Mind Out of Time: Arrival, Ted Chiang, and Sapir-Whorf

Arrival is based on a short story by Ted Chiang: Story of Your Life.

Despite what some have said, the main plot idea (as I remember from the story; I have yet to see the film) goes well beyond the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- it also requires that human consciousness (potentially) extend beyond the confines of the usual time span we perceive. This is a modification of fundamental physics, not just of cognitive linguistics.

See also A Modern Borges? and Beyond Human Science.

A modern Borges?

As you can probably guess, I read a ton of science fiction when I was a kid. There was a time when I could walk into a book shop and recognize every title in the sci fi section. But I stopped reading it about the time I reached high school, and, except for the occasional guilty pleasure (e.g., stuff by Vernor Vinge), haven't kept up since. Being a physicist makes it tough to read science fiction -- I particularly hate it when the sci fi assumptions or their implications aren't self-consistent or at least treated in an sophisticated way. It's also true that there is very little new under the sun (I suppose this applies to all literature). Every time I pick up a new title I can more or less recall several stories of which it is derivative. Sometimes I wonder if the author knows this.

Recently I came across the short fiction of Ted Chiang. It's the first really good science fiction I've read since I was a kid. I guess others agree, because Chiang has already won 3 Nebulas and a Hugo, despite having only published a dozen or so stories. (Read the reviews at Amazon for his one published collection here.)

This is probably over the top, but he reminds me of Philip K. Dick and even Borges. Some will violently disagree with me, but I think Chiang really understands the scientific or metaphysical concepts that appear in his stories, while at times I feel Borges is just alluding without deep understanding.

Here are some of his stories, available online.

Division by Zero. A mathematician has a mental breakdown when she constructs formal machinery showing the internal inconsistency of mathematics. The theme is eerily reminiscent of these comments by Greg Chaitin!

Understand. A shorter, updated version of Flowers for Algernon?

What's Expected of Us. A brief meditation on time travel and free will :-)

Varieties of Time Travel

My kids have been reading lots of books over the break, including an adventure series that involves time travel. Knowing vaguely that dad is a theoretical physicist, they asked me how time travel works.

1. Can one change history by influencing past events?      

OR

2. Is there only one timeline that cannot be altered, even by time travel?

I told them that no one really knows the answer, or the true nature of time.

I gave them an example of 1 and of 2 from classic science fiction :-)

1. Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound of Thunder:

... Looking at the mud on his boots, Eckels finds a crushed butterfly, whose death has apparently set in motion a series of subtle changes that have affected the nature of the alternative present to which the safari has returned. ...

(Note this version implies the existence of alternative or parallel universes.)

2. Ted Chiang's one pager What's expected of us, which also notices that a single time line seems deterministic, and threatens Free Will. (More ;-)

... it's a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they're playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it's easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can't. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There's no way to fool a Predictor.

The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. The full implications of the technology will become apparent later, when negative delays of greater than a second are achieved, but that's not what this warning is about. The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no such thing as free will.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that's what a Predictor provides. ...

I attended a Methodist Sunday school as a kid. I asked my teacher: If God knows everything, does he know the outcomes of all the decisions I will ever make? Then will I ever make a free choice?

I also asked whether there are Neanderthals in heaven, but that's another story...

Quantum GDP

"It's been only half jokingly said that today a third of GDP is attributable to quantum mechanics," -- former Lockheed CEO Norm Augustine.

I've heard the one third or 30% of GDP figure from time to time, but have never seen a detailed analysis. A list of modern technologies that arose from quantum mechanics would include: transistors, microprocessors, lasers, sophisticated chemistry and materials science, nuclear energy, memory chips, hard drive storage, LEDs, LCD displays, etc. These certainly account for a significant fraction of GDP.

Estimates of expenditures on communications and information technology alone in developed countries are typically in the 5-10% GDP range, which provides a lower bound. While the actual figure may be less than 30% it is certainly substantial. See here for a history of physics contributions to information technologies.

The huge (but poorly understood) impact of quantum mechanics on modern life is an example of the tremendous long term impact of fundamental research. There is every reason to think that increased world research expenditures would enhance productivity and quality of life, with very high ROI. However, there is little careful thinking about the "right" level of research investment as a fraction of GDP. Instead, we get:

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the history of quantum mechanics is not its technological and practical impact, but rather how it led to deep changes in how we think about the universe. See, e.g., Two slit experiment, Bell and GHZ, Weinberg on quantum foundations, and On the origin of probability in quantum mechanics.

Early pioneers doubted whether humans were smart enough to understand quantum physics:

[Wigner] Until 1925, most great physicists, including Einstein and Planck, had doubted that man could truly grasp the deepest implications of quantum theory. They really felt that man might be too stupid to properly describe quantum phenomena. ... the men at the weekly colloquium in Berlin wondered "Is the human mind gifted enough to extend physics into the microscopic domain ...?" Many of those great men doubted that it could.

Quantum mechanics, which made possible the modern age, is nevertheless only understood by at most a fraction of a percent of the population. See also Psychometric thresholds for physics and mathematics, Chomsky: genetic barriers to scientific progress, and Beyond Human Science.

Beyond Human Science: [This Ted Chiang short story envisions a future in which science has become the province of genetically enhanced "metahumans" -- leaving non-enhanced humans to gape from the sidelines.]

... imagine if research offered hope of a different intelligence-enhancing therapy, one that would allow individuals to gradually "up-grade" their minds to a metahuman-equivalent level. Such a therapy would offer a bridge across what has become the greatest cultural divide in our species' history ...

We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we.

Beyond Human Science

A short story by Hugo and Nebula winner Ted Chiang. See also A Modern Borges? and Genius (Nautilus magazine article).

The Evolution of Human Science

It has been twenty-five years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?

No doubt many of our subscribers remember reading papers whose authors were the first individuals ever to obtain the results they described. But as metahumans began to dominate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish secondhand accounts translated into human language. Without DNT humans could not fully grasp prior developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings.

No one denies the many benefits of metahuman science, but one of its costs to human researchers was the realization that they would likely never make an original contribution to science again. Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attention away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.

Textual hermeneutics became popular first, since there were already terabytes of metahuman publications whose translations, while cryptic, were presumably not entirely inaccurate. Deciphering these texts bears little resemblance to the task performed by traditional paleographers, but progress continues: recent experiments have validated the Humphries decipherment of decade-old publications on histocompatibility genetics.

The availability of devices based on metahuman science gave rise to artifact hermeneutics. Scientists began attempting to "reverse engineer" these artifacts, their goal being not to manufacture competing products, but simply to understand the physical principles underlying their operation. The most common technique is the crystallographic analysis of nanoware appliances, which frequently provides us with new insights into mechanosynthesis.

The newest and by far the most speculative mode of inquiry is remote sensing of metahuman research facilities. A recent target of investigation is the ExaCollider recently installed beneath the Gobi Desert, whose puzzling neutrino signature has been the subject of much controversy. (The portable neutrino detector is, of course, another metahuman artifact whose operating principles remain elusive.)

The question is, are these worthwhile undertakings for scientists? Some call them a waste of time, likening them to a Native American research effort into bronze smelting when steel tools of European manufacture are readily available. This comparison might be more apt if humans were in competition with metahumans, but in today's economy of abundance there is no evidence of such competition. In fact, it is important to recognize that— unlike most previous low-technology cultures confronted with a high-technology one— humans are in no danger of assimilation or extinction.

There is still no way to augment a human brain into a metahuman one; the Sugimoto gene therapy must be performed before the embryo begins neurogenesis in order for a brain to be compatible with DNT. This lack of an assimilation mechanism means that human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch their child grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser. It is not surprising that the percentage of human parents choosing the Sugimoto gene therapy for their children has dropped almost to zero in recent years.

As a result, human culture is likely to survive well into the future, and the scientific tradition is a vital part of that culture. Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry and increases the body of human knowledge just as original research did. Moreover, human researchers may discern applications overlooked by metahumans, whose advantages tend to make them unaware of our concerns. For example, imagine if research offered hope of a different intelligence-enhancing therapy, one that would allow individuals to gradually "up-grade" their minds to a metahuman-equivalent level. Such a therapy would offer a bridge across what has become the greatest cultural divide in our species' history, yet it might not even occur to metahumans to explore it; that possibility alone justifies the continuation of human research.

We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we.