You’re for­given if you’re bewil­dered–after sci­ence? How does that make sense? Am I say­ing that sci­ence is just a cul­tural phe­nom­e­non, a fash­ion? No. But it is some­thing that exists in a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal con­text, and the ques­tion I was ask­ing with thalience was whether sci­ence might pro­duce some new kind of activ­ity that, while not replac­ing it, could be viewed as an off­spring of equal value to us.

Let’s back up a bit. In Ven­tus I invented a new word, and gave sev­eral def­i­n­i­tions for it–quite delib­er­ately, because I believe that ambi­gu­ity is the life-force of words. The word is acu­tally defined now on Wikipedia, but the two def­i­n­i­tions given there are only half-right. Vinge asked me whether the word has to do with dis­trib­uted sen­sor nets–because the Winds of Ven­tus are a sys­tem of mas­sively par­al­lel nan­otech AIs–and I said yes at the time, but didn’t expand on what that implied. If your eyes haven’t glazed over yet, bear with me; you may find what fol­lows interesting.

What if you could sep­a­rate the activ­ity of sci­ence from the human researchers who con­duct it?Auto­mate it, in fact? Imag­ine cre­at­ing a bot that does physics exper­i­ments and builds an inter­nal model of the world based on those exper­i­ments. It could start out as some­thing sim­ple that stacked blocks and knocked them over again. Later mod­els could get quite sophis­ti­cated; and let’s say we com­bine this abil­ity with the tech­nol­ogy of self-reproducing machines (von Neu­mann machines). Seed the moon with our pocket-protector-brandishing AIs and let them go nuts. Let them share their find­ings and refine their models.

So far so good. Here’s the ques­tion that leads to the notion of thalience: if they were allowed to freely invent their own seman­tics, would their phys­i­cal model of the uni­verse end up resem­bling ours? –I don’t mean would it pro­duce the same results given the same inputs, because it would. But would it be a humanly-accessible theory?

This is a bet­ter ques­tion than it might at first appear, because even we can pro­duce mutu­ally irrec­on­cil­able the­o­ries that suc­cess­fully describe the same things: quan­tum mechan­ics and rel­a­tiv­ity, for instance. Their world­views are incom­pat­i­ble, despite the fact that together they appear to accu­rately describe the real world. So it’s at least pos­si­ble that non-human intel­li­gences would come to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about what the uni­verse was like, even if their the­ory pro­duced results com­pat­i­ble with our models.

This lit­tle thought-experiment asks whether we can turn meta­physics into a hard sci­ence; and this becomes the first inter­est­ing mean­ing of the world thalience: it is an attempt to give the phys­i­cal world itself a voice so that rather than us ask­ing what real­ity is, real­ity itself can tell us. It is pos­si­ble that thalient sys­tems will always con­verge on a model of the uni­verse that is com­pre­hen­si­ble to humans; if so, then we will actu­ally have a means of solv­ing what were once con­sid­ered philo­soph­i­cally impon­der­able questions–such as, what is the world really made of? How much of our under­stand­ing of the uni­verse is sub­jec­tive, and is tru­ely objec­tive knowl­edge even pos­si­ble? A thalient sys­tem could tell us.

When Biol­ogy And Tech­nol­ogy Merge

In Ven­tus, of course, the thalient sys­tem has lost the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with humans; but the end of the novel holds out the hope that some sort of bridge can be con­structed. Strangely, this bridge appears in the form of pol­i­tics, rather than as a meet­ing of minds through Rea­son or Mathematics.

But there’s a fur­ther mean­ing to the term. If you were to auto­mate sci­ence, and reap the rewards, what would you be left doing? Twid­dling your thumbs while the AIs solve all the big prob­lems? Well, not nec­es­sar­ily. The last def­i­n­i­tion of thalience involves the excit­ing pos­si­bil­ity that, yes, mul­ti­ple equally valid phys­i­cal mod­els of the uni­verse are pos­si­ble. Not one true “the­ory of every­thing” but many, per­haps an end­less num­ber of them. In this case, the con­clu­sions we reach about our place in the uni­verse when we under­stand quan­tum mechan­ics and relativity–or, for that mat­ter, New­ton­ian physics–are acci­den­tal, by-products of the sub­jec­tive side of objec­tive research. So here is the grand­est def­i­n­i­tion of thalience: it is the dis­ci­pline that chooses among mul­ti­ple suc­cess­ful sci­en­tific mod­els based on which ones best sat­isfy our human, aesthetic/moral/personal needs. In other words, given two or more equally valid mod­els of the uni­verse, thalience is the art of choos­ing the one with the most human face. It is the recov­ery of the nat­ural in our under­stand­ing of the Natural.

The abil­ity to cre­ate non-human intel­li­gences that can ask the same ques­tions we ask leads to the pos­si­bil­ity not just of answer­ing ancient ques­tions, but of turn­ing sci­ence into the pre­cur­sor of a new human activ­ity. If thalient enti­ties can cre­ate accu­rate mod­els of the world that are dif­fer­ent from our own, you may no longer be faced with the dilemma of tak­ing either a reli­gious, com­fort­ing view of the uni­verse, or an objec­tive and scientific–but not humanly satisfying–view. Thalience would con­sist in tak­ing science’s results as raw mate­r­ial for build­ing new mythologies–and pos­si­bly religions–which would dif­fer from all pre­vi­ous ones in that they would all be sci­en­tif­i­cally, objec­tively true.

Now maybe you can see how sci­ence could have a suc­ces­sor: thalience would use objec­tive truth as an artis­tic medium and merge sub­jec­tiv­ity and objec­tiv­ity in a cre­ative activ­ity whose pur­pose is the re-sanctification of the nat­ural world. To believe in an uplift­ing and sat­is­fy­ing vision of your place in the uni­verse, and to know that this vision is true (or as true as any­thing can be) would be sub­lime. Thalience would be an activ­ity wor­thy of post-scientific human­ity, or our own bio­log­i­cal or post-biological successors.

Whoa.