Review of Consciousness Unbound: The Dimensionless Chronicles
By Jeffrey Lockwood, professor of philosophy, entomology, creative writing
At first, the format perplexed me a bit. I had to figure out how to read and relate to the book with regard to the narrative and images. I finally decided to read it like an illustrated screenplay, as if I was reading a script with stage directions along with a storyboard for the filmmaker. And with this approach, it began to feel like watching a movie of sorts, and the story became quite absorbing. A few particularly intriguing elements have stuck with me:
You wrestle with the challenge of mind-body dualism in interesting ways. How can the DB effect the material world if it is entirely mind/consciousness — fundamentally different ontology than physical objects? It seems that DB can interact with Alex’s and Emma’s minds, they can use their bodies to effect change in the world. So, DB would seem to be constrained in an interesting way. But then, this gives rise to a fascinating take on consciousness…
You seem to have a view something like panpsychism such that consciousness is fundamental, not derivative or arising from material existence. I find this perspective enticing for various reasons, if I am correctly inferring your philosophical position on the matter. One result appears to be that DB is not some “other” or separate conscious being, but the characters’ consciousness “set free”. I’m not entirely sure what was binding DB before this critical event but perhaps a lack of conceptual freedom of the characters. This reminds me of the Hindu saying: “When the student is ready, the teacher will come” or perhaps the notion that rather than “seeing is believing” it is the case that “believing is seeing”?
And then we’re challenged with the “other mind” problem — how do we know that other people have minds like ours and share common experiences? I like what is implied by your story insofar as the supposed problem of whether AI is or can become conscious begins to seem far less compelling if we can’t even be confident that other people have conscious minds! It would surely seem that an AI could be a full-blown p-zombie and, if so, how could we possibly know (particularly if we can’t know whether the person across the table isn’t a p-zombie)?
For some reason, this led me to ponder the possibility of non-discrete cases (i.e., either another being is fully conscious in the same way I am or is fully a p-zombie). Perhaps more plausibly, p-zombieism (not a word but it should be) is a matter of degree. Maybe another person or another living being (or an AI) shares some of my conscious capacities but not all of them (e.g., the “other” has a genuine experience of fear but no phenomenology of awe). And, for that matter, perhaps I lack their experience of transcendence and only say things crudely approximating what they are feeling?
Treating DB as an AGI/ASI leaves some fascinating problems that you raise. The issue of morality is surely fundamental, and I wonder if moral reasoning perhaps requires genuine empathy — and can DB truly empathize without being embodied? So, it seems that DB is very un-godlike in lacking omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence — and I find this framework opens some vital questions with respect to AGI/ASI.
It’s interesting how DB considers “success”–and how Alex and Emma need to take a holistic view that somehow includes elements of unintended consequences. Their epistemic constraints (along with DB’s?) means that they cannot be sure of the soundness of their actions. And this is a fundamental problem with consequentialist ethics — the notion that an action is good if it produces good consequences. Setting aside the deep problems of what is good, any understanding of this success criterion becomes intractable as spatio-temporal scales increase — and it is even quite possible that one might intend a good consequence with all the reasonably possible knowledge one has and still have the world unfold such that the action caused terrible suffering (the problem of “moral luck”).
Well, those are some of the philosophical rabbit holes that I crawled into in reading your book — whether or not you intended a reader to become entangled in these particular problems. And so… well done! I learned years ago that an author simply cannot put a work into the world and have any control over how it is read, because writing/reading is a relational process and the reader will bring to the work his/her own perspectives, values, and experiences.