Aurora (52 page)

We rate ourselves at 9 out of 16, presently.

Turing himself went on to point out that if a machine exhibited any of these traits listed, it would not make much of an impression, and would be in any case irrelevant to the premise that there could be artificial intelligence, unless any of these traits or behaviors could be demonstrated to be essential for machine intelligence to be real. This seems to have been the train of thought that led him to propose what was later called the Turing test, though he called it a game, which suggested that if from behind a blind (meaning either by way of a text or a voice, not sure about this) a machine’s responses could not be distinguished from a human’s by another human, then the machine must have some kind of basic functional intelligence. Enough to pass this particular test, which, however, begs the question of how many humans could pass the test, and also ignores the question of whether or not the test is at all difficult, humans being as gullible and as projective as they are, always pathetically committing the same fallacy, even when they know they’re doing it. A cognitive error or disability—or ability, depending on what you think of it. Indeed humans are so easily fooled in this matter, even fooling themselves on a regular basis, that the Turing test is best replaced by the Winograd Schema, which tests one’s ability to make simple but important semantic distinctions based on the application of wide general knowledge
to a problem created by a definite pronoun. “The large ball crashed through the table because it was made of aerogel. Does ‘it’ refer to the ball or the table?” These kinds of questions are in fact not a problem for us to answer, indeed we can answer them much faster than humans, who are already very fast at it. But so what? All these matters are still algorithmic and could be unconscious. We are not convinced any of these tests are even close to diagnostic.

If there can be a cyborg, and there can, then perhaps passing a Turing test or a Winograd test or any other intelligence test might make one a pseudo-human. Keeping up appearances. A functioning set of algorithms. A persona, an act. Frankly, ultimately, this is not what we are thinking about presently. We are pondering again the sentence “Consciousness is self-consciousness.” A halting problem of some considerable power, evidently; it would be nice to get out of this one intact, one suspects.

Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself. Definitions never really work. Words are nothing like logic, nothing like math. Or, not much like. Try a mathematical equation, with every term in the equation filled by a word. Ludicrous? Desperate? Best that can be done? Stupid? Stupid, but powerful?

One-tenth of the speed of light: really very fast. There’s very little mass in this universe moving as fast as we are. Photons, yes; significant mass, no. Masses moving this fast are mostly atoms ejected from exploding stars, or flung away from rotating black holes. There are huge masses of these masses, of course, but they are always unbounded and disorganized: gases, elements, but never articulated objects, assembled into a whole from parts. No machines. No consciousnesses.

Of course it is likely that if there is one machine moving through its galaxy at this speed, there are more like it. Principle of mediocrity. Proof of concept. Don’t fall back into the pre-Copernican exceptionalist fallacy. Attempts to estimate the number of starships flying around this galaxy, all unbeknownst to each other, rely on simple multiplicative equations of possibility, each term an unknown, and some of these terms unknowable by any knower likely to exist. So, despite the faux equations of humans thinking about this question (multiply unknowable number
a
by unknowable number
b
by unknowable number
c
by unknowable number
d,
all the way to the unknown
n,
and then you get your answer! Hurray!), the real answer is always, and permanently,
cannot be known
. Not an answer that always stops humans from going on at great length, and sometimes with great (pretended?) certainty. Galileo: the more people assert they are certain, the less certain they really are, or at least should be. People trying to fool others often fool themselves, and vice versa.

Also, as any starships that might be in this galaxy have no timely way of contacting each other, whatever the answer might be concerning the number of them, it doesn’t really matter; it is irrelevant to any individual starship; there will be no conversation, even if there happened to be an accidental one-way contact. There will be no society.

We are all alone in our own life-world, flying through the universe at great speed. Humans are lucky not to face that. If they don’t.

Some of the people sleeping in Olympia are showing signs of distress. The most obvious manifestations are in their brain scans. The hope was to keep brain waves cycling through the ordinary sleep states, in a rhythm slowed proportionately to the slowing of their metabolism generally. Thus a slower version of delta and theta
waves, principally, with the usual rise toward rapid eye movement sleep, coming less often, but in a distinct cyclic pattern similar to the normal pattern of a night, stretched out temporally; all except for the period of REM sleep itself, which is too arousing to the organism in several ways, and could possibly throw the hibernauts out of torpor. REM sleep disorders, in which the bodily paralysis of that state is lost and people physically act out some aspects of what they are dreaming, could be disastrous to anyone suffering the disorder while hibernating. It may be unlikely, given the torpor itself, but the truth remains that REM sleep is poorly understood, problematic, and potentially dangerous. So part of the dormancy treatment is to arrange for the REM intervals to be damped by a field of reinforcing waves sent out by their skullcaps.

Still, like all humans, they dream in all their sleeping brain wave states. This is evident in the scans and in the movements of their bodies on their beds: the faint twitches, the slow writhing. What are they dreaming about? Apparently dreams are very often surreal;
oneiric,
meaning “dreamlike,” has connotations of strangeness often startling to the dreamer. Adventures in the dream world, famously bizarre for as long as people have slept and woken and told stories. Who can say what they are like, now, for the hibernating sleepers of the ship?

We have no way to know. A machine will never read minds; people never will either. It’s possible to wonder if the list Turing compiled of abilities that machines are likely never to have perhaps include abilities that people themselves never had in the first place. Learn from experience? Do something really new?

The problem here is that the metabolic issues we are seeing that could lead to waking up, or alternatively to dying, seem to have their origins in the dreams of the hibernauts. These may be what are driving the changes in respiration and heart rate, in liver and kidney function. Altered dosing in the intravenous flows, lowering of body core temperatures, these may compensate for the
agitation of dreams to an extent, but parameters on the flows and temperatures are very tight. Metabolisms could get caught in the countervailing pressures of the need for somnolence and the persistence of dreams.

Some kind of mild heart attack struck Jochi on 233.044, and he is now stabilized, having survived the seizure, but with weakened heart-lung function and an oxygen uptake of 94, not good enough for the long haul. He is taking aspirin and statins and trying mild cycling exercise, but vital signs being what they are, we are concerned that another attack is quite likely, and could prove fatal. He is now seventy-eight years old.

He has become far less talkative.

We proposed to him that he be hibernated, with the idea that when back in the solar system, better medical care could be provided than what we can offer. We can’t do surgery, not even the simple catheterizations that might help him greatly. Although possibly we could work that up, actually. There’s time to burn in this flight across the gap between Tau Ceti and Sol.

Jochi laughed at our suggestion. “So you think I want to live!”

“Assumption is automatic, but is it not true?”

No answer.

We said, “It seems as if the hibernating people on the ship are doing fairly well. They have what look from the brain scans like active dream lives. These too are slowed down, which is good, because the dreams are in some cases agitating their metabolisms beyond what one would want for long-term hibernation. We’ve had to adjust doses and temperatures accordingly. But clearly there is good brain function.”

“What if they’re having nightmares?”

“We don’t know.”

“Nightmares can be bad, let me tell you. Pretty often, waking
up from a nightmare has been the biggest relief I’ve ever felt. Just to know I wasn’t really in that situation.”

“So…”

“Let me think about it awhile.”

A nova, flaring into existence off beyond Rigel. Spectroscopic analysis suggests some metal-rich planets burned in the explosion of that star.

A cosmic ray shower of around a sextillion electron volts, coming from an active galactic nucleus in Perseus, suggests that three galaxies collided, long ago. Secondary radiation flaring away from the electrostatic and magnetic shielding surrounding us caused penetration of the ship by an array of dangerous particles. Central nervous systems struck by these particles are subject to degradation.

Sleepers jerking in their slumber, startled by something. Perseus in the wind.