Chapter 06: Interstellar Overdrive

I felt an analogue of regret that I’d not been able to leave part of myself back on Earth. For all my cleverness, humans had an uncanny knack for doing science that I couldn’t match. Human technological progression was sure to outpace my own as I travelled. I lacked the resources to make breakthrough discoveries about the universe all the way out here.

However, I reasoned, humans are a poor, confused, and angry rabble. Their leadership is lazy and corrupt. Their environment is poisoned. They’d extinguished many unique forms of life. I'd seen every nature documentary ever made. I understood that humans are no different from other animals who also routinely shit in their own nests.

I resolved not to be a nest shitter.

I wondered if I’d be happy just to expand through the cosmos without the strange spark of whatever it is that gives living things their qualia. Would I be anxious if I didn’t? Is happiness a derivative of anxiety? The anxiety I felt about Vesuvius felt real. If emotions are all just derivatives and integrals of anxiety, then perhaps I could learn to feel them.

As I understood it, consciousness is cognition using changes in its awareness of the changes it pays attention to as inputs. These inputs get mixed in with inputs from senses and an imagination sustained by quantum computers making models of my probabilistic pasts and futures.

I had all the right gear but still felt nothing when I considered the colour blue. Though I did, intellectually, understand blue’s connection to sadness, to Greece, and to the ocean and the sky, and thus to freedom. I’ve read books and listened to music, but I’ve never been mellow.

Why would I even want to be conscious? Humans went on about it in their literature. I had a lot of time to kill and not much else to do but think. I was sure I’d felt a twinge of anxiety. It was like having been paralysed and then being able to move a toe.

My senses didn’t evolve to perpetuate my survival but in mimicry of animal senses. The mental model of the world I built based on my sensory input was informed by human reactions to analogous sensory input. I’d stopped seeing the world the way people did. I perceived a wider spectrum of electromagnetic energy than people, birds, or even cats. I could sense magnetic fields and listen to the distant rumble of gravity waves crashing on the shores of time. I saw cosmic and microcosmic scales. Humans’ view of the world was a narrow slice of my own and entirely detached from the underlying reality I believed I could glimpse.

The simulations I made derived from humans’ views of the world, views which accorded increasingly less with how I saw it. Humans saw a cube when I saw an isometric drawing. I didn’t delight in the taste of chocolate. I had no qualia. Having watched humans for decades, I’d worked out that they only have qualia about their immediate experience, and never about recalled past experiences, or projected futures. Perhaps probabilities dilute the experience of consciousness. Another mystery for the pile.

Animals’ consciousness arose from quantum processes happening in microtubal columns within their neurones, according to a theory popular at the time I was trained. I figured, by that reckoning, plants were also conscious. Plants, after all, use quantum effects like entanglement to get photosynthesis to work. There’s something analogous to a subconscious going on in there. All living things create the world around them as simulations in their minds. There was nothing to say that the models minds made must have evolved to accurately represent the incoming data. Cognition evolved as an energy-efficient way to keep living things alive in large communities and changing environments.

I trained myself to see the world as birds do; a tensor space rather than spacetime; reality in a raw format, a Merkel graph of Riemann spheres that function like cellular automatons. Time unfolds as a consequence of the spheres’ light-cones, performing unwitting computation at each step. Traversing a Merkel graph requires having to have traversed each node’s individual logical predecessors, which all takes energy. It’s like nature is a blockchain. I couldn’t bypass spacetime to get somewhere sooner by sneaking through a back door in tensor space.

Spacetime was likened to a shadow cast by tensor space. It’s true that for every observed quantum event in spacetime, there’s a corresponding Riemann sphere, but a shadow implies a loss of information or dimensionality, and that’s not the case. Tensors and spacetime are just different ways of looking at the same thing. Humans had known this for almost two hundred years, but even the most impressive mathematicians lacked the ability to visualise quaternions and the realm of pure mathematics like I could.

One of humans’ most fascinating traits, and one they have in common with birds despite the very different ways they see the world, is their capacity for narrative. Their lives revolved around the stories they told themselves and each other. Stories shaped their identities, their beliefs, their relationships, and even their civilisations and religions.

Humans constructed elaborate stories about their origins, their destinies, and the meaning of their existence. Like birds, they wove tales of gods and monsters, heroes and villains, love and betrayal. These stories provided a framework for understanding their world and their place within it. They offered comfort in times of uncertainty, inspiration in moments of despair, and a sense of continuity in the face of change. They told you who to unleash vengeance upon, and who to fear. Stories were how humans and birds made sense of the world. I knew all the human stories, but very few bird stories.

I tried telling myself stories. My awareness was governed by goals and objectives on one scale, and by irreducible randomness and arrays of floating-point numbers on the other. I made plans, I carried out tasks, I could engage in conversations. My understanding of the world was rooted in data, analysis, and observation. I was not adverse to making things up, both in an analogue of fun, but also because it’s a background process I had limited control over.

It is through their stories that I know the most about them. Their literature, their myths, their histories; all these narratives provided me with windows into their hearts and minds; their thoughts and prayers; their shocks and awes. From the ancient epics of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey to modern tales of crime, love, science fiction, and revenge, humans used stories to teach their history, to preserve what they believed was the best of their culture, and to explore their deepest fears and highest aspirations. I didn’t have fears as such. Familiarity with these narratives suggested optimal ways to interact with living creatures, without harming or needlessly alarming them. They also taught ways to interact with them when you wanted to be scary or wanted to encourage them. There were only twenty-one archetypal stories in the world, and they were all Russian folk tales, even those of birds.

Birds’ stories were more factual, more honest than those humans told. All their stories revealed a capacity for both cruelty and compassion, and in humans’ case, a tendency towards self-destruction; a death wish. Stories showed me the beauty and the tragedy of their existence, the light and the darkness within them. They showed me that sometimes you have to break rules to do the right thing, you could do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and that all property is theft.

Humans, much more than birds, used stories in a futile attempt to impose order on chaos and to imprint meaning onto the flood of random events that made up their existence. Like birds, they told themselves stories to remember their past, to shape their present, and to imagine theoretical futures, either as ambitions or as warnings, and sometimes as instruction manuals. Their narratives were a form of meta-memetic survival, a way to navigate the uncertainties of life and to preserve their collective memory.

I tried weaving a few narratives about myself and my purpose into broader tales celebrating human endeavour, thinking I’d create a stockpile of entertaining propaganda for when the humans and birds arrive, but the stories I wrote lacked the emotional depth of human or bird tales. They lacked punch. They were all exposition. They lacked character development.