A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was a joyous discovery for me. I have long been aware of the story, but didn't have any expectations about it beyond what's obvious from the title. When I started reading it, I discovered that Twain used a simple scenario to explore problems of government and to illustrate freedom's benefits over coercion. Twain's penchant for stories celebrating individual endeavor drives this story.

The Connecticut Yankee is Hank Morgan, a blacksmith and horse doctor, who gets knocked out in a fight and awakens in King Arthur's England. Morgan quickly realizes that with his "modern" knowledge, he can do things the people around him won't understand, and he can use this to gain power that he can use to accelerate progress and bring about an early renaissance. Morgan's concerns are education, sanitation, and preparing the people for democracy. It doesn't take him long to figure out that they aren't ready, but he maintains his confidence that it's only a matter of time and education. He is convinced that once they come to see that the nobles are people, too that they'll be willing and able to govern themselves. In the end, he decides that it isn't the people who are the obstacle, but the hereditary aristocracy who can't learn that they aren't different. I suspect Twain was insinuating that the government of his day was composed of people who thought they were naturally suited to manage other people's lives.

Morgan starts out by gaining King Arthur's trust by recognizing the date of his scheduled execution at the court of King Arthur as the day of a lunar eclipse, and pretending to be a mighty wizard (in competition with Merlin) who can control the Sun. Once he has access to Arthur, he uses his understanding of modern science and manufacturing techniques to develop tools and processes that give him real powers to do things none around him know how to do. He then sets about reforming the country by vanquishing individual knights and setting them to tasks like promoting the use of soap that will completely remake society.

Along the way Morgan has to battle superstition, lack of critical thinking, learned helplessness, and many other obstacles. He builds a corps of youngsters who attend his secret schools and man his secret factories to turn out a long list of products that will improve people's lives.

The story is by modern standards closer to fantasy than science fiction, but Twain clearly intended to make the technology development plausible. There are times when his hero takes shortcuts that modern understanding makes obvious, but were probably less clear in Twain's time. For instance, Morgan's first miracle after calling the eclipse is to blow up Merlin's tower, for which he needs dynamite and wire. Twain assumes that making some wire could be done in a couple of weeks starting from scratch, but it without the infrastructure of a manufacturing economy even something so simple would be a lot more work.

I found this a remarkably enjoyable read, and was surprised that Twain covered so much territory. If you can get past the dated prose and Twain's conceit that a single person could manage such a vast enterprise with help only from people who have no concept of the idea of individual initiative, you'll probably enjoy it, too.

Ready Player One: Ernest Cline

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Ernest Cline's Ready Player One takes place mostly inside a virtual reality/MMORPG, though as usual with the recent spate of books in this genre, the action bleeds back and forth with physical reality. The setting is pretty familiar: it's 2044, and the economy has bifurcated into haves and have-nots, and most people seem to spend the bulk of their time in the OASIS. James Halliday, the billionaire founder of the company that runs the OASIS has died, and has set up a contest inside the system that will determine who gets his company shares, his wealth, and control of the OASIS itself. It turns out Halliday was hugely into eighties trivia, and most of the story involves the main character, Parzival, and his on-line friends finding and devouring movie, music, video game, and science fiction trivia from that decade. If you're not averse to geeking out on this stuff, it's a fun romp.

Parzival is the first to find the Copper key, the first step on the quest that Halliday built. Others soon figure out how to backtrack on Parzival's location which gives them the clues they need to follow on his trail. This starts a race to complete the quest and beat Innovative Online Industries, a company that wants to win the contest in order to exploit OASIS's business possibilities. The action is fast-paced, the settings are widely varied, and I enjoyed the references to familiar games, movies, and bands. The character development is fairly shallow, with Parzival maintaining a close friendship with one fellow gamer and a crush on a female-named character that lasts throughout the story. He's convinced he knows that it's someone he could love in real life, and never takes seriously the idea that people can have very different personalities and appearance than their avatars.

Ready Player One is a finalist for this year's Prometheus Award, but I don't think it's a very strong contender. The major element of libertarianism is that the central struggle is over whether the game's virtual world will be under the control of the main character and his friends or the bad guys. If you think the OASIS will be all the reality that matters to most of its denizens, you might want to cast that as a struggle over governance. But the choice isn't between any kind of freedom and some kind of authoritarianism, it's between a faction that has one particular corporatist view of how things should be run, and another that has no explicit goals other than keeping the VR out of their control. No mechanism is suggested for preventing the games' owner from doing whatever he wants. Maybe that's a libertarian outcome, in that it's private property, but that's not what the story's struggle is about.

The science fiction element in this story, like a lot of this genre, is thin. The particular capabilities of the VR software are beyond what we can do today, but not very far. The economy and society depicted outside the OASIS aren't a straight-line extrapolation from today, but they bear a strong resemblance to what some mild pessimists seem to expect. It fits the criterion mostly by being the kind of story that members of the LFS would be likely to read and appreciate.

If you like that kind of thing, it's fairly well done, and worth the read.

Snuff, Terry Pratchett

0.3

Chris Hibbert

I expected the usual fluffy, tongue-in-cheek material from Terry Pratchett's Snuff, but what I got instead was a serious story with profound insights about the nature of humanity, and the dangers of stereotyping. Of course, it has the usual fluff and tongue-in-cheek as well. Snuff is likely to be a finalist for the Prometheus award this year, because of its strong message of self-reliance and Sam Vimes' matter-of-fact acceptance of every person for their strengths regardless of others' prejudices. Vimes treats everyone as an individual and is incensed when he realizes that Goblins are being enslaved and that the laws don't protect them. (Maybe as a life-long cop he should have noticed earlier, but never mind that.)

The story follows Commander Sam Vines, Police Chief of Ankh-Morpork, as he attempts to take a vacation with his wife at her ancestral country home. He enjoys himself immensely, but that's because he enjoys his work. His vacation, counter to his best intentions, turns into a working vacation when he comes across evidence that a young goblin girl has been murdered in an attempt to frame Vimes himself. When he detects indications that the locals are conspiring to hide something, he goes into full detective mode.

In this case, he gets involved in unravelling a case of willful blindness, and a gap in the law's coverage. Goblins, it turns out have never been respected by the law, so it's not a crime to mistreat them them. But Vimes learns that they are thinking creatures with feelings, and their own culture. When he then learns that they are being killed, mistreated, and enslaved, he does something about it.

It turns into a rollicking adventure, with Vimes, his taciturn but well-armed manservant, and the various oddities that constitute Vimes' police department all playing parts. As Vimes has done in previous Discworld installments, he hires anyone who seems like they could be a competent cop, and turns them into a respectable member of the constabulary, regardless of their apparent handicaps social, ethnic, or species. (He has hired vampires, gargoyles, golems, and zombies. All turned into find police, with their racial predilictions exhibited as strengths.)

There's a good sub-plot woven throgh, in which Vimes attempts to teach his son, Sam, Jr., some of the wisdom he considers essential. Young Sam is oblivious and hilarious, and learns whatever he wants to learn, while uncovering embarrassing nuggets for the local ne'er-do-wells. This book, like the other Novels in Pratchett's Discworld that have been nominated for the Prometheus, hide a strong pro-freedom and pro-individualism message behind a light-hearted and fun surface story.

The Restoration Game: Ken MacLeod

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game is yet another entry in this year's bounty of books dominated by MMORPGs and set in a near-future real world. I've read at least three and I think I have another three in progress or at the top of my stack. MacLeod's stands out for having some actual science fiction, which (though it has significant implications for the characters' interpretation of reality) doesn't actually effect the story much. Any other Macguffin would have served as well; it is only revealed at the end of the story, and other than searching for it, its exact nature didn't affect the characters' motivations.

The MMORPG in question is being developed by Lucy Stone during the course of events (which is also not unusual in this year's crop of books.) In this case, Lucy is working for a game design company building a more prosaic MMORPG, and they are contracted to build a special purpose variant that will be used to promulgate certain destabilizing ideas among the population of Krassnia, an ex-soviet bloc region that is ripe for a revolution. Lucy's mother was a spy, so Lucy is used to working undercover and making her way unnoticed in the real world. She also has a few friends who seem to be connected to shady and unscrupulous characters.

The action is exciting and the characters' need to travel around Europe and visit the ex-Soviet bloc give MacLeod plenty of opportunities to compare places and the kinds of activities going on there. Krassnia is a dingy place, but the young people there are vibrant and exploring new business ideas and ignoring their elders who have habits developed and honed behind the Iron Curtain. Lucy herself had some scary run-ins with high officials while she was growing up there. That and her mother's book on the history and folk tales of the country give her a leg up when she has to sneak in and look for the MacGuffin.

Restoration Game is, of course, nominated for the Prometheus Award. It's very well written, and has at least a modicum of science fiction (which gives it an edge over Stephenson's Reamde). The libertarian elements are subtle—There's a popular revolution going on in the background, and government agents are trying to stop Lucy's progress. Lucy isn't explicitly libertarian, but libertarians will like her; she's a strong, responsible individual, trying to make her own way. There isn't a prominent struggle with important libertarian themes, though those seem to be generally lacking in this year's nominees. It's definitely worth a read if you haven't overdone the MMORPG-influenced genre yet.

Vernor Vinge: The Children of the Sky

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Vernor Vinge's The Children of the Sky is a sequel to his wonderful A Fire Upon the Deep. In this novel, we visit the home world of the Tines, a dog-like species who only achieve sentience when melded into packs of 3 to about 6. The main human characters are the children of a group of scientists who found a way to engender a widespread Slow Zone, where higher technology and FTL isn't possible, in order to slow the advance of the Blight, a malignant entity bent on a civilization-wide attack. The humans have been revived from cold sleep by various tine factions, and are trying to understand the galactic context that left them abandoned and possibly vulnerable in the Slow Zone. A few of them remember what life was like on a research station, and there is much recrimination and internecine battling among the maturing adolescents. At the same time, the Tines have their own politics and factions, some of whom are ruthless. They also only have second hand knowledge of the higher technology that was lost, and are jealous to be the first to invent useful tools and weapons.

Vinge is a master a depicting truly alien characters, and keeping them true to the characteristics he assigns them. The Tines are individually quite incapable, and don't function well when in close proximity to Tines other than their their own small pack. In this story, we also get to see that the Tropical Choir, which is a super-pack of millions of Tines, somehow manages to operate somewhat cohesively, to the surprise of the northern Tines. Individual packs of Tines have distinct personalities, and can plan and make and keep agreements. When they lose members, it's a lot like aphasic people, with distinct skills and knowledge getting lost. Some Tines and humans explore various approaches to sidestep these problems, but the alternatives have drawbacks that are often worse.

Children of the Sky is a nominee for this year's Prometheus award, and it may be the best written of this year's novels, but the libertarian elements are hard to spot. The Tines don't have an organized government, and no one seems to collect taxes. It's hard to say that they have a well-functioning spontaneous order, since there's little commerce to be seen, even though Tycoon is portrayed as a successful and innovative businessman. (Also, he/they seems to operate sweatshop-style factories, and imprisons and tortures rivals.)

Since the story takes place entirely on one backwoods planet in the slow zone in Vinge's enormous universe, the scope is necessarily narrow, so the implications for galactic civilization that we're used to in Vinge's stories in this universe are missing. The story is still one of adventure, intrigue, invention, progress and loyalty. The way that Tine packs can change attitude, knowledge, and alliance when they gain or lose members gives Vinge unusual opportunities for plot twists. It's definitely a fun read. Whether you like Vinge, or haven't yet seen how he can bring an alien civilization to life, you'll enjoy this.

Daemon and Freedom, Daniel Suarez

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Daniel Suarez's Daemon and Freedom tell a single story about an artificial intelligence, (the "Daemon" of the title) created by a game designer, that becomes extremely powerful in the real economy through violence and by hacking software systems throughout the world. In the end its creator offers to relinquish that power, but by then agents of various governments have shown how ruthless they can be in trying to defeat it, and a representative of the people being protected says it should continue running things. The story is occasionally violent, and includes several explicit misogynistic and sadistic scenes that I had trouble reading. The rest of the story is interesting enough on a couple of levels that I kept going.

It's a fast-paced story involving MMORPGs, augmented reality systems, and an AI created by a wealthy software gaming entrepreneur. The story (and its characters) presumes that the world's economy is controlled by a few powerful, wealthy, and unscrupulous tycoons who pull the strings of the big governments and are getting out of control. The AI makes a preemptive attack and attempts to take over in order to prevent an eventuality which is never really made clear. Instead, we see the US and other governments' secret agencies and militaries attempt to strike back at a system they don't understand, and which is decentralized and has infiltrated most of the world's computer systems. This allows it to watch its opponents and strike back in completely unexpected ways. It also invests heavily in a fleet of autonomous weaponized vehicles that it deploys very effectively.

The depiction of disaffected people from many backgrounds being recruited into a hidden network that deploys them on unexplained tasks that they willingly take on is disquieting. It's clear that many people who join have made thinly justified assumptions that the network's objectives are consistent with their values, but others do it because they're desperate for a job or a sense of belonging, and are willing to ignore their moral qualms about what they're doing--building, testing, delivering obviously dangerous weapons, or worse. It's plausible that many people would go along with an AI that could get this far, and the thing that keeps this from being possible now is that neither AI nor conventional intelligence augmented with modern tools give anyone enough power to pull it off. Who knows how soon that will change, though.

I thought the violence was over the top, and not really necessary to the story. I disagree with the world view that predominates here and says that malevolent actors control signifiant aspects of our economy and will go to extreme lengths to maintain their influence. I found the depictions of technology (other than the killing machines) reasonably plausible, and won't be surprised to see augmented reality, consensual shared overlays, and large-scale real-time cooperation. I expect the cooperation to be much less centrally controlled, and much more either spontaneous, or polycentric. And my strong expectations about AI are that it will arise gradually and in many places. It is very unlikely that one person (much less likely even than one independent group) will make a breakthrough that will enable them to take over. This particular question has been much debated, and there isn't clear agreement on how it will play out, but I firmly agree with Robin Hanson's position that a "hard takeoff" under the control of a single entity isn't a likely scenario. That one person could pull it off with help from at most two colleagues (as in the story) is completely unbelievable.

Sex at Dawn: Ryan and Jethá

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá's Sex at Dawn argues convincingly that monogamy isn't particularly natural for humans. It certainly is one common choice, but many modern people have a lot of trouble sticking to the program despite a lot of exhortation and systemic incentives promoting the practice. Ryan and Jethá marshall evidence from anthropology, evolutionary evidence, comparisons with other primates, and examinations of current practices. Their main argument is that a reasonable definition of "naturally monogamous" would mean that most people pair up with someone from the opposite sex, and aren't tempted to stray. There are a few species that mostly act that way, but looking at the broad range of what humans do, we're not like that. It's an interesting question as to why sociologists, and anthropologists seem to want us to believe that it is natural in the face of all the evidence.

There are several places in the book where the authors don't seem to really understand how evolution works. When talking about male parental investment, they ridicule the notion that maximum reproductive productivity is anyone's goal. It's clear from context that they're misunderstanding a discussion in which individuals are described as acting as if maximizing fecundity is the goal. But the evolutionary reasoning is just that those individuals who produce more offspring end up predominating in subsequent generations, regardless of why they acted that way. But regardless of this, they still make a strong case.

When biologists compare anatomy and mating behavior across species, human genitalia and sexual cycles don't make sense for a species in which couples stick together over the long term and don't cheat on one another. The size of male Genitalia, timing and (lack of) visibility of ovulation, breast prominence, are all unnecessary if the pair bond is unshakeable. They make sense when you assume each individual normally mates with multiple individuals of the opposite sex.

Our close relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos don't restrict themselves to single partners and we look more like humans evolved in an environment where individuals didn't restrict their attention to a single partner. In this kind of environment, evolutionary pressures push toward the large penises (by body weight), external scrotum, long duration of intercourse, and large volume of ejaculate you see in humans. If our ancestors had had reliable access to a partner, they wouldn't have needed these (evolutionarily) expensive features.

Another myth they take on is that of the demure female, uninterested in sex. It certainly occurs, but it's not predominant, either in societies (like ours) that constantly promote the idea or in societies that don't. Ryan and Jethá also make it clear that, evolutionarily speaking, homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of. Our nearest relatives and many other species engage in the practice, though seldom exclusively. Mainstream society's insistance that each person can be categorized as either heterosexual or homosexual, is just not consistent with our behavior or the evolutionary or anthropological evidence.

Anyway, if you're not sqeamish about these topics, it's a fun, eye-opening read. Not likely to change anyone's behavior, but maybe some people will feel less constrained about their choices. It'll probably also provide grist for some arguments, but that's a fine thing, too.

Migration: James P. Hogan

0.3

Chris Hibbert

James P. Hogan's Migration is a funny mix of high-tech space traveling futurism and down-home country folks. The bulk of the story takes place on Aurora, an interstellar ship on the first part of its journey, but it starts out on a mostly back-country world. We get to see some local politics and Korshak, a quick-thinking sleight-of-hand magician, who takes advantage of the local ruler's gullibility as far as he can. Korshak has a fan and friend who is on the recruiting team for Aurora, so he manages to escape his pursuers and jump into a world unlike everything he's used to. But he's an adaptable guy, so he learns to be useful in the new environment.

Korshak has to use his wits to rescue Aurora from sabotage by a subversive faction that has recruited Kek, a robot, to help them. We get the standard tour around the society as Korshak chases Kek from place to place. Some of the sub-societies are interesting, including one group trying to live at a subsistence level on this generation star ship. But Hogan makes it completely plausible.

Early on, the recruiters are interviewing a ne'er-do-well the local authorities would like to get rid of. He responds

"If it's military, or some kind of troublemaking to provide an excuse for protective intervention somewhere, the answer's no, but you don't look like a military recruiter. [That] doesn't solve anything. Just causes a lot of hate and reasons for revenge, and makes problems worse. The wrong people get rich."

"Who do you think should get rich?"

"Well, the way I see it is, nobody's born with anything. So whatever they get on top of what they produce themselves must come from other people. And the only way other people are going to give it to them is if they get something worthwhile back in return. So the ones who should end up with a lot to show are the ones who can do things better when it comes to providing what other people need."

But Hogan isn't consistently pro-commerce. The bad guys who have brainwashed Kek call themselves Dollarians and their high officials have titles like Banker. It's a fun story, but though it was nominated for the Prometheus award last year, it wasn't selected as a finalist. The side trip into Kek's attempt to be more human, (which ends up with him getting involved with a cult) is worth the trip.

Deutsch on the Evolution of DNA

I posted this on Google+ on Monday. I'll repost here for anyone who's not following me there. It's from David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity on the evolutionary origins of DNA as a universal language. I'll post a complete review when I finish the book, but these paragraphs really caught my attention.

Initially, the genetic code and the mechanism that interpreted it were both evolving along with everything else in the organisms. But there came a moment when the code stopped evolving yet the organisms continued to do so. At that moment the system was coding for nothing more complex than primitive, single celled creatures. Yet virtually all subsequent organisms on Earth, to this day, have not only been based on DNA replicators but have used exactly the same alpahabet of bases, grouped into three-base 'words', with only small variations in the meanings of those 'words'.

That means that, considered as a language for specifying organisms, the genetic code has displayed phenomenal reach. It evolved only to specify organisms with no nervous systems, no ability to move or exert forces, no internal organs and no sense organs, whose lifestyle consisted of little more than synthesizing their own structural constituents and then dividing in two. An yet the same language today specifies the hardware and software for countless multicellular behaviours that had no close analogue in those organisms, such as running and flying and breathing and mating and recognizing predators and prey. It also specifies engineering structures such as wings and teeth, and nanotechnology such as immune systems, and even a brain that is capable of explaining quasars, designing other organisms from scratch, and wondering why it exists.

He, She, and It, by Marge Piercy

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Marge Piercy's He, She, and It tells parallel stories about two not-quite-human creatures and their struggles to get along in the world. The main story takes place in a medium-future world devastated by ecological catastrophe. Shira grew up in a small Kibbutz in the desert, and when her husband abducts her child she leaves the corporate enclave they've been working in and returns home, where she developes a relationship with Yod, a cyborg invented to protect the town. The backstory, told by her grandmother in intercalary chapters, is about a rabbi in the Prague ghetto 400 years ago who raises a golem to protect his community. Both of the simulacra learn to be people and to participate more fully in their communities.

There are many interesting facets interwoven quite well in the story. Shira is a high-tech worker, and she and her companions infiltrate the corporate data bases through a three-day experiential interface in which they are attacked and have a narrow escape. The Rabbi and the golem give us a glimpse of oppressed Jews and what they had to do to get enough accomomdation from the local rulers to enable them to survive the occasional pogrom and the annual depredations of the local rabble-rousers. There is politics, intrigue, outright battles, and exploration of the devastated cities where society's cast-offs live.

The relationship between Shira and Yod develops slowly, and is complicated by interactions with old sweethearts, eccentric inventors, and both Shira's mother and grandmother. The women dominate the front story, and are the most fleshed out of the characters, not counting Yod himself. The backstory focuses on the golem and the plight of the Ghetto's populace. Both stories were fast-paced and engaging. All the focal characters were strong positive people and provided a good setting for the surrounding exploration of whether and what kinds of rights the two artificial creatures should have. Very enjoyable.

Diamond Eyes, A. A. Bell

0.3

Chris Hibbert

A. A. Bell's Diamond Eyes starts out with hints of what is to come:   Mira, the protagonist, hears her new staff advocate, Ben Chiron, asking

"Why bother blindfolding a blind woman?"
"Why restrain her?", and
"How much trouble could she be?"

She's used to these questions, so we know right away that she's blind, institutionalized, and a handful, but have to wait to find out why she insists on a blindfold (or more permanent measures.) The Serenity Center has a new, more humane director (Matron Sanchez) who has assigned Ben to work with Mira to attempt to bring her out of her shell. Ben promises to protect her from the other staff members who have been treating her roughly, and slowly wins her over.

There's not much action for a while as we get to meet the other characters. It's quite a while before we find out what's special about Mira's eyes, and Bell gives the story a mainstream feel until the revelation.

Mira is blind in the normal visual range, but sees ghostly visual echoes from events of the past. When she's above a building's first floor, she sees only earlier inhabitants of the area on the ground, and can't navigate because the walls and doors disappear. The blindfold keeps her from being distracted by the ghosts; she can't interact with people from the past, so they're clearly different from the flesh-and-blood people who talk to her and keep her tied up much of the time. She's obstreperous because the people who attempt to control her bahavior are only slightly more real to her than the ghosts she can see clearly.

Into this mix, Bell adds Dr. Zhou, who has invented a device that can tell whether someone is telling the truth (or at least believes that they are doing so.) Whle using Mira in a test of the device, the scientists are surprised to discover that she believes what are obviously (to them) hallucinations, they're interested enough that they follow up on her answers and figure out that that she's seeing into the past, then test her abilities by getting her to witness some known and some previously unknown events.

With this situation and characters Bell builds an interesting set of conflicts and an action packed story. I think the military intelligence angle behind Dr. Zhou was unnecessary, and the story would have been better without it. Mira's fight to free herself from the Serenity Center's institutional clutches is a heroic struggle, and the staff of the Serenity Center takes a little too much delight in restraining her physically (though Mira really is uncontrollable.)

Harper Collins sent review copies to the Prometheus Award committee, but none of the committee members thought the libertarian angles were strong enough to warrant a nomination. I agree; I enjoyed the story more for its off-beat sensibility than for the pro-freedom aspects. By the end of the story, Ben and Mira understand her strange ability, and have a strong relationship to build on. They've confounded the military, and Sanchez is on their side. Bell was a bit too even-handed to bring Mira's struggle for reasonable treatment to the forefront. I think it's even a better story for that.

The Ego Tunnel, Thomas Metzinger

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel is a provocative look at the nature of consciousness. Metzinger takes an innovative approach to the questions and raises some interesting issues without seeming to have a strong grasp of the subject.

Metzinger's project is to explore the nature of consciousness by examining two neglected states of awareness: out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), and lucid dreaming. He argues that studying these phenomena will illuminate the problem of consciousness and make everything clear. I'll agree that the exploration was intriguing, but I don't think we learned anything important over what Dennett made clear in Consciousness Explained. At the end, Metzinger heads out to left field for some completely ungrounded speculations about AI and ethics. In these areas, he's clearly way out of his depth. He doesn't understand what's been done in AI, or what's possible, and his claims about the "obvious" rights of artificial creatures and how it wouldn't be moral to treat them is unconvincing.

When introducing the idea of studying unusual states of consciousness, Metzinger makes the reasonable point that there is enough consistency in the experiences reported during OOBEs and lucid dreaming that it makes sense to take a look at them and see whether the commonalities are instructive. I thought he did a good job of drawing some clear lines around what it feels like to be conscious in comparison to other states in which there is awareness without self-awareness. The title comes from his metaphor of an "Ego Tunnel" as a constrained mental space encompassing the limited set of things that one is aware of at a moment in time. Metzinger points to recent fMRI work and claims that neurophysiologists are finding a neural correlate of consciousness, which they can identify in the brain, and so they can conclusively say that lucid dreaming and OOBEs are conscious states. It's not clear to me that whatever the MRIs are finding really corresponds to the same thing we mean by consciousness, but the argument that these are conscious states is convincing enough without that evidence. He brings up the idea of mirror neurons, and points toward an interesting argument that this feature of our brain is responsible for our being able to model ourselves as an active agent like others we can observe. This argument only occupied a couple of pages, and ended (I thought) inconclusively.

Unfortunately, Metzinger's identification of these mental states as reasonably corresponding to consciousness doesn't enable him to say any more about what consciousness is, what survival-related purpose it serves, or anything coherent about consequences. He tries to talk about AI and ethics, but his justification doesn't get beyond the level of our responsibility for our creations, and the primacy of experience. For him, it's obvious that it would be immoral to turn off anything that has experiences, so in his view, we shouldn't even explore the creation of artificial creatures, since we can't establish a theoretical lower bound for what it would mean to have experiences. This is a much deeper subject than he seems aware of, and he barely brushed the surface of it. With his (apparently) shallow understanding of the issues, his speculations are hard to take very seriously.

I thought the first two thirds of the book were worth reading for their exploration and presentation of how OOBEs and lucid dreaming relate to consciousness. The fMRI and other studies of these states may add significantly to our understanding of how the brain works and eventually to a clearer explanation of what's happening in the neurons during thought and consciousness.