Allow me a few observations and then see if you still feel the same.
First, have you heard that the daughter of Hugh Everett killed herself (some years after his death), and in her suicide note she said she was leaving to join him in another world where he was still alive? Or something like that.
I don’t know enough to say whether the idea of the multiverse actually had a bad effect on her life, or whether it provided her with some comfort. But it’s most likely that Everett’s daughter was among the inspirations of this story. And the larger point is that weird ideas have consequences (hello Roko’s basilisk, hello Zizians...), whether or not they are true, and whether or not they truly have the implications that people associate with them.
I also suspect that Greg Egan has become very uncomfortable with people taking scenarios of transcendence from science fiction, and trying to live them literally. It’s been quite a while since he wrote a story in which the protagonists started human and made their way to some fundamentally better plane of existence. Undoubtedly the character Derek Linderman is an attack on pop-science and pseudoscience sensationalism; but may I suggest that also lurking here, is Egan’s own fear or even guilt that as science fiction writers, he and his colleagues will do in reality, what Linderman did in this story—that is, propagate exciting falsehoods that will wreck the lives of some of their readers.
This is why Egan is avoiding stories of transcendence—out of fear that these will become comforting or enervating falsehoods for the superfans who take it literally. (I believe Egan was raised religious but became an atheist.) It’s why Charlotte’s own consolation is that, amid the grifting and the delusions of the world, she played a part in fostering the genuine search for truth. It’s even why he is apriori against the idea of an LLM-powered singularity happening in the real world.
So this isn’t just an attack on Max Tegmark. It’s a story of someone whose life was gravely affected by a scientific myth of transcendence, who made a career of falsifying the myth and succeeded, only for there to be no existential change because new myths are always available, but who at least managed to pass on the flame of true rationalism in an otherwise fallen world. Whatever Egan may think of Tegmark, in this story he’s just one ingredient, along with lore about closed cosmologies, the story of Everett’s daughter, and whatever else went into the mix.
Fiction writers are constantly getting in trouble for drawing on aspects of real people as an ingredient for their fictions, whether it’s for depicting them libelously, stealing their life story unacknowledged, or whatever. And probably Egan quite dislikes Tegmark, for multiple reasons. But possibly you can appreciate that there is also a story here. It’s not a transhumanist story, it’s not the human condition transformed by technology, but it is fiction about science and the impact of science on human life.
One last thing that I almost missed: One of the minor characters in Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime is called Derek Lindemann (slightly different spelling). And Vinge’s Lindemann, in a very different way, does what Egan’s Linderman did. So I think the similarity of names is no coincidence.
apologies. i went looking for a citation, certain i could find one quickly, but cannot. it appears i was under a mistaken belief. thank you for pointing it out.
>This is why Egan is avoiding stories of transcendence—out of fear that these will become comforting or enervating falsehoods for the superfans who take it literally.
I don’t think that is quite true. He has been pretty explicit in interviews of his views in this regard—he was dissatisfied with writings in the 80s he saw as “churning out very lame noir plots that utterly squandered the philosophical implications of the technology,” regularly expresses dissatisfaction with re-treading concepts he feels he has already explored and whatnot. It seems pretty evident he views transcendence similiarly, less interesting to him as a philosophical concept to explore and a trope he has engaged with already in a lot of his works (and one many others have engaged with).
>It’s even why he is apriori against the idea of an LLM-powered singularity happening in the real world.
I think it is better to assume he is honest about his reasons for being critical of AI. He facially doesn’t find the idea of AI in general implausible, but views many claims as being on their face seemingly silly and unevidenced. He has expressed sympathy that human minds are not inherently unique (including by citing Tegram, incidentally), and could be emulated by artifical machines (some of his works deal with this directly!) but explicitly doesn’t see on its face how running human language through a series of regression models would lead to human extinction or create an emergent entity with human intelligence (lacking any evidence of such a thing). That is a perfectly reasonable view and I would agree with cautioning in favor of understanding technology and advancements inside empirical frameworks that we can evidence.
Allow me a few observations and then see if you still feel the same.
First, have you heard that the daughter of Hugh Everett killed herself (some years after his death), and in her suicide note she said she was leaving to join him in another world where he was still alive? Or something like that.
I don’t know enough to say whether the idea of the multiverse actually had a bad effect on her life, or whether it provided her with some comfort. But it’s most likely that Everett’s daughter was among the inspirations of this story. And the larger point is that weird ideas have consequences (hello Roko’s basilisk, hello Zizians...), whether or not they are true, and whether or not they truly have the implications that people associate with them.
I also suspect that Greg Egan has become very uncomfortable with people taking scenarios of transcendence from science fiction, and trying to live them literally. It’s been quite a while since he wrote a story in which the protagonists started human and made their way to some fundamentally better plane of existence. Undoubtedly the character Derek Linderman is an attack on pop-science and pseudoscience sensationalism; but may I suggest that also lurking here, is Egan’s own fear or even guilt that as science fiction writers, he and his colleagues will do in reality, what Linderman did in this story—that is, propagate exciting falsehoods that will wreck the lives of some of their readers.
This is why Egan is avoiding stories of transcendence—out of fear that these will become comforting or enervating falsehoods for the superfans who take it literally. (I believe Egan was raised religious but became an atheist.) It’s why Charlotte’s own consolation is that, amid the grifting and the delusions of the world, she played a part in fostering the genuine search for truth. It’s even why he is apriori against the idea of an LLM-powered singularity happening in the real world.
So this isn’t just an attack on Max Tegmark. It’s a story of someone whose life was gravely affected by a scientific myth of transcendence, who made a career of falsifying the myth and succeeded, only for there to be no existential change because new myths are always available, but who at least managed to pass on the flame of true rationalism in an otherwise fallen world. Whatever Egan may think of Tegmark, in this story he’s just one ingredient, along with lore about closed cosmologies, the story of Everett’s daughter, and whatever else went into the mix.
Fiction writers are constantly getting in trouble for drawing on aspects of real people as an ingredient for their fictions, whether it’s for depicting them libelously, stealing their life story unacknowledged, or whatever. And probably Egan quite dislikes Tegmark, for multiple reasons. But possibly you can appreciate that there is also a story here. It’s not a transhumanist story, it’s not the human condition transformed by technology, but it is fiction about science and the impact of science on human life.
One last thing that I almost missed: One of the minor characters in Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime is called Derek Lindemann (slightly different spelling). And Vinge’s Lindemann, in a very different way, does what Egan’s Linderman did. So I think the similarity of names is no coincidence.
his own death was more or less a slow suicide by alcoholism, due explicitly to nihilism born of his physics.
What do you mean by “explicit”? That you can give a citation? Would you do so?
Adam Becker claims that his lifestyle was his goal from before starting his PhD.
apologies. i went looking for a citation, certain i could find one quickly, but cannot. it appears i was under a mistaken belief. thank you for pointing it out.
>This is why Egan is avoiding stories of transcendence—out of fear that these will become comforting or enervating falsehoods for the superfans who take it literally.
I don’t think that is quite true. He has been pretty explicit in interviews of his views in this regard—he was dissatisfied with writings in the 80s he saw as “churning out very lame noir plots that utterly squandered the philosophical implications of the technology,” regularly expresses dissatisfaction with re-treading concepts he feels he has already explored and whatnot. It seems pretty evident he views transcendence similiarly, less interesting to him as a philosophical concept to explore and a trope he has engaged with already in a lot of his works (and one many others have engaged with).
>It’s even why he is apriori against the idea of an LLM-powered singularity happening in the real world.
I think it is better to assume he is honest about his reasons for being critical of AI. He facially doesn’t find the idea of AI in general implausible, but views many claims as being on their face seemingly silly and unevidenced. He has expressed sympathy that human minds are not inherently unique (including by citing Tegram, incidentally), and could be emulated by artifical machines (some of his works deal with this directly!) but explicitly doesn’t see on its face how running human language through a series of regression models would lead to human extinction or create an emergent entity with human intelligence (lacking any evidence of such a thing). That is a perfectly reasonable view and I would agree with cautioning in favor of understanding technology and advancements inside empirical frameworks that we can evidence.