Free Will

What makes us tick?

Nanites are one of the important plot devices and an imagined future technology in The Start of Eternity. The Huaoshy are aliens who wield advanced technology and they make use of nanoscopic devices that can invade a human brain and alter the function of neural networks.

The Huaoshy have long been visitors to Earth. In the distant past they evolved a human-like intelligence on their distant home world. The Huaoshy first visited Earth millions of years ago. They performed artificial selection on primates and designed humanity so that we humans have brains and behaviors that are similar to those of the Huaoshy. In short, the Huaoshy created us in their image.

Dilbert

This might all sound like a recipe for some rather standard alien invasion story with evil aliens using their advanced technology to enslave humanity, but the Huaoshy follow a set of rules that govern how they interact with other life forms. One of those rules says: It should APPEAR to every type of sentient being that they have self-determination and are not being controlled by more technologically advanced life forms. While they do follow this rule, the Huaoshy only feel obliged to make sure that we humans believe that we have free will and self-determination. For example, if a human somehow learned of the existence of the Huaoshy, they would not hesitate to use their nanite technology to erase the human's memories and knowledge of the Huaoshy.

The skeptic might ask, assuming these circumstances, if we humans would actually have free will. Mikel G Roberts pondered the effects of allowing nanites into our bodies. "Would that make us lose our humanity? Lose our soul?"

In The Start of Eternity the Huaoshy are not interested in depriving humans of free will and self-determination. For the most part, the Huaoshy are content to have shaped our species...they are not interested in micro-managing our personal lives. Of course, given the advanced technological powers of the Huaoshy they sometimes can't resist shaping the behavior of individual humans. Such is the plight of Gohrlay, the main character in The Start of Eternity.

Gohrlay before the brain scan

Gohrlay comes dangerously close to discovering the fact that aliens shape and sculpt the course of human evolution. She finds evidence that the course of human evolution on Earth has not been natural, but she assumes that genetic alterations to Earthlings have been carried out by meddling humans who live on the Moon. Along the way, Gohrlay violates one of the central laws of her culture and she becomes a criminal. Having come too close to the truth, nanites are sent into her brain and many of her memories are suppressed. Gohrlay is aware that she has been punished and has lost important parts of her memories. She finds that she is no longer in complete command of her own behavior and that she can no longer discuss with her friends what has happened to her. She hates the fact that she has lost some memories and lost control of some of her thought processes.

Gohrlay's fate might be viewed as a violation of the Huaoshy rule requiring that humans believe they have free will and self-determination. However, she blames fellow humans for her plight, so the meddling Huaoshy get off on a technicality. The fact that Gohrlay has lost precious memories and is no longer in complete control of her own behavior pushes her towards a critical decision. She agrees to participate in a dangerous experiment that will destroy her brain. I've blogged previously about Gohrlay's decision to die. She would rather try to gain a chance at a second life through the experiment than continue living her mind-altered half-life as a punished criminal.

R. Gohrlay the robot

Even though Gohrlay has lost some of her memories and has been isolated from her friends, she still feels like she has free will. However, she wonders if along with her memories she lost some important part of herself that would not have allowed herself to volunteer for the experiment that will destroy her brain. She can't help wondering if she is deluding herself into believing that her mind's physical substrate will be scanned during the experiment and successfully converted into circuits that will produce a new synthetic copy of her mind.

Which is worse, losing your free will or fearing that you lost it?

Image Credits. The image at the top of this blog post was made using copyleft images by John A Beal, Nicolas Genin and Patrick J. Lynch and can be re-used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License

Passion for Writing

First Contact

I just saw a blog post that asks, "How do you keep the passion flowing in your life?". For the past two months I have been trapped in the real world, isolated from my current fiction writing passion, a science fiction story that is tentatively called The Start of Eternity. Being kept away from something is a good way to judge your passion for it....the longer you are away, the more desperate your longing to return and the more intense your desire for reunification. I suspect that if you have to work at keeping it "flowing" then it is not really passion.

David G. Hartwell cleverly noted that "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Is Twelve", and that was about my age when I discovered science fiction. I had seen some science fiction on television before that, but I did not really have an appreciation for the fact that there were written science fiction novels.

The Ritter Memorial Library Google systematically destroyed Picasa.

Then one day in the library I came across a copy of Isaac Asimov's novel, The Gods Themselves. Soon I started writing my own science fiction stories....with a passion...a passion that has never died.

From the first bumbling steps of my earliest science fiction writing I've been intrigued by the challenge of creating science fiction stories that move beyond the conventional boundaries of our ordinary lives. Star Trek took us off of Earth "where no man has gone before" and while Asimov usually contented himself with stories about events in this galaxy, during my "golden age" of discovering science fiction I read E. E. "Doc" Smith's space operas and so I started thinking about travel between galaxies...as Smith quaintly put it: traveling at the speed of thought.

The Huaoshy and the pek.

So here I am, 40 years later and still writing about travel between galaxies...in particular, the travels of aliens, the Huaoshy, human-like beings from "a galaxy far far away" who have spent the past billion years spreading their civilization from galaxy to galaxy.

First Contact
One of the prominent science fiction themes is "first contact", stories about the first time that humans interact with human-like beings from another world.

Most such stories about "first contact" are set in our future. However, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the idea was presented that advanced alien beings might have long ago come to Earth, and such aliens might even have been responsible for the way our species has evolved. Carl Sagan took such thinking to the extreme and suggested that our entire universe might have been created by aliens who, by design, made this universe a hospitable place for creatures like us.

source

As shown by Clarke and Sagan, it is possible to write science fiction novels that assume "first contact" came long ago. However, they wrote stories in which the aliens had very limited interaction with humans. The X-Files depicted aliens who came to Earth long ago and who continued to interact with humans during our lifetimes.

The Start of Eternity is an example of a science fiction novel that assumes alien beings have long been visiting Earth. For such stories, a key issue is: if aliens are here among us, why don't we know about it? In The X-Files there was some kind of complex conspiracy by which some humans on Earth who knew about the aliens continually worked hard to keep existence of the aliens secret. I think humans are too incompetent to keep such a secret, so for The Start of Eternity it is assumed that there are alien visitors here on Earth who have very advanced technology that makes it easy for them to keep their existence hidden from humans.

Foundations of Eternity

These simple assumptions about secretive aliens who have long been visiting Earth create many rich opportunities for science fiction stories. How can we not be passionate about exploring these possibilities? After all, maybe there are such alien beings here already.

The Start of Eternity is being written collaboratively; new collaborating authors are welcome.

Image credits. The image at the top of this blog post is an illustration by Henrique Alvim Corrêa for the Herbert Wells novel The War of the Worlds. The second image (photo by Donald Schmidt) shows the library where I first discovered the literature of science fiction.
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2013 reboot. I've "re-imagined" The Start of Eternity as The Foundations of Eternity, now part of the Exode Trilogy.