wine and cheese thousands of years ago without having to know anything about the
chemistry involved. Who’s to say that the Taloids couldn’t have learned to
domesticate the life forms that they found all around them too? We take wool off
sheep to make overcoats; they take wire from wire-drawing machines.” He
shrugged. “It’s the same difference.”
“Everything about them is us the other way around, and taken back three or four
centuries,” Webster said. “We were practical artisans first, and from those
beginnings we developed engineering and the physical sciences. Biochemistry came
later. The Taloids developed applied biology first, but without any real
comprehension of biological science, and now they’re only just beginning to
dabble in the physical sciences.”
“That seems strange,” Crookes commented. “You’d think that all the advanced
hardware down there would have given them an intuitive comprehension of it from
early on.”
“Why should it have?” Spearman asked. “Human beings are advanced biological
systems, but that doesn’t give them an intuitive understanding of how their
brains and their bodies work. That knowledge could only come later, when
suitable instruments became available . . . and it’s still far from complete.
Human consciousness operates at a level way above that of the neural hardware
that supports our mental software, and the world of raw sensory data which that
hardware reacts to. We don’t perceive the world as consisting of pressure waves,
photons, forces, and so on, but as people, places, and things. Our awareness
arises from the interaction of abstract symbols that are far removed from the
original physical stimuli—shut off, as it were, from any direct knowledge of its
own underlying neurological and physiological processes. So we can think about
the things that matter without knowing anything about what the trillions of
nerve cells in our brains are doing, or even being aware that we have any.”
Crookes frowned for a moment. “So what are you saying—that the Taloids are
advanced electronic systems, but that doesn’t give them any intuitive
understanding of how they work either? Their awareness operates at a higher,
abstract level in the same way?”
“Just that,” Spearman replied.
Thelma nodded as the implications became clearer. “So just because the Taloids
are computers, it doesn’t mean necessarily that they think with machine
precision and possess total information recall, does it? They might not be able
to remember a conversation from yesterday word for word, or behave the same way
in the same situation every time . . . just like us.”
“That’s what Graham’s getting at,” Webster said. “At its basic hardware level,
the human brain is every bit as mechanical and predictable as an electronic
computer chip: A neuron either fires or doesn’t fire in response to a given set
of inputs. It doesn’t go through agonies of indecision trying to make up some
microscopic mind about what to do. At that level, there isn’t any mind to make
up. ‘Mind’ emerges as a property of organization that becomes manifest only at
the higher level. … In the same kind of way, a single molecule doesn’t possess
a property of ‘elephantness’; a sufficiently large number of them, however,
organized in the correct way, do. Taloid minds are almost certainly a result of
complexity transcending their underlying hardware in the same way.”
Spearman moved back to the cold chamber, stooped to look at what was going on
inside, and entered a command into the control panel below the window. “If you
showed a Taloid a piece of holoptronics from the inside of a computer processor,
I think it’d be about as mystified as someone in the Middle Ages trying to make
sense of a rabbit brain,” he said over his shoulder. “We understand machines
because we were able to begin with the simple and progress through to the more
complicated—from pulleys and levers, through dynamos and steam engines, to
computers, nuclear plants, and spaceships. Hence we can explain every detail of
our creations and its purpose, right down to the last nut and bolt of something
like the Orion. But an understanding of biological processes didn’t come so
easily because, instead of being able to start with the simple, we found
ourselves confronted by the most complex—the end-products of billions of years