Dream Dance

Day 361 - Tools, Tanzen, and the Recursive Mind

Doul wants me to give three presentations. "Everyone's interested in your work," he droned. I suppose that's true, and there's a lot of time to fill at the conference, but three talks seems rather excessive. For one I figure I can talk about methodology and equipment -- that hardly requires preparation. I just have to make a few notes about things I found helpful and challenging and I can ad lib most of it from there. Not sure how much of a point to make about my power systems, but that's more politics. Never my strength.

For the second talk I figure I can introduce everyone to the Tanzen I have come to know, and narrate some videos. Shell and Sen, and the maternal relationship; Edith and Eddie and the apprenticeship; Tip and Tilty and Minty and all the pups and their strange play, so human-like and yet so alien. I can get by with a long Q & A period on that one. I don't need to stress the "how we're different / how we're the same" angle -- everyone else will be thinking that themselves.

I do need to have at least one scholarly paper. With all my negative results I'd like to weave that into a story that suggests a new direction for research, and that will put me on solid footing when I petition for a more aggressive program. I think I'm going with technology, since that's one of the ambiguous areas that most people in other fields can relate to.

Roughly speaking there are four types of technology (I don't like the traditional word "levels" since that implies a ladder, and these are not mutually exclusive). They are Incremental, Predictive, Recursive, and Analytical. For this discussion technology can be roughly thought of in terms of tool use.

Incremental tool use is what we normally think of as instinct, although it can be tradition, folklore or rules of thumb. It just means any tool use that comes about by incremental improvement, where small (normally accidental) changes are perpetuated because they give a better result. Termites build arches, no doubt because the behaviors that made arches worked better than other behaviors as the nests got big. Grain farming in early human communities probably underwent a long period of accident and regional variation that also altered as the plant species adapted to cultivation.

Predictive tool use is what we normally call forethought. Given a set of possible tools, a predictive tool user picks the right tool or combination of tools for the situation based on what they want to accomplish. Although humans tend to be good at this, it's an intuition we have to learn. It takes a tremendous amount of experience to be able to apply this skill well in a specific field, and even humans who are predictive in one domain may grope blindly in other areas of endeavor. Our great ape relatives are notoriously bad at it (but perhaps because they lack training). Gadget birds are savants -- proficient at predictive tool use and markedly little else. Crabs are probably good at this, although they live so much in an environment of their own creation that it's hard to tell, and controlled experiments are hard to come by.

Recursive tool use means using tools to make other tools. Many animals may make tools, but only a few make tools expressly for the purpose of making other tools. Humans certainly do, and there are precious few other examples. Crabs make tools that make other tools, and yet again their own environment is so proscribed that everything they do in some way supports the technology that they live inside of.

Analytical tool use means having a theory about tool use. The analytical tool user has a formula for how a specific tool can be used, and applies the formula to find the right tool or build a new one with the right characteristics. For me this is where the conventional model breaks down, because there is no way to define analytical tool use outside of language and its application. We know that Crabs will build things with different capabilities, mostly matching their usage, but does that mean they have a theory? Did they use an equation to determine how big to make a certain part? We can't know because we can't talk to them. Since we can only talk to humans, this one's a bit unfair.

How do the Tanzen stack up? The recursive form of tool use, in particular, is a marker of sentience. It requires thinking not just about a proximate goal in the world, but about an intermediate, imagined goal. Such reasoning implies knowing about one's self in relation to a hypothetical world. Tanzen are definitely predictive -- that's actually characteristic of how they interact with their crafts, certainly far above Gadget bird level. I believe they may be recursive too, although that's somewhat harder to demonstrate. It tends to border on subjective, and since we cannot get inside their minds and they cannot explain their thought processes, it's just going to take a lot more observation.

Day 357 - Keep Slapping Those Paddles

Crab cities are built in circles. If you look down on a Crab city it's easy to pick out a circular shape, but no matter how large or small the feature you find it keeps going in both scales. Any circle will be a part of a related cluster of other circles, and if you look wider you'll see that they make up a larger circle. That one will just be a fractional part of a larger circle, and so forth almost as far as you want to go. Likewise any circle you find will be broken up into smaller arcs and sub-circles, and so on down to smaller and smaller scales. Crab cities -- and in fact the whole Crab world is nothing but a multi-level fractal of circles and circular arcs.

The core of this pattern is the Crab arena. Arenas are basin-like depressions of various sizes that dot the landscape in another interesting power-law relationship. Early in the understanding of Crab society these were thought to be sports venues -- places where Crabs would compete, see and be seen. Pretty close, and yet, again, totally wrong.

Crabs collect in arenas all day long, every day, and yet there are peaks of activity just after dawn and just before dusk. New arrivals spiral towards the center of the dish and those who have for one reason or another exhausted their experience there spiral out the opposite direction. The plethora of arenas that dot the typical Crab city are always teeming hubs of activity. Due to the bowl shape, anywhere on the sides of the arena all the Crabs can see the ones in the center.

The center has paddle rigs. They were believed to be the first way that Crabs might communicate with each other. Individuals reaching the center of the arena would slap the paddles, flipping them from up to down, left to right, in complex, fast-moving patterns. In fact, it turned out, pairs of Crabs would line up and slap paddles in parallel -- both slapping patterns in sync until they diverged and, perhaps, one of the two was the victor. Although most of the activity was pure chaos to human eyes, in the few cases where paddle slapping was a simple contest the winner was obvious by other Crabs crowding around them as they left, like celebrities trying to leave a football pitch.

Expedition personnel spent many, many hours working on paddle slapping trying to decode the hidden language. But suppose that was the case -- Crabs talked but only by paddle slapping -- if all talking had to be done by whoever could reach the center of arenas before and after work, their lives would be far more limited. But there was none. It took quite a cogitative leap to see how Crabs could work without basic communication, one that has left us reeling.

I'd like to say that I anticipated that result, but I didn't. My work -- my real work -- was at least consistent with the true explanation. But I have to admit that I was as astounded as anyone else. I at least had that privilege to be present when Dr. Ellis turned the world upside down.

Day 353 - Exploration Team of One

Sigma 957 has seen many births, but not quite like this before. Chia po-Reevel trumpeted out a proud squall of kitten-like intensity. Yesterday, 2 hours after midnight, at 2.9 kg in mass and 48 cm in length. Mother and daughter are doing fine.

Most newborns don't cry for long. They calm quickly and spend several hours staring raptly as though they can see well. Perhaps they can. They have been through a peak experience: first a physical trial that stresses their endurance to the limit followed by nothing short of a total transformation of their experience of the world. They go from warm, wet, muffled and dark to their polar opposites in every dimension. The adult mind cannot conceive of a world so new.

We get small glimpses of it sometimes, when we understand a deep truth or feel or see things beyond our ability to categorize and explain. We may even claim to be "reborn" by it although it can only be a feeble echo of the life-changing event we cannot, no matter how we might strive, remember.

Welcome new explorer! Strike out boldly into these uncharted lands, and revel in this fantastic, frustrating, exhilarating and exhausting adventure of people, places and things. Learn their names and features and let the knowledge bear you to new and unexpected insights. We had to go to a different planet to find marvels to feed our epistemic thirst. You've discovered a new world just by being born.

Day 349 - Dead by Sunset, Burried by Dawn

I think there may have been a death in the southern town. My census modus alerted me about an individual who has disappeared from regular interactions. Records show his last appearance near his complex of dwellings, and it seems likely that he's died. He would have been about 38 seasons old which would make him relatively elderly for a Tanzen.

How do the Tanzen handle their dead? For humans this is a signature issue; it's from ancient burial sites we can infer the earliest occurrence of symbolic ritual and metaphoric thought. But it's a red herring. It's clear that the human obsession with death is a quirk -- some have said a bizarre tic -- of our mental evolution. For the human mind, mental life is eternal. We literally cannot imagine, or accept, our non-existence. Thus, when we contemplate death, we concoct fabulous fantasies about what our "lives" will be like after we die involving afterlives that either recapitulate our Earthly existence or some sort of Utopian parody of it.

However, even if a species lacked an insane intuition of immortality, they might have an experience of grief. Many non-human primates do. They might also project their "theory of mind" on to dead bodies as if they were alive. Treating a dead body "gently", as if it were able to feel pain or take offense, might be quite natural for a sentient species.

The Tanzen, as always, both defy and transcend these simple ideas. Dead bodies are generally disposed of in a manner that is both safe and rapid based on the environment. The river Tanzen I'm currently watching weight them with rocks and deposit them downstream of the town, usually under a small waterfall. The aerobic environment promotes rapid decomposition and any dangerous microbes are safely destroyed. The process is remarkably practical.

At the same time, dead bodies are only moved at night. I know that if I want to see where this individual is placed I'll need to ramp up night observation by the probe's sensors. It's not obviously rational, so it suggests that there is some deeper significance, or it could be an evolutionary accident. For me it's just another piece of a big, big puzzle.

Day 345 - I'll be Happy when Everything's Drier

I think the vomiting has mostly stopped. At least the diarrhea arrives with less painful cramping. I'm running assays when I have the strength and I haven't seen anything extra-terrestrial for nearly 12 hours. I will probably live, but for a while I'm going to wish that I wasn't.

It's my own fault of course. Two weeks after the end of the rains my little valley was a watery wonderland. I had rushing rivers, gurgling waterfalls, and a beautiful pool: crystal clear, fresh and smelling of mineral. Swimming in it was glorious, and it shouldn't have been a problem; I could have done that all day. But I didn't have a canteen with me, and the water seemed clean and sweet. So I drank some. Just a mouthful -- slightly less than a lethal dose of Anumgenic ameboids.

I'd seen them under the microscope. se-Isakov's team did early experiments showing how they could evade digestive acids by converting some of their enormous mass to protective mucus, and how, once in the gut, they set up shop turning partly digested (especially native) foods into toxins -- mostly ammonia. e2's can cope with them, but the e1's and myself have to be careful.

Don't. Drink. The water.

OK, I get it. I've learned my lesson. Now I'm going to sleep as much as I can and try not to dream about hurling.

Day 341 - Love Made Me a Crazy Person, Again

Earthdate: March 2, 2314. Monday. Paal talked at SEB: the Symposium on Extrasolar Biospheres. During the Q & A he kept using "I" instead of "we", as if he alone were the sole originator of the various ideas and approaches that he so cleverly summarized. I kept looking at him, expecting that at some point he'd acknowledge any other member of the team, but especially me, and especially when he talked about a particularly knotty problem that I -- not he or anyone else -- had cracked.

He never did.

After he spent an insufferably long time talking with a cute e2 girl who was way too interested in his (really our) data crunching methods for someone who didn't seem to know the first thing about it, we closed the connection and sat back in the tiny little dorm room we shared. Took him hours to realize I was upset; he probably only noticed when I didn't want sex.

When I explained he clucked and said, "You're so insecure." He started to lecture me on the fine points of auditing which I had known since I was six, so I curled up on the bed with my back to him. He eventually stopped, and, soon after, I began to cry. Vicious, choking sobs clawed at my throat and forced their way out of my clenched teeth. If I held them in my body shook with the effort; if I let them out they turned into wails. I couldn't stop them.

Paal never offered a word of comfort, never touched me. He just lay there, inert.

When my body quieted I stayed, fully clothed on top of the sheet, rigidly immobile. Perhaps I slept, some. When low morning sun came through the window Paal was gone. I pulled myself up and although stiff and lightheaded I felt calm resolve. At some point I had decided that this was all my problem. I had difficulty with trust, and with intimacy, and with working in a team. I did some stretching, made some coffee, and then got down to the intentional effort of making the research, and the results, the only thing I cared about.

If there was a way to send a message, instantaneous across the vast lightyears that separate me from her, older me from younger me, even if the enormous energy cost blew up a sun somewhere it might be worth it to send just two words:

Leave. Now.

Day 337 - Where the Wild Things Aren't

I was right about the planetary Roam. The hubs that were recreations of old Sol-system social hubs have all fallen into silence, while the Sigma 957 hubs are active and vital. One of the most fun is Known Unknowns where we map out what we know we don't yet know about the planet.

For example, we estimate there are 39 million species and that we have cataloged -- between probe and human activity -- 108,319, adding about 7 every day. At that rate we'll be done in only 15 thousand years. There's also about 1% error in that exact-sounding count due to occasional re-classifications and errors in sample collection.

On the other hand, we also know that most of the missing species are small, unicellular, or aquatic. For land animals larger than 10 kilograms we estimate the number remaining to be found at zero. There might be something big lurking somewhere, perhaps in remote caves or under rocks, but it's very unlikely. As descendants of ancient hunters, we and our machines are very good at spotting things moving through the brush.

Here's a couple of fun facts. The closest living relative to the Tanzen is a quadruped living a life very much like a terrestrial anteater. They are rare, have large ranges and live mostly on the northern continent. Ranandeep thinks they split from their Tanzen common ancestor no sooner than 12 million years ago. They are not very closely related.

Fact two: there are no large predators. The largest meat-eater specializing in larger prey is the Tuvan snake bird, an ambush predator topping out about 12-15 kilos, and they mostly eat fish. Mingrui will happily point out all the adaptations that larger plant eaters and muttavores have to defend against attack, but none of the actual predators that inspired those spines and horns and sprays. It's a puzzler. If she's right there may have been large-prey predators around up until perhaps 2 or 3 million years ago. Where did they go?

My guess: the Tanzen killed them.