queen's questions have driven many an sf story. The love-it-or-hate-it blog io9 offers a dozen fine examples of (un?)successful attempts to escape from a virtual environment in two posts: the first six and then the second six. Take a look. What'd they miss?

The most recent film I've seen that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy is Charlie Kaufman's wonderfully eccentric Synecdoche, New York. You wouldn't classify it as science fiction, although it's decidedly speculative! And it doesn't use the idea of a virtual reality at all. In fact, the film's characters aren't ever wrestling with the question of whether what's happening to them is real or not. No, it's the viewers who must grapple with that one. And I still haven't figured it out. If you have, let me know.

Philosophically, this kind of story raises lots of questions. The main metaphysical question is what it is for something to be real. In The Matrix films, for example, we gradually move from thinking that the Matrix is an unreal deception to seeing it as simply another part of reality. We do call it virtual reality, after all! For an intriguing treatment of this issue, see David Chalmers's "The Matrix as Metaphysics."

More familiar is the epistemological question: how do we know what's real and what's not? Or, better, how do we know we aren't being deceived about our surroundings? After all, I could be perfectly aware that I'm in a virtual world, or I could be deceived into believing I'm in a virtual world when I'm not. Christopher Grau gives an elementary account of these issues, Matrix-style with clips, here and here.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, we might wonder with Jim Pryor "What's So Bad About Living in the Matrix?" Why do most sf stories depict a virtual reality as a prison or a trap or a trick? What precisely would be missing in a virtual existence? As more and more of our lives happen digitally, this question may become increasingly important.

Time Travel 3: No Blasts From the Past

Many time travel stories involve traveling into the past and altering it, with the result that the future to which the time traveler returns is also changed -- whether for good or for ill (perhaps depending on which Back to the Future film one is watching).

Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (the short story, not the less than mediocre film) is the paradigmatic case here, wherein a dinosaur hunter (another familiar time travel trope) steps off a marked path and squashes a butterfly. The upshot of that seemingly insignificant change in the past is that the future somehow feels different, as Bradbury so wonderfully describes:

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were... were.... And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk... lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind.

Furthermore, the words on the wallsigns are spelled differently, and the wrong guy has just won the election!

As much as I love this story, it just doesn't add up. In increasing degrees of incoherence...

(1) While I buy the idea that a small change can have a dramatic effect (and this is where we get the phrase "the butterfly effect," after all), it's extremely unlikely that the ripple effect would leave the present intact enough for the same two candidates to be running for office but different enough for loser and winner to switch places. Likewise, while a change in language is possible, it's likely the change wouldn't simply be a matter of different spelling.

(2) The idea that the time travel agency could safeguard the timeline by creating a path and marking the target animals doesn't sit well with the idea that any minuscule change might be catastrophic. Surely they can't be tracking insects--and even microsopic organisms--to make sure none are inadvertently extinguished by a time traveler. Given the butterfly effect, it seems inevitable that any travel to the past would have serious repercussions in the present

(3) The past is the past (pace William Faulkner). It's already happened. So if anyone leaves the future in a time machine, their arrival in the past has already transpired and whatever they do has already been done. It isn't as if there is a pre-time-travel past (with a living butterfly) and a post-time-travel past (with a dead butterfly). No, there's just one past. So while time travelers may be able to visit the past, and if so they can certainly affect it, they cannot change it. Wanna know what that kind of time travel looks like? Watch 12 Monkeys.

If I'm right about this, then many time travel stories don't make sense, in spite of how much fun they might be. This post has to end, but I can't help observing that Back to the Future's idea that as the past changes people will fade out of a photo from the future is especially ridiculous.

Chaospet (the source of the last link) has a nice trilogy of webcomics on this issue: 1, 2, 3.

Wondering about the possibility of multiple timelines? Stay tuned.

Time Travel 2: Time Wars

A long time ago... or a short time ago... or some time in the future? One of the familiar tropes in time travel stories is the guardian of the timeline. In a world where time travel is possible, the past is seen as yet another venue for terrorists to threaten the world for the sake of their cause and for unscruplous opportunists to try to make a buck without a care for the damage they do. And this new temporal peril calls for a new kind of hero, or a force of heroes, to save the present day--or the future, depending on one's frame of reference. Future warriors fighting their battles in the past! That's pretty cool stuff.

Some classic examples of this kind of story are Poul Anderson's The Time Patrol stories and Simon Hawke's longrunning Timewars series. Also Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, which won the Hugo in 1959.

In film, we mustn't forget Timecop (1994), one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's somewhat less objectionable films, and the three (soon to be four!) Terminator films, which--like the killer robots themselves--"absolutely will not stop, ever." And we mustn't forget The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

What can you add to my list?

Killing machines chasing people through our every day landscape. Time soldiers taking the place of Robin Hood or the Three Musketeers, fighting battles with sword or musket rather than with blasters. Stories in this sub-sub-genre tend to explore the exciting prospects afforded by time travel rather than exploring its logical or physical paradoxes. And one doesn't have to think about such stories for very long to be struck by the utter implausibility of the thesis that a military operation could somehow protect the integrity of the timeline. Still, these stories do raise one of the most philosophically interesting questions about time travel: whether it's coherent to talk about changing the past. But that'll have to wait until the next post.

Time Travel 1

Time travel is one of science fiction's earliest and most enduring themes. Mark Twain gives us what is perhaps the earliest example of a person who is displaced in time in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), while H.G. Wells invents the fiction of a time machine in the aptly titled The Time Machine (1895).

Is time travel possible? In what sense? We may want to know whether time travel is physically possible, given what we now know about the nature of the universe. People have lots of interesting things to say about this. Not me, though.

Philosophers are more likely to wonder whether time travel is logically possible. And this question is intimately connected to the fascinating question of whether an sf story about time travel can be coherent. I'll be assembling several posts on these matters in the near future.

For now, see what some sf writers have to say about the use of time travel in sf at the excellent blog SF Signal.

What Is It Like to be an A.I.?

What's the difference between being an A.I. and being a human being--from the inside? Listen to how one sf writer imagines the unimaginable:

She had been in her human body only a day, and yet already the electronic self that once had felt so copious was far too small... it was small by nature. The ambiguity of flesh made for a vastness of possibility that simply could not exist in a binary world. She had been alive, and so she knew now that her electronic dwellingplace gave her only a fraction of a life. However much she had accomplished during her millenia of life in the machine, it brought no satisfaction compared to even a few minutes in that body of flesh and blood (Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind, p. 293).

The "She" here is Jane, an intelligent computer program (although that doesn't quite do her justice) who is one of the central characters in Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet. In the fourth and last book, in a complicated series of events, Jane experiences an incarnation. The above episode describes her reaction to a temporary return to her former electronic existence.

What's interesting, perhaps, is that Jane is all along depicted as intelligent, as a person, as having emotions, friendships, etc. So while her existence as an A.I. is very different from our own, in some ways superior and in others inferior, still it seems right to regard her as "one of us," a person, a member of the moral community, both before and after she inhabits a body. And yet clearly Card wants us to think that having a body matters deeply.

Of course, this is a novel. But it's food for thought....

Philosophical SF Writers: Robert J. Sawyer

The Hugo and Nebula award winning author Robert J. Sawyer has often remarked that the most ambitious science fiction stories are "philosophical fiction." It's fitting, then, that I inaugurate this new category of post by saying just a bit about Sawyer's writing--before I give you something to think about!

Many of Sawyer's books (although I confess I haven't read them all) are driven by a provocative thought experiment, often just the sort of thing that you'd find widely discussed in the philosophical literature. What would it be like if... everyone in the world were to catch a glimpse of the future? Or if we were to discover scientific evidence of a soul leaving the body at death? Or if we were able to return our aging bodies to their youthful condition? Or if we were to encounter an alien who believed in God? If you want to know what Sawyer thinks it'd be like if such things were to happen, read Flashforward, The Terminal Experiment, Rollback, and Calculating God, respectively. You can count on his books to engage your mind not only with plot and character but with ideas. As somebody once said, the true protagonist of a good science fiction story is an idea rather than a person!

I want to think about the central thought experiment in one Sawyer yarn (Mindscan) in a bit more depth. Suppose that you're in your forties and you've just discovered you have a terminal illness that'll kill you sometime in the next few months. Now suppose that you are presented with an extraordinary opportunity: your consciousness--personality, memories, and all--can be copied and downloaded into a synthetic body that will live on indefinitely. The biological you would live out whatever time you have left, too--out of the way and on the moon! What kind of objections might be raised against doing this? Would you do it? Why or why not? Do you think the result of this procedure would be you? Or a mere copy of you? What's the difference? Does it matter? Here's another chance to think about personal identity in a sf context....

UPDATE: You really ought to check out Sawyer's talk about the relevance of sf. It's called "A Galaxy Far, Far Away" My Ass! and it's been given the Youtube treatment in three parts: 1, 2, 3.

UPDATE 2: Rob has kindly linked to my little blog here. Thanks!

No one cares about the man in the box

Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006 ) is both a wonderful film and the source of a provocative set of thought experiments about personal identity. I'd like to talk about a few of the movie's philosophical implications of the film and ask some questions, but I should first warn you that spoilers lie ahead.

David Bowie delivers a delightfully quirky performance as the scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Surely in both character and actor we have here the nearest thing to science fiction that real life humanity has to offer!

Tesla builds a fantastic machine for the magician Robert Angier (played by Hugh Jackman), who is desperate to duplicate the astonishing feat of his arch-rival Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). Somehow Borden is able to convince an audience that he has transported himself across the stage in a mere instant. Angier (wrongly!) thinks that one of Tesla's machines is responsible, so he wants one for himself.

But the machine he receives doesn't merely duplicate Borden's trick. It duplicates Angier himself! After the Tesla lightning plays over his body, Angier is apparently unaffected--except that a second Angier appears some distance away. Now that's magic!

Suppose we're wondering just what this machine does. Consider the following possibilities:

(1) The machine creates an exact duplicate of Angier some distance away from the orginal Angier, who is otherwise unaffected by the machine and simply remains where he was. Call this case Duplication.

(2) The machine transports Angier some distance away from his original position and then creates an exact duplicate of him in that position. Call this Transport and Duplication.

(3) The machine replaces Angier with two exact duplicates of himself, one in his original position and the other some distance away. Call this one Fission.

I'd argue that the film favors (1), since it jives quite nicely with the earlier version of the trick wherein Angier must hide under the stage while his body double receives the accolades of the audience. And it's also an extension of the film's opening trick with the bird, too, in which the original bird is killed and then replaced by an exactly similar one. But that's not really my point here. Instead, I want to suggest that although these initially appear to be three distinct options, the differences among them become blurred upon reflection.

Angier says, "It took courage to climb into that machine every night... Not knowing if I'd be the Prestige.... Or the man in the box." But what is it that he doesn't know? Each of the two men thinks that he is "the real Angier." Yet they cannot both be Angier, notwithstanding Tesla's earlier remark that "they are all your hat, Mr. Angier." You see, identity is a transitive relation, so if Angier 1 is the original Angier and Angier 2 is the original Angier, then Angier 1 is Angier 2. And obviously that isn't the case, since there are two of them, and one lives and one dies. (In the first use of the machine, the Angier who remains shoots the Angier who travels, while in later uses it's the Angier who remains who is dropped into the box and drowns.)

So, if they cannot both be identical to the Angier who steps into the lightning, how do we answer Angier's question? Are we asking about the causal connection between the original Angier's body and the bodies of Angier 1 and Angier 2? Or are we asking about psychological continuity rather than bodily continuity? What's the difference between a machine that transports people and a machine that destroys and then duplicates people? (This question will be familiar to Star Trek fans....) In the end, does it matter whether the machine works in way (1), (2), or (3)? Is there really a difference?

Note that this problem isn't merely a result of the obvious fact that we don't understand how an incomprehensible fictional machine works. The deeper problem is that we don't understand exactly what it is to be a person and to be the same person when such odd things are going on. But do we understand such matters in ordinary cases? Perhaps not. And there are odd cases in real life as well as in sf.

How Many Dolls in the Dollhouse?

Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly (for anyone who’s been living under a rock), has just launched his new show, Dollhouse. Here’s the description from FOX’s website (where you can catch the first two episodes of the show):

ECHO (Dushku) is an "Active," a member of a highly illegal and underground group of individuals who have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas. Hired by the wealthy, powerful and connected, the Actives don't just perform their hired roles, they wholly become -- with mind, personality and physiology -- whomever the client wants or needs them to be. Whether imprinted to be a lover, an assassin, a corporate negotiator or a best friend, the Actives know no other life than the specific engagements they are in at that time. Confined between missions to a secret facility known as the "Dollhouse," Echo and the other Actives including SIERRA (Dichen Lachman), are assigned engagements by ADELLE DEWITT (Olivia Williams), one of the Dollhouse leaders. After each scenario, Echo, always under the watchful eye of her handler, BOYD LANGTON (Harry Lennix), returns to the mysterious Dollhouse where her thoughts, feelings, experiences and knowledge are erased by TOPHER BRINK (Fran Kranz), the Dollhouse's genius programmer.

As Adelle says in the second episode, an Active is a tabula rosa (a blank slate), not even really a person, adds Langton. Between missions, that is. But when an Active is on a mission, he or she seems very much a person, specially created to do a job. The catch is that each of these is a very short-lived person.

So, although we only see a handful of human beings serving as Actives in the Dollhouse, it seems to me that the place is "home" to a whole lot of persons who live only a day or so. The Dollhouse seems to pressure desperate people to serve as "hosts" or "body donors" for their organization, effectively giving up five years of their lives, and then they create a series of persons to do their dirty work only to terminate each of those persons when the work is complete. Seems like a pretty nasty outfit to me.

Of course, that assumes that we accept some kind of psychological contintuity account of personal identity. On such accounts, if there's absolutely no psychological connections between the serious hostage negotiator of the first episode and the gutsy outdoorswoman of the second episode, then they're different persons from one another--and from Echo, the in-between, low-functioning person who's mostly interested in massages and swimming.

One of my main questions when I first heard about this show was how Whedon was going to make us care about Echo if there's really no continuity between the various persons who animate this body. Turns out that premise starts to erode as early as the second episode, where we start to hear about "composite events," in which Actives retain memories from previous missions. Seems like the doll is slowly going to become a real girl....

A Robot Descartes?

Isaac Asimov's many robot stories (some of which are collected in I, Robot, on which the Will Smith film is loosely based) explore what happens when human beings interact with robots who are programmed to comply with Asimov's famous three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov delights in showing how perfectly logical beings who work within these parameters end up behaving in strange and sometimes humorous ways. In "Reason," QT-1 ("Cutie") a robot who has spent his entire "life" on a space station finds himself reflecting on his existence. Like Rene Descartes, Cutie decides to reject everything he doesn't know for certain and start from scratch, accepting only those principles that seem logically self-evident--with a marvelously absurd result: Cutie deduces that he cannot have been created by human beings because he is superior to them and he eventually invents a religion that involves worship of "the Master," an essential piece of machinery on the station.

Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs is extraordinarily frustrating for Powell and Donovan (the two men assigned to field-test Cutie). Cutie's logic seems unassailable from within his own perspective, and they're unable to demonstrate his error. Like some of Asimov's other robot stories, this one plays with the limits of reason and implies that we cannot expect abstract reasoning in the absence of empirical evidence to guide us to the truth. Ironically, however, as the story closes we find out that Cutie's seriously mistaken picture of the world and his place in it doesn't prevent him from performing his function on the space station with exact precision. Your thoughts?

The pic is the cover of yet another forthcoming philosophy and popular culture volume. I have nothing to do with this one, but the image of Descartes as a terminator was too good to pass up...

Thinking Meat?

Philosophers often see problems and paradoxes in what look like ordinary places, whether by asking an unexpected question or by turning things on their heads. Terry Bisson's wonderful short story "They're Made Out of Meat!" is a hilarious philosophical exploration of the idea that we are material beings. That we are mere meat is an absurd idea -- according to a pair of extraterrestrial beings who are made of who knows what....

A surprising number of folks have been inspired to create short film versions of this story. See here 1 and here 2 and here 3 and here 4. Which one is the best?

My latest pop culture book chapter is out (or almost out): "What's Supernatural About Supernatural"? in In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural, from BenBella Press. Here's an excerpt:

Supernatural seems to be part of what we might think of as a new trend in horror fiction. Classic horror tales describe how something strange and forbidding breaks into our everyday world. As Noel Carroll puts it in “The Nature of Horror,” characters in horror tales “regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order.” Some particular thing shows up that just doesn’t obey the rules; it defies our categories and so we don’t know how to think about it. In fact, this is one way of thinking about what a monster is: something singular that doesn’t fit our view of the world. A number of more recent horror narratives, including our show, seem importantly different. These stories naturalize their horrific elements, making them familiar and, at least in some sense, normal and natural, so that horror somehow becomes part of the mundane world. Although we should be wary of offering exact classifications here, we can divide such stories into two broad categories without exercising too much force.

The first kind of story re-conceives a supernatural creature as a natural one: the monster isn’t from the pit of hell, or animated by an amalgam of magic and science; he’s just a human being who’s been infected by a virus, not really “supernatural” at all. A scientific monstrosity, not a supernatural one. Think of the undead creatures from 28 Days Later or the recent film version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Or consider Ridley Scott’s Alien. These stories locate a horror story inside the natural world as we understand it; they work without any intervention from the outside. Unforeseen events give rise to something that looks supernatural, but really isn’t. This kind of story eliminates the supernatural piece by piece, showing how what looked like magic or mystery can be explained in scientific terms. Although this kind of horror has been flourishing fairly recently, thereby earning the title of a new trend, it’s not really a new phenomenon. In fact, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is perhaps the quintessential scientific horror tale. And, more generally, a lot of science fiction stories can be classified as belonging to the horror genre, too. It’s no surprise that a modernist sensibility would favor reducing the magical to the scientific, the inexplicable to the explicable. But this isn’t how Supernatural rolls at all; our show isn’t into reductionism.

The second kind of story involves expanding or altering our conception of nature. Such horror stories have a lot in common with fantasy, because they take up the project of building another world, an alternate reality. They’re extended exercises in wondering “What if?” In such a story, vampires are magical creatures, perhaps, but then the world of the narrative is a magical world! Consider Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series or Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books. In these popular story arcs, vampires and werewolves are just part of American society. They have jobs and they have to pay the rent. They even have their own bars and nightclubs to frequent. Laws have to be written to handle their special circumstances, maybe even some anti-discrimination legislation. And, of course, they’re potential dates for whoever is our current protagonist. Here, too, the presence of a monster requires no intrusion from the outside—there need be nothing supernatural in that sense. It’s just that the inside of these storied worlds is a lot bigger than the inside of our world (and, as we’ve seen, that creates an ambiguity in what it means for something to be supernatural). Joss Whedon’s endearing and enduring Buffyverse is one of the earliest and most formative examples of this kind of story. Buffy goes to class, chats with her friends, and stakes a vampire in the cemetery. As I’ve characterized it in this essay, “the Winchesterverse” is this same kind of place, although sadly it makes for a much less graceful moniker.

Are you a Sim?

After watching The Matrix, a lot of us enjoy flirting with the idea that we might be in some kind of simulation. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests that this shouldn't be a mere flirtation. He argues that the odds that you are right now living in a computer simulation are pretty good. There's a website dedicated to the presentation and discussion of "the simulation argument." A short version of it can be found here.

Essentially, Bostrom argues that one of the following three claims must be true:

1. Almost all civilisations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.

2. The fraction of technologically mature civilisations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.

3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

To the extent that you're inclined to think that 1 and 2 are false, then, you'd be justified in thinking that 3 is true.

Or, to put it another way, if a civilization advances to the point where they're capable of providing simulated environments, and if that civilization is interested in running simulations of the past (ancestor simulations), then there will be many people living in such simulations. And if the set of persons contains a significant number of people in simulations, there's at least some significant probability that you are such a person!

It's not an easy argument to assess. What do you think?