Will Eaves - Murmur

This prompts a response to your interesting remarks about mirrors. The lady who isn’t there in the glass, who’s all alone, is possibly a feverish example of one’s thoughts about being original in some crucial respect. One has one’s moments, after all.

It strikes me that a mirror reflects, but that, geometrically speaking, it transforms rather than translates. One is turned back on oneself and in the process one sees a second person, a new person whom one does not fully recognize. Always uncanny, this about-facing, and not unrelated to the common fear of automation, which people assume to be a sort of coming doom. The fear of robots, I take it, is like the fear of prophecy, the essence of which is repetition: if you can be repeated, you can be replaced.

But the funny thing about a reflection is that it isn’t actually a repetition at all. I remember goggling at myself in the Haunted Mirror Maze two years ago, in Battersea, and wondering about this. The person I saw was clearly capable of being another person—inaccessible to me. And isn’t that why the Queen in Snow White is so angry? Her slave in the mirror is really someone else. An apparently obedient but deceptive likeness. And, for that matter, isn’t Snow White herself another betrayer of the Queen’s beauty, another likeness come to life, with her own puffy-sleeved and faintly irritating style? (You made this point rather less mechanically when you talked about cartoons being a surprise.)

Now, I’m no beauty—please, don’t insist—but I present our anxious government with a similar dilemma. I am a piece of sensitive information. I am, in fact, the personification of such information. I hold secrets. I know how impulses passing through mercury tubes can store memory. I have the key. I am the gatekeeper at a technological frontier. The difficulty is that there are only two things you can do with a piece of sensitive information, as we discovered at Bletchley, June. You can disguise it, or you can delete it.

The problem with disguising or encrypting it is that the original still exists. One has doubled the information, not made it less sensitive. Something has happened to it, but the semantic load persists behind a mask, a veil, a foreign accent, new papers, breasts, etc., and really the only thing to do about that, if you’re still anxious, is to remove both bits of information—the original and the encryption—altogether.

Why are the intelligence services paranoid? Because they know you can’t force someone to conform, or learn the error of their ways. You can’t reach the inner life. I can’t be a model citizen—though, heaven knows, I’ve tried—because the menace lingers inside. You can’t simply change people, in other words, or double them, because you can’t know they’ve changed. Only they can know that. Only they know what it’s like to be copied.

I bathe slowly because it hurts. My skin is sore, but I’m consoled by the stinging of the water and the sheer awkwardness of feeling my shape so altered, the eczema under the flaps, the bruised diminution of my maleness, my fatty hips. I look at what has happened in the mirror and do not in any way recognize what I see, while at the same time feeling, deep down, that I am more myself than ever. A person who feels pain. When I go to the Infirmary, I am being given instructions. When I eat, I am instructing my stomach acids to get to work. Everything acts on me to gain a programmed response, and sometimes I cannot imagine a way to retrieve what self-determination I once had except, perhaps, by the admittedly extreme measure of introducing a halting mechanism.

But the more I become an instrument, the more I am treated like a thing, the more convinced I am of my real existence, and of its uniqueness, which is what binds me to you and you to me. I would go so far as to say that we are commonly alone. This is a version of Schrödinger’s theory about consciousness. We each have our view of the same mountain. I wonder if it mayn’t be the case that consciousness is a contradiction: universal by dint of being irreducibly one aspect, one mind, at a time.

I am in the mood to dwell on this a little longer, in part because I have been so misunderstood on this subject (as you will know, if you listened to that broadcast with Max and Julius).

If I say that sufficiently human-like behavior is enough to suggest the presence of intelligence, that does not mean that I think the mind trivial or unmysterious. On the contrary, I think it is inevitable. The mind is a) the inevitable result of certain physical processes, each with a unique history of formation, the outcomes of which are—like certain mathematical truths—logically undecidable in advance, and therefore b) wholly mysterious. Somehow it is the case that the mind arises from a biology and a physics to which it may not return. That is what I mean when I say that we won’t know what machines are thinking once they start to think. We won’t know because once consciousness has come about, it looks out of different eyes. It has particolored shades of meaning. It is like poor Vertumnus, in the Metamorphoses , who shape-shifts like mad but has only one ambition, which is to love Pomona. Or even, a little, like my own idea, the Universal Machine, which is different machines fielding one mutable property. The point to grasp in this analogy is that the different machines, in the same box, are different. So I don’t think consciousness is ever really copied. Because copies aren’t copies.

Copernicus tells us that our corner of the universe is typical of the whole, and from that we infer that, in an infinite cosmos, however rare the conditions may be that lead to life and consciousness, they must occur an infinite number of times. If the beings that arise from these conditions then exist in finite states (are embodied) for a finite period of time, it follows that they must exist in those finite states infinitely often. We conclude that there must be an infinite number of replicated beings, all of whom are identical: a universe of doppelgängers.

But if people are replicated, and one of the features of any person being replicated is a relation to consciousness that is unique, how are these replicated beings the same?

I see no easy solution to this conundrum, where reproducible computing intelligence is concerned, unless we accept that thinking machines will only ever be merely efficient, and therefore unconscious, which I do not accept. And even then, I do not think the unconscious machines are quite copies, because they must be enumerable, and the order in which they are enumerated makes a difference. Furthermore, I begin to suspect that we cannot rely on the seeming efficiency of a body, or an assembly of valves and switches, to be as brutish as it appears to be. Because among duplicates with variations, each has a powerful claim on originality, though it may not be strictly aware of the fact.

This is the essence of the story of Pinocchio, I take it, who is a puppet and a person at the same time. Or, better: he is a puppet who does not know that he is already a person.

I am much more interested in machines that do not quite realize they are already persons than I am in all that Amazing Tales nonsense about machines faking human life and taking over the world. Why, for heaven’s sake, would they bother?

Which brings me to another imperfectly preserved nocturne, dear June. It is difficult to say what it describes: Christopher, again, and the isolation I observe but do not feel. I am on an island, with Stallbrook and Matron, and then in a room, and then in a submarine chamber, fathoms and fathoms down. I’m separated from Chris at the beginning. He looks back at me—he knows something. He seems to be saying, “Now I see…”

He crops up again, twice, and—he’s different each time.