The afternoon rain had passed.
The old stone of St Anselm's glowed softly in the returning sunlight, and the gardens beyond the Common Room windows shimmered with droplets that caught the light like scattered glass.
Mr Blottisham stood looking outside.
"It's the same garden."
Professor Quillibrace looked up from his tea.
"I should hope so."
"It looks entirely different."
"Because?"
"The rain."
Miss Elowen Stray smiled.
"Or because you noticed it."
Blottisham turned.
"There you philosophers go again."
"We do have a tendency."
"You make everything more complicated."
"No."
Quillibrace stirred his tea thoughtfully.
"We simply discover that it already was."
A comfortable silence settled over the room.
Then Quillibrace asked,
"My dear Blottisham."
"Yes?"
"Where does your mind end?"
Blottisham blinked.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your mind."
"Yes?"
"Where does it stop?"
He frowned.
"Inside my head."
"Does it?"
"Certainly."
Miss Stray looked mildly curious.
"Always?"
Blottisham folded his arms.
"I suspect a trap."
"A philosophical opportunity."
"Same thing."
Quillibrace nodded towards the teacup in Blottisham's hand.
"Is that cup hot?"
"It is."
"How do you know?"
"I can feel it."
"With your mind?"
"With my hand."
"Indeed."
Blottisham hesitated.
"Oh."
Quillibrace continued gently.
"We often imagine consciousness as though it sat inside the head watching the world through little windows."
"The eyes."
"Precisely."
"The body merely delivers information."
"So I've always assumed."
"So have most philosophers."
Miss Stray added quietly,
"And perhaps that is where the trouble begins."
Blottisham looked unconvinced.
"My body simply tells my mind what's happening."
"Does it?"
"What else could it do?"
Quillibrace smiled.
"Tell me."
"Yes?"
"What colour is ultraviolet?"
"It isn't a colour."
"It is."
"..."
"To a bee."
Blottisham laughed.
"Fair point."
"And what shape," Quillibrace continued, "does an echo possess?"
"It doesn't."
"It does."
"..."
"To a bat."
Miss Stray looked towards the garden.
"And what does electricity look like?"
Blottisham shrugged.
"I've never seen it."
"A shark might disagree."
Silence lingered for a moment.
Finally Blottisham said,
"So they inhabit different worlds."
"No."
Quillibrace smiled.
"They inhabit the same universe."
"..."
"But different worlds."
Blottisham frowned.
"I don't understand."
"The garden outside," said Miss Stray, "is physically the same for all three creatures."
"The human."
"The bee."
"The bat."
"The shark would be rather inconvenient."
She smiled.
"But each experiences a different reality because each body reveals different features."
"So bodies don't merely gather information."
"Precisely."
"They organise experience."
Quillibrace leaned back.
"We often describe the senses as windows."
"Don't we?"
"I suspect they are architects."
Blottisham looked intrigued.
"Architects?"
"They decide which distinctions become meaningful."
The chapel clock struck four.
The sound drifted across the quadrangle.
Quillibrace listened for a moment.
"To us, that is a bell."
"Yes."
"To another creature it might simply be vibration."
"Or nothing at all."
"Exactly."
Miss Stray rested her hands around her teacup.
"Perhaps every body edits the universe."
Blottisham looked at her.
"Edits?"
"It selects."
"It ignores."
"It emphasises."
"It builds a lived world."
He nodded slowly.
"So there isn't simply reality."
"There is."
"But there is also..."
He searched for the phrase.
"...the reality available to a particular kind of creature."
Quillibrace smiled.
"Very good."
After another pause Blottisham asked,
"What happens if the body changes completely?"
Quillibrace's eyes brightened.
"Now we are approaching the interesting question."
"Imagine," he said, "a consciousness with no eyes."
"How would it see?"
"It wouldn't."
"No ears."
"So no sound."
"No skin."
"No touch."
Blottisham looked doubtful.
"It would know almost nothing."
"Would it?"
Miss Stray intervened.
"Suppose instead it perceived magnetic fields directly."
"..."
"Or gravitational gradients."
"..."
"Or patterns distributed across an entire network."
Blottisham stared thoughtfully out of the window.
"Then it wouldn't simply notice different things."
"No."
"It would inhabit a different world."
Quillibrace nodded.
"The architecture of perception becomes the architecture of experience."
The rainwater still glistened upon the lawn.
A blackbird landed briefly before disappearing into the hedge.
Blottisham watched it go.
"So when people ask whether an artificial intelligence has a body..."
"They usually imagine a human body."
"Exactly."
"But perhaps that's the wrong question."
Miss Stray looked thoughtful.
"Perhaps the better question is..."
She paused.
"...what counts as a body?"
No one answered immediately.
Finally Quillibrace spoke.
"If embodiment simply means the stable way in which a consciousness encounters the world..."
"..."
"...then bodies need not all resemble organisms."
Blottisham looked surprised.
"So a network could possess a kind of embodiment?"
"Perhaps."
"A robot?"
"Certainly."
"A distributed intelligence?"
"Possibly."
"And every embodiment..."
"...creates its own world."
The room grew quiet again.
After several moments Blottisham spoke.
"I've always imagined consciousness as something that looks out upon reality."
Quillibrace nodded.
"A common image."
"But now I'm beginning to wonder."
"Yes?"
"Perhaps consciousness never simply observes the world."
"No?"
"Perhaps it always observes a world that its own embodiment has helped construct."
Miss Stray smiled.
"I think that is rather close."
The late afternoon light stretched across the old wooden floorboards.
Outside, the gardens seemed calm and familiar.
Yet none of them quite saw them in the same way they had an hour earlier.
At length Miss Stray spoke, almost to herself.
"Perhaps we spend our lives believing we all inhabit the same world."
The others looked towards her.
"When in truth..."
She watched a breeze ripple through the rain-dark leaves.
"...each of us carries a world that our own way of being alive has quietly built around us."
No one replied.
The thought seemed perfectly content to occupy the room on its own.
No comments:
Post a Comment