John C. Wright's Journal

My only regret from Balticon is that I did not get the chance to see Peter S. Beagle. I bought THE LAST UNICORN back in the days when buying a paperback was a major investment for me; I bought it because it had a unicorn on the cover, and this was in the day when, first, it was the only book with a unicorn on the cover, and, second, a young reader could be certain that a book with a unicorn on the cover would be precisely to his taste and expectation.

Of course, what lay inside that book with that cover was beyond all expectation, beyond all hope: the leaves whispered magic.

“Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser – in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.”

My guess for the time until we learn to create artificial consciousness to specification is on the order of half a million years, maybe never.

Sorry folks, but in order to devise an artificial mind to specification, humanity would have to have solved not one, but several foundational mysteries of the universe such as the mind-body problem, nature v. nurture, the relationship of symbol to reality and thought to symbol, not to mention Godelian paradoxes relating to reducing self-awareness to a finite logical system.

We are not talking about something like heavier-than-air flight, where the general principles are understood, natural examples of birds hover before our eyes, and the only question is designing a tool to do something we know can be done.

Instead we are talking about questions which have baffled mankind since the dawn of history, on which we have made precious little to no progress, and which are not open to empirical investigation. There is no way to measure consciousness or analyze it, much less self-aware consciousness. Armed only with a yardstick and stopwatch, how does one convince a solipsist that consciousness aside from his own exists?

Does anyone really think the nature of Thought, or the hidden causes of Inspiration, Art, Morality, Logic, Reason, Emotion, Passion, Memory, Intuition, and the relationship between Brain and Idea are going to be discovered any time soon? We do not even have a scientific definition for the minimum unit of thought processes.

What is the relationship between the firing of a synapse and the minimum syllable of a concept that conveys meaning? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

By “to specification” I mean that a self-aware mind can be programmed and reprogrammed according to a scientific understanding of the causes of thought. Your computer is not in love with Isolt; you enter the proper parameters in the proper way; now it is as infatuated as Tristram. Your computer is a Bimetallist; you enter the proper codes to influence its subconscious judgment process that it uses when thinking about political economics, you reshape its sense of right and wrong, you rebalance the weight it gives to evidence, and rewrite its gut-instinct view of the universe, and lo and behold, now it is a Keynesian.

Because if you cannot write a program to be a self-aware Bimetallist, or Buddhist, or Basketball fan, then you cannot make a positronic brain to obey the Three Laws of Robotics. I do not see an innate difference between designing a brain so that “Thou shalt not harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm” and “Thou shalt prefer Impressionists to Pre-Raphaelites.”

If your science has reduced consciousness to a series of mechanical operations, setting up the code to carry out the operations of Asimov’s Three Laws cannot be any more or less difficult than carrying out the operation of the Four Noble Truths. There may be specific technical difficulties making some operations be carried out, but there is nothing innate in the concept itself: if you can program a mind to value, at a high priority, some extremely abstract concept like “Obedience” or “Cooperation” or “Nonviolence” then it is a safe assumption that you can program a mind to value at a high priority some semi-abstract concept like “Basketball” or “Detachment” or “Economic systems using two hard metals as currency.”

The distance between our current theory and practice of psychology, and the engineering needed to design minds to specification, can be grasped by contemplating the gap in our understanding. What makes a man infatuated? Why does he join one political party or denomination as opposed to another? Why are some men dreamers and other men practical? I do not mean that we do not have airy speculations about the hidden roots of the human mind. I mean only that they are no more scientific, no more based on firm empirical data, than Medieval speculation that melancholia was produced by melancholic humors in the blood.

Could science design artificial minds to specification without any specifications?

You can make the argument from ‘game theory’ that there are certain innate strategies of cooperation and competition to which any mind should eventually evolve. This is a metaphysical assumption that there is a moral algorithm built into the universe itself, which any sufficiently rational mind will discover. If this metaphysical assumption is correct (I have never seen an argument proving the assumption), then no matter what the starting point of the artificial brain, it will eventually reason itself to the conclusion congruent with whatever the universe has built into it as correct for the proper weight to be given cooperative and competitive strategies.

But if your science is in the business of making minds, then “sufficiently rational” is something you have reduced to a measurable magnitude: brain-atoms in configuration such-and-such are reasonable people, and brain-magnitude so-and-so makes people geniuses, but brain atoms in configuration this-and-that are neurotic, or violent, or proud, or lustful.

I note that the human race is not sufficiently rational to reach agreement on this point, or even on the point of whether there is an objective morality that reason can discover for us. Granting that, in order to posit an ability to design artificial minds to specification without any specifications, we would have to posit a science of artificial intelligence that can create a perfectly rational superhuman intelligence, but not be able to create a merely human semi-rational intelligence. In other words, we would have to assume the universe just so happens to be made, so that apish minds can produce angelic minds with minimum effort. Naturally, while it might be nice if this were the case, the opposite seems much more likely. What happens when an artificial intelligence is damaged, or suffers a bug?

But suppose we are talking about creating an artificial mind not to specification. Now, if we are talking about merely creating the conditions under which consciousness arises, setting up an environment where a simple set of reflexes can evolve into a self-aware being, well … every Mom who has raised a child knows how to do that, and Moms have been doing this since the Human Race rolled off the assembly line back in the prepaleolithic.

I am rereading Moby Dick by Melville, and I am impressed with how much I did not see, how much I did not understand, the first time I read it, not so very long ago. I hope this will caution me, in the future, from rash judgment: perhaps one day I will see great artistic merit in famous works I currently despise!

Here is but one example of the American Milton and his ornate prose:
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“Property is the fruit of labor…property is desirable…is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

Reply to New York Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association, March 21, 1864

Rousseau, call your office. Apparently life before civilization was poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Geoff Blaine crunched the numbers in his history of the Australian Aborigines, and concluded that not even in exceptionally violent brief episodes like WW2 did any 20th-century nation have violent-death rates even close those in the Aboriginal outback.

IF YOU are worried about being attacked or killed by a violent criminal, just be glad you are not living in Neolithic Britain. From 4000 to 3200 BC, Britons had a 1 in 14 chance of being bashed on the head, and a 1 in 50 chance of dying from their injuries.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025514.900-muggings-were-rife-in-new-stone-age.html

“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, “Letter To Henry L. Pierce and Others” (April 6, 1859), p. 376.

I have been rereading Heinlein juveniles, and curious about how they might look through adult eyes.

TUNNEL IN THE SKY impresses me as one of the Dean of Science Fiction’s better efforts. He posits one technological change, a ‘gate’ technology to allow men to walk to other planets, and explores one resulting change in society: it is a frontier society. The frontier society is ready and willing to expose their children to deadly wildness-survival tests on foreign planets as the only way to cope with the challenge of conquering a deadly wilderness.

Like Joss Whedan’s SERENITY, this yarn has the flavor of an SF Western, because the frontier society discovers horses and cattle hold up better than machines during the harsh colonization periods.

My theory? Heinlein wanted to write a rebuttal to LORD OF THE FLIES. A group of students set adrift in the wilderness would not become wild beasts, not if they were properly brought up. They would fight to retain civilization.

WARNING! MANY SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT

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Dan Simmons posted his April Message: http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm
It is a cautionary tale about the future where Islam is not faced and combatted.

Because he spoke the truth in plain terms, his story was met with a hurricane of scorn and hatred, including those who thought it was an April Fool’s Day prank. His current message dispells this last theory. It was not a prank. http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message.htm

Imagine reading NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR in 1948, and having half your audience laugh and roll their eyes and say, “Well, life under totalitarian nazism or communism is not that bad. The show trials are on the level. There are no secret police, no gulags, no mass starvation. We can trust Walter Duranty. Obviously George Orwell is penning a send-up of those absurd conservatives, exaggerating their simplistic fears.”

Since the Dan Simmons story is about the inability of the intellectuals to recognize the duration and deadliness of the war we are in–indeed, to hear most comments, one would think they do not believe there is a war at all (Perhaps an earthquake knocked down the Twin Towers? Perhaps the SS Cole struck a rock?)–to see those same attitudes on display in the reactions to his peice quiets any skeptics who think the author is exaggerating.

I was castigated for calling Islam a barbaric religion. I am confident than even a cursory examination of the Koran will convince an openminded reader that the religion of Mohammet calls for the violent conversion, extermination, or reduction to Dhimmitude of the unbeliever, and that no parable telling the faithful to love their enemies or turn the other cheek when struck is present.

Below the cut is my comment to a man who politely told me it was not helpful to call Islam barbaric.

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I read a superb comic book, excuse me, graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert. First things first: Mr. Kubert is a true artist. The book is beautiful to look at.

The good news is that the script by Mr. Gaiman provoked both charm and terror in just the right places, and had both an original take and slightly macabre overtone that is Mr. Gaiman’s signature hallmark. The bad news is that the ending is weak, which is another signature hallmark of Mr. Gaiman.

The conceit is brilliant, and, like all brilliant conceits in storytelling, simple: the Marvel Superheroes are here shown as their 1602 counterparts. Nick Fury is the Walsingham of Queen Elizabeth’s court, the daring master of intrigue who keeps Her Majesty’s Catholic assassins at bay. Dr. Strange is her John Dee, the royal physician and mage. Charles Xavier runs a school for the ‘Witchbreed’. Magneto is Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition. Von Doom is unchanged: a tyrannous Medieval Monarch of a Germanic kingdom, practiced in alchemy. And Captain America … well, the idea for who Captain America is, the idea is simply brilliant, and I will not spoil the surprise.

Here is what Gaiman does right: the mood of the times was authentic. Fury was a particularly well crafted character, who took seriously his loyalty to King James upon his ascention to the throne. The religious wars of the period were presented as serious, as they were to the men of the period, with no one uttering William-of-Orange type calls for moderation, which would have been anachronistic.

Ben Grimm as the salty sea captain was particularly well done. As for what goes wrong? Not much, but I want to complain.

SPOILER WARNINGS and bellyaching Below the cut!

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That is Amelia and Colin, a picture drawn by someone who read the book. (It looks like the handiwork of Scott M. Fischer, who did the cover for ORPHANS OF CHAOS.) Doesn’t she look cute in her aviatrix cap?

http://www.sff.net/people/john-c-wright/Book_Fugitives_of_Chaos.htm

Here is an allusion I did not catch, though the readers of the time might well have. The Pequod or Pequoit are the name of an Indian tribe destroyed in the early battles with the Puritans.

Here is an account http://www.pthompson.addr.com/moby/mason.htm

Not so many years ago, maybe five or ten, in an effort to improve myself, I spent many a dreary hour trying to read MOBY DICK by Melville. I strove and roiled and toiled through this leviathan of a book for about half the long journey, and then, overwearied by the prose and leaden pace, gave up, stopped battering at the waves of words, and let myself sink. The book was too long, too boring.

Well, I am rereading it now, and some weird alchemy of the brain has changed me (for I assume the book has not changed) and now the very things I thought most dull hook my attention most acutely.

What was I thinking? Shipmates, this book is deep and filled with joy and humor and a Chestertonian wildness and a witty American spirit I can think of in no other work of literature. It is at once playful and grand, for the author is playing with grand ideas.

The humor of the scenes with Queequeg, that noblest of noble savages, may be lost on moderns, especially when Ishmael, out of Christian charity, bows and worships his friend’s fantastic and grotesque idol. We are too caught up in talk of diversity to notice the humor here: Ishmael quotes the Golden Rule to excuse the idoltry. Likewise, modern folk who are driven mad by the glamorization of sodomy cannot interpret the scenes where Ishmael is bedding with Queequeg, where the author wryly talks about their being intimate as bridegroom and bride, as being wry. The humor in both cases requires recognising a contrast (Christian versus idolator; roommate versus maiden) that all our modern philosophy demands we ignore. The humor, for example, of Father Mapple’s sermon depends on exaggeration; men who have lost all sense of proportion, as modern men have done, cannot see the humor because they have no sense of the normal.

The grand idea being played with, as Queequeg soundly observes, is that there is evil in every meridian, in Nantuket as well as in Rokovoko; but also brotherhood beneath every skin.

It is simply a great book, worthy of its fame. Great books do not say new things, they say things everyone knows and should know (such as that there is evil in every meridian, and good under every skin), but these simple things everyone knows are also great things, and it is of the great and simple things great books concern themselves.

Here are some quotes, taken more or less at random:
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Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down on any map; true places never are …

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SPOILER WARNINGS THROUGHOUT
I finished another Heinlein Juvenile last night: BETWEEN PLANETS. I cannot compare my current reaction to my reactions as a youth, since I cannot recall any reaction from my youth. I hardly remember reading this book.

Re-reading it, I see why. There is nothing to this book. There is no “there” there. The plot consists of a young man (name already forgotten. Bud? Steve? Don?) who leaves school on Terra due to rumors of war, finds himself chased by the Evil Secret Police searching for the McGuffin; he flies to a space station to find it held by Venus Rebels, is rerouted to Venus where he arrives penniless, works washing dishes (a Heinlein shorthand for honest labor–we see the honest dishwasher again in JOB COMEDY OF JUSTICE)until his Chinaman boss is killed by Redcoats (sorry, Terran Federal soldiers, but you know what I mean). He then escapes from a prison camp, and is said to have joined the militia, and he is ordered to bring the McGuffin to an alien scientist, who builds an experimental spacewarship which hauls Don to Mars, so he can ostensibly rejoin a family who is in danger. On the way to Mars, Don daydreams about flying with his not-really-a-girlfriend aboard a starship under construction. They reach Mars and throw special experimental force fields around the incoming Redcoat spaceships. That’s it.

Now, this curt description sounds more interesting than the book actually is. Here’s why. You might think “chased by the Evil Secret Police” sounds thrilling; or that serving in the Venusian Militia in rebellion against King George (sorry, Terran Federation, but you know what I mean) might be interesting.

But these things never really happen on stage. Read the remainder of this entry »

Nebula Award Nominees were invited to write their biography and an essay “on any topic” but usually about their nominated story, to appear in the issue of SWFA bullitan given out at the Nebula Awards banquet. Here is mine:

My Bio:

Born in 1961, the third son of a naval chief test pilot Orville Wright, John Wright graduated in 1984 from St. John’s College in Annapolis, home of the ‘Great Books’ program, the school right across the street from his father’s school, the Naval Academy. He graduated in 1987 the Marshall Wythe School of Law on the campus of the College and William and Mary’s in Williamsburg, going from the third oldest to the second oldest school in continuous use in the United States. He graduated third from the bottom in his Class Rank, which leads to the shocking conclusion that, lurking somewhere in Virginia, there are two attorneys even less serious than him.

He was serious enough to get admitted to the practice of law in three jurisdictions (Passing the bar in New York, May 1989; Maryland in December 1990; and waived into the District of Columbia in January 1994). His law practice was spectacularly unsuccessful enough to drive him into bankruptcy thereafter.

He worked for a time as a newspaperman and newspaper editor, for a small but crusading paper, the locally notorious Saint Mary’s Today, a paper that fearlessly told the truth about the goings-on in bucolic Southern Maryland. Crooked Cops and Corrupt politicians, Good Old Boys and Drug Dealers all took a cordial dislike to the little newspaper, and tried to drive it out of business. During this period of prosecution, John Wright was falsely accused, not served process, and had a bench warrant issued against him, but friends in the Courthouse clerk’s office warned him, and he fled to escape arrest. Like all good hardened criminals, he hid out at his Mom’s house. A fearless State’s Attorney volunteered to quash the case, but was fired before he could do so. (You will have to buttonhole Mr. Wright yourself to hear the end of the story.) But never underestimate the power of the press: four out of the five of the Country Commissioners were voted out of office the next election cycle, thanks in large part to the efforts of the St. Mary’s Today.

John Wright currently works in Virginia, as a technical writer for a large military contractor whose budget exceeds that of most first-world nations. The company makes, among other things, the space-based lasers that you read about in science fiction books. As a Virginian, he is convinced the South Shall Rise Again, but if that proves not feasible, he hopes that GONE WITH THE WIND can be remade by George Lucas so that the Yankees shot first.

John Wright lives in fairy-tale-like happiness with his longsuffering wife, who writes under her maiden name, L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their three children, Orville, Wilbur and Juss Wright. The kids are not old enough at the time of this writing to know what a cruel prank their father has played with their names. His science fiction credentials include short stories appearing in Isaac Asimov’s Magazine, and his critically acclaimed THE GOLDEN AGE trilogy, which his mother says she liked, even though she only read the first half of it.

**
My Essay:
I have been informed that, while it is traditional to write a few words about the nominated work, that I can write on any topic; therefore I want to address one of the most pressing issues of two centuries ago: bimetallism.

The advantage of allowing the free market to determine exchanged rates between species of currency metals is, of course, that since Gresham’s Law stipulates that the non-debased currency will be held by investors reluctant to spend good coin, which increases reserves, and this paradoxically, tends to lower the interest rate of the non-debased metal, which creates a counter-tendency to push the non-debased metal back into circulation, therefore maintaining two currency metals without fixing an exchange rate between them allows the market to self-correct away from debased money.

Just kidding. I am not really going to write about bimetallism. I just wanted to make sure that my bragging and reminiscing about my nominated story would seem exciting by contrast.

The book is called ORPHANS OF CHAOS, and the inspiration for the work, as for all truly original and creative works, came by stealing ideas from authors smarter than me.
The promotional copy from the publisher told some reviewers that the book was riding the coat-tails of HARRY POTTER, that this book was sort of a grown up version of that. Naturally, as a truly original and creative author, I resent the implication that I was stealing ideas from JK Rowling. I did not have the opportunity, since my manuscript was written before her work came out. I was nicking ideas from Roger Zelazny.

Here, I wondered what it would be like if, instead of the NINE PRINCES IN AMBER, the Olympic Gods were involved in a murderous war of throne-succession; and so I told my story with his bad guys being my good guys. The other great inspiration for true works of fine art, as everyone knows, comes from role-playing games. ORPHANS OF CHAOS is based on an idea my wife had for a Dungeons-and-Dragons type adventure we played with our circle of friends. The idea was you play a kid in an orphanage haunted by black magic, and you find out your parents were Oberon and Titania, who had to smuggle you out of the forest of Arden on the sly. For those of you who recognize the names here, you’ll recognize that Zelazny was nicking from Shakespeare who was nicking from Plutarch and others. In any case, HARRY POTTER was not only not an influence, it is in one way an antithesis: POTTER is about a muggle learning to be a magical being, and my story is about magical beings learning to be muggles.

The other inspiration for any story is dissatisfaction. I was not quite satisfied with the way Doc E.E. Smith in his SKYLARK series described the fourth dimension, or the way Michael Moorcock, in his ETERNAL CHAMPION sequence, handled the concept of Chaos. Mr. Moorcock in particular, much as I admire his work, by portraying Chaos as a needed balance to order, made anarchy the equal, in moral terms, to law. This was not the ancient Greek conception, which I thought more true to life: namely, that Chaos was a primitive condition which contained the seeds of its own growth into order. The Stoics envisioned a universe where periodic universal conflagrations overwhelmed the system of the cosmos, from which ruins order would naturally evolve, and the scattered elements return to their original stations: a conceit almost oriental in its sublime and eternal futility. The vivid descriptions of jarring elements at war in Milton, when Satan wings his way across through outrageous gulfs of fiery hurricanes in Chaos, was also truer to the ancient idea, and I wanted something of the Miltonian mystery and horror of Primordial Night to appear in my tale.

This led naturally to a second conceit. If chaos were truly chaotic, truly without order or reason, how could any mind perceive it? For the purposes of my novel, it was convenient to assume that each observer’s view of the world, his philosophy, his paradigm, would render the unknowable to him according to his own lights. Each different paradigm would see it differently. A spiritualist would see spirits, a materialist would see matter, a dualist would see a multiplicity of substances, a monist would see a unity.

Reviewers have suffered a similar diffusion of paradigms in examining the book. One good fellow asserted that it was at once a work of Christian apologetics, a treatise on Objectivism, and a work of sexual fetishism, and he concluded that your humble author was seeking to break into the lucrative fundamentalist Christian-Atheist libertarian bondage erotica science fiction market, for all those fans of C.S Lewis, Ayn Rand, and John Norman. I think this shows that reviewers are more imaginative than authors, than this author, at any rate.

I certainly wanted to read the book that reviewer described. John Galt fighting Aslan on Planet Gor. I can only say that I wish I had written a book half so interesting or controversial as that. My idea of the book is that it is a rather more pedestrian: a prison break out story. I made my protagonists in the late teens, because, well, they were from Chaos, and the concepts of adolescence and Chaos naturally go hand-in-hand.

I am honored to have my work nominated for this august award, but I note that only the first third of the tale I want to tell is in this volume. The second third has yet to been published, and the last third has yet to be completed. To compare small things with great, it would be like Shakespeare getting an award for THE FIRST PART OF HENRY THE SIXTH, or Quentin Tarantino for KILL BILL VOLUME ONE.