Customer Reviews

The Black Cloud

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Amazon site associated with a different printing contains many excellent reviews of The Black Cloud by British astronomer Fred Hoyle, my favorite science fiction story that I have re-read many times. Here I focus on some of the philosophical implications of this classic 1957 novel to modern studies of consciousness. Hoyle's novel stimulated the interests of two historical figures in a personal and professional relationship at the time: physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist Carl Jung. As described in Hoyle's autobiography Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life, Pauli later told Hoyle that he discussed the philosophical implications of the novel with Jung and thought the novel was "better than your astronomical work."

In Hoyle's novel, a black cloud of matter with diameter larger than the earth-sun separation approaches our solar system. The heroic scientists make repeated attempts to study its physical properties by probing the cloud with electromagnetic signals of different frequencies, resulting in cloud behavior in apparent violation of known physical laws. After eliminating all other possibilities, the scientists are forced to an astounding conclusion: the cloud is intelligent! The scientist's next question is whether the cloud contains a single consciousness or many little conscious entities. They decide that the cloud has developed highly effective means of internal communication by electromagnetic fields. Each small part of the cloud is able to send signals to other parts in select frequency bands. The imagined process is analogous to the internet, but with a large fraction of the earth's population on-line at all times and rapidly sending messages to an ever changing subset of recipients.

The scientists decide that because the rate of information transfer between all parts of the cloud is so high, the sub-clouds can not be considered as having separate consciousnesses. Any thoughts or emotions experienced by a sub-cloud are assumed to be quickly and fully transmitted to many other sub-clouds. Thus the black cloud is deemed to contain a single global consciousness. Individual sub-clouds might be concerned with tasks like celestial navigation, memory storage, internal regulation of bodily functions and so forth; however, for the cloud to behave as a single mind, the sub-clouds must work in concert. Neuroscientists now refer to the analogous brain processes as functional segregation and functional integration. Different brain regions do different things; they are segregated. At the same time, they cooperate to yield a unified behavior and (apparent) unified consciousness so they are integrated. The question of how this can be accomplished in human brains, known as the binding problem in neuroscience, is discussed many places, including my new book (2010). The work of Benjamin Libet, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience), shows that our subjective feeling of the present actually refers to times about ½ second in the past; consciousness is distributed over time. Modern neuroscience studies (EEG, etc) show that consciousness is also distributed over space within the brain as implied in Hoyle's novel. Still another excellent yarn by Hoyle having to do with the apparent relationship of consciousness to information is October the First Is Too Late. Although these are books of fiction, Hoyle makes it quite clear in his comments that he is quite serious about the ideas presented.

First-rate science fiction. Liked it so much I bought "A For Andromeda" and it was just as good. The hidden message seemed to be to take care of mother earth.