Calculating God, Mindscan – Review

In the last few months, I’ve read two books by Robert Sawyer: First I read Mindscan and more recently Calculating God. Robert Sawyer is a Canadian science fiction writer who has won both the Nebula Award (for The Terminal Experiment) and the Hugo Award (for Hominids). More recently and of more relevance, he won the John W. Campbel Memorial Award for Mindscan.

Mindscan takes place in the not too distant future. A company has found a way to scan a brain and copy the exact neural pattern in it into a synthetic body. The procedure is extremely expensive, so the only customers to undergo the procedure are those who don’t believe they will be around any longer – generally the elderly, who want to transfer their consciousness into a body that will live on for longer. Once the procedure is done, the synthetic body is supposed to inherit everything from the biologically original, while the original goes off to live out the remainder of their days on the moon.

At the face of it, this seems no different from the standard transporter though experiments – if you step into a scanner on Mars, and it scans (and dismantles) your body and produces a completely identical self on Earth, have you been transported? What if the person on Mars isn’t dismantled, but sticks around for a while after the scan? For the “you” on Earth, it seems like you were just on Mars and are now on Earth, but to the “you” on Mars, there seems to have been no change – you’re still where you started. This is an interesting thought experiment, but one that is far too common. An entire novel on this would be far from something new and unique. Luckily, Mindscan goes beyond this, exploring some of the ethical, social and legal issues with this mindscanning technology.

The story in Calculating God is drastically different. Extra-terrestrials visit Earth, seeking scientific knowledge. It is quickly discovered that these aliens believe in God. However, their belief isn’t like our standard human belief (in fact, at one point an alien calls anyone who believes God communicates with them deluded) – for the aliens, God’s existence is a scientific theory.

This book was interesting because it sort of fleshed out the idea that God’s existence could be proved. Many atheists, when asked the question “What would it take for you to believe in God?” are sort of stumped – extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is hard to come up with the sort of extraordinary evidence that would justify a claim that a god exists. The aliens have pretty good evidence – they have a unified theory of physics that pretty much necessitates an intelligent creator, and they understand intelligence enough to have a theory about how this intelligent being came about.

Sawyer’s novels tend to read more like a philosopher’s thought experiments than science fiction novels. The plot is sometimes a bit weak (particularly in Calculating God, where most of the plot could just be taken out to make – in my opinion – a much better, shorter book), but they are still fascinating and hard to put down because of the good, thought provoking parts.

Besides the tendency towards a weak plot, I have some other complaints about the books – particularly Calculating God. For example, the book claims that intelligence is an emergent property – that intelligence just emerges from a complex enough system. This is the explanation given as to how God was created – in an earlier universe (according to the aliens’ physics the universe goes through multiple, but finite, big crunches and big bangs), intelligence just came about from the complexity of the universe. In other words, random matter just floating around – without any selective pressure or reproduction – just formed into an intelligence far greater than our own. This seems extremely implausible, but I suppose it can be forgiven as a plot device which gives the God hypothesis a lot more weight.

I did like it that Sawyer gave this God’s supposed existence an explanation. One reason why the God hypothesis is (in our universe) so bad is that it has no explanatory power – it just “explains” everything by appealing to some thing (God) that is just there and used its god magic to make x, thus “explaining” x. I think offering an explanation of a god’s existence would be requisite for me to believe in it. Of course, some may complain that this “reduces” God to a natural phenomenon – but if by explaining things we reduce them to natural phenomena, I think that’s just a problem with the supernatural.

Another problem I had with Calculating God was the ambiguity about the term “God”. Just what is this God responsible for? How much of a role did this god play in the evolution of life (it is premised that He played some)? The aliens, with their advanced scientific knowledge, never answer this. Instead, the main character (Thomas Jericho, an atheist and a defender of evolution) seems to at one point concede that the intelligent design proponent/crackpot Michael Behe (who contends that the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved on its own) was right.

Even if it is fiction, I cringe at the idea of Sawyer giving Behe some credit. This is a problem with Mindscan as well – Sawyer gives much more credit to a theory than is due. In the case of Mindscan, I am talking about Penrose’s theory of consciousness which involves quantum weirdness to explain the mind. Sawyer uses this as a plot device to add a bit of weirdness (and implausibility) to the novel that it really could have done without.

Overall, these are both very thought provoking novels, and I would recommend either of them.

Mindscan: 15/17 Tommy Points
Calculating God: 13.5/17 Tommy Points