Jeremiah Tolbert

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?