Art Is About the Lonliness of Sentience, Especially SF
Filed Under: Recommended Media, Short Story
f you haven’t read it already, I recommend you go check out Jetse de Vries’ story in Clarkeworld today, “Qubit Conflicts.” I am kind of spoiling part of it here in this post, so if you are against that kind of thing, go read the story and then come back here.Interesting, wasn’t it? I like the unconventional stories, that take risks with not having conventional characters and storylines. I can’t write them, but I love reading them. Anyway, the ending of this story, I think, could be read as an interesting response to some of the ideas of Mundane SF. And it gets to something that I am only just now picking up on, which is maybe what purpose art serves and why we create art at all.
The end of the story has this super intelligent singularity AI remarking on how maybe it was a mistake to set a thinking pace so fast (Planck speed), and ultimately how lonely it is, waiting for aliens to contact it. And it got me thinking about something I read recently, a quote of the late great Kurt Vonnegut, about how every being needs to be reminded that they are not alone, that there are others like them out there.
I think there’s something inherent about the nature of our sentience that brings along a certain loneliness. I can’t quite put my finger on why being able to think and being self-aware means that we pine for the minds of others, to know them, but we do. Maybe it’s a side effect of being the evolutionary end product of a social species. Maybe a sentient solitary predator wouldn’t have this problem, and it’s only a peculiar side effect of our own sentience. But any sentient creations of ours will have this problem, as Jetse seems to convey. I think I agree with that. Their intelligence, while artificial, will be modeled after ours. And we definitely seem to be lonely, every one of us, and I think we create and consume art because it soothes that fear that we’re alone. We get to, through a complex invented system thousands of years in the making, enter the mind of another being. No matter what the narrative is, there is that, in the background, that comfort.
And SF takes that them and makes it explicit in tales of the extraterrestrial. Fantasy does the same thing. Honestly, I don’t find SF/F that completely rules out the idea of the Other Mind very satisfying. It can be compelling and entertaining, but aliens and elves and all of it, they are a salve that we have invented to soothe a pain of which we’re barely aware.
Oh no. What if our species is the Emo Kid of the Galactic Lunchroom?
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