Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation, Aug 2013.
In
Poul Anderson's "Epilogue", sea rafts, self-repairing motorized
floating boxes with solar batteries, inertial navigation devices and
homeostatic systems, took dissolved minerals from sea water, delivered
to shore depots and returned for more while continually assembling
duplicate rafts even after life had become extinct.
Hard
radiation mutated the rafts' electronic templates of their own designs
and some of the imperfect duplicates had advantages like the ability to
get metal from other rafts instead of from the sea. Through hundreds of
millions of years, machines went ashore and proliferated into different
types. Evolutionarily refined solar batteries store dielectrically on
the molecular level in microscopic cells. Alloys are not as labile as,
but are more durable than, amino acids. Parts are either processed
(eaten) or used (like organ transplants). Sessile machines (plants) use
acids in glass-lined compartments to break down ores, manufacture alloys
and concentrate dielectric energy.
Mobile machines
get metal from sessiles and from each other. They did not invent hunting
but evolved as hunters, as if men were descended from tigers instead of
simians. One form specializes in reproduction; another in strength and
agility. Two body patterns heterodyne and crystallize in currents and
magnetic fields. A "person" becomes comatose only in an emergency when
his cells are extremely polarized.
Would this evolution
generate consciousness? Computers as such are not conscious because
rule-governed manipulation of symbols is not knowledge of their meanings
and because simulation of anything, including intelligence, is not
duplication. Consciousness arises when organismic sensitivity to
environmental alterations quantitatively increases until it is
qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation. However, these
mechanisms are interacting with their environments and are being naturally selected for sensitivity...
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