Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (17 page)

Many voices have sought to comprehend the thoughts and hidden meanings that lie within Eugenia's diary entries, which are often rambling and oblique. Among them, one of the most prevalent questions has been: when did her mind begin to turn? Many have pointed to the last week in July of that year as the probable moment, when her computerized model of the fjords became complete (at least in the first of its two incarnations). This, unlike its ill-fated successor, is still extant as a functioning model.

In spite of the apparent success of her project, her diary entries from this time convey a pervading sense of disappointment, which she seemed at pains to comprehend. The fact that she opted to keep an electronic record of her work rather than a traditional paper diary has proven an unexpected blessing to researchers, as it allows us to track the marked differences in her work and sleeping habits during this time. Rest seemed to come to her with difficulty and instead she would occupy herself throughout the early hours of the morning, running through endless cycles of life and death in her virtual ecosphere. Between July 1 and 3, she would compose two, rather uncharacteristically morbid diary entries:

Dead again. This cycle has been the longest so far at two and a half hours. It was the predators who triumphed this time, if such a word can really be used. The seagull population exploded some time around midnight, killing off the sea fauna. This echoed up the food chain until the snow foxes depopulated the birds below breeding levels, and then died out themselves. In the silent aftermath, the seaweed grew uninhibited until eutrophication set in. All that remained then was the six, blank white squares of dead snow. Maybe permanent balance is a biological impossibility, like the perpetual motion device rendered in flesh. If this is life in fast-forward, then perhaps this is a bleak vision of things to come for us.

At approximately 3:00, there followed an unexpected addendum:
No, just one of an infinity of potential futures
. This peculiar digression into Leibniz seems to have accompanied a renewal of faith on Clarke's part. Some time during the days that preceded her next entry, she appears to have successfully used her model to create her first self-sustaining ecosystem. She writes:

Seventeen hours now. Until now, the longest it has ever lasted has been three and a half. The cycle is endless and beautiful. There is something timeless and ancient about such a pattern, and it is no longer any wonder to me how so many of the world's oldest religions had this as their principal focus. Even so, there is something off about it all.

Later, she adds:
Something is still wrong. I fear it is not the program's function, but its very being. I delight in the cold beauty of a world reduced to first principles; a lifetime in mathematics has invested me with this. But now the world of numbers seems like a prison, into which I have simply created a window. Now entities cry out at me through the bars, their voices mute, baffled. This is Hades, a death world, in which shades of that which once was living now dwell in mindless repetition of what their lives were before. It was I who brought them here.

Eugenia Clarke's philosophical disaffection at the completion of her initial project marks the beginning of a curiously silent period in her diary. It is unclear whether any more use was made of her model, but the few sporadic entries appearing during those two weeks deal with rather more mundane concerns. It is hard to be certain what these entries portend, but what they certainly do not indicate is a descent into madness.

Whatever new thoughts were now resolving themselves in Eugenia's mind is something we may never ascertain. However, witness accounts indicate that almost all of this time was spent in the library. She seemed to borrow rarely, but it is assumed that much of what she later references in her work was read during this time (no small feat, considering the breadth of her research). Given the nature of her work, it was only a matter of time before such names as Turing, Searle, and Grey Walter would come up in her discussions. Yet her writings after this time also indicate a more esoteric leaning to her tastes. Plato's Cave is mentioned, along with the theories of mind of Rene Descartes. In time, even such curious luminaries as the Pseudo-Dionysus are quoted at length, while particular attention is paid to the more mystical works of Pythagoras. Whatever she sought, it was evidently beyond the scope of what modern science could offer.

Yet in spite of what would ultimately transpire, Clarke's initial return to work was a curiously subdued affair, indicating little of the changes that would later become apparent. It was early in her writings that she first suggested a human addition to her project, but at the time this was little more than a speculation. Inspiration for this had first come from a postscript to Dr. Loughbridge's book, which told of a hunter whose job it was to help maintain wildlife populations. Loughbridge tells of how overfishing along the coast had driven bird populations into the fjord, disturbing the fragile balance. The hunter's task was to cull animal populations to a quota, thus ensuring a return to equilibrium. On reading this, Eugenia was at first horrified. Slowly, however, she began to understand its necessity within the implacable logic of the fjord's brutal daily realities. On her return to the project, she resolved herself on this addition, which would essentially take up the role hitherto played by the user in her simulation. Thus, a hunter was born and his name, she decided, was Jotun.

It is not clear when her first conscious steps into the sphere of artificial intelligence were taken, but her first explicit mention is one made in retrospect, and coincides with her decision to introduce her model hunter. It came upon first reading about the Grey Walter tortoise, one of the earliest examples of applied robotics. One particular aspect of its description seems to have struck a chord with her, as she writes:

One of the most remarkable qualities of this little device seems to have come almost as an afterthought. It appears that it is able to detect when it is reaching the end of its battery life, and limit its movements accordingly. This is, if anything, a demonstration of reasoning behavior, if not feeling, in its most rudimentary form. If something can react, then it can surely learn, adding another dimension to its reasoning. I realize now that if I'm to make this final addition to my project, then it must operate on a level separate from the rest of its kin: a program within a program. While the fish and foxes operate according to the fickle logic of algorithms, our hunter must have true reasoning; it must have intelligence.

The two-week long period of silence that heralded this second phase of her work is followed by a number of marked stylistic changes. Whereas before, Clarke had been rigorously thorough in detailing the minutiae of her coding processes, now only her most significant accomplishments were recorded, with little mention of the intervening work (something that has proven no small annoyance to critics keen on establishing the veracity of her accounts). Instead, the practical business of programing now took place against a backdrop of agonizing deliberation over the more theoretical aspects of her work.

One of the greatest misconceptions about Eugenia Clarke's legacy is that she sought to create an AI program with a soul. Though she does give thought to this possibility, at no point did she ever propose bringing such a thing into existence. Nonetheless, in one sense at least, this seems to have been exactly what she would eventually achieve.

The first stirrings of theosophical thought in Clarke's recollections stemmed from a profound disagreement with one of the leading contemporary theories on artificial intelligence. Known as the hard-AI principle, it asserts that on a fundamental level, there is no difference between a complex computer system and human consciousness. This works on the belief that, when deconstructed, what we understand as the human mind manifests as an infinitesimally complex series of logical deductions to derive the appropriate response to a given piece of data. Aspects of the mind, such as emotions or memories, are thus understood as units of this process, designed to facilitate thought. This means that, like a computer, the human mind is on no specific level truly conscious in any real sense. It merely
thinks
it is. A popular analogy for this process is the Chinese Box theorem, in which an individual sealed within a room (representing the human mind) is anonymously handed slips of paper containing Chinese characters with which they are unfamiliar. They are then charged with matching them to a corresponding set of symbols elsewhere, with no ultimate comprehension of their meaning.

Clarke's dispute seems to have arisen more from a profound discomfort with the implications of this theory, rather than any logical counter-argument. It may have been that, should this really be the case, then the vision of a
death world
, which had so horrified her when seeing her program take form, may have been closer to reality than previously supposed. In response, she seemed to have struck out in search of a theory of her own, and would plunder the writings of authors of whatever discipline she could find for ideas that would support her own. In doing so, her project was rapidly changing from one of science to one of faith.

Her central belief during this period appears to have been that the logical processes that comprise human thought, when gathered in sufficient complexity, take on a character and substance that is wholly unique, and greater than the sum of its parts. This was expressed through a multitude of rephrasings and extrapolations that fill the pages of her diary in these sections. Curiously, it was by her own admission that she observed, with apparent humor, that this principle was the same as that underpinning the ancient science of alchemy.

Her thinking during these researches is marked by a singular refusal to accept that the minds of animals, even ones of demonstrable intelligence such as apes and whales, are in nature and substance fundamentally the same as those of humans. This is a point she seems to emphasize with an uncharacteristic vehemence. Indeed, it is during one of these recurrent episodes that she makes her first explicit mention of the
soul
. She would continue implementing this term, and other theological terminology, in an equally unguarded manner for the remainder of her endeavors.

It is a fact to be appreciated that Eugenia Clarke would eventually find no satisfactory resolution to her problem with hard-AI. What she resolved to do instead was at once a display of her formidable cleverness—and her now evident madness. This resolution would, in time, redeem her faith in the uniqueness of human thought. What she proposed was not to create an AI with a soul; by her own admission, this was impossible within the bounds of modern science. What she would do instead was use her project to create an AI that simulated the actions of a soul-bearing entity. In doing so, she would prove the ultimate superiority of her ideas over the tenets of hard-AI by making her soul-creation the first program ever to convince another human of its own humanity, thereby passing the fabled Turing test.

However, what Clarke initially proposed as a realistic alternative to an understandably impossible ambition would in turn prove an equally absurd task. Nonetheless, as she set out her specifications for what would define a human with a soul, her confidence in her abilities to mimic one was unfaltering. Clarke's definition for the human soul is spread out across her work in a series of digressions and internal discussions around an ever-changing theme, drawing on Christian and pagan sources alike. What she settled on seems to have been somewhere between Pythagoras and St. Augustine. Perhaps her most lucid definition is one written on an evening in late July:

Souls and minds are at once a single entity and two separate bodies. The soul is moved by the rigors of divine providence, and in turn affects the predilections of the mind. Yet the mind is possessed of free will, and has the power to unconsciously influence the path that is chosen for its counterpart. Mind-stuff and Soul-stuff are two different substances, but this is not their main distinction. What truly differentiates the two is that while both are reasoning agents in their own right, minds reason in time, whereas souls reason in eternity. The soul is thus the mind's gateway out of time and into the realms of divine providence.

Despite its elegance, scholars of theology have been sparing in their credit for Clarke's proposal, with many dismissing its arguments as reductive. She was, it is said, paring down the writings from which her work was derived to their most basic elements, and turning what were ultimately moral ideas into a crude logical framework. Yet while the definition itself may not have provided much of a framework for considering the ultimate question of the soul, it was nonetheless sufficient for Clarke's purposes. With these ideas set in place, she now had working model upon which to base her computerized analogy for the soul-bearing creation. It was to be, in essence, an entity whose actions were neither their own nor wholly the product of their creator, but driven by some ever- changing essence of its own being. Whether Clarke willed it or not, this would remain an apt definition for what Jotun was eventually to become.

Just how successful she was in realizing these curious ambitions is hard to say—not least because the whole of this second incarnation of her program appears to have been deleted within the two weeks following its creation. From Clarke's diary, we know what the hunter looked like (a rather unimpressive anthropoid form pasted into a diary entry in late August) and that it seems to have been capable of speech, at least through a number of stock messages. After six weeks of strenuous hacking, it appears to have been completed. She would then spend much of the subsequent days marveling at her creation. She writes:

I watched him resume his lonely vigil, walking the ice-blasted rocks and dark shores of his domain in quiet contemplation. He is patient. He knows the land and is satisfied with his simple lot in life. Furthermore, he cares deeply for the birds and the foxes, and the manifest creation he sees all around him. He is like Francis of Assisi, or the ascetic first fathers in the deserts, or even like Adam wandering the forests and valleys of paradise. I asked him, why does he hunt? He recognized the question, and gave his response in blunt and predictable terms. I told him he should shoot a gull in the northernmost corner of the fjord, which I indicated. He refused, not saying that he wouldn't, nor couldn't, but merely should not, even though it would not (I knew) affect the overall balance either way. He said it was simply wrong. Later, once the seasons changed and the cycles adjusted, he shot that very bird, leaving its chicks defenseless. It had, it seems, become acceptable that this bird die.