True manifest or thought experiment - „Blindsight” by Peter Watts

Blindsight - science fiction novel by Peter Watts...
It has been sometime since I have read this book and I'm still uncertain whether it sincerely represents its author's view of life (or perhaps author's world view) or it is a sort of gigantic thought experiment.

First, some facts. It is certainly one of the best science-fiction books I have ever read. Set in the second half of XXI century it describes an encounter between humans living on Earth with alien inteligence. The encounter starts with the apparent survey the aliens perform sending micro-satellites (called as fireflies). Humans sent a spaceship, „Theseus” to get into first contact with the aliens dwelling on a cosmic structure, a vessel-sattellite called by itself  „Rorschach”. The encounter reveils that the aliens represent totally different kind of intelligence humans expected. The intelligence is lacking consciousness yet it remain highly intelligent, surpassing humans. When the danger of this devilish creatures becomes critical, the artificial intelligence controlling the human spaceship attacks them in apparent suicide mission leaving the lonely survivor live and coming back to Earth, that, by the time of the mission undergoes a new kind of holocaust, caused by unconscious vampires ... It is possible that he is the only truly conscious subject in the entire universe...

Plot is perhaphs not the best part of the novel, though in comparison to many sci-fi(s), it is original and untypical. Language is difficult, peppered with many biological and neuroscientific terms, but the deep comprehension is rewarding. Yet not the plot itself or its language make the essence of the novel. In reality it is a philosophical treaty said in the frame of sci-fi story. It's a big discourse about human consciousnes and its nature, mind and matter interplay, essence of biology, human interaction, artificial intelligence etc.

However, when I read it carefully, I noticed that its author identifies with some quite specific views that go far from what I used to belive in... Sex seems to be presented as nothing more than a blind copulation. His views on biology seems to verge on a brink of primitive reductionism. In his world human free will seems not to exist and intelligence does not need conscious beings to express itself. I probably oversimplify it, yet this is what seems to emerge from Blindsight...

I have an impression that Watts somehow believes in propositions put forward in famous GEB (Gödel, Escher, Bach) book (by Douglas Hofstadter). Yet this book was not mentioned in the "Notes and References" to the novel. In the "Notes" author seem to explain scientific background for many of his constructs used in the novel.

I prefer to believe that Watson's novel, dark and mechanistic is indeed a kind of thought experiment - not an epiphany of some well grounded scientifically based conclusions. For example, while it is instructive to know that Metzinger's "Being No One" was one of inspirations, it is somehow reassuring that such views do not even dominate the whole gamut of current consciousness sciences...

And, as the thought experiment - it is one of the best I ever read...

Evilest evil cast upon the future - „Use of Weapons” by Iain M. Banks

I usually try, when writing reviews, not to spoil a given book to its future readers.

This time it is just impossible. All the time that has passed since I read Iain M. Banks „Use of Weapons” I have been thinking how to write the review of that incredible, „moral” sci-fi novel. I was deeply thinking about it when I went to meet, face to face, Iain M. Banks recently in Edinburgh’s Waterstones bookstore, even though he was not talking as „Iain M. Banks” — an author of sci-fi books, but as „Iain Banks” — the author of his, so called, mainstream books.

Unfortunately, to write a true and intimate review of „Use of Weapons” seems impossible without revealing some of its secrets — so please be warned — and if you have not read it yet — please better do not read this post. Come here after to share your thoughts with me…

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Use of Weapons” is a story of two characters, the archetypal good and equally archetypal evil. However, unlike other stories of the kind, it is far from being a cliche where we have a struggle between „forces of evil” and „forces of good”.  Instead, we have here a profound tale where we discover a blending of good and evil into almost impossible oneness…

The main narrative of „Use of Weapons” is the story of Cheradenine Zakalwe — a man who grown up in a noble family in far future. His childhood and adolescence was relatively happy with two sisters and, from some moment in time, with another boy, Elethiomel, who was his foster-brother. Beyond the few chapters about his young life, we know very little about him.  Then a war starts and he becomes a soldier. His foster-brother leads the enemy side. At the final stage of the war, the fighting or rather a deadlock in it, becomes so intense, that the foster-brother invents a cruelest way to crush his opponent — he murders Zakalwe’s sister, (who, incidentally, was also his foster-sister …)  and announces it to him in a most cruel way — the way that later becomes a leitmotif of a false remorse ...

Cheradenine, both depressed and correctly judging his slim chances to win, and knowing that his surrender can bring long awaited end of the war, in the act of utmost sacrifice — commits suicide…
And the peace comes... And this ends the story of the good, though we wait to the last pages of the book to discover it…

From now on, the most of the book portraits the evil. I must note, that literaly the concept of  "from now on" is not well defined in the novel. The temporal relations are deeply entangled, but lets say "from" for the sake of this review.

Elethiomel falsly incarnates into Cheradenine and becomes The Zakalwe. We have no clue how it happened and why. From some of the Zakalwe actions we could gather he tried to redress himself from the horrible sins and crimes he committed. But such thoughts seem to be contradicted by relations of more cruel acts he committed. As life goes on, he develops a kind of approach to his own life, in which he finds at least some acceptance of himself by changing his role:

„It had always seemed to him that the ideal man was either a soldier or a poet, and so, having spent most of his years being one of those — to him — polar opposites, he determined lo attempt to turn his life around and become the other...”

In fact, from this moment, I had some trouble with the character. The book was written in such a way, that, if one reads only superficially — it becomes easy to put oneself on the side of Zakalwe. He is attractive person, ruthless, powerful, yet with „some” grain of remorse. However, deeper reading reveals that the true intent of the author was to show the evil and badness in its purest form.

„(…) given all the things Zakalwe’s done, just since we’ve known him, they’d have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start forgiving him.”

Instead of true regret and attempt to redress for his crimes, he plays a life-long game. And finally, to the total moral disgust, he even tries to find an approval for his horrible deeds in the eyes of the sister of both the true Zakalwe and the murdered girl. The same sister who was his mistress in their adolescence. He says:

„Go back: go right back. What was I to do? Go back. The point is to win. Go back! Everything must bend to that truth.”

His attempt to exonerate himself from the crime, trying to prove that the end justified the means, are fruitless. The only leaving member of Zakalwe family rejects him.

„Why do you do this? she said. “Why do you do this ... to him: to me . . . why?  Can’t you just leave us all alone?” (...) Livueta Zakalwe walked out, closing the door behind him.

In the scene that portraits the final and the last rejection, like in Last Judgement, he almost dies from a brain stroke. He is rescued by a drone — perhaps only to feel to the end of his days the pain and the burden of the evilest of evils a human can commit…

I probably should add that the book is written in a very unusual way and its reading is both a great challenge and a specific pleasure. It has a very specific temporal and, so to speak, „spatial” dimension — possible only to sci-fi genre...

Yet it will remain in my mind as a very controversial book — for its apparent yet unspoken admiration to the evil character and its acts:

„But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness. Such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon... ”

which seems somehow perverse to me. Despite the cold beauty of the language and the meaning of the sentence in the entire experience of its reading.

The discovery of the truth about the character — is the central moral message Banks makes — but it requires some deeper afterthought and I’m not sure how many readers discovered it... For me it took double reading of almost the entire book...

All in all — it is a great and important book, perhaps because of these incredible tension between admiration and condemnation of evil — the evil cast into the future...

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Finished in Paris, April 15th, 2012

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

I have been reading this incredible book on all media. Started in paper, switched to e-book on Nook, finished in audio, backing my audio experience by e-book again...

All of them — because the book is exceptionally multidimensional and deep and difficult to comprehend if read casually...

Well, I can't afford to write the full review today, yet let me tell you that it is perhaps the most "moral" sci-fi book I ever read. And this morality is not expressed in any simple, trivial way — it is expressed through a profound understanding of human nature set to extreme, which possibly could only be described with such power, only in sci-fi sort of tale...

Promised — the review will come...

But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness. such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon...

...

My first Nook-Book is ....

I must say I'm quite happy with Nook applications. I have them on my new Android phone (Galaxy Note), on my old Android tablet (Archos 101) and on my PC ....

The first book I'm now reading, from cover to cover (what that means in digital world ?) is "Use of Weapons" by I.M. Banks... Started it in paper some time ago, but never finished...

BTW, the book is amazing ...

Steven’s King harmonic theory of time and universe – 11/22/63

Stephen King’s writing has always been above the level of popular literature — whatever he used to write about. His horror books were not interesting because of the frightening horror scenes and plots — they were interesting because of the author mastery of storytelling. I could imagine King writing anything, even stupidest tales, yet I’m sure, it would be worth reading.

Travels in time, alternate histories — such themes were no seldom in novels. So, in some sense, the main theme of 11/22/63 is not very original. Yet King converts the seemingly banal sci-fi theme into a vehicle that he uses to portrait America of nineteen sixties with incredible meticulousness and color (we could even say — with a smell). He also uses it to tell us about his philosophy of time, of past, present and future…

In a synopsis to the novel I could only tell (not to spoil the pleasure of reading it) about its main hero, high school teacher of English from Maine who, with the help of seriously ill local diner owner, finds in this diner a time slip that enables him to travel in time to nineteen sixties. He finds many reasons to go there and “to correct” the flow of events that would later lead to some tragic facts. However, the diner owner’s mission, which he could not accomplish, was to revert the history of America by saving J.F. Kennedy, killed on November 22nd, 1963… 

Let’s leave it for now whether the mission was successful or not. The paradox is that with King’s imagination comes deep thinking about history and its essence.

“The past is obdurate and it does not want to be changed”.

Would we have better world if Kennedy was not killed in Dallas?

Traditional views and our hero say — yes, but are such views justified? King takes us on a journey, where we start with strong conviction of the veracity of such conviction, but where we later end with deep doubts. Yet King's conjectures are not politically motivated, instead he sheds light on the nature of causality itself, on the incredibly connected world where „butterfly effect” of individual human freedom of choice is profound. Its effect is so strong that for many, the world existing in time appears like the pre-ordained rigid and obdurate structure, but when one dares to trust his own sense of freedom — he finds that he could indeed change the course of events. Would it be for good or for bad — that’s another question which usualy remains unanswered… (The novel seems to claim - for bad)

King's mastery allows the mere mortals to ponder on these deep philosophical conundrums without any kind of abstract and unrealistic “philosophizing”.
How often we, in our lives try to rewrite our past? It is hard to find a person who passed his life without thinking (or sometimes even doing) „it would have been better if I did so and so”… Many tried, usually to no avail. In almost all known cases, we come to that simple fact of the persistent obduracy of the past…

It is not a first time when the great literature of our age contemplates time. Kurt Vonnegut in his Slaughterhouse No. 5 makes his hero “unstuck in time”. For Vonnegut events in time are fixed and frozen:

A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.' So it goes. "If You know this," said Billy, 'isn't there some way you can prevent it?
Can't you keep the pilot from pressing the button?' 'He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.  

For King, the time is open ended and our will can create parallel universes. They harmonize and we perceive all them as one single and consistent universe:

The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar, Strum them and you create a pleasing sound. A harmonic. But then start adding strings. Ten strings, a hundred strings, a thousand, a million. Because they multiply! (…) Sing high C in a voice that’s laud enough and true enough and you can scatter fine crystal. Play the right harmonic notes through your stereo loud enough and you can shatter window glass. It follows (to me, at least) that if you put enough strings on time’s instrument, you can shatter reality.

Here we come to the essence of the novel. The travel in time and Kennedy case are used to teach us the fundamental lesson about the higher harmony that exists in time and in events of history.

It is so easy to shatter the delicate harmony of the world. We must walk and live carefully.

“Every breath we take is a wave”…

The novel ends beautifully. You can read these words, they will not impair your future reading:

„She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music, but I hear her — I always did. „Who are you George?” „Someone you knew in another life, honey.” Then the music takes us, the music rolls away the years, and we dance.

It was one of the best novels I ever read...

Neuromancer — „what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?”

There are two kinds of Sci-Fi books. Of the first kind are books that once described the space travels in gigantic cannon cartridges.The second kind of books uses the Sci-Fi „tools” to transmit a specific message. The message or thought that does not reduce itself to any specific implement or concrete futuristic scenery.

There are many primitive books (and movies) of the first kind.
There are much fewer books of the second kind….

I read number of books of both kinds. Sometimes you start a book, with a hope to find there a message, but it ends up in the proverbial „trip to moon in cannon ball”. Unfortunately the Sci-Fi book I read and reviewed here recently „WWW trilogy” is nothing more than such a stupid story. Even though its theme was artificial intelligence.

William Gibson’s „Neuromancer” is certainly of the second kind. But in the very beginning of this review, let me tell you that from the first sentence you know you encountered a great literature:

„The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

The language of the entire book has such specific colouring. As with many other books I read and reviewed, I find that kind of specific atmosphere, the best described via an analogy to color, as something rear and extremely valuable in books. However the colouring of Neuromancer is dark and void. Is not friendly, nor quite humane. Yet it exhibits beauty of its own kind.

What is so special about this book, the book that I discovered because of my son recommendation (he read it about 10 years ago !) and because of another book, „Infinite Reality:…” (by Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson) ?? Perhaps it did not correctly predicted WHAT is cyberspace now, or HOW it is built. But many years before Web it very accurately captured its spirit:

„Cyberspace. A con sensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.  Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding....”

As many agree, it was Gibson, who in some metaphoric sense “invented” cyberspace. How true is  this review title, borrowed from Jack Womack’s note about Neuromancer: „ what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?”. Impossible? Well… If you think about all these geeks and web inventors of the nineties who certainly have been reading Neuromancer before or during starting up their garage businesses? He also shed light on the aspect of cyberspace which we only recently discovered in web2.0 communities:

„It wasn't a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.
"Go," he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries, journals, and news services.”

Gibson's painting of the virtual reality touches the most important aspect of it – total controllability and enumerability:

„And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).”

However, Gibson went further and beyond cyberspace as we know it today. He explores matters that are related to AI in a way nobody at his time did. Instead of writing about robots, he explores the roots of AI:

„The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.”

Any doubts he is right? The game industry was, if not strongest, driving force of virtual reality technology — at least its most popular. But he drills it deeper. He explores what could be defined as personality problems associated with AI. He somehow predicted what later proponents of so-called Apocalyptic AI would preach. However, Gibson notices issues that, despite many years of development, were not yet addressed:

„Wintermute had built Armitage up from scratch, with Corto's memories of Screaming Fist as the foundation. But Armitage's "memories" wouldn't have been Corto's after a certain point.”

He also comes to the matters related to such, potentially omnipresent (nothing strange in today’s cyberspace) reality:

"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?"
"Things aren't different. Things are things."
"But what do you do? You just there?" Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan. "I talk to my own kind." "But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?"

In many ways Gibson’s depiction of Virtual Reality denudes its deep and dangerous ramifications. What is human reaction to it? Suddenly we discover that rage is perhaps the most human reaction to it:

"Mean, motherfucker," he whispered to the wind. "Don't take a chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh?
I know what this is...." He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. "I know, see? I know who you are. You're the other one. "So what now?" He swung them back into the bank of cloud. "Where do we go from here?" "I don't know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that question.

This very aspect of Neuromancer – disclosing and denuding the consequences of AI concepts, plans and steps toward it – should be studied with diligence by any adept of the nascent Brave New World….

Great book. The movie is coming.

The third part of „The WWW Trilogy” — Just another flop ...

I tuned to the audio rendering of Robert J. Sawyer third part of his famous „The WWW Trilogy”. After „Wake” — the opening part, „Watch” — the second tome, here comes „Wonder” — the concluding part.

Honestly, after „Watch” I already had suspicion that the trilogy could and should be reduced to the single „Wake” part and would stay in our memories ...

However, it is not a first time in the genre that the sequel or, worse still, the second and third parts — are a far cry from the first book.

As you can read in my previous reviews (Wake, Watch), the „The WWW Trilogy” is about the emerging artificial mind born out of existing Web infrastructure. The theme itself is interesting, touches many current trends like AI, Semantic Web, knowledge representation, mind-body relation etc.

Unfortunately, while wandering from „Wake” to „Wonder” it arrives to extremely naive, almost childish story, possibly good to kids in the preschools...

The WebMind starts to talk to politicians, overthrows China government, works for peace, health and prosperity of humanity and so on, so on....

At some passages it is easy to identify some strange episodes that make me think that  the author indulges in „product placement” activity. Repeated references to „a single iPhone button” or the advice WebMind gives to US president to use FireFox instead of Internet Explorer — are explicit „signals” of such activities...

Well, why I read it after all ?

I tuned to it only to get something lighter and less serious than my recent war-time reading...
I now regret I spent several hours listening to it. There are better books to spend time with ....

Science fiction, philosophy or ... teology ? 2001 — A Space Odyssey

As usual, it is extremely hard to write a review about the book or a movie that deserved and received thousands of reviews. So it was with Arthur C. Clarke's „2001: A Space Odyssey” for me. Yet there are some aspects of this novel, that seems to be overlooked by many.

First let me shortly recall, that the novel is less well known in the popular culture than Stanley Kubrick's famous movie, that has been and continues to be — one of the best movies ever done. I'm sure not many of my readers would disagree. However, both the movie's screenplay and the novel were created almost concurrently, and the novel was published after the film public release. So, while the movie's visual and verbal narrations have their own life and are great achievement of the great writer and the great filmmaker — the narration of the novel extends the main message of the film and goes much deeper.

The final sequences of the famous movie show the transformation of the main character into an older and older person, and then upon the influence of the monolith — to the child. The very last scenes reveal the symbolic „return” of the child to the earth or its orbit.

The novel is more textual at its climax: we know that the mind and memory of the main hero are being transformed from his physicality into a „mind” which, while still incorporated in the child, is clearly the omnipresent mind with the deep insight and awareness about everything it/he wants. In the last scenes of the novel the child (mind) comes back to the earth at the right moment, at a brink of a nuclear war and saves the world by destroying the warhead of death.

The last sentences of the novel read:

„He had returned in time.

Down there on that crowded globe, the alarms would be flashing across the radar screens, the great tracking telescopes would be searching the skies - and history [as it had hitherto been known] would be drawing to a close.

A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies it contained were no possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky.
He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief false dawn to half the sleeping globe.

Then he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers.
For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.

But he would think of something.”

On the surface, and out of context it sounds naive, but when you read the book — it is not. Clarke's parable is in fact a philosophical speculation on the idea of linking religion with external intelligent life. While I'm not in favour of such speculations, it is hard not to see the elegance and wisdom which Clarke puts into his allegory. Just muse over the penultimate sentence: „For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next” ....

The review of WWW: Watch

As promised few weeks ago, here is my review of WWW: Watch.

Robert J. Sawyer second part of his sci-fi WWW trilogy (my review of the first volume is here) continues the story of WebMind — a spontaneous emergence of conscious AI-like mind on the Web. The intelligence and later consciousness grown out of cellular automata created by "lost" packages of data on the net. I must say, that I was very positive year ago, when I read the first volume. Unfortunately, the second volume does not stand up to the challenge of convincing description or plot related to Artificial Intelligence. The WebMind becomes too human-like mind with too many naive dialogs and scenes. The introduction of top secret government watchdog agency, which, after the discovery of the intelligence tries to kill/stop it, is in the aura of today's sci-fi genre (oh these bad guys from Avatar...) - and is, unfortunately very superficial. The author even did not try to elaborate on the nature of the danger for the officials from the emerging AI.

The only plot that is fine, is that mysterious one about Hobo, the intelligent chimpanzee/bonobo crossbreed. In same sense, these plot - that points us to the future, third volume, was the for me like a lifebuoy during the reading.

The book ends with extremely naive invocations to peace, humanity and beauty. Come on - that was not what I expected...

Finally, let me say at least one good thing - it is real page turner or ear defender (if you happen to listen to it as I did :-))

The second part of WWW Trilogy ... not as good as the first...

While the first book of the "WWW" trilogy (by Robert J. Sawyer) was quite good - I cannot say this about the second part "WWW: Watch". It is more naive and less philosophical. I was also negatively struck by the bombastic and pompous ending that has a form of quite phony sounding summons about the universal consciousness.

I will soon publish full review of the book here. Stay tuned.

Billy Pilgrim’s (modified) theory of time ...

Slaughterhouse No 5 is absolutely incredible novel. It is the second novel in my life (after Zusak’s „The Book Thief”) that I reread again almost immediately after the first reading.

So it went.

I did it on the trip to Paris, and finished it at the CDG airport before the flight to London.

I want to shed some light on the theory of time that is embedded in the book. Traditional view on the time assumes that only present truly exists. Past does not, because it has just past and is not there anymore. Future does not because it is not there yet. According to Billy Pilgrim (the novel main character), or rather to his teachers on planet Tralfamadore, the time exists in its full reality:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

In the novel, Billy travels in time, back and forward, essentially abolishing the faith and the need for free will – because the future is as rigid and unchangeable as is the past. No one can do anything about it.

See:

Would-would you mind telling me,' he said to the guide, much deflated, 'what was so stupid about that?' 'We know how the Universe ends,' said the guide, 'and Earth has nothing to do with it, except that it gets wiped out, too.' 'How-how does the Universe end?' said Billy. 'We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.' So it goes. "If You know this," said Billy, 'isn't there some way you can prevent it?
Can't you keep the pilot from pressing the button?' 'He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.

However, even knowing this from his teachers, “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”. Billy finally grasped the idea of time and acquired the ability to perceive the time in the new way, after he was taught how primitive his earthling notion of time was:

There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish to the Tralfamadorians, too. They couldn't imagine what time looked like to him. Billy had given up on explaining that. The guide outside had to explain as best he could. The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe. This was only the beginning of Billy's miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, And there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar about his situation. The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped-went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, 'That's life.'

Now, let me for a bit of more serious thought...

I don’t like the idea of total determinism and a negation of free will. I think, it is exactly for the human free will, that we cannot travel into the future. There are also serious physical arguments against such ideas, all of them having roots in the third law of thermodynamics — in the very notion of entropy.

But I like the idea of the past having its existence. The past, all the events of yesterday, last year, last century last era – simply exist. The nature of its existance is, of course, different from the existence of this table or of ourselves, but it still has many enduring existential attributes.

The past events are petrified, trapped like bugs in an amber, in some mysterious fabric called “the past”.
For ages, equipped only with our memory, we did not have means to see it, but today we have. It probably started with photography and evolved through movies to Flicker’s shots, Youtube’s reels and Twitter’s tweets. More and more we have means to go back and to see clearly, to contemplate all the moments of the past, as they were, and – as they are – unchangeable, trapped like in amber, but ... no less beautiful than the present....

Time can be visualized as unfolding dynamic tree. At present, as “a fork” it bifurcates into zillions of branches, each branch being a different possibility for events to happen, words to utter, gestures to make, steps to walk... But once this fork moves forward, the branch becomes like a fossil, petrified and impossible to change.

I guess one could even built morality and ethics on this concept of time. No one wants to have his bad deeds and bad decisions recorded and permanently available for reading. But, like it or not, they are. There is no escape from this. So, one should try to have only good deeds of his to stay trapped in the amber of the past. That’s the simple base for morality.

Is it ?

Written in London at 4.35 AM on November 9^th – during a sleepless night. Unstuck in time....

The Lost Symbol - A mixed blessing

I must first say that I'm confused and torn apart any time when someone asks me about the latest Brown's novel - The Lost Symbol. Let me start with the following judgment - it is a very good page-turner (if you read it), or your ear-bender (if you listen to it). The narration is great. Even after many days after reading you still can recall the tension of the plot and the feeling of being there with the heroes - almost seeing with their eyes.
As I said before - Dan Brown is unquestionable great story teller and just for a mere pleasure of reading good story - this book is worth reading.

However, when it comes to the essence - it is just opposite - it is a very strange book.

First of all, the book uses the same pattern of elements we know from "Da Vinci Code" - you could almost map the characters from the two novels one-to-one. Even the secret device of "The Lost Symbol" is almost the same in its role as it was in "Da Vinci Code". No original ideas...

"The Lost Symbol" explores the mysteries and secretes of Masonic societies. On the surface, you feel the positive attitude of the author to Masons and their subculture. But when you think a bit of, somehow, unwanted effects - this attitude becomes less positive. The cornerstone of the plot - the imminent "nation-wide security threat" is the threat of publication of the movies recorded during Mason ceremonies, with several high-level US officials participating ...
Come on ! What author achieves for the people who do not know the truth about Masons - is that they continue thinking with prejudice and bias against them !!!

There is such a big amount of primitive naiveté, that I marvel at Dan Brown's talent to write something like that. For example, two of the most important heroes, just after the most traumatic events of their lives, just after killing of their son and nephew, in less than 1 hour start to philosophize and discuss abstract truths and ponder on religious matters. BTW, these discussion are worthless, bombastic and almost void of any value.

Another primitivism is demonstrated when it comes to the "scientific" reasearch done by the book heroine. I think Brown could invent something more intriguing than "soul weighing"....

So, I do not wonder when I see such reviews like that of William Sutcliffe's - where he writes: "(the book) is filled with cliché, bombast, undigested research and pseudo-intellectual codswallop".

There is only one moment in the plot which is quite natural and very moving, when the antagonist reveals his true identity. But even this very moving scene is later spoiled by the author, who do not build any interesting conclusion of this pivotal moment of the plot.

So what now ? Read it - and tell me what do you think....

PS. Solution of the riddle: it was from "The Lost Symbol" :-)

Ray Kurzweil interview

I had occasion to listen to an interview/conversation with Ray Kurzweil that was recorder about 3 years ago by C-Span. I was inspired by reference to Ray in Cory's Doctorow book "Content".

First and foremost I'm not in favor of such deep and far reaching futurism as he expresses. I always have in mind impressions we have when we read about some futurist of the past. Take authors like Julius Verne. When it comes to story telling - he was just great, but when it comes to his direct predictions about technology - we just smile. We smile, because Verne was such a fine man, but we do laugh at some other futuristic predictions of the past.

So I have mixed feeling about some of Ray's messages. About his idea of spiritual machines and his pseudo-religious views. I think he even shows some selective ignorance when it comes to some issue of technology and intelligence. He cites famous Turning test that is a test of potential machine intelligence, but falls short to mention Church-Turing thesis - that for me is still a prove for impossibility of true artificial intelligence in a strong sense of the word (i.e. human intelligence connected necessarily to concept of mind and conscience). He mentiones Penrose, but does not notice his key arguments against strong AI. He seems to be ignorant of Gödel and Tarski discoveries and their consequences for AI and machine reasoning...

Well, I do not want to go too far. He is fine man. His achievements for blind people, his work on speach recognition and education and last but not least - his famous musical synthesizers, and his company - are just great things - and I like and admire him for all these achievements. No wonder he was awarded of 16 honorary doctorates !

It was my first longer encounter to his thoughts. I will certainly read some of his book soon.
Recommended, despite of what I have said above ...

Ubik - the classic of philosophical sci-fi

Were it not for a recommendation from my son, I probably wouldn't have discovered Philip Dick’s novels and his most famous one - Ubik.

Popular ranking puts Ubik and most of his other books into the “Science-Fiction” category. On the surface it is true – the book describes events in then-future (was written in 1969) i.e. in 1992. The main plot revolves around a strange company (Runciters Inc.) whose principal business is to protect its clients from unwanted interference from some telepathic “criminals”, who by use of psychic field, may interfere with humans brains (There was no Internet then, but Dick’s imagination was like a prediction of spam. BTW - Dick, in some sense, predicted the web – as a customized source of information via a "pape machine").

Another pillar of the novel’s plot is the “half-life” – the state into which a person could go after death of her/his physical body. The idea of possible contact of real people and people physically dead, done via interception of residual brain activity – plays an important role.

However, that’s enough about the plot in my review. I’m not going to spoil it for the future readers. The whole point in the reading of the book is about surprise, about incredible interleaving of time and space in such a way, that reader is often totally lost as to where the plot happens and in what time. There are amazing descriptions of time going backward into the past – and descriptions that do leave us with total uncertainty about the temporal and spatial frames of the plot.

The book is also deeply philosophical, and in this aspects, Dicks style reminds me of Lem’s writings. As with Lem, Dick transmits deep philosophical thoughts about time, space and human will. However, he does so in a very sincere way - free from any pathos or elation. There is nothing like bombastic moralization – and if you do not buy his philosophy – you can just ignore it. The reading is still a thrilling experience.

The last pages of the book, with an invocation of some ironically biblical tone, and the very last sentence of the book says something fundamental of humans condition – about freedom and almost Machiavellian will to exist, to survive, to prevail.

And last – but not least – the language of the novel. There are sentences and figures of speech of unprecedented beauty and wit. Read this:

“The chill debased the surfaces of objects; it warped, expanded, showed itself as bulblike swellings that sighed audibly and popped. Into the manifold open wounds the cold drifted, all the way down into the heart of things, the core which made them live. What he saw now seemed to be a desert of ice from which stark boulders jutted. A wind spewed across the plain which reality had become; the wind congealed into deeper ice, and the boulders disappeared for the most part. And darkness presented itself off at the edges of his vision; he caught only a meager glimpse of it.”

If you like good sci-fi – read it, if you do not like – read it anyway. Dick’s writership transcends any attempt to pigeonhole it.

WWW: Wake - A Web Odyssey ...

Since "2001: A Space Odyssey" we no longer ignore science-fiction novels and movies, even if we are not in favor of such kind of literature. They usually question our common-sense philosophical paradigms. Of course, only if they have deeper meaning beyond the techno-babble of primitive scifi books. I do not need to recall books like Neuromances, authors like P. K. Dick or movies like Matrix. All of them bore some deeper philosophical questions.

Robert J. Stewart’s “WWW:Wake” inscribes itself into this stream of thought interwoven with scifi fable.

Stewart creates the trilogy about the Web. Wake is the part one of it. It is a trilogy of an intelligent consciousness rising in the web - out of its almost residual activity, related to lost signals and cellular automata-like activity of them.

The first part: WWW:Wake is really a good reading. In fact one almost does not feel any typical scifi climate. We follow the plot of young girl blind from her birth. At some moment in her life, a Japanese professor offers her his help – a promise to restore her sight. An implant is planted into her brain to correct her optic nerve transmission. However, instead of restoring her vision, at first it enables her to see ... the web.In fact, we need here to correct the author - she is able to see the Internet, not the WEB.What is more – the web architecture is not properly described through the visions of the character.This was the first tiny slip of the author – while he made a lot of effort to describe some concepts of the web correctly, at some places we can find many conceptual shortcomings.

However, these issues are minor – the author so brilliantly describes the learning process of the computer program, that is almost like a popular introduction to semantic web ontologies and their “use cases”:

"And and and yes, yes, yes it was staggering, thrilling, long long last, here it was,the key, this website, this increadible website, expressed concepts in a form I could nowunderstand, systematizing it all, relating thousands of things to each other in a coding system,that explained them. Term after term. connection after connection, idea after idea, this websitelaid them out, curious, interesting, an apple is a fruit, fruits contaib seeds, seeds can grom into es..."

The another positive side of the book is its references to important yet less known people and works, like"Cyc" and its author Douglas Lenat, "Mathematica" and Stephen Wolfram or Princeton's WordNet.

Finally – We will look forward to read the second part of the WWW trilogy – I hope it will reveal the true virtues of the author and his opus.

The post finished in Paris, France on May 1st, 2009.