Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (38 page)

God’s monster and Mary Shelley

Such a story—if I’d made it up, you wouldn’t believe it. Hang on to your hat.

In the summer of 1816, the rock star–famous poet Lord Byron was living with his servants and personal physician at Villa Diodati, a grand rented house on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Six months earlier, his wife, Annabella, had given birth to a daughter and then scandalized England by separating from her husband amid accusations of physical and mental abuse, homosexuality, and incest. (It was probably all true. The last bit was almost certainly true: Byron seems to have been having an affair with his half sister Augusta Leigh, and may have been the father of one of her children.) The publicity was too much even for the flamboyant Lord B, who fled the country in April and never saw mother or baby (or England) again.

Mary Shelley was still Mary Godwin, and still just eighteen years old, when she too fled abroad with her lover, the poet Percy Shelley, who had abandoned his wife, Harriet, and their two children. (He already had two children with Mary. Meanwhile Harriet, back in England, was pregnant with their third, and his—probably, but see below—fifth.)

Mary and Percy went to stay in a house near Byron’s. Just to keep things nice and complicated, they were traveling with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Claremont, who had been another of Byron’s lovers in England—and who, as it turned out, was already pregnant with another of
his
children. She insisted on going to Switzerland with Godwin and Shelley because she wanted to resume her relationship with Byron; he (initially—maybe for about half an hour) insisted he didn’t want anything more to do with her.

Lady Caroline Lamb, yet
another
Byron lover from a few years before, had famously described the poet as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”; this (and his absolute cynicism) comes out especially in the relationship with Claremont. Of being with her again in Geneva he later wrote, “I never loved her nor pretended to love her, but a man is a man, and if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night there is but one way. The suite of all this is that she was with
child
, and returned to England to assist in peopling that desolate island.”

Claire’s daughter Allegra was indeed born in England, but bizarrely enough she was taken by the Shelleys back to Byron, who was by now in Italy. He quickly and rather predictably lost interest in her, and placed her in a convent school, where she died of typhus in 1822. Claire, not unreasonably, more or less accused Byron of murdering her daughter. In a recently discovered memoir, written when she was an old woman, she describes both Byron and Shelley (with whom—take a deep breath—she may
also
have had a child) as “monsters.”

But back to 1816. The weather that summer was freakishly cold and gloomy, for reasons the party could not have known—see below. They retreated inside to the fireplace, where they read German ghost stories and Byron suggested that they amuse themselves by writing some of their own. Mary’s story became one of the most influential books of the century and perhaps of all time:
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
.

Shelley got her subtitle (and the idea of animating dead tissue with electricity) from the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s apt description of American genius Benjamin Franklin, in the wake of his experiments with lightning. Both Kant and Shelley were referring to the myth about the Greek Titan who, taking pity on cold and shivering mankind, incurs the wrath of Zeus by bringing celestial fire down to Earth. But she was equally aware of the parallels between her story and the Christian “divine breath” story, as told in Genesis. Victor Frankenstein’s “creature” in the story actually finds and reads a copy of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
(lamenting that his fate is even worse than Satan’s), and for an epigraph Shelley chose these heartbreaking, plaintive, faintly accusing lines, addressed by Milton’s Adam to his creator:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me Man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?

This is the question every child asks, or thinks of asking, when a parent resorts to that phony line “You owe us everything!” In modern English: “I didn’t ask to be born. So whose interests were you really serving? Mine, or your own? And if your own, why do I owe you anything?”

For more on Milton’s Adam, and the questions he raises (and then meekly drops) about what we should believe, see the note on Socrates and religious fundamentalism. But let’s stick with that gloomy summer weather—and how’s this for a weird and wonderful connection? The atmospheric conditions that prompted the ghost-story party, and thus
Frankenstein
itself, were caused by the April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). It was by far the largest eruption in modern history, leaving a crater four miles wide and causing years of global climate disruption, crop failure, and famine. 1816 became known to New Englanders as “the year without a summer”: that June, there were blizzards in upstate New York.

As Kit’s remarks suggest, the science-fiction riffs on the Frankenstein idea are innumerable. Two of the best are Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
and Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner
(based on Philip K. Dick’s
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
). Nearly all the writers who have followed in Shelley’s footsteps hint at a question she might have expressed this way: “Does the creature move and speak only, or does it have a soul?” In modern terms: “Does it just behave like us? Imitate us? Or is it truly
conscious
?” (For why that distinction is a very big deal, see also the note on Turing. More on this in
The Babel Trilogy, Book Three: Infinity’s Illusion
).

By the way,
Frankenstein
’s young inventor was the daughter of radical philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. After her marriage, she always styled herself Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in honor of her remarkable mother, whose own epoch-making book was
A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792).

While we’re on the subject of women a century or more ahead of their time, note that the daughter Byron had left behind with his wife in England grew up to be the brilliant mathematician and the world’s first “computer programmer,” Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (or more popularly, Ada Lovelace). Ada supposedly read her father’s work and wasn’t impressed, vowing that she would become a better mathematician than he had been a poet. Her achievements were great indeed, but they might easily have disappeared from view if they hadn’t become an inspiration to another early programmer, who appreciated their depth and originality—Alan Turing.

Finally, no account of
Frankenstein
’s origins in that amazing summer would be complete without mentioning the fact that the same group, in the same writing session, also invented the modern vampire—and (oh, it’s almost too good to be true!) this first vampire was an angry caricature of Lord Byron himself. Byron’s “friend” and personal physician at Lake Geneva, John Polidori, had come to hate his employer’s success. His own contribution to their ghost story exercise was
The Vampyre
. The main character, Lord Ruthven, is a pale, mysterious London aristocrat with an irresistibly seductive voice; he’s bad news, especially for women, and is clearly meant to be Byron.

In a further twist, which horrified and enraged Polidori, a publisher got hold of the manuscript of
The Vampyre
and published it as a new work
by
Byron.

Mary and Percy were married back in England in December. Harriet, his first wife, had killed herself weeks earlier.

“The gray outline of the Institute . . .”

Readers familiar with the University of Washington campus will infer that I had to tear down both Cunningham Hall and Parrington Hall before I could build ISOC. Sorry.

Geist, atman

Geist
is German for “spirit”—it’s cognate with our
ghost
, from Old English
gast
, “spirit or breath.” The Sanskrit for
maha
(“great”) and
atman
(“soul, spirit, or consciousness”) is where Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi got his nickname.

Darwin’s
Origin
and changing the question

1859 was the year Darwin published
On the Origin of Species
. Here’s how Julian Jaynes glosses that epoch-making event in his own book about origins,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
:

Now originally, this search into the nature of consciousness was known as the mind-body problem, heavy with its ponderous philosophical solutions. But since the theory of evolution, it has bared itself into a more scientific question. It has become the problem of the origin of mind, or, more specifically, the origin of consciousness in evolution. Where can this subjective experience which we introspect upon, this constant companion of hosts of associations, hopes, fears, affections, knowledges, colors, smells, thrills, tickles, pleasures, distresses, and desires—where and how in evolution could all this wonderful tapestry of inner experience have evolved? How can we derive this inwardness out of mere matter? And if so, when?

As the third book of this trilogy will indicate, I think this is partly right and partly wrong. On the one hand, Darwin and evolution make it much harder to see consciousness as all-or-nothing, and we no longer do: we take it for granted that many other organisms are conscious
in some sense
, even if not quite ours. (Dogs and chimps experience hunger and pain, probably also loneliness and anxiety, possibly also joy and grief; they probably don’t worry that their children are wasting time, or that God disapproves of them, or that others may say mean things about them after they’re dead.) On the other hand, it’s misleading to imply that the origin of consciousness is now a purely scientific question. Whether that will turn out to be true depends on what the answer turns out to be, and some philosophers still argue that there’s a problem with the very idea that consciousness could be explained by any new scientific finding. When I eat a potato chip, taste receptors on my tongue detect sodium ions and send signals to the brain via specialized neurons, et cetera, et cetera. But the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz had the measure of this three hundred years ago: you can elaborate the physical story as much as you like, get as fine-grained as you like with your description of the mechanism, and still not have an answer to the most basic question of all: Where’s the
saltiness
?

Turing among the machines

Alan Turing was born in England in 1912. In the late 1930s, while spending two years in the United States at Princeton, he started to produce original work on logic, the nature of computation, and the concept of an algorithm. He famously spent the Second World War helping to crack German military communications by applying mathematical logic (and some innovative mechanical tinkering) to cryptography in Hut 8, the nerve center of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Perhaps his most influential work was the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” published in 1950, which essentially created the field of artificial intelligence. It famously begins, “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”

In 1952, Turing was arrested for homosexual acts, a criminal offense in the UK at the time. Having been stripped of his security clearance, he was forced to choose between prison and an estrogen treatment “cure”—chemical castration, essentially. He chose to take the drugs, because it would have been impossible to continue his work in prison.

Two years later, he died somewhat mysteriously of cyanide poisoning. Many think this was suicide, brought on by depression over the hormone treatment, but this seems unlikely. He had already completed the treatment some time before his death, was no longer taking estrogen, and was actively engaged in computational work (and experiments involving chemicals that included cyanide).

Since Turing has become something of a cultural icon, it’s perhaps unfashionable to say that he has been oversold as the “lonely genius of Bletchley.” But many brilliant people worked there—and, contrary to the “cold autistic savant” myth so heavily underlined by the 2014 film
The Imitation Game
, he seems to have been an eccentric but willing (and warmly humorous) collaborator in a giant team effort.

It’s even more unfashionable to say that his published ideas on computing and intelligence are anything less than brilliant, but there it is: “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is a clunky piece of work and surprisingly vague (one is tempted to say confused) on what the “imitation game” or “Turing test” is, how it should be conducted, or what it might be taken to show. (You can get something of the flavor by comparing that famous first sentence, “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” with a less famous one that follows soon after: “The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.”)

Fiction tends to make the confusion worse: writers and filmmakers have often been more thrilled by the sound of Turing’s idea than by stopping to work out what it really is. So characters in movies and novels tend to throw around the term “Turing test” as if it’s a special way of proving that something is conscious—or (a different muddle) as if it’s a special way of deciding whether we ought to treat something as if it’s conscious.

To see what the Turing test is really about, and what its limitations are, it’s useful first to clarify which of two scenarios we’re talking about. Are we (as Turing imagined) communicating by text with something that might be a human or might be a machine imitating a human in another room? Or (as per so much science fiction) are we sitting on the couch with a “person” who might be a human or might be a robot/replicant/cyborg/android that’s imitating a human? Turing himself raises the “android” version of the story only to dismiss it as a distraction (“We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions”). However, given the intervening decades of science fiction, I’ll assume it’s the “android” scenario we’re talking about. In the end it doesn’t really matter: as Turing recognized, the point is that these two versions both describe a conversation and a veil (either the wall or the flesh that might be silicon) that stands between me and
knowing what’s really going on
.