Karl Schroeder

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Karl Schroeder (born September 4, 1962) is a Canadian author. He was born into the Mennonite community in Brandon, Manitoba, and now lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter.

An author of far-future science fiction, Schroeder presents philosophical speculations in his work. One of his concepts, known as "thalience" has gained some currency in the artificial intelligence and computer networking communities. His novels Ventus (2000), its prequel Lady of Mazes (2005), and the unrelated Permanence (2002) present far-future speculations on topics such as nanotechnology, terraforming, augmented reality and interstellar travel. Permanence won the Aurora Award in 2003 for Best Novel in English. Schroeder also wrote Sun of Suns: Book One of Virga, and co-wrote The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction with Cory Doctorow.

1 Thalience
- 1.1 Sentience
- 1.2 State of being
2 External links
- 2.1 Thalience

[edit] Thalience

Thalience is a concept invented by Schroeder in Ventus. The idea of thalience has been adopted by some members of the artificial intelligence community to describe the self-organizing properties of fine-grained distributed networks.^{[citation needed]} As presented in the novel, however, the concept is far from clear and there are, in fact, two possible definitions.

[edit] Sentience

One definition of thalience is as the attempt to determine whether non-human sentient systems are truly independent minds, or whether they are merely "parrots" that give back to human researchers what the researchers expect to hear.^{[citation needed]} In this definition, thalience is an ironic counterpart to sentience, and the novel says that the word was deliberately chosen as an allusion to "silent Thalia", the muse of Nature. Unlike the Turing test, which aims to determine whether an artificial system is conscious, thalience aims to determine whether it is independent of human categories of thought, or merely a mirror of them. This may represent the logical next question to ask after a system has passed the Turing test. In the novel Schroeder alludes to Pinocchio in describing the nature of the question: at what point does Pinocchio become a "real boy"?

[edit] State of being

The other definition of thalience, which the novel uses more consistently, is as a state of being.^{[citation needed]} Entities are considered "thalient" if they succeed in developing their own categories for understanding the world. According to this view, artificial intelligences that inherit humanity's concepts instead of inventing their own are not truly independent beings even if they are conscious. This idea is dramatized in the novel by a global terraforming system driven by intelligent nanotechnology. As this system evolves, a crisis point is reached after which it will either be forced to abandon the unique models of the world that it has generated, and become a mirror to human ambitions and prejudices, or it will gain true independence. One implication of thalience is that a truly independent consciousness will be difficult to communicate with because its ideas of reality do not map perfectly to ours.

The concept of thalience is related to philosophical notions of the Other.^{[citation needed]}