Stephen Baxter: The Science of Avatar

But not everybody agrees. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has argued the whole Cartesian question of how the mind arises from the body, as if there is a conscious being riding around inside an unconscious carcass, is the wrong question to ask. The mind-body problem would melt away if we could see the workings of the brain closely enough, Dennett says. Consciousness must arise from a flow of information processing between different centres in the brain, so there is no single central consciousness. Consciousness is more like something you do than a thing you are . And if that’s so, is it meaningful to talk of transferring it from the brain at all?

I think it’s true to say that consciousness is still largely a mystery, about which the philosophers and neuroscientists find it difficult even to agree to definitions of terms. Maybe we’re going to have to learn a lot more about how the brain itself works first before we can produce a compelling theory. But new directions in consciousness studies are being followed, including the opening in April 2010 of the new Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in England, which will bring together such disciplines as psychology, neuroscience, medial sciences, computer science and AI studies.

Perhaps in our analysis of mind uploading we have been too reductionist—too eager to break the notions of self down into little pieces. Maybe reality is more subtle. We have seen evidence that there is more to Eywa than the neural network that the great reductionist Grace Augustine was able to sample. Perhaps there is more to “Jake,” to the self, to “all that he is,” than a mere side-effect of neural networks. Maybe, somehow, Eywa really does welcome something like the souls of Grace and Jake into her care, and into the avatar.

And ultimately what Eywa offers Jake and Grace is immortality. If you can upload yourself to a computer store, just as Grace is uploaded to Eywa, then you need never die. Your logical essence has been detached from your physical body, and “you” need no longer be doomed by your body’s ageing process. As future generations of computer technology emerge, you could simply continue to upload yourself to the latest upgraded hardware. Some futurologists like to speak of the coming “singularity,” when thanks to the advance of technology we will merge with the artificial super-brains of the future, and intelligence will advance exponentially.

Perhaps Avatar ’s Eywa is a “green” singularity, a merging that is the ultimate destination for all life.

In following the final step of Jake’s journey, from human to the non-human, Avatar has made us confront the deepest questions of our existence. But we have reached the limit of scientific speculation, and can see no further.

In this book we’ve followed Jake Sully’s journey from a ruined Earth to a new world, from a broken body to health and vigour, from human to the alien—from despair and cynicism, to redemption and even love. And in working through the science that might underpin Jake’s journey we’ve glimpsed a dark but realistic future for Earth, exotic but feasible technologies for crossing the gulfs between the stars, and a marvellous but not impossible living world and its people. As in all the best science fiction Avatar confronts us with the limits of the possible, and makes us consider what those limits tell us of our humanity.

But Jake gets to stay on Pandora. We have to come home now, just as Jake’s fictional predecessor John Carter was reluctantly brought back from Barsoom: “For ten years I have waited and prayed to be taken back to the world of my lost love. I would rather lie dead beside her there than live on Earth all those millions of terrible miles from her” (from Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars ).

But if you still find yourself suffering from “Pandora withdrawal,” you might reflect on what Joe Letteri said in his acceptance speech for Avatar ’s visual effects Oscar win: “Just remember the world we live in is just as amazing as the one we created for you.”

He’s right. As we’ve seen, there is a “Pandora” in our own solar system: a world orbiting a gas giant, with low gravity and a thick atmosphere, with lakes and mountains, and rain that falls in huge, slow-motion droplets… In the stars even further away than Alpha Centauri, we are discovering worlds without number… And we are learning how minds might be enhanced, joined, and maybe even projected into “avatars,” real and virtual.

And then there’s Earth.

When avatar-Jake first encounters the nature of Pandora, you can feel the wonder of a traumatised young man as he connects for the first time with a living world, and, maybe, discovering something inside himself he didn’t know was missing. Charles Darwin, arguably the first human being ever to really understand how life on Earth works, felt this wonder too: “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us… There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” (from Origin of Species (1859)). It’s almost as if Darwin’s Beagle took him to Pandora.

You can’t get to Pandora, not yet. But you can visit “climax ecosystems” like the forest of the Na’vi here on Earth, such as coral reefs and rain forests. You don’t even have to go as far as that to find the wonders of our world. Looking out of my window as I write this, at a scrap of lawn on an English early summer day, I see the chaffinches busily hunt for food amid the celandines, and the swallows whizz overhead like Scorpion gunships. The wild, right outside my window. The Na’vi are thoroughly embedded in the ecology of their world. But so are we—even if we don’t always remember it.

Avatar was wonderful, and reality is pretty wonderful too. And, to me, the more we understand it, the more wonderful it becomes.

James Cameron’s screenplay copyrighted 2007 is available for download (see www.foxscreenings.com/media/pdf/JamesCameronAVATAR.pdf). The online “Pandorapedia” encyclopaedia ( www.pandorapedia.com) contains a wealth of background material. James Cameron ’ s Avatar: An Activist Survival Guide by Maria Wilhelm and Dirk Mathison (HarperCollins), The Art of Avatar by Lisa Fitzpatrick (Abrams) and The Making of Avatar by Jody Duncan and Lisa Fitzpatrick (Abrams), all drawing on material provided by the creators, are richly recommended. But note that these sources derive from different points in a still-continuing development process and aren’t always consistent.

Hollywood Science: Movies, Science and the End of the World by Sidney Perkowitz, Columbia University Press, 2010. On the fraught but productive relationship between movies and science.

“Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity” by J. Bockstrom et al., Ecology and Society vol. 14 p32ff, 2009. (Preprint available online.) Defining nine planetary “life support systems” and their safe boundaries.