Learning to Be Me

Learning to Be Me

By Greg Egan

At nineteen, also I was studying finance, I took an undergraduate philosophy unit. The Philosophy Department, however, apparently, had nothing to say about the Ndoli Device, more commonly known as “the jewel”. (Ndoli had in fact called it “the dual”, but the accidental homophonic nickname had stuck). They talked about Plato and Descartes and Marx, they talked about St. Agustine and – when feeling particularly modern and adventurous – Sartre, but if they’d heard of Godel, Turing, Hamsun or Kim, they refused to admit it. One of sheer frustration, in an essay on Descartes I suggested that the notion of human consciousness as “software” that could be “implemented equally well on an organic brain or an optical crystal was in fact a throwback to Cartesian dualism: for “software” read soul. My tutor superimposed a neat, diagonal, luminous red line over each paragraph that dealt with this idea, and wrote in the margin (in vertical, boldface, 20-point Times, with a contemptuous 2 Hertz flash): IRRELEVANT!

I quit philosophy and enrolled in a unit of optical crystal engineering for non-specialists. I learnt a lot of solid-state quantum mechanics. I learnt a lot of fascinating mathematics. I learnt that a neural net is a device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to be understood. A sufficiently flexible neural net can be configured by feedback to mimic almost any system – but achieving this sheds no light whatsoever on the nature of the system being emulated.

Learning to be me. Photo : Elena

“Understanding,” the lecturer told us, “is an overrated concept. Nobody really understands how a fertilized egg turns into a human. What should we do? Stop having children until ontogenesis can be described by a set of differential equations?”

I had to concede that she had a point there. It was clear to me by then that nobody had the answers I craved – and I was hardly likely to come up with them myself; my intellectual skills were, at best, mediocre. It came down to a simple choice: I could waste time fretting about the mysteries of consciousness, or, like everybody else, I could stop worrying and get on with my life

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)