The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

 

To kick off the new year, we read Rebecca's pick, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. This novel takes place in the not-so-distant future where there is a struggle between humans, the rise of trans-national corporations, AI, and an intriguing but dangerous octopus species that seems to have developed its own language and culture. The book begins as Dr. Ha Nguyen is sent to Con Dao Archipelago to study the octopus alongside the highly intelligent android, Evrim. The company that sends her there, DIANIMA, is headed by Dr. Minervudottir-Chan, a neuroscientist and the creator of Evrim. Does Dr. Minervudottir-Chan's motivation have the interests of the octopuses in mind or is she more driven to study and create intelligent minds for the purpose of exploitation and control? Does Dr. Nguyen learn to communicate in octopus language and can she form a meaningful relationship with these intelligent creatures? Has Evrim reached the level of consciousness that human's enjoy and how can we know? Will AI replace the need for human relationships? Will greed and violence always be prevalent in human existence? All of these questions and more are explored in the book.

The novel presented many areas for discussion. Language, of course, was one of them as we all share a background in speech recognition. We enjoyed the details about how Dr. Nguyen goes about studying the octopus language, and some noticed for the first time how the language symbols are printed on the fore-edge of the book pages. We were a bit disappointed that it wasn't more like the movie Arrival (where aliens come to Earth and humans try to understand their written language). But it was interesting to follow the language development side of the story. 

We talked about technology and reflected about how not so long ago the main way that people met spouses was through proximity at school, work, sports, etc., but how the main way now is online. We discussed human relationships with AI in the book, for example, Ha's relationship with Evrim and Ha's relationship with her point five (her AI companion, Kamran), and how, even now, some people report having deep, profound, even loving, relationships with AI entities. 

We also talked about consciousness, what this means, and how you can tell whether or not something is self-aware. We observed that the moment the portal into Evrim's mind was closed off was the exact moment that they became conscious. We also explored the idea of what it would be like to be conscious but without a human body, perhaps with an android body or no body at all. And what would this mean for your perception of the world and existence since some live more 'in the body' while others live more 'in the mind.'

Related to this, we discussed the different ways that people perceive and think, connectomes, the always-active creative mind, the state of being hyper-focused, and transformational books. All of this while eating delicious food = heaven. Thank you for hosting, Rebecca. We were missing, Liz and truly hope to see her soon!

(making like the octopus)