Contemplating Oblivion

A new novel by Keith Wiley, author of A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading

In 2014, I published A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading, which has enjoyed a modest reception within the futurist community. Ten years later, in 2024, I have recently released a novel titled Contemplating Oblivion, for which this article serves as an introduction. The first book, Taxonomy, is a combination of futurist speculation and philosophy-of-mind analysis. It opens with a set of thought experiments, some common, others rarely encountered, that offers a laboratory in which to test one’s interpretations of mind uploading. Does a given interpretation and judgment of a particular mind uploading scenario actually make sense? Find the scenario in the taxonomy and see how the interpretation fares. That same book then presents my preferred theory of metaphysical personal identity, branching psychological identity. The rest of the book shows how branching identity operates in the context of the choicest selections from the taxonomy.

Although that is my only book on the topic, I have written several articles over the years, published in a variety of places but also available on my personal website. The bulk of my writing has focused on mind uploading metaphysics, primarily an ongoing defense of branching identity. But I have written on other topics as well, such as the Fermi Paradox, accompanied by a defense of my expectation that there is no sentient life in our galaxy and my corresponding opinion that we should focus greater effort on extragalactic SETI projects. These topics feature prominently in the recent novel.

I have also written a few articles on my worldview, or the German term weltanschauung, sometimes preferred for its ability to capture nuances considered lacking in the English term. In short, I have formulated what I consider to be a reasonably complete and consistent model of what is ultimately important in life and the universe (hint: it relates to consciousness), and which goals and projects we should be pursuing to serve that importance, all of which surfaces in the new novel—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As stated, I have recently released the culmination of ten months of work in the form of a science fiction narrative, Contemplating Oblivion, ostensibly a hard science fiction novel, wherein an author adheres to world-building of a future society whose science and technology are considered to be within the realm of contemporary understanding. Such works eschew various deus ex machinas of seemingly physics-defying natures, such as faster-than-light travel. Satisfying this laudable goal can be a bit of a personal judgment call however, especially in philosophical realms concerning the brain and the mind, since people hold varied views on these issues. Therefore, while I consider the science in the book to be hard, others may consider it borderline fantasy—or merely wrong, metaphysically speaking. That’s what will make the discussions about the book so interesting!

Contemplating Oblivion is, at heart, a novelization of one of my aforementioned articles: ‘Mind Uploading and the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything’, an obvious homage to Douglas Adams. That 2015 article presents a theorem of sorts, a directed acyclic graph of axioms and lemmas, leading to a claim that developing computerized intelligence is practically the most important goal humanity has ever beheld. Why? Well, that’s the point of the article; it’s freely available on my website. The novel leads the protagonist and the reader on a quest that illustrates several components of that article’s argument, namely pertaining to the relationship between consciousness and purpose. Emphasizing these realizations is, to a significant degree, the point of the book in one of its more climactic scenes.

The novel takes place a million years in the future. In this far-future world, humanity has closed physics, solving the last questions from the smallest scale to the largest. All the great mysteries that continue to confound us in the twenty-first century are fully resolved, as are whatever questions we might imagine will arrive in the twenty-second century and so on. With essentially unlimited control over forces and matter—within the bounds of practicality—humanity has also long ago solved the brain. In fact, this great project was completed in the story’s ancient past—in an era not too distant from our own. Everything that David Chalmers describes as the easy problem of consciousness is fully comprehended, namely the neurological functions of the brain, their information-processing effects, and ultimately their cognitive and intellectual consequences. With this grand task of neuroscience completed, the biological brain (and our bodies) have been discarded for a million years by the time the story takes place. Brains now consist of brain orbs, dense baseball-sized conglomerations of computational hardware that comprise almost countless engineered neurons, organized with unfathomable complexity in a way that mirrors but vastly extends its biological origin. In other words, all of humanity is fully mind uploaded. Bodies, or corporealizations, are treated as vehicles that a mind temporarily wears, not as integral components of the metaphysical self, if for no better reason than that people can exchange human form for any other form at will. The novel depicts, in multiple scenes, the popular recreation of becoming alien animals from throughout the galaxy and experiencing life in those forms for years at a stretch.

In fact, exploring the space of possible conscious experiences is the preeminent pastime of humanity in this world. Aside from rejiggering their brains to those of the galaxy’s varied alien animal forms, a popular activity is the barely nonrandom challenge of designing new neural arrangements of neurons and then attaching them to one’s own (computerized) brain to sense and feel any resulting qualia—conscious states—that might arise. People who specialize in this activity are called quale-divers. This activity persists because Chalmers’ hard problem remains utterly vexing in the novel’s million-year future. Why or how a particular conglomeration of neurons invokes an associated conscious sensation is as mysterious in the novel’s future setting as it is today.

Aside from quale-diving, other explorations of conscious experience are a popular activity as well, such as hiving, a recreational act in which a small group of people briefly merges their minds into a larger superorganism, a new being representing the cohesive cognition of the group. Hiving is taken to its logical conclusion elsewhere in the novel in the form of certain groups that choose to remain thusly merged indefinitely, but unlike most science fiction depictions, mine does not present this state of affairs as nefarious, violent, imposing, or otherwise undesirable. I’m bored by the standard evil technology tropes, frankly.

With such powerful control over matter, humans have become essentially immortal. In fact, many date back to prefortification days, the term for mind uploading, with the era preceding the invention of fortification referencing our own time, a million years in their past: some of the characters are practically our contemporaries. But now being fully uploaded a million years older, they enjoy many benefits. They can decorporealize at will, physically vanishing, with their minds continuing to operationalize on their brain orbs, housed within bunkers deep beneath a planetary surface, wired into that planet’s pervasive computing network infrastructure—inhabiting vast simulated worlds that rival full planets in their breadth and detail. Alternatively, they can choose to dispense with even their brain orbs during decorporealization, permitting the planetary computing network to process the neural operations of their brains—and minds—in the cloud, as it were. The novel’s employment of this method of neural processing runs counter to some contemporary views concerning the necessary underpinnings of consciousness, as there are those who believe consciousness requires a physical network and that a mere software arrangement of such a network is insufficient to spark the conscious flame. To alleviate this debate somewhat, I offer a brief defense of my view that such minds are in fact conscious in one early scene. However, I don’t bother with its contentious nature after presenting my argument, and surely readers and theorists of the opposing ilk will remain unconvinced. It should make for great discussion!

Not only can people decorporealize and recorporealize around a planet, using the computing network as a mode of near-instantanteous travel, but they can do the same thing over the futuristic equivalent of radio or laser transmissions. This permits anyone to travel around a solar system with ease, and more critically, to do so across interstellar distances, in the form of beamed data files that describe their neurological brain states—always nonbiological of course. They still can’t travel faster than light, so hopping around the galaxy requires tens of thousands of years for medium-length trips, but this cost hardly matters to the people of the novel’s world, as old as they are. Doing so is frequently performed in the form of branching, wherein the person sends a brain file, called an etching in the novel, off to some far-flung stellar society while otherwise continuing to live their life unaltered at the origin point. As per a committed adherence to branching identity, no one in this world interprets such a branching event as spinning off a mere copy of denigrated identity status while the continuer remaining behind is granted the craved label of bonafide original. This is a world in which branching identity has been universally embraced, and as such, both branches, traveler and remainer, are recognized by everyone as equivalent mental descendants of their shared mental ancestor. Correspondingly, upon return from such a cosmological voyage, two people of shared mental ancestry might then reunify into a single person who will carry the union of both sets of episodic memories forward. None of this is contentious to the people of the novel.

But, the closure of physics has given this world and its ancient, immortal, mind-uploaded inhabitants a concise view of the cosmological arc, and this causes them great vexation, for they know how the universe will end. I chose, somewhat arbitrarily, the open universe model, in which the universe continues to spread out forever, eventually cooling to absolute zero, and in the farthest future, even disintegrating at the scale of subatomics, leaving only cold nothingness.

Quadrillions of immortal, sage humans experience a near-uniform angst over this fate. They are each individually destined to die one day, as is the totality of humanity’s grandest achievements spanning a million years of galactic expansion and artistic creation—plus the output of a few adolescent millennia on Earth in its biological era. All the art, all the culture, all the discoveries and learned knowledge—and all the minds of the people, of course—is fated for inescapable annihilation. This angst is universally referred to as the End Of Universe Survival Problem, the EOUSP, which the entire population pronounces with the shared vernacular of yewsup.

The stage is now set. This is the world in which Contemplating Oblivion takes place. The protagonist, Lysandra, is a highly skilled quale-diver who chances upon a neural configuration which, when attached to her brain, invokes a quale—a conscious state—of a solution to the yewsup! But it is incomplete, merely giving her a sense that such a solution exists while leaving the clarity of its details elusive. Nevertheless, humanity celebrates her discovery with unrestrained excitement. New religions spring up in which she plays the unwilling role of a full-blown messiah. She now finds herself mission-driven to somehow refine the neural configuration and its associated quale so as to fully reveal the solution to humanity’s greatest and final vexation: a way by which individuals as well as humanity’s cultural legacy might survive the end of the universe.

But there is a cosmological theory that doing so could be disastrous. To survive the universe would require holding a small piece of information off to the side as the universe’s death begets a new universe in an author-concocted sequence of infinite universes—and this hold-out, this information describing a quadrillion brains, as well as the information describing a million years of acquired scientific knowledge and cultural output, would by necessity render the subsequent universe infinitesimally smaller than the current universe. Over eons, with each universe yielding the next in somewhat diminished form due to this hold-out, this process is theorized by some characters to create a cascade of dwindling universes that eventually fade to nothing, resulting in true oblivion, the real end of all things. Followers of this cosmological model are consequently highly motivated to prevent Lysandra from completing her work, and in this way, the story gains its antagonists and its challenges to Lysandra’s quest.

Contemplation Oblivion has its moments of action, but for the most part it is a philosophical story. The characters do experience the perils we have come to expect from science fiction, perils delivered at the behest of the unrelenting adversaries to the protagonist. But just as many scenes depict the characters discussing, debating, and consciously experiencing various aspects of the presented metaphysics and the cosmological implications of the circumstances presented above. It is my intent that the story is not merely entertaining, but further inspires curiosity and consideration in the mind of the reader—and hopefully enthusiastic debate as well.

Contemplating Oblivion is available most places books are sold, and in most of the popular formats. Pick up a copy and see what ideas it inspires in you.

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https://keithwiley.com/

Computing, Consciousness, Culture, Literature, Mind, Philosophy, Robotics, Science