In The Face of Oppression and Tyranny
The Emergence takes place in a vibrant future where machines, technology, and humans are integrated and a movement is underway to challenge the governments’ control and hierarchy. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story?
This story actually began in 1986 for me, where I explored the main ideas in a short story done for a writing class at the University of Washington. Themes about emerging technology and the struggles for identity, authenticity, and freedom were already prevalent in society, as well as the disintegration of social structures such as family, rigid gender roles, and the negative impact of patriarchy at that time. These issues became much more significant as time passed, especially the impact and need for surveillance technologies, and how their misuse was being rationalized by governments all over the world. I needed to explore this more fully in the novelized version of this story, and I wanted to do it while telling a good story.
Your characters were intriguing and well developed. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?
The struggle for personal freedom and autonomy versus conformity, the emergence of psychological independence and free-thinking as the juxtaposition between the struggle of free will and determinism was a driving force. Of course, I strongly wanted to show that individual and collective choices can still be made even in the face of oppression and tyranny. For the disempowered, there is always a struggle for assertion of identity and I wanted to show how the power of love can help sustain anyone, even in the face of what appears to be insurmountable odds to persist and achieve, even what they thought was not possible. Love triumphs and free choices and acceptance can help an individual reinvent themselves if they need to!
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
I looked at dialectical thinking and dialogical relating, something which I’m quite familiar with in my long career as a therapist and my training. I see them both as important to psychological development. I also wanted to explore how technology impacts culture and community. Is it both good and bad, can it be used for the good or not? What would an emerging AI consciousness look like? And finally, how has patriarchy enslaved people and cultures? How does encountering and esteeming an existential Other make us more enlightened as persons and cultures? And what changes are possible as people embrace freedom? Lastly, I wanted to show that the inclusion of others, even those much different from ourselves, is a worthwhile pursuit.
This is book one of the Robochurch Trilogy. What can readers expect in book two?
In book two, the movement known as Robochurch continues to develop, but it is not an easy path. There is tremendous conflict between the status quo, government controls, and the promise for independence and freedom which many elites are seeing as a threat. The Robochurch continues to develop and in some cases, warring factions become more polarized in their struggles, and open war breaks out. There are betrayals and allegiances that are discovered and rediscovered. The characters develop further. The robots and AI become even more developed. What will be the outcome? Readers will have to read it to see!
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Posted on November 15, 2021, in Interviews and tagged author, author interview, book, book recommendations, book review, book reviews, book shelf, bookblogger, books, books to read, ebook, fantasy, fiction, goodreads, kindle, kobo, Lee J. Keller, literature, nook, novel, postapocalyptic, read, reader, reading, science ficiton, scifi, story, The Emergence, writer, writing. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
LITERARY TITAN 
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
The thing I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461