I AM standing under a tree, looking at a squirrel on a bough above my head. The squirrel is looking at me. Eventually it decides to leave and swarms away, its action like a trigger, its tail following the parabola of retreat.
It is a moment of mammal empathy between us, such as you would not enjoy with a crab or a slug. There is no doubt that the squirrel is aware, conscious, working out its next move. I myself have extended consciousness, can foresee my death and reflect on my birth and the birth of the Universe, which the squirrel cannot. But not even in my youth could I have nipped up a tree as deftly as that squirrel.
The question of extended consciousness, or EXTC-I take the expression from Antonio Damasio鈥檚 study The Feeling of What Happens-remains unanswered: how did it develop, where is it centred, what advantages does it deliver beyond the core consciousness of a squirrel?
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Such questions did not engage me deeply in 1969 when I wrote my story Supertoys Last All Summer Long. Life is one thing, art another. At that time, excited by the workings of early computers, I believed that much was possible. I even shared a then common belief that the human brain worked like a computer, and that dreams were probably the computer downloading at the end of the day.
It was not hard-particularly within the limits of a short story-to imagine a small android boy who had been programmed to believe himself to be a real boy, and to love his adopted human mother. In any case, the story was more about love and the inability to love than the progress of computer science. I felt more affection for David, the android, and his sidekick, Teddy, than did Monica Swinton, the boy鈥檚 adopted mother.
When Stanley Kubrick bought my story in 1982, I encountered a director who believed that the human race was faulty and would be better replaced by a phylum of robots. We got on well, because I also believed humankind to be faulty, though I was less keen on the robot idea. I remembered that C. S. Lewis had said: 鈥淟et鈥檚 pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.鈥� Note that this did not stop him imagining the human race escaping to Mars and Venus. Art is one thing, life another.
Kubrick and I never managed to write a screenplay. Nor did the others who worked with him on the idea. When Kubrick died in 1999 his friend Steven Spielberg took over the work. More than thirty years after the story was published, the Kubrick/Spielberg film derived from it has reached the big screen. In the film, androids move and talk and make love. And David survives a thousand years under ice in New York harbour. In the future, things are evidently built to last. Without wanting to give the plot away, Monica does get to love David, before doing a Little Nell on us and fading away.
Where does EXTC fit in with all this? Take a step back in time. After the fifth great extinction, the small creatures of the Palaeocene-inheritors of the vanished dinosaurian world-were able to proliferate. What slowly emerged from the havoc was the world we recognise, the world of palm trees, peregrines, parsnips and primates.
From those primates we have evolved, to struggle with insects and bacteria for the ownership of the world. With the cooling of the Earth during the Miocene, grasslands and open spaces developed. The Bovidae came into their own-fortunately for early humans, who were going to need sheep and goats for clothing as well as nourishment when the Ice Age arrived. Fortunately, too, grass grows from its roots-when grazed, it rapidly regenerates itself. These accidents of nature favoured another accident of nature, human beings, as they stood up on their hind legs and learned to hunt and live in groups.
The savannahs suited them. Their nearest relations they probably left behind in the rainforests. Of course there was competition. But most other mammals-elephants being a notable exception-live solitary lives, much like our domestic cat. In family groups, information can be traded and the old protected and tended for the knowledge they have accumulated. By then the basic reflexes prevailing over all mammalian life-fear, aggression, sexual impulse, hunger-had been tempered by intelligence and curiosity. The opposable thumb permitted the making of tools, weapons and pots-and the holding of paints with which to adorn the cave.
All this we understand, together with the rapid growth of the brain that makes us distinctively human. It does not tell us when EXTC dawned. It seems that part of the mind is rooted in the system of non-conscious neural patterns operating in the body-the roots of a tree whose leaves provide the rustle of consciousness itself.
In part, we are of very ancient design. The beginnings of modern humankind lie in the Palaeozoic. Richard Fortey in his book Life: An unauthorised biography says of the sabre-toothed tiger: 鈥淸It] arrived at its design as much because of events in the Devonian, where land tetrapods first acquired legs and fingers, as because of events since the extinction of the dinosaurs; design is a consequence of a thousand prior circumstances.鈥� As much can be said for the design of human beings, including the autonomous nervous systems which are the necessary antecedents of awareness.
In my distant schooldays, Stone Age Man (never Woman) was represented solely by his flint tools and axes. 鈥淲hat a boring life,鈥� I thought. But the 1930s was a utilitarian age-like today. Why should we wish to instil intelligence into mechanical creatures? Not so they might enjoy themselves, but so they might serve us.
The larger brain that distinguishes us as a species comes with a price tag. It uses up much energy. It means that women in childbirth must eject that large cranium from their wombs. The head itself-that treasure-house-is vulnerable, as clearly acknowledged in the days of beheadings. Yet consciousness has not evolved for utilitarian reasons, that we might forge sharper axes.
In the grim, workaday world we have devised for ourselves, I espouse the Aldiss Eudemonism Theory: that EXTC evolved and exists for our pleasure, our greatest invention after God. Astrophysicists, nuclear physicists, higher mathematicians, all work hard. Because they can. Because the quest gives them pleasure. EXTC adds to the pure biological enjoyment of being alive. It assures us we are alive, while the squirrel is alive but cannot realise the fact. Perhaps the first woman, gazing one night into the fire she had managed to domesticate, saw something magical in the flames, banishing the darkness around her. A tender imagining took root in her brain. She felt a prompting beyond the material. In that moment, she saw herself as a separate Self, and marvelled.
We have come to realise what a wonder our extended conscious minds are. Our perceptual world is filled unbidden with imagery, with memories of family, with fatuities, old tunes and lines of dialogue spoken or unspoken, with quotes, figures, expectations and jokes, with fantasies about the girl next door or the hooligan next door but one.
Indeed, our brains are better designed to fantasise than to think logically. Fantasising, daydreaming and storytelling give such pleasure. For logic, for reason-not for pleasure-we have to go to school. EXTC constantly needs its fortifications, and knowledge its disciplines.
At the age of five, in Peterborough Museum, I came across the entire skeleton of an ichthyosaur, dredged up from the muds of the River Nene, preserved in a long glass case. A seminal discovery. I followed it marvelling, vertebra by vertebra, down its entire length. Since then the Mesozoic has enlarged and enriched my consciousness. How easily, how pleasurably, I can imagine dinosaurs roving among cycads.
But consciousness and its lower strata of unconscious awareness yield not only pleasant imaginings. I mentioned the faultiness of humankind. Other bizarre kinds of life or non-life persist, inimical to our peace of mind. Take the androids of AI, Blade Runner and other science fiction movies. Such impossible beings are the inheritors of a long ancestry of chimeras plaguing our imaginations.
Goblins, gnomes, fairies, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, leprechauns, dragons, water sprites of various kinds, nameless things that go bump in the night: they haunt us. Above them sits a bewildering and unending hierarchy of gods and goddesses: Baal, dusky hags like Ishtar and Astarte, Zeus, Hera, Nemesis, Isis, Mithras, all the way to old Silenus, Lucifer and Satan, the Hitler of the Underworld.
Such preposterous gubernatorial creatures have been and are all-pervasive. They permeate our vocabulary. Nemesis lives on. Even the word 鈥済alaxy鈥� is named for the milk spurted from the breasts of a goddess. Thousands of these spectres have governed human life since human life began and someone lit a fire. Senior bogeymen still determine what we should eat or not eat, which way we should face when abasing ourselves to them, with whom we may or may not sleep, and against whom we should go to war. Faulty? I鈥檇 say. A definite genetic misfire.
Aliens from other worlds form merely a continuation of this darkling line of conjectural ahumans, given some credibility by the trappings of science. As yet we have absolutely zero proof that we are not the one and only species in the Universe with EXTC. Statistics is not proof. Alien life there may well be. As yet, however, it exists only in science fiction, and optimistic programs at NASA and SETI. Perhaps it is a subconscious fear of being alone that leads to the creation of androids, just as Monica Swinton has to have David for companionship in Supertoys Last All Summer Long.
We should more seriously be asking ourselves the following question: supposing we form collectively the solitary EXTC in the galaxy, faulty though that consciousness may be, what then are the implications of this solemn imposition upon us? None? Or many, still to be determined? A destiny too grand to be yet considered? The opening words of Hamlet are 鈥淲ho鈥檚 there?鈥� We have yet to work out the answer.
It may be that our human awareness is still a mere flicker in the night, yet to catch full fire; we are a neoteric species. Possibly in later centuries our EXTC will blaze up, will come to full flower and scorch out these subversive imaginings. Evolution is not over. Indeed, it is more than probable that with time we will understand this marvellous elusive property, EXTC. Its definition may well lead us to a new science, where the celebrated gulf between classical physics and quantum levels is bridged.
But how even to define EXTC? How to pin it down? We come back to Steven Spielberg鈥檚 film. It begins well, with a group of scientists discussing problems of artificial intelligence, but soon abandons such tricky questions for the sake of drama. The film shows us androids with manufactured brains who are indistinguishable from humans. Artificial intelligence: it sounds so simple. We just need better, faster computers, and to circumvent several million years of evolution, and we are home and dry.
Brains are far more than mere computers, even forthcoming computers with carbon nanotubes in place of today鈥檚 silicon-based semiconductors. Intelligence cannot exist without consciousness. Artificial consciousness: that sounds like a taller order, and indeed it is.
As Damasio says: 鈥淔eelings cannot be duplicated unless flesh is duplicated, unless the brain鈥檚 actions on flesh are duplicated, unless the brain鈥檚 sensing of flesh after it has been acted upon by the brain is duplicated.鈥� Until we can formulate the functions of consciousness, it is unlikely we can programme them into a robot. Can we do it? Well, probably. But if consciousness is in fact a mind/body operation of ancient vintage, then the difficulties of reproducing it in plastic and metal are considerable.
So too would be the rewards. Conscious robotic beings, who would neither breathe nor require three meals a day, could explore on our behalf the planet Mars, the depths of the Solar System and beyond.
No doubt many viewers of Spielberg鈥檚 blockbuster will become convinced such developments are just around the corner. Dream on, I say. Art is one thing, life another. We are fully entitled in a fiction to imagine what we will. Such imaginings give pleasure, and perhaps further the cause, as undoubtedly they did in the first journeys to the Moon-the outcome not only of cold war politics but also of science fiction. But there鈥檚 a clear distinction between fiction and hard fact.
So what I believed in 1969 is what I do not believe in 2001. Nor has the theme of the poor neglected boy the personal appeal it once possessed. My own frail EXTC and everyone else鈥檚 have moved on. We know more than we did about both technology and the human brain. The brain proves to be more wonderful than the planet Mars, and certainly more full of life.
