The Mountain in the Sea
The Mountain in the Sea
A Novel by Ray Nayler
Description:
Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future. Rumors begin to spread of a dangerous species of hyperintelligent octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. The marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them. The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, from the rest of world. Dr. Nguyen travels to the islands to join DIANIMA’s team: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first android. The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of the octopuses’ advancements, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves. But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. Or what they might do about it. A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy.
Quotes
“We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think”
From “The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel” by Ray Nayler.
“No intelligent animal is as antisocial as the octopus. It wanders the ocean alone, more inclined to cannibalize its own kind than band together with them, doomed to a senescent death after a haphazard sexual encounter.The octopus is the “tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,” denounced by Homer. This solitude, along with her tragically short life span, presents an insurmountable barrier to the octopus’s emergence into culture. But this book asks the question: What if? What if a species of octopus emerged that attained longevity, intergenerational exchange, sociality? What if, unknown to us, a species already has?
Then what?—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think”
From “The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel” by Ray Nayler.
Read more on Everand: https://www.everand.com/book/747008961
“What matters to the blind, deaf tick is the presence of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the bat, what matters is air-compression waves. This is the animal’s umwelt: that portion of the world their sensory apparatus and nervous system allow them to sense. It is the only portion of the world that “matters” to them.The human umwelt is structured according to our species’ sensory apparatus and nervous system as well. But the octopus will have an umwelt nothing like ours. In a sense (and I use that word purposefully) we will not exist in the same world. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think
From “The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel” by Ray Nayler.
Read more on Everand: https://www.everand.com/book/747008961
“Death is a part of us. It shapes our bodies from the very beginning. You might think your fingers are formed by the division of cells in the womb—but that is not the case. Fingers are chiseled out of a paddle of flesh by the death of cells, the same way David was chiseled by his sculptor f…”
From “The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel” by Ray Nayler.
Read more on Everand: https://www.everand.com/book/747008961
I don’t need agreement - I need resistance
I think therefore I doubt I am
technology that moves us forward and not the other way around
notes ..
- Backfilling - post hoc rationalisation
- justify any action we take - after the fact. Evolved for this
- autopoesis ?