Isaac Asimov’s Terrifying Vision of the Afterlife | The Last Answer

0:00 A while ago I covered Divided by Infinity, a short story about a man whose consciousness keeps finding a way to continue, even long after death should have ended his experience. The last answer brings us back to that compulsory existence. But here there's someone the man can question about it. An intelligence has kept him.

0:25 It can explain how his mind works, why he was selected, and what it expects him to do. He can tell it that he doesn't want his existence, it understands him perfectly. But understanding him doesn't mean it will let him go. And as the conversation continues, the question becomes what this being needs from a human mind badly enough to keep it forever.

0:56 There is here neither heaven nor hell. There is only myself hi guys, Quinn here.

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2:30 Thanks to ZocDoc for sponsoring this video. As I said, I've already covered Robert Charles Wilson's Divide It by Infinity. And if you watched that video, you can probably see why I wanted to talk about this one. We spent a lot of time with the idea that consciousness might keep finding a way to continue after the person living through it has lost any desire for that future.

2:59 Wilson follows that possibility through Bill Keller's grief and into a world that barely resembles the one he knew. The last answer brings us back to that compulsory existence, but here the person trying to understand it can speak directly to the being responsible, and that changes the kinds of questions he can ask.

3:22 There's also the connection to Asimov's The Last Question, which I've done a video on too. The last answer came later in January 1980. They have similar titles, but they are separate stories, and I think they work well as two different approaches to the relationship between intelligence and eternity.

3:43 In The Last Question, intelligence keeps trying to overcome the end of the universe. The last answer asked what a mind that already possesses extraordinary power might still be looking for. And that is the focus of this video. We've talked about the nightmare of being unable to die, and here we have the idea that your continued existence might be useful to something else.

4:13 The story follows Murray Templeton, a physicist who dies and remains conscious. A being called the voice explains that it has recreated the workings of his mind, a pattern of electromagnetic forces preserving his memories and personality. Murray has been selected because of his capacity for thought. If you remember the reconstruction of Keller in Divided by Infinity, this is familiar territory.

4:45 In that video, I raised the problem of whether recreating a person's mental pattern actually transfers their consciousness. A being could remember your life perfectly without proving that your existence has moved into it. Here too, the person having the experience has very little way to establish what happened to the original.

5:06 But Asimov doesn't spend the whole story trying to settle that question. That's not what it's about. There is a conscious person here now, and the immediate problem is what this being intends to do with him. Even if we considered Murray a reconstruction, that would leave us with someone capable of objecting to the conditions of his existence.

5:29 So that doesn't matter to this story. In the story, the voice claims that it created the universe itself for its own purposes. So it's a kind of demayurge. So Murray is dealing with a being whose relationship seems to be built around that claim. Everything he knows came into existence within something it made.

5:52 Now he is supposed to understand his place in the arrangement. There's something really unnerving about the idea of encountering an intelligence that can explain your entire world and still be completely uninterested in your view of it. To Murray, a universe contains people with lives of their own. To its creator, those lives might be events occurring inside a project.

6:21 Both could describe the same thing accurately and understand their importance very differently. I think that's actually more disturbing than the simple idea that we might be too small for a cosmic intelligence to notice. This intelligence does notice. It knows enough to preserve a particular person. The problem is that being understood in detail does not guarantee being understood as someone whose wishes matter.

6:50 There's an assumption that we have sometimes that knowing more about a person will make us more sympathetic to them, and that can happen. But knowledge can also make someone easier to use. A person who understands what frightens you might comfort you. Or they might know exactly which threat will get the response they want.

7:16 On the scale of this story, there is nowhere outside the situation where Murray can take his objection. The being telling him how things work is also the being that made those things work that way. It can present its own decisions as facts about reality, and Murray has to work out whether there is any difference between something being inevitable and something this being simply refuses to change.

7:44 In the story, the voice's stated purpose is to obtain new thoughts and discoveries. It keeps minds as a research team, introducing possibilities it has not already worked through for itself. So Murray's intelligence is the reason he has been preserved. But at the same time, his own reasons for thinking aren't particularly important to the being.

8:08 What's interesting to me is that there's the common idea of the atheistic scientist. But not all scientists are atheists, in fact, some are agnostic or even theist or even deist. Someone who has spent their entire life studying the universe might imagine that meeting its creator would finally explain what their work was leading towards, potentially.

8:32 But what if the conversation reveals that their work has made them suitable for simply another assignment, this time with no opportunity to turn it down? Kind of a cruel way to make use of something a person values. Murray is a thinker. It would be easy to describe his new existence in terms that sound like a reward.

8:52 He could continue to pursue knowledge. He has more time than he could ever have while alive. Why wouldn't you be grateful? But when someone loves an activity, it doesn't necessarily follow that they want every part of their existence to be organized around it. Murray accurately tells the voice what made his work matter when he was alive.

9:17 He could discover something himself and do it with the little time he had.

9:24 Now the voice is asking him to work forever on things it could figure out itself. You could see why that doesn't feel like a reward. Who gets to decide what your abilities are for? How much of yourself can someone else claim because they made your work possible? And what happens when the person asking those questions is also the resource another intelligence intends to use?

9:55 But the big question in the story is: why would something capable of creating the universe want ideas from beings that seem so limited beside it? I think it is one of the most interesting questions in the story because it kind of exposes that there is a gap between the voice's power and the voice's knowledge.

10:15 And those are two things that we often imagine together. Give a being enough power, and eventually we start calling it all-knowing, but those are different capacities. The voice gives Murray an example. You could know every even number and still not know a single odd number. You could know infinitely many things and still be missing something.

10:38 Murray points out that you could derive the missing numbers, and that's the work the voice wants from him.

10:44 Finding a way from what it already knows to something it hasn't thought of yet.

10:50 In the story, the voice regards unpredictability as useful. I find there is something about that view of creation that is uncomfortable because our experience of uncertainty involves things that we desperately want resolved. We want to know whether someone will come home or whether a relationship will survive or whether a plan is going to work.

11:18 An observer might find those same uncertainties interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with us. Something could watch a person struggling with a problem and value the fact that the result was undecided. From its perspective, removing the difficulty might make the situation less productive. That is how I read the troubling relationship between intelligence and curiosity here.

11:47 Curiosity can lead us toward other people, and it can also keep us watching when we ought to be helping. Whether the experience being observed is worthwhile depends very much on who has to live through it. There's also another limit to knowledge that power wouldn't automatically settle. If a being understood everything inside the world it created, it could still have questions about itself.

12:14 Explaining the existence of one universe would not necessarily explain why its creator existed, or whether its own existence could change. This is what brings the story back to the questions we often find in science fiction about gods. A being can be unimaginably powerful in relation to us while still having a predicament of its own.

12:40 If it involves other minds in resolving that predicament, we would want to know whether helping was something they could choose. There's a part in the short story where the voice makes its control explicit, and that's when Murray considers ending his own existence.

12:59 Even concentrated thought on ending your own existence may, in spite of you, come up with something new and interesting. And of course, if you succeed in this suicide attempt, you will have accomplished nothing. For I would instantly reconstruct you, and in such a way as to make your method of suicide impossible.

13:23 And if you found another and still more subtle fashion of disrupting yourself, I would reconstruct you with that possibility eliminated, and so on. It could be an interesting game, but you will nevertheless exist eternally. It is my will.

13:44 I discussed in Divided by Infinity how unsettling it was that Keller could remain available as information after everything familiar was gone. But there is an extra amount of cruelty in the idea here that an attempt to escape could help the captor improve the confinement. You would be showing something about how you understand your situation, and then it could simply learn from the method you tried while you were left living through the consequences of that lesson.

14:18 Murray eventually decides to direct his thinking towards destroying the voice, and the voice tells him that the other preserved minds have also reached that same ambition. The ending then turns on Murray's interpretation of that arrangement. Perhaps the creator itself wants an end. And these minds are a part of its search for one.

14:44 I like that this makes you consider the conversation. The voice's interest in new ideas might have been concealing a much more personal problem. It might be bringing other intelligence into existence because it cannot find a way out of its own. That's Murray's conclusion. We don't see him succeed, and we don't hear the voice confirm that he has understood its motives.

15:13 Still, it is an intriguing way to think about what a creator might want. Because we're used to imagining people seeking answers for some greater being than themselves. Here, perhaps the greater intelligence has made people because it wants an answer to.