Exhalation by Ted Chiang
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Self-Consciousness and Its Discontents

The cost of awareness is the knowledge of inevitability, including the inevitability of death. This is the inherent irony of the universe. It doesn’t matter what we know, our fate has already been fixed. Our ambitions, choices, and persistence are in vain. The idea of predestination is simultaneously an intellectual triumph and a spiritual dead-end - mind realising its own impotence and unimportance.

This self-consciousness is the dominant theme throughout Chiang’s stories. In a tale that could be from the Arabian Nights, the protagonist discovers that “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry...” Our apparent purposes are just as much a product of the systematic causality of the universe as desert sandstorms and random tragedies. So “past and future are the same, and we cannot change either.” Not even that modern dream of time travel can affect our fates. Everything has been programmed from the beginning.

In the title story, which takes place in a world of robots who are effectively immortal, one daring individual seeks to uncover the source of his consciousness within his own mechanism. But in succeeding, he also discovers the inescapable law of increasing entropy that points to the inevitable doom of the robot-civilisation. The allusion to our current concerns about global warming is unmistakeable. Thus the robot’s conclusion: “Some find irony in the fact that a study of our brains revealed to us not the secrets of the past but what ultimately awaits us”

Another little gem shows the profound but unanticipated consequences of a new high-tech toy. The Predictor is a small hand-held device which accurately anticipates when the owner will activate it by lighting a green LED. “There’s no way to fool a Predictor.” It works every time. So much for the idea of free will and our ability to change the course of universal development. And the implication? “Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”

The longest tale takes place in a pop-up AI company that has developed a “Neuroblast genome” for a species of virtual creatures called “digients.” Digients are adept at language and learning, and are sold commercially to be nurtured like high-tech Tamagotchis. They can also be installed temporarily in robots and become part of the physical world. Digients are ‘taught’ by their owners but also teach each other. Consequently they develop their own language and independent culture - with unpleasant revelations for their owners.

So Chiang’s attitude toward technology, indeed toward the conscious life which produces it, may seem rather grim. But he is surprising in his quasi-editorial observations. For example one of his characters concludes that “Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.” Another makes a virtue out of impotence: “My message to you is this: Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t.” And ultimately he provides some sensible spiritual advice to “Contemplate the marvel that is existence.”

Perhaps not a complete dead-end after all.

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