Brian Kiteley
Email me: bkiteley@du.edu
A Brief Interview with Richard Powers Concerning Galatea 2.2
Conducted 1997
Richard Powers: To the students of Brian Kiteley: here are some hasty answers to questions that really deserve a lot more time than I fear I can give them at the moment. Here’s hoping even telegraphed, elliptical answers might trigger discussion worthy of them! (The Turing Test will be whether I can give you answers that will convince you that the thing on the other end of this fancy teletype hook-up is really the author of this book!)
Brian Kiteley: How would you describe consciousness?
Powers: That’s the 64-quadrillion neuron question, isn’t it? We all know what the word means, but defining it seems more than usually difficult. The difficulty of pinning “consciousness” down to a good definition probably says something about the slipperiness of the phenomenon itself. History has certainly presented a large variety of answers, contentiously argued. And cognitive neurologists are continuing to honor that tradition of argument all the way up to the present moment. (Witness the John Searle review in the current New York Review of Books: is a thermostat “conscious”?)
A good definition probably would include, but not be limited to, a fairly strong sense of self-awareness. One favorite philosophers’ question that helps us think about consciousness is: “What would it feel like to be an X?” If the answer (to the extent that we can answer such a leap) is probably “nothing,” then X is probably not conscious. When Richard Powers (the character; hereafter referred to as Richard! What would it feel like to be this guy?) tells Lentz: “She’s conscious,” he’s saying that Helen, as far as he can make out, has reached a point where “she” (begging the question, perhaps) has perceptions of what passes in her own mind.
If you’d like to start a vigorous and endless argument, ask a bunch of people from various disciplines whether animals are conscious. The answers may surprise and even challenge your own convictions.
Kiteley: How close have computer scientists come to making a neural network like Helen in Galatea 2.2?
Powers: I recently read that if the earth were the size of an orange, the oceans of the world would be no deeper than the mist formed by a warm breath. So while, on the one hand, I have to admit that the cleverest neural net is no more than the thinnest film of vapor on the medicine ball of high-level cognition, these efforts can still seem pretty impressively deep down at surface level. Most research-oriented neural nets are built to do one very local and definable thing (like learning how to form the past tense of English verbs, for instance). The titanic scope of even such limited tasks instills everyone who witnesses them with a humbling view of just how complex high-level cognition is. (I hope Helen’s story instills a little of that in the reader, too. Lots of steps missing between “Mother calls the doctor” and “Call me Ishmael”!)
Kiteley: How did you do your research for this book? What were some of the most important books in your research? What else than books or articles helped you understand this complex process?
Powers: I did a lot of reading for this book, much of which was cut out from the final version of the book. I made a definite choice to pitch the final story to a lay audience, and not to the specialists. But some of the more influential technical sources made cameo appearances, both by allusion and proper name. As important as the texts was the year that I spent at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Research, speaking directly to connectionists, reading their papers, and witnessing their experiments.
Kiteley: Lentz says, “Consciousness is deception.” He is talking specifically about how Helen will be essentially a vastly more elaborate version of the trick Diana and Lentz pull on the narrator. Julian Jaynes thinks that deception was a crucial learned behavior in the recent emergence of modern consciousness. Can you expand on how human consciousness depends on deception?
Powers: The phenomenon of “false memory” has gotten a lot of press lately, but in one very real sense, all self-reflection on perception falsifies as it represents. The great trick of consciousness is its ability to smooth all sense data into a kind of ex post facto continuity. (A simple example is how we do not “see” our retinal blind spots, but are aware only of a continuous field of vision. A more complex example is the perception that I am the “same” person as I was at the age of 22.) Consciousness’ smoothing of the discontinuous and “representation” of all sorts of pre-verbal, incoherent data lies at the heart of what Lentz frequently refers to as the “put-up job.” Even deeply brain-damaged patients will frequently deny that they have undergone any change or that they are missing any ability to make sense of the world.
Kiteley: Your narrator says that meaning is “not a pitch but an interval. It [springs] from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit’s center and the edge of another.” This sounds similar to how metaphor operates and perhaps how language works at its most basic level. When you reread Galatea 2.2 (if you do) are you surprised at the character Helen you’ve created, at the personality that sings out between her utterances?
Powers: Every rereading of a finished book is a surprise, and not always a pleasant one! Fortunately, the more time that passes (and the more intervening words), the less threatening it is to go back and disillusion myself about what I thought was there. Galatea is a dense enough book that it can now take me a few moments to make sense of some of the metaphorically packed sentences, and I’m not always sure what I meant by all of them! But I suppose every reader has to do to any book what Helen does to “The boy stood on the burning deck....” “What comes after Implementation H?” Lentz asks at the end of the novel. Of course, it’s Implementation “I,” and every first-person story is a constant, recursive revision (hence 2.2, and not 2.0). I can no more read my own work twice than I can see the same thing in any work that I go back to in the run of time. “We spend our years as a tale told,” and the tale that we have told does not stand still any more than the years do.
I was surprised and amused that you were too polite to ask the question everyone wants to ask: “How much of this is true?” But of course that question is the one on everyone’s lips, not just the readers’, but Helen’s, Richard’s, and my own. That’s the very question of consciousness, I suppose.
Hope this helps somewhat. It’s odd to be adding an author’s take to that of my own alter ego’s!