Chapter 31 — Blobs in a Box
Rufus mulls what it means to do research.
Followed by Chapter 31 —— Blobs in a Box, in which Saskia and Mica spend time looking into Saskia’s next steps.
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Hello Friends,
The title of today’s chapter is slightly unfortunate, given that donuts are referenced within. But, what can you do: competing interests.
That donuts make an appearance here is a little nod to Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars, one of my favorite novels of the last few years. To quote the blurb on Amazon, Ryka’s book is a wonderful tale of a cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts. Much of her story takes place a few suburbs south-east of where Saskia lives. Of course, donuts are ubiquitous, and a little research found a couple of purveyors in Pasadena.
The shop I’m loosely basing mine on is called Hello, You’re Welcome, though I have to confess that I haven’t actually visited the store in person. I did try, but when I was out there it had already closed for the day. In an online picture, one of their donuts looked like there were freeze dried strawberries crumbled atop the icing, though I couldn’t find definitive confirmation that the red granules were in fact strawberries. Either way, I liked the idea enough that I incorporated it into my story anyway.
Thinking about all of this got me mulling what is meant by “research”. The undertaking is notoriously full of rabbit holes down which one can easily fall, and, as a writer, there is a fine line between sleuthing out intriguing details to include and getting distracted. In an alternate direction, I have other friends for whom research looks quite different.
An old roommate from grad school, who is now a professor of American history at Berkeley, described what, to me, felt like an oxymoron: days and weeks in the bowels of the Victoria and Albert museum in London studying the early United States. On the bright side, his entire family enjoyed a few months with him in the English capital.
To most mathematicians, research means a pencil and notepad in a cafe. A few of them ask computers to seek out examples or counterexamples to their conjectures, but I suspect it’d be surprising to most listeners here how similar mathematical research looks——at least from the outside——to fiction writing. Though it invariably includes doodles and sketches more akin to fine art studies; the analogue of storyboards for the film director.
Finally, research is often thought of as a solitary activity, but it can also be wonderfully collaborative. From scientific labs pushing and prodding on disparate aspects of a problem, in the hopes that more will be revealed with a comprehensive accounting of their subject of interest, to a rock band jamming, research can be a glue of purpose.
For now, let’s turn back to Mica and Saskia to see what their research on the oil spill reveals.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter thirty one, in which Mica and Saskia examine what is publicly available on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
— 31 —
Blobs in a Box
Saskia and Mica sat in Saskia’s back yard. Saskia with her laptop, and Mica on her phone. They were sitting right where everything had started for Saskia, and she smiled at the thought of how well everything had worked out. Best of all, it was a delight to have a project to work on together.
“Seems like this Zeno Williams character is the guy who maybe could have stopped it before it happened,” Mica said as she looked up from her device. “But it looks like he’s based in Dallas, not the Gulf.”
“Where’d you see that?”
Mica grinned. “It’s not the first time I’ve stalked a subject.”
The corner of Saskia’s mouth lifted. “Ok, so to prevent this oil spill, I need to get to Texas. And I need to do it a week ago.”
“At least,” Mica agreed.
Saskia recalled her mother had called Boss-man and mentioned something about Texas. What exactly, she couldn’t recall. She felt bad about not having followed up with her mom, but everything was ...“I can tell you I don’t have much more than a week in me right now. My trip back here”——she cast her hand towards the spot she’d been resting when she first slipped in time——“back where it all began, that wiped me out.” But her mother had more or less confirmed she’d been in Texas, and even as she pushed back on Mica, Saskia opened a web page to look at flights. “I could get a flight this evening.”
“I wish I could join you,” Mica lamented.
Saskia’s eyes landed on the shed at the bottom of her garden. Suddenly, she had the irrational anxiety that her double might be sitting there, inside it, watching them. A week ago, that had been her. It had felt like a stake-out without the donuts. She turned back to Mica. “You like donuts?”
Mica cocked her head, unsure what Saskia was really asking.
∞
“This is the most decadent donut I’ve ever eaten,” Mica announced as she struggled to keep frosting from covering her fingers.
Saskia smiled back. “I love the crumbs of freeze dried strawberries on mine.” She ran her tongue across her upper lip, mopping up said delicacies that her own frosting had adhered there.
They meandered from Colorado Boulevard north, headed towards the mountains. Soaking in the afternoon sun as they strolled, Saskia absently led them towards the City Hall. She’d stumbled across the courtyard inside a couple of years ago and it had the romance of a European town square, the lovely ochre building with majestic arches leading out to decomposed granite gravel that surrounded the Californian live oaks inside.
A hispanic father was taking photos of his daughter in a graduation gown with the gargoyled fountain, turquoise patinated drainpipes and live oaks behind her. So many different measures of time in one scene.
Watching the girl, Mica sat on a bench. “I guess I can do some research while you’re gone.”
“Research?”
“Sure.”
Saskia cocked her head at Mica, askance.
Mica grinned back at her. “It you’re successful, I’m sure there are other worthy missions. Besides, there’s that little question of how you’re doing it all in the first place.” She paused, recollecting something. “You remember how you described slipping in time as the way the world slows down during a life-threatening event?”
Saskia smiled and nodded. She was delighted by how carefully Mica paid attention to her analogies. Was that the journalist in her? Or did it reflect something deeper?
“I did a little digging.” There was a twinkle in Mica’s eyes. “You curious what I found?”
“Do tell.”
“That effect is one of recollection, not your actual experience.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s your memory of the event that makes it seem longer, not how you lived it.”
Saskia laughed. “How on earth could anyone know one way or the other?”
“Seems nuts, right?” Mica agreed. “But this neuroscientist——David Eagleman——he devised an experiment——”
“You remember his name?”
“It’s kind of apropos for his experiment: He pushed his test subjects backwards off a building.” Mica described how Eagleman had employed an amusement park ride to run his test, and that his human lab rats had reported feeling the sensation of time slowing down. “They estimated their falls lasted between four and six seconds.”
“So?”
“So, the fall was only three seconds.”
Saskia raised one eyebrow.
“I agree, not exactly conclusive of anything. Here’s the kicker, though: he repeated the experiment but this time had his subjects wear a watch that was flashing numbers, just slightly too fast to read. He figured if time really did dilate for them, then they ought to be able to tell him what numbers the watch was flashing——”
“And none of them could?”
“Nope. Nifty experiment, though, right?”
Saskia admitted that she appreciated the ingenuity of the experiment. It kind of made her want to try it herself.
“Really makes you think about what ‘experience’ means, right? Do we experience anything directly?” Mica paused to pick another freeze dried strawberry crumb from the corner of Saskia’s mouth. Then, shrugging, she licked it off her fingertip and grinned back at Saskia. “Did you know they say smell is, like, 90 percent of taste?”
As a seasoned machine learning specialist, Saskia had given the root question behind Mica’s observation some serious consideration. “What is feeling?” she asked rhetorically, nodding her head at the significance of her question. “That’s, maybe, the fundamental mystery at the heart of AGI. Something like: ‘What would it mean for a computer program to feel?’”
“Fascinating!”
“No kidding, right. If our perception of the world around us is actually just the collection of electrical signals——from our senses, eyes, ears, etc——shunted up to the brain, how different is it for a machine?”
“It is a bit different, though,” Mica protested. “If I touch a hot stove I get burnt.”
“So might a robot if it touched the hot stove.”
“But it’d hurt me.”
“Meaning . . . ” Saskia gave Mica time to reflect on what it actually meant. “Your brain receives the message from your fingertips that it’s hot, and sends back the message ‘move your hand’. I could argue that the pain is just a way of underlining that message.”
“No. The pain’s it’s own thing. And I’ve got no control over that.”
“What if I gave you an anesthetic?”
Mica was stumped.
“If you think of our brains as blobs in our heads, then they don’t look that different from a computer sitting in a box. Both are running some sort of software——though the hardware-software distinction starts to blur when we think about it in the context of our brains; firming up connections between neurons in your head is more physical.”
Mica’s eyes flicked right and back again as she weighed Saskia’s words.
“In any case,” Saskia continued, “neither has any first hand experience of the world around it.”
“But ...” Mica wasn’t able to form a coherent objection, so she took another bite of her donut instead.
“We could say our brain’s goal in life is to create a viable model of the world around it. That’s pretty much what an LLM does.”
“Whoa!” Mica put her hands on her head. “My brain’s exploding.”
Saskia grinned at her. “Computer science is pretty fun, huh?”
“Well, it certainly seems there’s plenty for me to look into while you’re gone.”
“Right,” Saskia agreed. She then offered Mica a lop-sided smile. “Can you spot me a ticket to Texas? I kind of gave my money away.”
