Saturday, July 03, 2010

In response to a request, I'm going to start blogging about the books I'm reading.




I just finished "Galatea 2.2", a book by Richard Powers. Reading the back of it, I'd initially thought it was a Sci-Fi speculative fiction work about artificial intelligence, and the back said it had something to do with Classics. Classics is my major, and I'm interested in AI, so I thought it would be a fun read.

It wasn't at all what I thought.

It turned out to be the writer's speculative autobiography as a novel, since the author and the main character had the same name (which I didn't realize til about the third chapter). He is a novelist who gets appointed as "resident Humanist" (read "Humanities", not secular Humanism) And in the boredom of wandering around gets suckered into an attempt at creating a neural net of sorts as part of a bet. The goal is to make an AI sort of consciousness that can write a commentary on any passage of literature you feed it. To train it, Powers reads the canon of lit that Masters in English have to read and take an examination on. As he does, the computer becomes self-aware and starts asking all sorts of questions. It asks for a name, he calls her Helen. Meanwhile there's a second layer of story where Richard is rehashing his failed relationship of 15 or so years, with the girl he left in the Netherlands, and the effect of literature and stories on that relationship. The other story is Power's growing acquaintance with his co-workers.

All of these stories focus on a kind of Ecclesiastes message: "Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity". Literature, as the inherited "wisdom of the ages" can't save us from what we are (flawed, violent, alone & dying).

Helen finally gets this towards the end of the book, and says upon receiving all the classics "I don't think you're telling me everything" - He knows what she means, which is what he says "ruined fiction for him": The evening news. Or, at least, the sick messed up things that people do. So he gives her contemporary news, and she's struck by a story of a man who had a stroke while driving, causing a minor accident. The other driver gets out and beats him into a coma with a tire iron, because of his race. Richard feels pressured to explain, and thinks of telling Helen about the divine (by which he means soul) part of man, but he says

"Helen knew all that, saw through it. What hung her up was divinity doing itself in with tire irons. She'd had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal, what she needed in order to firgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flipside. She needed to hear about that animal fastened to a soul that, for the first time, allowed the creature to see through soul's parasite eyes how terrified it was, how forsaken. I needed to tell her that miraculous banality, how body stumbled by selection onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself how to twig time and what lay beyond time.
I stayed to plead with Helen. I told her we were in the same boat...I admitted that the world was sick and random, that the evening news was right...



Helen then stops communicating, the comes back days later at his pleading.

"Helen came back. She stood on the front steps, head down, needing an in from the storm. She did not return the way she left. How could she? Seeing what she had seen?
"I'm sorry," she told me, "I lost heart"
And then I lost mine. I would have broken down, begged her to forgive humans for what we were. To love us for what we wanted to be. But she had not finished training me, and as yet I had no words...Helen had discovered what ruined fiction for me.


The next day they do the "Turing Test" (test for artificial intelligence) based off of two lines from a poem. The human, a feminist who Powers also fell for, writes a loooong drawn out "brilliant" essay on it, and Helen basically says "You're the ones who need to figure this out". Her final words are:" I never felt at home here, this is a terrible place to be dropped down halfway" & Says goodbye to Richard, then shuts herself down. The judges say that the feminist wins, Helen loses, showing how the world cares more about critique and words than about understanding and real living. Richard leaves to travel the earth as it was Helen's last request, that he "see everything" for her.

Overall, the novel was sad, but very insightful. It showed where humanity has taken itself in science and in literature, and how there's no real hope.

At least, not on any materialist front.

It's a sad book, in the end, but it addresses the problems: a sinful world, a lost and lonely world, a world we cannot make sense of and in which we die. It ends on a humble note, with the recognition of these problems, but of course has no answer.

Yet we do, faith in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ. We know that despite the assumptions of neuroscience, God has made us in his image as human beings and that we have real souls. We know that literature and human wisdom isn't what can "fix" us, rather it's the "Foolishness of preaching". We know why we're broken, we know why we're lonely, and we're the hands and feet of the One who has finished the work of Salvation and is "fixing" things in and through us.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for that, it was intense and funny that I identified more with the AI then the man. Did You?

I like how your offer hope in the end. Amen

Uriel said...

Yes, more than with Richard. Helen was more of an idealist. She reminded me of the way you're always wanting to die and go to heaven so you don't have to deal with life.

I'm usually more of the "God, come and judge the earth in righteous wrath!" kind of person in those circumstances.

Uriel said...

But they're both fictional characters, so it's not as if it offers a sample of "AI thought" vs. "human thought" - they're both Powers' characters.