Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Book Review: Fall (or, Dodge in Hell) by Neal Stephenson

 Not really a book review. More like, some thoughts on this book. It was long and not so straightforward as most books I read, so there was something to think about rather than just be awed (like with the Three Body books I finished last year - awesome books, huge ideas, but it was all there on the page - nothing to figure out, or reflect on, as far as I could tell).

I read this because of a review I read when it came out in 2019. There's an early section that I think got most of the attention of reviewers, where the characters go on a road trip through a post-truth America, which sounded most interesting to me. In the world of the book (or at least of this section - the story seems to span a century, and this is the only discussion of the world outside the immediate experiences of the main characters) the American hinterlands have devolved into a confused tribal culture where all belief systems are focused on the noise-filled descendant of the social-media internet we have today, and every belief is a false conspiracy theory of one sort or another. The city-classes rely on special tools, namely human editors, to keep their information accurate. That's a neat idea, and it barely has anything to do with the rest of the book!

I wasn't disappointed, though. Because while the whole back half of the book seems unrelated to this road trip, I realized after finishing the story that there was a serious connection to make. In the world of the road trip, it's pretty clear that the populace's disconnection from reality is a Bad Thing: the lives of people are brutal and confused and social progress is made impossible. It's suggested that this is because they are all exposed constantly to these noise-filled media channels where all content is false, generated by algorithms with varying hidden motives. The obvious implication is the what keeps the lives of the city people better is their connection to reality and true information - keeps them healthy, safe, and allows for progress.

The back half of the book isn't about the real world at all, though. It's about a digital afterlife where human consciousnesses* are uploaded after people die. This world begins when the first uploaded person (Dodge) finds himself exposed directly to world of chaos, that he learns to shape into meaningful things, thereby becoming the creator god of a new plane of existence. It's never said outright, but the chaos is various cloud-based (i.e. internet-based) computational activity, which means nothing at all to a human mind that is connected to it without an interface; by molding it into meaningful stuff (from Dodge's perspective), this computational activity is being replaced with new computational activity (from the outside-world perspective).

At first I thought that the book would get into an actual connection between this cloud-world of noise and the garbage-information world of the hinterland. But that connection never happens, and after a while I stopped expecting it and forgot about it. But after finishing the story I realized a different connection: the people of the digital afterlife are themselves all exposed to a false world - it's a computer game, basically - but it's ok, a Good Thing, and the ultimate meaning of the story is found there. Is it an inversion of the situation revealed in the road trip?

Sort of, I think. But also it's a comment on curation: the world Dodge creates is real in that everyone that inhabits it experiences it the same way. There are actual truths there, though they are ultimately shared psychological truths - at one point Dodge discovers that he can't change the world if other people are watching. 

This sets up a very different situation, but with obvious parallels to and deviations from the road trip world. In the real world, truth is essentially a physical thing: things exist physically, or events happen physically, and that's what makes them real, and what makes ideas about them true. People in the hinterland have beliefs that are largely false, because they are about things and events that don't exist or didn't happen. 

In the afterlife, there is no physical existence in the normal sense - physically, all the objects and places that people experience are actually processes running on vast banks of quantum computers. So strictly speaking, the things people believe in are all false, or at least not true. Not only that, but people in the afterlife have no knowledge of the 'real' world on the outside. Truth in the normal sense is impossible. Yet, because everyone agrees on this reality, we can think of beliefs in this world as having a kind of second-order truth value. Beliefs are at least meaningful and grounded, even if they are grounded in something (seems-to-be rocks and trees) that is not what it actually is (seems-to-be computers in buildings).

So then I wonder - is this a comment on the earlier part of the story? Because we can see the degenerated people of the American hinterland in the same way: their beliefs might be shared delusions or hallucinations, or vast conspiracy theories, but if they are meaningful and grounded, isn't that as good as what people have in the digital afterlife? Or, are the afterlife people in just as dire and meaningless a situation as the hinterlanders?

The book doesn't try to make this equation, I'm the one making it. The digital world is portrayed as wonderful for some, and nightmarish for many others, while the hinterland is depicted (indirectly) as more uniformly nightmarish. But again, maybe there are those in the hinterland that are living well, living their best lives despite their detachment from the larger realities. Is Dodge equivalent to a benevolent pirate king living out in the Nebraska wasteland?

At any rate, I was surprised at these connections, how they started to creep up on me.

*Re consciousness. I think that Stephenson is sufficiently vague about exactly how consciousnesses are simulated that I could suspend disbelief, or fill in the blanks myself. It sounds like the idea is that, with the connectome of a human brain, you just simulate the network on a massive parallel computer, giving each neuron its own computer processor. Maybe in some version of that, IIT consciousness might be possible (though I think probably not - but maybe)?

A bigger problem with the idea as he describes it is that a connectome could not be enough to simulate a brain, even if you had the connectome right down to every synapse, and even if (as we think is true) neurons connected with synapses are actually the right substrate of consciousness. That's because you don't know the rule for each neuron. A neuron has all these inputs, thousands of synapses on its dendrites, but what does it do when the neurons on the other side of those synapses are in whatever state? The connections don't tell you anything about that - you have to know something about how each neuron works, and what makes it harder is that there are so many kinds of neurons, so many kinds of synapses, and they might all follow different rules.

But those are details that could be filled in with enough imagination.

It was a great book, enjoyed it. 9/10. (minus 1 for being too long or too short - there's a bit more that could have been explained just about how the world worked, and the connections between the inside and outside of the afterlife, giving us a nice 1200 page book, or a part 1 and part 2 - or it could have been pared down to lessen expectations for those kinds of details. and the ending, considering how much we built up to it, was awfully abrubt, but good.)

No comments:

Post a Comment