The first issue in my Transgressive Science Fiction series is up (public access, not paywalled):Hive Minds: Diverse or Totalitarian? It’s almost by default that a hive mind must be totalitarian, in most works of science fiction. Why? Beehives behave collectively by voting. If neurons over-synchronize, you have an epileptic fit. A spirit of a nation is a more proper comparison. And if it’s to be conscious, it would have to be incredibly diverse.
The first chapter of the first book in my series, repackaged as a short story, has been published by Amazing Stories. I had no control over the illustration, but the audio narration was graciously done by Pete Lead. A new illustration (replacing the original AI-generated one) is by Logan @ Fiverr. The Most Peaceful Airship
I have just published AI, Human, Cyberhumanhttps://link.medium.com/HFMumN06aFbCan AI reach or surpass us in creative arts?Dispelling the myth of super-intelligent AI. If you like it, please spread the word! AI, Human, Cyberhuman is a multidisciplinary synthesis of works in neuroscience, machine learning, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, psychology, and theory of evolution, referencing work by Rodolfo Llinás, Gerald Edelman, Ilya Prigogine, Ernest Hartmann, and others. Our journey in this article will take us to the fundamental reason that the brains evolved in animals and not in plants. We will discuss how the neural nets learn, while our brains are based on the evolutionary principle.…
There is a great hashtag in Mastodon: #WritingWonders. Each day, authors are asked to answer one question about our stories, our characters. Today, the question is about the main character’s hair, for example. Yesterday, it was about the main themes in our works in progress. I find it good to sum them up here, as well. I have been working on a series of novels, two of which have been completed but not published yet, and I’m now working on the third (with more to follow): In all of them, trauma is an important theme. Almost every character of importance…
Last time, we talked about emotions being intrinsic to sufficiently advanced AI. A closely related subject is whether a mind needs a body to be “complex enough,” including what you would call a body (which may not be at all the same as ours). Let’s backtrack a little. The brain developed in animals and not in plants because animals must execute complex movement in complex environments. The brain is a prediction engine, attempting to predict the outcome of movement and adjust itself based on the results, via the feedback loop. The butterfly effect, present in sufficiently complex environments, makes exact…
It has been a staple of common wisdom that artificial intelligence (AI) is to be something like Data, an android from Star Trek–rational and largely incapable of emotion, even questioning the emotions’ utility. Vulcan, also of Star Trek, is a non-AI example of this kind of rationalism. In general, the idea that reason is superior to emotion has been our legacy since the Age of Reason. Star Trek is not the only example of that in fiction, either. Science fiction abounds with examples of super-rational AIs, which are “programmed” to do this or that, and the like. If they are…
The following appeared originally in a writers discussion forum, in response to a question on whether a sufficiently powerful computer could predict everything a human would do in advance, assuming everything was deterministic–and whether quantum interdeterminacy would interfere with that. What many people tend to forget is that “deterministic” doesn’t equal “predictable.” Let’s start with the classical formalism and then consider the quantum one. The equations of classical gravity are deterministic. Once you have the initial coordinates and velocity vectors for all bodies involved, the state of the world at any time T is uniquely determined. But is it actually…
This post of mine is a little old but still applicable, methinks: Optimism and Darkness in Science Fiction.
In my previous post, I talked about how mental imagery (illustrated by but certainly not limited to vision) ultimately derives from memories, modified by the pink noise that all of us have in our brains. This is why malleability of memories is so useful (unlike the pixel-perfect digital storage): it allows creativity. The same applies to dreams, but with a twist. Again, the contents of our dreams derive from memories (we wouldn’t dream an apple if we never saw one in our lives), but the modification of the images (and other sensory modalities) is more extreme. What’s going on? Ernest…
Last time, we talked about writers on the aphantasia spectrum–a reduced detail of mental imagery (whether visual or audio or any other sensory modality, although I will use the visual one for examples). Interestingly, with few exceptions, the same level of detail (from almost-photographic to vague to near-nonexistent) applies not just to voluntary or involuntary imagining but also to memories and dreams. What is going on here? Could there be some commonality between these forms of mental imagery? Indeed, there is–at least, this is what current neuroscience tells us. In fact, most of our mental imagery is ultimately based on…