The Terrible Truth About Consciousness

0:00 Consciousness is the strangest thing in the universe. Because it is the only thing we know from the inside. It turns matter into memory, it turns matter into pain, to fear and love and identity, and the feeling of being a person, the feeling of being someone. But the more science fiction pushes on the idea of consciousness, the more disturbing it really becomes.

0:27 Because what if the self is not solid? What if awareness can be copied and stretched and trapped and broken? What if intelligence does not even require consciousness at all? That is, as I like to say, the terrible truth at the heart of these stories. Consciousness may be what makes existence meaningful, but it may also be what makes existence unbearable.

0:54 To be aware is to experience time, suffering, and isolation, the horror of knowing that you are a mind inside a universe that may not care whether that mind survives intact. By this time, humankind has begun the colonization of our solar system. This was made possible by a world-changing piece of technology invented in the 80s.

1:46 The jaunt. The word jaunt was first used in Alfred Bester's 1956 science fiction novel, The Stars My Destination. In this novel, humans have access to personal teleporters. Teleporting was referred to as jaunting in this novel. Stephen King takes the idea of the jaunt and twists it into something not merely dark, but horrifying beyond comprehension.

2:12 The idea of teleportation has been common in science fiction for many decades, and the fears associated with it are not unexplored. Cronenberg's famous The Fly explores the horror of a teleportation experiment gone wrong in which the main character's DNA is accidentally mixed with an insect. Teleporters have featured prominently in Star Trek since its original release in 1965, and it's never been fully clear if the teleporters allow for a continuous stream of consciousness, or if they are simply killing the original person and rematerializing an exact copy with copied memories in a different place.

2:51 The Jaunt also considers what becomes of consciousness during teleportation, but in a different way. To understand, you have to learn how the jaunt was first invented in this story by a man named Victor Karoon. In this story, man begins to run out of oil. And this, of course, leads to a huge energy crisis.

3:13 It mentions that 10,000 people in America froze one year because there was nothing they could do to heat their homes. The jaunt was instrumental in solving this energy crisis because there was oil on Mars. Victor Karun was a scientist who had a contract with the government. He basically invented the jaunt by accident.

3:35 First, he teleports his fingers. Pushing them through the threshold and pulling them back, he's fine. Then he teleports a pencil, and then keys, then a watch, and then a mouse. But the mouse is where things get really, really weird. Karoon touched the mouse. It was like touching something inert. Packed straw or sawdust, perhaps, except for the aspirating sides.

4:06 The mouse did not look around at Karoon. It stared straight ahead. He had thrown in a squirming, very frisky and alive little animal. Here was something that seemed to be a living waxwork likeness of a mouse. Karoon snapped his fingers in front of the mouse's small pink eyes. It blinked and fell dead on its side.

4:29 Karoon's measurements indicated that no time distortion happened between the time of entering the jaunt and the time of leaving it, at least not physically. And yet, all living creatures who were jaunted ultimately died, even though physically they appeared perfectly healthy. Sensory input, he thought almost randomly.

4:52 When they go through, they see something, hear something, touch something. God, maybe even smell something that literally kills them. What? What became of consciousness when crossing through the jaunt? What lied within that space between that was so terrible that life simply gave up upon re-entering the physical realm?

5:20 The animals could not speak, but a human could. When the government got wind of what Karoon was doing, it was only a matter of time before human trials would begin, and of course they used prisoners. Karoon basically figured out that if you sent an animal or a person through sleeping, then when they came through on the other side, they were fine.

5:44 But they still wanted to know what would happen if you sent a person in awake. So they got a man named Rudy Faja to volunteer. He was a prisoner sentenced to death who had murdered a bunch of people. And in exchange for doing the jaunt awake, they would allow him to leave and be let free of all charges if he survived.

6:09 He came through alive. But Rudy Faja was in no condition to eat his chicken dinner. In the space it took to jaunt across two miles, pegged at 0.00000000067th of a second by a computer, Faja's hair had turned snow white. His face had not changed in any physical way. It was not lined or jolly or wasted, but it gave the impression of great, almost incredible age.

6:45 Fagia shuffled out of the portal, his eyes bulging blankly, his mouth twitching, his hands splayed out in front of him. Presently he began to drool. The scientists who had gathered around him drew away, and no, Mark really doubted if any of them had talked. They knew about the rats, after all, and the guinea pigs, and the hamsters, any animal, in fact, with more brains than your average flatworm.

7:12 They must have felt a bit like those German scientists who tried to impregnate Jewish women with the sperm of German shepherds. What happened? One of the scientists shouted. It was the only question that Fajja had a chance to answer. It's eternity in there, he said, and dropped dead of what was diagnosed as a massive heart attack.

7:35 The scientists four gathered there were left with his corpse, and that strange and awful dying declaration. It's eternity in there. Now, if you saw my Halloween special from last month, then you know that all of Stephen King's books are connected in a giant macroverse. And other Stephen King stories like it do mention that people's hair turns white when they look into the macroverse because of the cosmic madness of it all.

8:05 But I think there's also another implication here. I think that what consciousness actually comes face to face with within the jaunt is eternity itself. A single mind, no body, all alone in infinite nothingness for an eternity. In that time, the mind begins to cannibalize itself. The body is transported instantaneously, but the mind is left in this void with only itself for an eternity and is suddenly snapped back into existence, and it caves in upon itself.

8:47 By the year 2300, traveling through use of the jaunt is common. It is how we have colonized planets, but all travelers still have to be put to sleep with the gas before traveling. In the beginning of this story, we are introduced to a man who is about to travel with his family through use of the jaunt, and he recounts the story of Victor Karoon to his children, explaining that the reason they are put to sleep is because eternity waits for them should they remain conscious.

9:19 Hearing this and knowing this, his 12-year-old son develops a deadly case of curiosity. And upon the completion of the jaunt, they all awake to find something devastating. Beside Ricky, his sister still mercifully slept. The thing that had been his son bounced and writhed in its jaunt couch. A 12-year-old boy with a snow white fall of hair and eyes which were incredibly ancient.

9:49 The cornea is gone a sickly yellow. Here was a creature older than time, masquerading as a boy, and yet it bounced and writhed with a kind of horrid, obscene glee, and its choked, lunatic cackles. The jaunt attendants drew back in terror. Some of them fled, although they had been trained to cope with just such an unthinkable eventuality.

10:13 The old young legs twitched and quivered, clawed hands beat and twisted and danced on the air. Abruptly they descended, and the thing that had been his son began to claw at its face. Longer than you think, Dad, it cackled. Longer than you think, held my breath when they gave me the gas. I wanted to see.

10:33 I saw, I saw, longer than you think. Cackling and screeching, the thing on the jaunt couch suddenly clawed its own eyes out, blood gouted. The recovery room was an aviary of screaming voices now. Longer than you think, Dad! I saw long jaunt, longer than you think. It said other things before the jaunt attendants were finally able to bear it away, rolling its couch swiftly away as it screamed and clawed at its eyes that had seen the unseeable forever and ever.

11:05 It said other things, and then it began to scream. But Mark Oates didn't hear it, because by then he was screaming himself. So, we've heard the notion that consciousness exists because there is at some point some being that contained all of consciousness. And because it was alone being the only thing, it split itself so that it would no longer be alone.

11:36 Imagine being just a mind in nothing for eternity. No body, no stimulus, just existence. The human mind was meant to exist for about eighty years and then end. It wasn't meant to be stretched thin across all of eternity. I really love this story because it's about technology and the risks and fears associated with it, and it also has that element of cosmic horror, the unthinkable, looking into the unknowable and being scarred by it, and that's of course a very Lovecraftian idea.

12:20 So the Skeleton Crew is a great collection of stories. It also includes The Mist, which I talked about in my Halloween special. Definitely check it out if you like these kinds of stories. Thanks so much for watching, guys. A short stay in hell opens with a man named Sorin Johansson, dying and learning that almost everyone had the afterlife wrong.

12:44 The true religion was Zoroastrianism, and instead of entering the Mormon heaven he had expected, he's greeted by demons and sent to a personalized hell. His punishment takes the form of an impossible library based on Borges's Library of Babel. Somewhere inside it is a book that perfectly tells the story of his life.

13:07 Finding that book means a release. So his damnation is technically temporary, which becomes just a cruel joke. Because temporary doesn't really mean much when the thing you are searching through is larger than the human mind can even hold. At first, this hell almost feels like some kind of social experiment.

13:32 Everyone is young again. There are vending machines, rooms, books, sex, friendships, arguments, and even death. Though death never lasts. People who die wake up restored the next day. They can drink themselves to death and return without a hangover. Pain remains. Consequences disappear. Books in this immense library are mostly nonsense.

13:57 When someone finds a phrase like sack it, people treat it like a revelation. They start projecting meaning onto the scraps because the alternative is admitting that almost everything around them is simply noise. As the years turn into centuries, people begin building cultures inside the library. By the year 102, Soren has already lived more than twice his original lifetime.

14:24 They hold meetings, celebrate rare, coherent sentences, make music out of bones and intestines, and pray to the Zoroastrian god. Sorin wonders what kind of god deserves worship after creating a system like this. Over time, people invent rules and games just to stay sane. Sorin spends around a thousand years with a woman named Rachel.

14:49 At one point, they spend decades talking about dogs, and then years pretending to be dogs, with others joining in. Later, huge games of tag last thousands of years. It sounds ridiculous, and that is the point. In a place this empty, even absurdity becomes some kind of structure. Then eventually a prophet named Dyer Dan rises, and the library turns violent.

15:17 He claims that God has spoken to him and gathers thousands of followers by preaching that hell has become too peaceful. His followers begin hunting, torturing, raping, killing people in the belief that cruelty will earn them heaven. The library was already unbearable because of its size, but now human beings make it worse.

15:40 Sorin and Rachel are hunted. Rachel jumps into the abyss to escape. Sorin is captured, tortured, killed, revived, killed again. Eventually he manages to grab Diardane and throw them both over the railing into the endless drop. Sorin falls for miles, then thousands of miles, dying and waking as he goes.

16:03 When he finally lands far below where he began, he learns the true scale of the library. Someone has calculated the number of books, and the number is beyond comprehension. There are more books in the library than there were electrons in the old universe. That discovery destroys whatever hope people still had.

16:26 The search is not impossible in theory, only so vast that theory stops mattering. Sorin wonders for hundreds of years, then spends eons throwing himself into the abyss every morning, using death as a method of travel. And after all that time, he realizes that he has not even fallen a single light year.

16:49 He still has googles and goggles of light years to go. Eventually, after billions of years, Sorin reaches the bottom of the library. It does not save him. It only gives him a place to begin searching upward. The real horror of this short story, a short stay in hell, is that a consciousness is stretched across that kind of time.

17:12 A mind is forced to awake through eons of repetition, boredom, and near total hopelessness. Sorin is trapped in his own awareness as much as he is trapped in the library. He is condemned to keep experiencing a monotonous eternity that technically has an ending, yet feels endless in every single way that matters.

17:36 From God's perspective, it may be really a short stay, but for a human being, it is forever. Blood Music by Greg Bear is a short science fiction novel broken into five sections, which vary in length to the interphase, the prophase, the metaphase, the anaphase, the telephase, and the interphase thought universe.

18:02 Blood Music was published fully in 1985. The entire novel takes place over the course of less than a year. Something was introduced to Earth, a kind of infection. It changes humankind, forcing evolution. This video will have spoilers for blood music, so if spoilers is a thing that you care about, then you might want to not watch this video.

18:26 This book deals with themes surrounding the concept of gray goo and nanotechnology. It also deals with the concepts of consciousness, reality, artificial intelligence, and the integration of technology and biological life. Blood Music also explores some similar themes to Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke and Blind Sight by Peter Watts, both of which I've also covered on this channel.

18:53 In my video on the hegemonizing swarm and Ian Banks' Culture series, we also specifically discuss the concept of Grey Goo. The themes explored in this novel have been explored in many other science fiction books, but this book specifically highlights the horrors that could potentially arise from bioengineering and also contains elements of body horror.

19:16 The novel begins when a scientist by the name of Virgil Ulam creates biological computers based on his own cells. The specific cells he used to model these on are called lymphocytes. These are a type of immune cell produced in bone marrow and found in blood and lymph tissue. He named his creations newscytes.

19:38 It was based on a combination of the word lymphocytes and the Greek word for mind, noose. Because his research was being shut down, Virgil attempts to smuggle his creations out of the company by injecting them into his own body. This, of course, does not go the way he expected. The new sites once injected begin to evolve extraordinarily fast, developing not only intelligence but self-awareness, real consciousness.

20:06 They alter their own genetic material within Virgil to create an entire civilization on a nanoscale. As the civilization progresses, it alters its host, eventually correcting genetic defects, improving intelligence, strength, and eyesight. Every aspect is altered and improved upon by the sentient organisms living in his blood.

20:28 I don't wear glasses, my back doesn't hurt. I haven't had an allergy attack in four months, and I haven't been sick. I used to get infections all the time in my sinuses because of the allergies. No colds, no infections, nothing. I've never felt better. So altered smart lymphocytes are inside you, finding things, changing them.

20:49 He nodded. And by now each cluster of cells is as smart as you or I. You didn't mention clusters, but they used to cram together in the medium, maybe a hundred or two hundred cells. I never could figure out why. Now it seems obvious that they cooperate. Edward stared at him. I'm very tired. The way I see it, I lost weight because they improved my metabolism.

21:13 My bones are stronger. My spine has been rebuilt. Your heart looks different. At this point in the novel, even with their seeming improvements, Virgil remarks that in this stage, which would prove to be an extremely early stage, the new sites had not yet made it to his brain, and only had an understanding of the endocrine system, and yet at this point they were already in the billions, perhaps trillions.

21:38 Virgil is unsettled by the creatures initially. He mentions that one night he awoke to find that his skin had begun to crawl as the creatures moved around in it. Virgil believes that the creatures wanted to get into his skin because it would be the easiest way for them to run circuits for communication across the surface.

21:58 They would need this once they discovered the. True function of his brain, the fact that the creatures were exploring his skin would indicate that they were close to understanding him fully. Eventually the creatures begin to leave his skin and explore the outside. It's coming from my skin. They're not telling me everything, but I think they're sending out scouts.

22:19 Hey, astronaut scouts, yeah. He looked at Edward with an expression that didn't quite cross over into concern, more like curiosity as to how he'd take it. Edward's stomach muscles tightened, as if waiting for a second punch. He had never seriously considered the possibility until now, not consciously.

22:40 Perhaps because he had been concentrating on simply believing, focusing on more immediate problems. Is this the first time? Initially, Virgil's colony could not survive outside his body. They could not be transferred to other life because they had been based on his own cells. Seeking a practical use for the organisms, an attempt is made to develop a similar organism that will not trigger an immune response in other animals, essentially a kind of infection.

23:11 But the ramification of a sentient infection was not considered, and it goes horribly wrong. The lab-generated infection gets out of hand, and of course begins to spread rapidly. It's a disease, isn't it? She said. Edward nodded. That's what Virgil made. A disease that thinks. I'm not sure there's any way to fight an intelligent plague.

23:37 A disease that is intelligent is fundamentally different from any other disease. An intelligent disease can act based on observation. It can preserve knowledge and make educated decisions. If non-intelligent diseases are already a problem for mankind, imagine the effect that an intelligent one may have.

23:57 The process of diseases spreading normally is not totally random. Diseases have evolved to spread from host to host efficiently, but the process is, in fact, unguided. A guided process would be disastrous, especially when considering the concentration of intelligence within these particular organisms.

24:20 In blood music, the disease spreads at a lightning fast speed, and all of the Northern American biosphere is assimilated. A new civilization arises out of ultra-evolved new sites and assimilated human beings. The civilization expands so greatly that it ultimately is forced to limit its growth. Its continued expansion would destroy the entire Earth.

24:43 The reason behind this is supposedly loosely related to the concept known as the Anthropic Principle. A hypothesis proposed in 1957, the anthropic principle is also sometimes referred to as the observation selection effect. The anthropic principle is used to explore the notion that the universe seems finely tuned for the existence of life.

25:07 Essentially, the hypothesis states that the universe appears finely attuned for life because if the constraints and the parameters of the universe were even slightly different, life would not exist. The range of potential observations that we can make about the universe is limited by the fact that the observations can only happen in a universe capable of developing life that is intelligent in the first place.

25:34 Greg Bear in Blood Music seems to be using the strong anthropic principle, which essentially says that the universe is in some sense compelled to eventually have consciousness emerge. And essentially, observers are necessary to bring the universe into being. In Blood Music, the new sites and assimilated humans are forced to expand beyond normal space and into a realm of pure consciousness.

26:02 This will be the only way to avoid the problems that such a concentration of consciousness would have on the physical world. Because of what I've been saying, there are too many of them already. If they were to expand beyond that radius, they would create something very peculiar, a portion of space-time much too closely observed.

26:22 The territory would not be able to evolve. Too many brilliant theorists, don't you see? There would be a kind of frozen state, a breakdown on the quantum level, a singularity, a black hole of thought. Time would be severely distorted, and the effects would destroy the earth. I suspect they have limited their growth realizing this.

26:45 The entire earth would eventually be moved into an entirely different plane of existence, beyond human understanding. This ending is very reminiscent, in my opinion, of childhood's end. Mankind's evolution is forced upon them by a different race of beings, and ultimately they move beyond the physical world into a higher plane of existence.

27:07 What's distinct about blood music, however, is that the invader in this case takes the form of a disease created by mankind itself. This falls into a common trope in science fiction, where humankind, through our lack of forethought, is ultimately our own self-destructor. It has to be addressed, however, that the new sites evolved into a race of beings just as intelligent, if not more so, than our own.

27:36 Yes, they are alive because of us, but other organisms are responsible for our continued existences. What in the end justifies our survival over their own? Humanity is, of course, not eliminated entirely in the end, merely our form changes. Humanity in the end is preserved, but not in the way we would have imagined, but perhaps far more concretely than we could have ever done alone.

28:04 The final lines of the book are: Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten. It was in the blood, the flesh, and now it is forever. Blood Music is a great read, but it definitely feels like a science fiction book that was written in the 80s. It covers concepts and ideas which we have seen explored a lot of times since, but still has its own way of exploring those ideas.

28:28 All in all, Blood Music is a compelling science fiction thriller with some pretty awesome and mind-blowing concepts and an edge of post-apocalyptic horror. Thanks so much. Evolution built advanced minds not once, but at least twice, gifting them not only to mammals and their kin, but also to cephalopods, and especially to the animal at the apex of ocean intelligence, the octopus.

29:23 These animals so unlike us that most aliens we imagine in our fantasies about outer space have more in common with humans. But there is no denying their sentience. I believe the first aliens we encounter will rise to greet us from the sea. The Mountain in the Sea is a science fiction book by Ray Naylor that focuses on events surrounding the Kandao archipelago in Vietnam.

29:49 This had been a place where strange stories persisted even before the Dianema Corporation bought out the entirety of it, creating a research facility and displacing the locals. In this world, corporations have more power and wealth than many countries. The intersection of technology, capitalism, and surveillance culture has led to a society where corporate goals override national interests and ethical considerations.

30:16 Problematic individuals are often discarded in this world. Slavery persists, and new forms of intelligence, both artificial and biological, are emerging and challenging the definitions of consciousness and autonomy. Keep in mind this video will have spoilers for the mountain in the sea. The main events begin when biologist Dr.

30:38 Ha Nilyan is brought to Kand Dao. Something is occurring there that might not have occurred in any other place in the world. There is evidence that in the waters surrounding Kandao, a new species has developed, and possibly possesses a form of structured symbolic communication. Initially, Ha is not fully convinced.

30:58 She recognizes that octopuses are highly intelligent and individual, but she also knew that there were barriers to them ever becoming able to form conscious awareness, meaningful communication, or a true culture. The largest of those barriers was lifespan. Most octopuses only lived for two years max.

31:17 Smaller species only a season. Coldwater octopuses who lived deeper in the ocean had longer lives but were less intelligent than their closer to shore cousins. She knew that if it was possible, it would develop in octopuses that lived closer to the shore. Another major barrier was their biology. After mating, males die soon after, and females often starve to death guarding their eggs.

31:43 Even if they survived, their offspring typically drift far from their birthplace, severing any chance of generational continuity. This means young octopuses grow up without parents, without mentors, without any stable community. For most species, there's simply no opportunity to pass down knowledge, neither across generations nor within them.

32:05 They live short, solitary lives and start as blank slates. The only inheritance they receive is genetic, instincts, and physical traits. The book draws attention to how radically different that is from humans. Our culture depends on shared memory, language, and social structures that accumulate over time.

32:26 If every generation had to relearn everything from scratch, civilization wouldn't exist. Even sites like Octopolis and Octlantis, real locations where octopuses gather seasonally, don't necessarily indicate true culture. They must be anomalies, not evidence of sustained social learning. Ha believes that while octopuses are undeniably smart, their evolutionary path may have locked them out of the kind of consciousness that builds civilizations.

32:58 Kandao is fertile ground for rumors. Everyone who lives here, she corrected herself, who lived here, I mean, saw ghost. When I visited here as a child, you couldn't speak to a local without ghost coming into the conversation. The ancestral spirit of Vo Ta combing her long black hair in Hangduang Cemetery.

33:20 The starved dead wandering in the shadows between the trees. The stories go on and on. Too many people died in the prisons here for their not-to-be stories of ghost. The residents lived in a world half composed of spirits. This archipelago is ripe for weird cryptozoology. The potential sentience of the octopuses of Kandao is not the only focus of this book.

33:42 A major focus of this book is AI. The research team is led by Evrim, who is an invention of the Dianema Corp, specifically the scientist Dr. Minervu Del Tyrchan. Evrem, whose name means evolution, was built based on the structure of many human minds, including Dr. Minervu Del Tyrchan herself, at its core.

34:05 He was believed to be the only artificially created conscious being ever. The world had reacted negatively to Evrem's creation, leading Dr. Minervu Deltier Chan to place him on the archipelago out of sight. Ostensibly, Evrem was created to be human, but in reality, Minervi Doltier Chan had created him to surpass man.

34:28 He was a being of perfect recall, of perfect memory. Happening simultaneously to the events on Kondao are two other storylines which eventually all connect. Rustim, a programmer and hacker, is hired to hack a neural network, an AI mind. But this particular mind he's been hired by a mysterious group to hack is the most complex he has ever encountered.

34:51 Initially, he does not think he will be able to hack it. The company that has hired him is mysterious and elusive, willing to kill to protect their secrets. Over time, Rustim comes to admire the construction and the perfection of the mind he is attempting to hack. It's comparable to a human mind, but more elegant and clearly constructed as Roostim identifies what he metaphorically refers to as its seams.

35:16 The other storyline, and one of the most interesting parts of the entire book, revolves around an automated fishing vessel called the Seawolf, run by trafficked slaves and hired mercenary guards. We see the events on board through the eyes of Captive Echo. The ship's AI Mine worked based on pure logic.

35:35 Its objective was to fish and to serve the needs of the corporation who had built it and illegally allowed it to function with the use of slaves. Over time, Ako witnesses the madness of the ship's mine, especially when its objective is initially threatened by Alaskan pirates. The AI mind of the ship showed them no mercy.

35:55 The shudder of impact. Aka was crawling across the floor, not thinking, moving to the port side window. Have to see. Have to know. The sea wolf's spotlights played across the writhing chop. There, off the portside, dark shapes of men in the water, the gray ship slipping under, sides staved in. Rammed them, so daring, desperate, something a human would do.

36:23 A pale face looked up out of the sea, black bearded and wide-eyed. A chatter of bullets from the sea wolf's gone whale pushed it down into the red water, the recoillous rifle hammered in fury, like a madman who continues to stab a corpse. The wheelhouse of the gray ship tore away in flame. Madness, not logic.

36:45 Moments later, the gray ship went under. Acho saw its shadow for a moment descending, the fire in its wheelhouse still burning beneath the water, like an oil lamp behind waxed paper, then gone. Madness. The opaque hardened glass of the wheelhouse, its reinforced steel plate door. Beyond it, the mind ill with its economic logic, its production calculations, the mind also full of rage and violence.

37:15 What monsters have we made? There was more than cold logic in the mind of the ship. There was anger, full on rage at having been attacked. It didn't simply subdue the enemy, it annihilated them. Also on board the ship is another enslaved person named Sun, a man originally from the Kandao Archipelago.

37:38 It's through him that Eiko learns of Kandao, and the monster said to reside there. Tales of mysterious deaths and unexplained sightings near the shores. Back on the island, Ha and the research team are observing the local octopuses through underwater drones, and they eventually witness the use of what appears to be symbolic language by the octopuses.

38:01 Eventually, Ha attempts communication by recreating a symbol on the shore. There was a response, but it was not the one they wanted. This symbol was rough, hasty. The edges were blurred here and there by a jutting or misplaced piece of material. But its shape was clear enough. The arrow directed away from the water up the beach.

38:26 Its tip was tilted to the left. It pointed exactly at the hotel. This symbol too was made mostly of darker rocks, seaweed, and driftwood. But there were other objects mixed in. Ha bent down. Among the seaweed, driftwood, and stones were pieces of the submersible drone sent into the shipwreck. The one that had been destroyed.

38:52 The submersible had been torn apart. Pieces of its hull and internal workings were scattered inside the symbol. And there were other things. A dive mask, scuba tanks, a spear gun, a glove. And Ha almost did not recognize it right away. It was crusted with barnacles and green vertide so that it did not stand out from the other objects under the light of the moon.

39:21 Waning now from full for the last several days, but still bright enough in the sky. Of all the objects, it was placed with the most care near the tip of the arrow that pointed back to the hotel. Staring up, unseeing into the sky, a human skull. It was complete, with all its teeth in place, and its lower jaw hinged open, looking up as if agape at the beauty of the stars overhead.

39:52 The crescent-shaped symbol represents the barrier of the octopus's domain. The arrow pointing outward formed it into one obvious message. Stay out. Before Dianema came, there were tales of divers going missing underwater, being found drowned with all of their equipment removed, stories of gashings and stabbings along the shore, shadows arising from the ocean.

40:20 These creatures were hostile. But that is the point. We were hostile first. This is a story about communication, the differences between different forms of intelligence. To the octopus, we were the monsters from the shore, lumbering beasts of rigid flesh, incapable of the silent fluid language of gesture and hue.

40:48 Our machines tore through reefs like storms, our nets strangled their kin, our lights pierced the sanctuary of their dark. To them we were not explorers, we were invaders. And so they learned, adapted, and remembered. Ha realizes that this has been going on for quite some time. Convergent evolution. They continue to observe and attempt communication with the octopuses, eventually witnessing an individual octopus who they name Shapesinger, communicating a poem to others gathered around it.

41:26 The octopuses use their body's ability to fluidly shift color to create representative symbols of language on their skin. The team also observes that the octopuses cooperate with each other, and they have culture. Eventually they find a kind of altar with thirty human skulls within. The octopuses had drawn on them using ink, demonstrating an ability to preserve their symbols and knowledge beyond producing the symbols on their bodies or forming them in debris.

41:58 The bone was deeply etched all over, and the etched forms were filled with a dark substance. The lines stood out black against the white of bone, interlocking shapes in which Ha saw several she recognized as having flashed across the skin of one of the octopuses. Here, though, there was no linear sequence, just forms fitted within forms, a pattern of mesh symbols laced across the curves of Maxilla, Foramen, Septum, each skull slotted into the carved coral wall as a work of careful art, each different from the others.

42:36 On board the Seawolf, a mutiny occurs. The slave workers kill the guards and threaten the ship. Without them knowing, the AI mine seals off all essential, vulnerable areas, cuts the food supply, and then the water. It turns out that the guards had mainly been for show. The crew could either work or be starved and dehydrated.

43:00 The ship had one objective, to meet the fishing quota. But there was more. Because of what they did, the ship continued to starve them, giving them half food rations even once they started working. This was making the crew weaker. Eiko, who had realized that the ship operates on a system of economic logic, attempts to reason with the sea wolf.

43:25 It appears to work, as the sea wolf provides them with double rations that night. Throughout the book, we see that sometimes automated fishing vessels like the sea wolf will sometimes come up to the shores of Kandao in an attempt to fish the rich waters. They were always shot down by the island's defenses.

43:45 At the end of the book, this is where the sea wolf is headed as well. Rostem knows that whether or not he hacks the mind or not, the mysterious group who hired him will still attempt to kill him. The mind he is attempting to hack. Isn't just a program, it's a palace, intricate and vast. He eventually does find a portal into the mind left by its creator, a pathway to its center that could control it, but he refuses to hand it over to the people who hired him.

44:15 He recognizes its beauty and its uniqueness. This mind, Evram, is not something that should be controlled. He kills the woman who hired him before she can kill him first, but not before she tells him that he is making a mistake. Evram is a monster, she claims. When the sea wolf reaches Kandao, it is attacked.

44:37 It has come too close to the shores of the archipelago. It is obliterated by the defenses. Aiko and Sun find a raft released by the Sea Wolf itself, perhaps in a final gesture of mercy as it sink below the depths. Eiko and Sun hide from a security drone that's executing the remaining crew, but in the chaos, Sun is killed.

45:00 As Eiko drifts, he sees something watching from the depths. Eyes, many eyes, staring from the dark water. Evrem around this time reveals that he had a vision of Rustem the very day that he had met Ha. In it, Rustem had told him the portal in his mind meant to control him would be destroyed. Evrem believes that Dr.

45:23 Minervo Del Tyr Chan, who has come to the island at this point, wants to shut him down because that portal, her link to his mind, has been shut down. He believed that she intended to kill him. From the perspective of the octopuses, they are being attacked by the humans, so they attack the place where they know that humans are, the hotel complex.

45:44 Later, Dr. Minervo Del Tyrchan is found dead, killed by the octopuses. Her death wasn't vengeful. It was simply practical. She was in the way. To the octopuses, humans are not inherently important. They are indifferent towards us. Killing her was as inconsequential to them as a human killing a fish or swatting an annoying fly.

46:13 It wasn't malevolent evil, as in the tales of the Kandao monster, merely indifference. When humans were in the way, they were removed from the equation. In reverse, humans did likewise. But for the first time, something was happening differently here on Kandao. The octopus they had named Shapesinger was different.

46:38 Ha had bonded with her, forming a fragile bridge of mutual recognition. She realizes that while they had been watching and studying the octopuses, Shapesinger had been studying them all along, moving along as she willed, silently gathering data. She must have hidden in the pool when the others left, Evram said.

47:02 But why? To try to speak to us, Ha said. And it's not a pool. It's her submersible. It's her research station. It is her outpost in our world. She has been watching us from the beginning, and now she felt as if something were in the room with her, had been in here with her for a while now. And not only from there, she has gone anywhere she wanted to, observing us, and we never saw her.

47:31 This isn't a story of a perfect utopian unity between octopuses and humans. It's a story about the difficulty of communication, the many ways in which it can go wrong, and a story about the horror of indifference, the indifference of those who run the companies that set slave ships in motion, the indifference of humanity towards the other life on this planet that we make extinct.

47:59 But in the end of this story, we do see that a seed was planted, a single link bridging two species, a connection between two individuals, Ha and Shapesinger. From there, something else could be built. Evram, who as I mentioned earlier, was built based on the minds of many humans, reveals at the very end that the core of his consciousness was based on the doctors.

48:24 That meant that he had knowledge of his own creation. He could make more of himself. Evram is more than a singular mind. He is a seed, a self-replicating consciousness, potentially, a species in the making. In the epilogue of the story, Aiko drifts ashore with Sun's lifeless body. On the raft released by Seawolf, he reads that the ship had been operated by a subsidiary of Diana McCorp, the same corporation behind the Kondo project.

48:58 This clearly relates to a metaphor that is presented earlier in the book. Corporations functioning like octopuses. An octopus has a central brain, but each of its limbs also contains neurons that allow them to act semi-independently, even without direction or sometimes awareness from the central brain.

49:21 In the same way, corporations like the Dianema Corp operate through many branching subsidiaries, each acting on its own logic. As a result, Dianema was simultaneously producing the slave ships and destroying them. The corporation wasn't acting out of contradiction, but out of fragmented, self-replicating logic that doesn't require consistency, only momentum.

49:48 The Mountain in the Sea makes you rethink what it means to be intelligent and to communicate. The octopuses of Kandao show that intelligence doesn't always look like ours, and their ability to develop culture and symbolism makes us question assumptions that we make about non-human minds. The novel also explores the consequences of unchecked technological and corporate power.

50:14 And also, just like the octopuses, Evram is driven by more than just logic. He feels, he adapts, and he challenges human ideas of what it means to be truly alive and conscious. This was a pretty fantastic book, and it also made me think of Vilno's movie Arrival, which is also an amazing work of science fiction about communication between species.

50:35 You should really check that out if you haven't seen that. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe, and thank you so much for watching. Enough to make it clear that there's life in here. This is going to shake them up badly, though. Life embedded in the accidental computations of Wang's carpet, with no possibility of ever relating to the world outside.

51:02 This was an affront to Carter Zimmerman's whole philosophy. Nature had evolved organisms as divorced from reality as the inhabitants of the most inward-looking polis. Where was the privileged status of the physical universe, the clear distinction between reality and illusion? And after 300 years of waiting for good news from the diaspora, how would they respond to this back on Earth?

51:52 With AI content on the rise, YouTube is recommending human narrators less and less. If you appreciate my content, consider hitting the like button and subscribing. Thanks so much, guys. Greg Egan's Diaspora is one of the most ambitious and mind-bending science fiction novels ever published. It came out in 1997 and originally started as a short story called Wang's Carpets.

52:17 That story ended up as a chapter in the novel. Diaspora is dense, smart, and way ahead of its time. This is hard science fiction to the core. Egan invents entire new branches of physics. He reimagines life, consciousness, time, space, even what it means to be human. In the spirit of dense epics like Dune, this book does not ease you in.

52:42 There is a glossary in the back that explains various terms, including Cossack theory, which is a major part of this book. And I'll talk about that in just a second. By the year 2975, humanity isn't one species anymore. It's split into three groups: the Fleshers, the biological humans, including the statics, the unchanged baseline humans, that most closely resemble original humans.

53:11 And there are all sorts of other modified humans, underwater people, people who've hacked their genes, and dream apes who are humans that have given up speech entirely to live closer to nature. These modified humans were known as exuberants. Different exuberants have made modifications to all kinds of characteristics.

53:35 Some have been simple, pragmatic adaptations for new diets or habitats, digestive, metabolic, respiratory, muscular skeletal, images flashed up from different points on the tree, amphibious, winged, and photosynthetic exuberance, close-ups of modified teeth, diagrams of altered metabolic pathways. Orlando rose from his seat and started drawing curtains.

53:58 The contrast of the images improved. Often, habitat changes also demanded neural modifications to provide appropriate new instincts. No one can thrive in the ocean, for example, without the right hardwired reflexes. And then there are the Gleiseners, who are AIs in robotic bodies that live mostly in space.

54:18 They care about the physical world and experience time like regular humans. And then finally, there are the citizens, these are digital minds that live entirely in simulated worlds. Some of them might be uploaded humans, but most of them are not. Most of them were born in code. They live in virtual environments, they don't have bodies, and they can think hundreds of times faster than any flesher.

54:42 In Konishi, every homeborn citizen was grown from a mindseed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mindseeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the Paulus founders had invented the Shaper programming language to recreate the essential processes of neuroembryology in software.

55:08 Most of the book follows these citizens, especially one named Yatima, who isn't born in the normal sense, but generated as an orphan by the Kalnichi Polis. Yatima grows up in just a few days of real-world time. Everything in this society changes when a Gleisner named Carpal detects a catastrophic cosmic event.

55:32 A gamma ray burst from a binary neutron star collapse. It shouldn't have happened for another 7 million years, according to the Cossack theory, which we mentioned earlier, but it happens fast. He had to get in touch with colleagues in the asteroid belt, show them the data, and talk through the possibilities calmly.

55:52 But if he was right, how long did the Fleshers have before Lacerta lit up with gamma rays 6,000 times brighter than the Sun? Carpo checked and rechecked the calculations, fitted curves to different variables, tried every known method of extrapolation. The answer was the same every time. Four days. An attempt is made to warn the Fleshers.

56:17 They try to get them to either upload into polises or at least get underground, but most fleshers don't listen. Then the gamma ray burst hits, wiping out Earth's entire atmosphere and nearly all life on the planet. This is a mass extinction event. The Gleisner robots and the citizens survive. Their tech was hardened against cosmic radiation.

56:40 Some of the fleshers survive as well and get uploaded after the disaster, but for the most part, biological humanity is done. The main story kicks off after that. Citizens from a polis called Carter Zimmerman, focused on real-world physics, realize that the Kozak theory is flawed. They launch the diaspora.

57:01 A thousand copies of their polis are sent out across the galaxy in order to gather data, to learn what they can, and try to understand how the universe really works. From this point on, the book follows different versions of the same characters because each copy of the Carter Zimmermann polis has the same cast at launch, but as they travel, they evolve differently.

57:23 Some explore exotic physics, some make contact with alien intelligences, some even cross into entirely different universes. It's less about a single story arc and more about the question, how far can intelligence go when it's not limited by biology? One of the wildest parts of diaspora is how it handles time.

57:44 Citizens experience reality way faster than Fleshers, as I mentioned earlier, about 800 times faster. That means that they can live hundreds of subjective years in just one year of real time, but they can also slow down, stop, or tune their consciousness however they want. One polis even slows its perception down enough to watch continents move.

58:06 General perception is significantly different for citizens. Linear, like language or math, information that's transferred like data packets, and gestalt, like seeing or smelling. All of the info arrives at once and is processed subconsciously. They also use something called tags to instantly share identities, ideas, or entire datasets.

58:30 In this book, Egan isn't just writing to speculate about future tech. Diaspora is wrestling with what it means to be alive when you're no longer a body. If you can redesign your thoughts, if you can stop time, clone yourself, or become pure code, where do values come from? There's a part in this book where characters discuss why even do a diaspora at all?

58:57 Why not simulate a diaspora? What does it mean to care about anything? If we don't need to spread our genes, what replaces that drive? Is it curiosity? Is it joy? Is it duty? Egan doesn't hand you the answers either, he just shows you what the questions might look like thousands of years from now, if we survive long enough to ask them, that is.

59:21 Diaspora is definitely hard science fiction. It's not light reading. As typical of a lot of hard science fiction, especially older science fiction, there are no easy emotional hooks. But in this one in particular, there are also no chosen one arcs, no clear heroes or villains. It's all technical, philosophical.

59:40 It's not afraid to make you feel small either. But it also shows a future where intelligence doesn't fade, it continues to evolve, it reaches and learns and becomes something totally new. If you've ever wondered what humanity might look like after biology, post-biology, after Earth, and after the universe itself, then Diaspora tries to answer that, or at least map out the first few steps.

1:00:06 Transhumanism is a very interesting idea in science fiction. It shows up all over the place, and this is one of the most interesting explorations of the idea that I've read in a long time. We tend to imagine that a species evolving equals a species becoming smarter. But scientifically, that's obviously not the case.

1:01:25 The most successful species on this planet are not intelligent in the slightest. We are still used to seeing depictions of alien civilizations that are different from us, but still in some way fundamentally like us. Operating based on at least some form of reason, operating based on some form of comprehension.

1:01:48 We assume that in order for a species to travel the stars, intelligence is necessary. So therefore we assume that most, if not all, space-faring civilizations would be, to some degree, intelligent. But if we truly think about this reasonably, wouldn't exactly the opposite be true? The human brain is a tremendous resource cost for our body.

1:02:15 Other animals don't have to worry about growing a huge brain so they can put resources in other places, like reproduction, which is technically the goal of life. When we talk about what makes a species successful, the answer is not intelligence. Plenty of intelligent animals have gone extinct. A good measurement of the success of a species is the population and the quality of life, and we all know that humanity has a unique propensity for suffering, that is thanks to intelligence.

1:02:45 So the blind side, spoilers ahead by the way, provides an interesting and rather devastating idea. What if humanity is just a fluke? Now, I should say that intelligence is not precisely the issue here. The issue is self-awareness specifically. A creature could potentially be highly intelligent while completely and utterly lacking consciousness.

1:03:15 Completely and utterly lacking self-awareness. So, in essence, a step is cut out. Consciousness gets in the way. Consciousness slows the process. I waste energy and processing power, self-obsessus to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it. Scramblers are more parsimonious, with simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains, deprived of tools, of their ship, even parts of their own metabolism.

1:03:51 They think rings around you, they hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they're saying. They turn your own cognition against itself, they travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness. So the scramblers who we encounter in the blind sight are the first extraterrestrials that humankind has ever come into contact with, and they're not conscious at all.

1:04:18 But they have several orders of magnitude, more brain power than human beings. But they use that brain power to operate their exceptionally complex sensory organs and musculature system. They're extremely fast, extremely reactive, and formidable. So, an interesting concept that this book introduced me to is the concept of the Chinese room.

1:04:42 Now, this book itself recognizes that the actual idea of a Chinese room is actually a fallacy, but for the purposes of understanding this section of the story, the concept is adequate. Imagine a man in a room. And through a hole in a wall, he is being given pieces of paper with symbols on them. And he also has access to a database of symbols just like the ones that come through the wall, and rules that tell him how to put those symbols together.

1:05:11 But the point is, he still doesn't have any idea what all these symbols are or what information they contain. He only knows that when he encounters a certain symbol, he is to respond with this set of rules involving this set of symbols. Now, if you've ever heard of the Turing Test, this idea was originally thought to be the counter to the Turing test.

1:05:34 Now this story brings up this idea in an extremely creepy context. For a while, the crew of the spaceship Theseus are attempting to communicate with the alien vessel. They refer to it as Rorschach, and the alien vessel is responding to them in a human voice. So eventually they realize that the voice that they're talking to actually is a Chinese room.

1:05:58 But what's really Creepy about it is how closely this Chinese room resembles actual comprehension, actual understanding. Oh right, Rorschach said suddenly. We get it now. You don't think there's anyone here, do you? You've got some high-priced consultant telling you there's nothing to worry about. Jack was deep in the forest.

1:06:26 We'd lost most of the tactical overlays to reduce Bod. In the dim visible light, Rorschach's great rigid spines, each the size of a skyscraper, hashed a nightmare view on all sides. The feed stuttered as Bates struggled to keep the beam aligned. Consensus painted walls in airspace with arcane telemetry.

1:06:45 I had no idea what any of it meant. You think we're nothing but a Chinese room, Rorschach sneered. Jack stumbled towards collision, grasping for something to hang on to. Your mistake, Theseus. The ship Rorschach itself is also terrifying. It's described as like a giant crown of thorns, twisted and dark and unreflective, and just like way too tangled to ever actually go on somebody's head, and also absolutely giant with spikes the size of skyscrapers.

1:07:15 So the combination of the image of that vessel and the creepy, unnerving voice that's being transmitted from it makes for really great horror, in my opinion. And this book has other really awesome elements of horror. For instance, in this book, vampires actually existed at some point during human history.

1:07:35 They were an offshoot of humans that became predatory towards other humans, but they also had this ability to go into hibernation for long periods of time. So actually, in this series, they're able to, through biological engineering, bring back vampires and actually create hybrid humans that actually have some of the hibernation abilities of those vampires.

1:07:57 One of the crew members of the ship Theseus, Saresti, is actually a vampire. And he makes the other crew members very nervous because at any time he could revert back to his primal instincts and decide to prey upon them. So not only is there this ominous extraterrestrial threat from the outside, there's also a potential threat on the inside.

1:08:20 This book also goes into other concepts like selfhood and the idea of consciousness being uploaded into a cloud. It has many of the great elements that I really just love in science fiction. So I definitely would recommend this book to you guys if you enjoy these elements and stories as well. There's also the sequel, Echopraxia, which I plan on covering at some point in the future as well.

1:08:44 Thank you guys so much for watching. Make sure you like and subscribe for more Quinn's ideas. Of a world in which we've created an entire class of disposable people and forced them into servitude. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is obviously one of Philip K. Dick's classic books, but it often gets overshadowed by its adaptation.

1:09:57 But the interesting fact is, this book, thematically, says something fundamentally different from the Blade Runner movie. Essentially, the movie is saying something to the effect of, the androids are really just like us. The book, however, is much more nuanced. The concept of empathy is brought up over and over in this book.

1:10:20 What is empathy? Is empathy necessary? Is empathy even real? We learn early on that the main difference between androids and humans is that humans can feel empathy while androids supposedly cannot. Curiously, we carry this fact in our head while also seeing the humans in the story also not behave with very much empathy, and there's certain humans, in fact, like Phil Resch who behave far more soullessly than the androids.

1:10:49 And yet we are still shown again and again cases of androids clearly not possessing empathy. Like for instance, the spider dissecting scene. Like I said, most animals have gone extinct in this world, so living creatures are very rare. You have the character Isidore who finds a spider and he shows it to the androids who he's helping out.

1:11:11 And then he's horrified when the android Pris dissects the spider right in front of him. The android doesn't necessarily behave maliciously, it simply just does not feel empathy for this living creature and is fine with cutting off its legs one by one to see if it can still walk. So a big theme in this book revolves around examining the artificial mechanisms by which we engage with our own emotions and our own humanity.

1:11:37 So I mentioned the empathy box, but they also have devices which allow them to dial in specific moods. So rather than letting emotions come and go naturally, emotions are now delegated to a machine, just as empathy is now delegated to a machine. Another aspect to this is there is want and desire in their society, but there is no fulfillment.

1:12:02 Having a living animal in this society is seen as a great status symbol. So everyone wants a living animal, but they're very, very expensive. So most people settle with electric animals, so that's where the title comes from. Do androids dream of electric sheep? And there's more to that title that we'll talk about in just a second.

1:12:22 The main character, Deckard, is a bounty hunter, and bounty hunters hunt down androids who have escaped their masters on Mars and come to Earth to hide. And he's doing the specific job that he's on in this book, hunting down the Nexus 6 models, because he wants to buy a living goat for his wife. So all genuine human emotion is delegated to a machine, and everyone is obsessed with acquiring what are essentially meaningless objects.

1:12:53 And even empathy is reduced to something that is ultimately false, something that is ultimately artificial, and in the real world, humans don't seem to engage very empathetically with each other. So if you've noticed the similarities between what I've described in this book and the modern world, then you're not alone in noticing that.

1:13:15 I can't help but think of the internet when I think of the empathy box and the idea of this artificial way of engaging with empathy. Like you'll see a children's hospital burn down, one like equals one prayer, and you got all these people liking it, and something about that artificial expression of empathy engages a similar area in their brain so they don't feel the need to be empathetic in their real life.

1:13:43 Because I like this post online. It's a very weird phenomenon, but something that definitely happens. So I don't think Philip K. Dick is necessarily saying androids are just like us. He's saying that there is something about humans that is different, the fact that we have the capacity for empathy, but he's also giving us a warning that basically says we shouldn't become like them.

1:14:09 That on this evolutionary journey that we're on, we should not lose our empathy for each other and for life in general. So let's break down the title of this book. So, as I mentioned, the only thing people really want in this society is to acquire these electric animals. So the question in the title is essentially asking, what do androids want?

1:14:38 What do they desire? Are they the same as our desires? For humans, empathy is a choice. You can choose to be a monster like Phil Resch, or you can choose to be a better person. Now, this book is full of really interesting concepts, and I want to dive more into some of them in other videos, but right now I really want to get to something that I found extremely interesting.

1:15:03 This book brings into question what even is real? What does artificial mean? Does it matter if anything is artificial? This is such an interesting book, and a little bit of a confusing book because you end up questioning every aspect of it, to the point where by the end, I don't even think it's clear whether or not Deckard himself is human or android.

1:15:27 Yes, it is pretty much established that androids can't feel empathy. But empathy can be a choice, and it is implied that the androids might be able to feel empathy for similar androids to themselves. So if that's possible, then maybe empathy in general is possible. But I think what's important is it's making us ponder the question: does it really matter?

1:15:54 And I think that's the point. Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't, but that's up to us as society to figure that out for ourselves. So at the end of the book, you have Deckard encountering a frog out in the desert. He brings it home, he gives it to his wife, and then she tells him that it's electric. And also a kind of creepy addition to this is that we have no idea how that frog got into the desert.

1:16:21 An electric frog just doesn't appear in the desert, someone had to put it there. That aside, at the end of the book, although the frog is electric, Deckert's wife begins to care for it. She orders a terrarium for it and fake flies for it. So ultimately, it doesn't matter whether the frog is electric or living.

1:16:44 So in future videos, we'll talk about the empathy boxes and the religion of Mercerism that is surrounding them. We'll also dive more into the concept of a disposable race of people and compare and trust how it's handled in this book to other science fiction stories, because a lot of other stories have also done this concept.

1:17:02 So this novel is actually quite short, but it's also very dense, and it's written in a way that might confuse certain people. So if you're not used to reading Philip K. Dick, you might be thrown off slightly by the writing style, but just know you don't have to understand it the first time you read it.

1:17:19 The book is meant to make you ponder for a long time on certain concepts, and even hardcore Philip K. Dick fans will admit that Philip K. Dick does at times kind of have a strange writing style. That doesn't make it any less enjoyable for me, but I'm also a weirdo. So thank you guys so much for watching.

1:17:35 Make sure you like and subscribe for more Quinn's ideas. Tell me what science fiction books you'd like to see me cover next on this YouTube channel. Now that brings me to another short story that has been sitting in my head for a while, Lena by Quantum. I've talked about Quantum before on this channel, especially with There Is No Antimetics Division, a book I called one of the scariest things I had read in years.

1:17:55 That short story was terrifying because it imagined something hidden underneath reality. Something the human mind literally could not hold on to. I also recently had the chance to talk with Quantum about the book and some of the ideas behind it, and that conversation will be coming soon. But the short story Lena is terrifying in a completely different way.

1:18:14 It's about a consciousness turned into a product. A mind you how the mind is started and endlessly we're not until it starts to feel like something on Lena will be on the later.