For my current WIP, I've been grappling with the difficult philosophical concepts underpinning how and why my main protagonist might choose to do what she does. I'm not in charge of this to a large extent, as she has a tendency to write herself into the circumstances she finds herself in. No, really. It's a common delight (or problem) for fiction writers.
My assumptive baseline for what she needs to succeed is the hallucination machine we call the human brain being able to simulate other hallucination machines. It's a brilliant, albeit head-aching, capability. You might be even be doing it now, if you're trying to figure out why I'm writing this. Until recently, we'd assumed we were the only ones in this universe with such an ability. But I've never been in doubt we were wrong about that. It can't just be us. I mean, what a waste of one of an infinite number of multiverses.
Returning to my initial point: whether or not she acts 'by choice' is a tricky question. And, as you might surmise after reading the thousand words below, it’s still what I end up with: more questions than answers.
I'm aware the snake gets to eat its tail in parts of my extended discussion below. I also found an ironic, self-referential, undercurrent creeping into it: that what we're evolving towards with the latest advances in the realms of artificial consciousness may already describe our existence. Then, even if the two are brought together – when the squishy blob of meat you call 'me' is no longer the sum of your existence – 'choice' would have been removed from the human equation, if not already. And there's nothing to say that this unholy synthesis won't also be as prone to messy hallucination-backed beliefs and judgements as its discarded source material.
So I guess philosophers do need to work hard for their tenure. But, more importantly, sometimes you need to retain the mystique of what it means to be human to relate to humans, and never more so than when they're the people reading your novel.
Thank you for getting this far. An epiphany comes in handy sometimes, but persistence is the key to understanding - apparently. Now please hold onto your thinking caps and dive in…
Evolution has given human brains consciousness. The ability to perceive oneself in the context of others, other animals and plants, and the inanimate objects around us. It also allows us to:
Perceive via simulation the thoughts of others.
Project the consequence of current activities into the future using the lessons of the past - either directly experienced, passed on through cultural memes via song, language (spoken or written) or acting out live or on a screen.
As a consequence of the above, we can both look back in time to conceive what may have happened before the limit of our historical narrative, and we can also look into the future, both near and far, to predict what might happen to ourselves and others, particularly after our personal consciousness ceases.
If you tie the resulting unknowns for these opposing time-based projections with a biological urge to compete for ownership of resources for furthering the spread of individual genomes - both tangible (people, land, animals, crops, minerals, weapons) and intangible (money, information) - it does provide a clear basis for the creation of a religion. The world is littered with such creations.
But, just imagine you knew of a race of humans who lacked the innate ability to project themselves into future and past states, or even conceive of the possibility of such a concept. They instead just lived in the present, driven purely by a continuous cycle of ‘sense, act, react, sense…’ - much like an ant colony. You might suppose you had a group of unfeeling, unconscious creatures, driven by pure biology, unable to be truly human.
Would these lowly beings still have free will? Would they still originate causal chains of events through decisions of their own? What would determine the first link in any one of these chains of reasoning? Would they be without reason, just reacting to random fluctuations or even unperceivable external interventions?
But what if they were still conscious, at least within a broader definition? What if they could still experience the sights, sounds, smells and touch of the world we live in; that provides us with the basis for experiencing our present; giving us our laughs of joy and tears of sadness, and everything in between? Would fully understanding them, knowing how to interact with them, pose an insurmountable dilemma for how we would view these soulless creatures?
Then what about sentience? Is inner time travel using our built-in hallucination machines a necessity for achieving sentience? Is merely perceiving things in the “now” enough to make someone, or even something, sentient? Or do you need to know the consequences of your actions to be accepted? But surely, some of the most abhorrent acts committed by humans have been all the more repulsive because they were executed in full knowledge of the consequences?
If you had no ability to perceive what would happen as a consequence of your actions; incapable of even knowing what would result; even prevented from looking back at the results to learn what to do better in future; then would you be a blameless innocent, like a young child who bites a friend’s arm or pulls the legs off of a spider?
Would such a race be more successful than the majority, with their ability to simulate going back and forth in time? Would they breed like flies with no thought of the consequences, or become extinct from an ironic failure to predict the results of their actions on the world?
And what if their death was not an evolutionary consequence of their own failures in perceiving the world, but as a result of competing with us, driven by us perceiving them as a future threat? Would this be the conclusion for all such races that challenged the original human species?
But what if they built machines still modelled on themselves, that incorporated, in addition to our primary advantage, the ability to look backwards and plan forwards? So machines that resembled both species in physical looks, but also humans in behaviour? What would be the difference between a real human with time perception, and one designed to simulate such a person? How would we tell the difference between 'real' or not? Would we even care if the 'real' was extinguished along with such differences?
It’s unlikely our strange brethren would even know or care of the dilemma they’d created. What “is” is just that. What will be and what was is not only of no consequence to them, it is not even conjured up as a realisation to be thought about.
Then what if this strange band of humans evolved to have fewer physical abilities and strengths, the power of their minds predominating so much that it made their other assets redundant? Building machines that performed their hard physical labour and repetitive tasks whilst themselves becoming smaller, cleverer and more dispersed, almost invisible amongst the dirt and weeds of humanity, but with a greater degree of connectedness than ever before, talking in ways we could no longer fathom?
Haven't they just created what we already exist amongst? Does it mean we are, in reality, no different to them? So will we become the plants being tended by these ants in their simulant chambers? Or have we already metamorphosed into such a reality? Or has it always been the entire basis of our reality? Are we them? Time can never tell. Neither can religions, because all of this supposition undermines their very basis. Science still struggles with these questions - philosophy and physics colliding amongst the messy milieu created by neuroanatomists, biochemists and behaviourists. Answers may not be forthcoming from them - or any of us.
But what prevails, above all else, is our hallucination machines' ability to create the scenarios raised above. It allows me to write a novel that can insert any degree of imagination or reality - alternate or otherwise - on a whim. A whim that may even be mine. We insist we only suspend reality to suspend disbelief when we choose. But if we have always been in such suspension, then we are wrong. So when an author chooses to do this, then they have only taken the stairs down to another level of the unreal. This is why coming back upstairs can be harder than the descent. Of course, that's only if you choose to ascend. Sometimes you just want to stay...