Using Storytelling to Investigate Scientific Questions
Fiction can be an important tool to explore complex science and technology questions: Would our legal system be more equitable if an AI delivered verdicts rather than judges and juries? What will happen to future climate refugees? Is human consciousness just another algorithm? That’s why Issues has partnered with ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination to publish Future Tense Fiction, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore science and technology questions like these ones.
On this episode, host Mia Armstrong-López, an editor of Future Tense, talks to Arula Ratnakar, a computational neuroscience PhD student at Boston University and author of “Coda,” a recent Future Tense Fiction story about computing, consciousness, and cryptography. They discuss how Ratnakar’s work as a writer enhances her work as a scientist and vice versa, and how storytelling can help both experts and nonexperts think about complex technical issues and enhance the practice of science.
Resources
- Read Arula Ratnakar’s story, “Coda,” and Cristopher Moore’s response essay, “Computing Consciousness.”
- Check out the paper that inspired “Coda”: “An RNA-based theory of natural universal computation.”
- Find more of Ratnakar’s stories and research on her website.
- Check out Future Tense Fiction to find more stories!.
Transcript
Mia Armstrong-López: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.
Would our legal system be more equitable if an AI delivered a verdict rather than judges and juries? What will happen to future climate refugees? Is human consciousness just another algorithm? Issues has partnered with ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination to publish Future Tense Fiction, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore science and technology questions like these ones.
I’m Mia Armstrong-López, an editor of Future Tense. I’m joined on this episode by Arula Ratnakar, a computational neuroscience Ph.D. student at Boston University and author of “Coda,” a recent Future Tense Fiction story about computing, consciousness and cryptography. I’m excited to talk to Arula about her story, how her work as a writer enhances her work as a scientist and vice versa, and how storytelling can help both experts and non-experts think about the complex issues and enhance the practice of science. Arula, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Arula Ratnakar: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Armstrong-López: So, I wanted to start at maybe not the beginning, but at a beginning, and I wanted to ask you what inspired you to study computational neuroscience, and then also maybe as a part of that, ask you what came first, your origin story as a scientist or your origin story as a writer.
There’s something really unique about science fiction in that it allows you to think about science concepts in a way that’s very different from thinking about them in doing actual science.
Ratnakar: So, I actually started out when I was an undergrad as an architecture student, and I guess I was really interested in crafting environments and spaces and how people navigate through different environments and perceive things and all of that. And it was actually for this one project I had in architecture school that I guess I had to think about how a scientific lab was designed. So I was reading memory research papers to understand how the lab would be designed. And through that, I was like, “Wow, this is really interesting stuff.” And I realized that that was just much, much more fascinating, and it answered all the questions about reality and perception and all of that that I was interested in architecture, but at a much more fundamental level. And that led to me switching over into neuroscience.
And your other question was about what came first. I think actually writing came first. My first sci-fi story in Clarkesworld magazine was published when I was still in architecture school, so before I switched over. And I think that also definitely influenced me to think deeply about the philosophy of these scientific concepts and the science itself.
Armstrong-López: What would you say are the main questions that animate your work as a writer, and how do those intersect or diverge with the questions that animate your work as a scientist?
Ratnakar: With science fiction, you can think about things that are impossible in reality, or at least very, very improbable, but try to approach them—at least in hard science fiction, which is what I write—through a rigorous approach. And I also feel like you can think about scientific concepts or even neuroscience concepts or mathematical concepts in speculative fiction and science fiction in a way that you could not possibly do without having characters and having this fictional world around them. I don’t know, there’s something really unique about science fiction in that it allows you to think about science concepts in a way that’s very different from thinking about them in doing actual science, but it gives you a richer understanding and appreciation for those concepts, I think.
Armstrong-López: In some ways the storytelling and the characters allow you to take scientific concepts outside of the lab and imagine how they’ll make people feel and what sort of actions they’ll motivate for people. And I’m really interested in this approach that you discuss as a rigorous scientific approach to storytelling. And I would love for you to walk through what that actually looks like. So you’re a computational neuroscience researcher. A lot of your work, including the story that you recently published in Issues in Science and Technology as part of our Future Tense Fiction series explores very complex topics related to consciousness, quantum computing. But what is a rigorous scientific approach? What does that look like when you’re constructing these fictional worlds?
Ratnakar: It’s hard to say whether my approach is rigorous because it’s not actually doing science. But I guess it’s maybe thinking about what goes into existing… for example, for cryptography, looking into what goes into the best standard for cryptographic schemes and realizing oh, it’s based on integer factorization and discrete logarithms and these particular algorithms. And then going into, why is quantum computing a threat to that? And all of that is grounded in what actually exists in real life. And then the speculative part comes into what would happen if there was a powerful enough quantum computer that could break these cryptographic schemes, and what would come after that in response to that? Just keeping everything grounded in a really logical and plausible trajectory for how the world might respond to something.
Armstrong-López: That makes a lot of sense. And I think it helps to ground the reader. It helps make these fictional worlds that you’re exploring feel more tangible because they exist in these scientific worlds that we’re also exploring in our present. And I want to talk about that approach a little bit more specifically in the story that you wrote for Issues in Science and Technology as a part of the Future Tense Fiction series, which is “Coda,” as I mentioned previously. And it’s a story that I think really combines your scientific expertise and your narrative creativity. So maybe to just start by setting the table, can you describe in a couple of sentences what Coda is about?
It’s also really a philosophical exploration about the substrate of consciousness and what a self-aware human personality can potentially exist as.
Ratnakar: The story is about a woman who ends up discovering something shady going on at her company, but it turns into this exploration of what consciousness is and how consciousness can be created. It’s also really a philosophical exploration about the substrate of consciousness and what a self-aware human personality can potentially exist as. And about the intersection between dynamical systems theory and theoretical computer science, which there’s this really interesting conjecture that inspired this story about how a finite dimensional dynamical system, like a set of differential equations, that is able to simulate a Turing-equivalent machine, which is basically anything that’s programmable can be run on that machine. The conjecture is that something like that would be impossible to have in physical reality. Even though it’s theoretically possible, in physical reality, it wouldn’t be possible because additive perturbations to the evolving differential equations would cause really, really different diverging stuff, and it would dismantle the system, in a sense.
Armstrong-López: So the conjecture is this sort of computation could not exist in our biological world because… This is going to be an oversimplification. I want you to correct me while I’m wrong.
Ratnakar: I was also overly simplifying. Now I want to make that clear too, that this is definitely an oversimplification too.
Armstrong-López: Of course, of course. Actually I’m interested in talking about that too, where we simplify and where we complexify some of these scientific theorems or realities through fiction. So just to make sure I’m understanding, the conjecture is that this sort of computation could not exist in our biological world because the biological world is too chaotic for it to exist in that systemic way.
Ratnakar: I think that’s a good way to put it. The way that Cristopher Moore set up the Turing-equivalent computer that would have formed from a dynamical system is by embedding it into numbers. And this is, again, very much oversimplifying it, but if you imagine changing just a couple of numbers in a long string and then moving it to the next step, then it could potentially send that number on a totally different trajectory than what would have happened otherwise. And these tiny perturbations could cause really, really different trajectories.
Armstrong-López: So this conjecture, which is key to the plot, because essentially one of the narrative setups for “Coda” is that the protagonist, who’s named Ray, has disproved this computational conjecture, which is put forth by the real world computer scientist, as you were mentioning, Cristopher Moore. And Cristopher Moore was actually the person who wrote a response essay to the fictional story. Every fictional story in our Future Tense Fiction series on Issues is paired with a response essay from an expert in the field. And I wanted to ask you, what was it like to read Cris Moore’s response to your fictional playing with his conjecture?
Ratnakar: I was really pleasantly shocked because I had no idea he would be the one writing the response essay, but I was really excited to see that. Also, obviously he knows this conjecture, and he knows this stuff way better than I do, so I highly recommend people read his response essay for an in-depth perspective on the science of it because he definitely knows, obviously, it’s his conjecture. But it was really interesting to see his thoughts on what might happen if it’s disproved and how it is an open conjecture, and why he also thinks it’s probably not going to be disproved. And it was really cool reading that response essay.
Armstrong-López: And I think it’s a really interesting space because I think what you’ve done with the story is you’ve used a fictional world to explore the boundaries of a scientific theory and what does it look like when those theories change. And so I wanted to ask you about that in particular. How do you think about exploring the bounds of science in your work as a writer?
There’s nothing really other than science fiction where you can do something like this, where you can take an open conjecture and imagine, say it was disproved, then what would happen?
Ratnakar: Oh, yeah, I think about it a lot, for sure. I think there’s nothing really other than science fiction where you can do something like this, where you can take an open conjecture and imagine, say it was disproved, then what would happen? There’s not really any other format other than speculative fiction where you can really think about that kind of stuff. It’s interesting to put that into a story form of where might this go, what might be the consequences, and what kind of universal computation be created from a dynamical system. I definitely think about that kind of thing a lot. If something was proved or disproved, what would happen next? In some of my other stories, too, I take these really abstract mathematical concepts. In one of my other stories, I took Bruneian linkages, and I was like, what if I made a hive mine that was constructed based on Bruneian linkages? You can do stuff like that in science fiction.
Armstrong-López: I am someone who is so far outside this world of expertise in terms of computational neuroscience and computing in general. And I think the thing that is fascinating to me about this story and the use of science fiction to explore some of these concepts is that I think it opens the door to more people. Because if you sit down and you tell me, “You need to read this paper on Cristopher Moore’s conjecture,” I would have a really hard time getting through it, not because it’s not a brilliant conjecture, but because that’s not my background, and my brain shuts down. But if you tell me, “Here’s a fictional world that is going to explore some of these concepts that you might not be familiar with, and it’s a way to get your feet in the door,” that all of a sudden to me feels more doable, and it feels more accessible. And I’m wondering if you see science fiction as a tool to make some of these complex topics in science and research science more accessible to more people.
Ratnakar: Yeah, I think it’s a great tool for that. I think just having a character and their life and their humanity being a central part of what you tie the math and science concepts to immediately makes it more accessible to a reader. Because even if in the story, it’s harder for them to grasp the math or the science, they still have the character, and they still can get something from the story through what happens to the character and what’s going on. So I definitely think it’s a good tool for science communication. Obviously there are speculative elements, but definitely for introducing people to thinking about certain scientific concepts, it’s a really useful thing.
Armstrong-López: Or even to give people a tool to start asking questions or feel like they can start asking questions. You were describing how you use fiction to push the bounds of science and ask what it would look like if things were different. And I thought that was really interesting because in some ways, what you’re doing as a writer is you’re placing different potential realities alongside each other. You’re placing the reality that we know, and then you’re asking us to imagine what it would be like if that were different or if that were different in the future.
And I think that there is a connection to what happens actually to the protagonist in your story, “Coda,” to Ray. And Ray eventually gets into this space where she sees two different realities play out or exist alongside each other, and she’s forced to question or ask herself, which one is the quote-unquote “more true” one, or if there is a “more true” one? And it connects to this theme of exploring consciousness. And I know that that’s a common theme in some of your other stories as well. So I’m curious what draws you to explore consciousness in so much of your work, whether as a scientist or as a writer.
If we’re pretty much the only species that can understand and interrogate consciousness and self-awareness and the ability to think about our universe and the nature of reality, then we should figure out what causes that.
Ratnakar: This is definitely getting really philosophical, but it’s pretty amazing that humans are these complex self-aware machines. We have this ability to reason about and figure out the nature of reality that as far as we know, is pretty unique to us. And I have this feeling of, if we’re pretty much the only species that can understand and interrogate consciousness and self-awareness and the ability to think about our universe and the nature of reality, then we should figure out what causes that. We should turn it inwards and figure out what leads to that in the first place. And I think that’s why it interests me because it’s partly because what else can do that? There’s nothing really other than humans that can do something like that.
Armstrong-López: And it’s why this human-driven, character-driven storytelling does feel like such a rich space. And as we’re talking about all of this, I am also plagued by some process questions, which is that you are a PhD student, obviously a very busy, stressful, involved time, and then at the same time, you’re able to carve out space in your life to pursue these fictional explorations. So I wanted to just ask you on a more logistical level, when and how do you find time to write fiction amid your busy schedule as a PhD student, and why is it something that you choose to prioritize?
Ratnakar: Oh my gosh, so it is actually hard to find time to write. I’m a very slow writer, and for the most part, I put out one story a year, in general. For my novellas, they usually take me a year, or the one I’m writing now is probably could take over a year to actually complete. And it’s hard to find time to actually write it out. But generally, I have an outline, a working outline, and I have bullet point story beats.
And when I’m just going through my day-to-day in the back of my mind, I think about what’s going to happen in the story and stuff like that. I literally just, I don’t know, while taking out the trash or taking a walk or just in my day-to-day life, I think through the story. And if I come across an interesting conversation or an interesting experience or an interesting talk I go to or whatever, then it feeds into that stew. And eventually, once I have something that I’m happy with in my head and in the outline form, then I’ll spend a couple of weeks, just when I’m on break or something, writing out the thing, and then it’s written out.
Armstrong-López: Well, thank you for walking me through that. I will say to me, it sounds like a very short time to write a novella in a year or even more than a year, especially because your work is so grounded in these complex scientific topics like we’ve been talking about. And I want to understand the process of you decide, I’m going to write this story that imagines what might happen if we were to disprove this conjecture. So how are you taking these scientific pieces, like research papers, talks, how are you taking those different elements and then putting them into your fictional world? What does that process look like for you?
Ratnakar: My research is on embryonic neurodevelopment, and I’m trying to create mathematical models of how the brain self-assembles during embryonic neurodevelopment. So there is this one really interesting theoretical biology paper that I read by Hessameddin Akhlaghpour, and it was called An RNA-based theory of natural universal computation. And it walked through this … he wasn’t saying that this is how this works, even though in my story I imagine that it was exactly what happened in the paper because why not?
Armstrong-López: You have to take some leaps.
Ratnakar: Yeah. (laughs) But he basically proposed this idea of how a Turing equivalent machine could be embedded in RNA. So I thought it was really fascinating. And when I was looking at what he was discussing in his paper, he brought up Cristopher Moore’s conjecture, and all of this was for things I was just thinking about for my research. Even though my research isn’t on this, really, this is already a separate thing. I was like, “Oh, this is potentially interesting.” So it was through that paper that I found Cristopher Moore’s conjecture, and I read Cristopher Moore’s stuff. And then I was approached by a Future Tense Fiction magazine. They’re like, “Oh, what are you interested in for writing a story?” And at the time, I had been reading this stuff, and I was like, “What if I just write about this stuff that I’m already reading about?”
Armstrong-López: Well, I love that, and I think it’s a really good example of how your work as a scientist enriches your work as a writer and enriches our experience as readers by grounding the work in real research, real questions. And I wanted to ask how you think it goes the other way. Do you think your work as a writer makes you a better scientist?
I think definitely it helps me be a better scientist, too, because I think about science more broadly than I would if I was just doing research.
Ratnakar: I think so because it’s an additional motivator for me to engage with and understand these mechanisms. I think the philosophical aspect of, oh, we’re the only species that can do science and try to figure out the nature of our reality, and oh, I can think about that and engage with that through art and writing. Having that as a motivator makes me want to understand the actual research and science even more because it’s an additional motivator beyond just, oh, I hope my model works, or I hope it’s verifiable, or things like that.
So yes, I think it helps me be a better scientist because it’s just this huge additional source of motivation for learning things and also for branching out beyond my topic of expertise. I’m not a quantum computing person at all, but this story gave me the opportunity to think about that. And you never know when those tangents or things beyond what your tunnel visioning on for your PhD topic, you never know if those outside pieces will end up influencing you in some way. So I think definitely it helps me be a better scientist, too, because I think about science more broadly than I would if I was just doing research. And it also reminds me of the philosophical and human importance of science.
Armstrong-López: I love that idea of narrative and writing as a way to expand the questions that we might ask ourselves and the way that we might understand how our work will interact with the world and interact with people in the world, which is ultimately the point of science and the point of research is what happens when it gets outside of the lab. And it changes maybe the ways people interact with things or with each other in some way. And I think in this conversation, one of the things that we’ve been touching on a lot is how science is also a process of storytelling. We use what we know in science to weave narratives about what might be possible, and then we test through those narratives.
Again, I’m probably simplifying this, but I thought it was a really compelling part of Cristopher Moore’s response essay to Coda. He wrote, “We base our cryptosystems on the belief that certain computational problems are very hard, so that breaking our codes will take an exponential amount of time. But problems we thought were hard in the past have turned out to be easy when a clever new mathematical insight came along.” And so I wanted to ask you, how would you describe the way that science uses stories?
Ratnakar: A lot of what science is is really turning everything in our universe into a form that we can process, and a form that we can process is ultimately a story. So science is just translating everything that’s happening around us into a narrative that we can engage with.
Armstrong-López: I think that’s a really compelling thought. And you, at the beginning of our conversation, talked about science fiction as a form of science communication, and I think that that resonates with me so much. And so I think it’s a fantastic reminder of the uniqueness of our ability to do science, and then also the sacredness of our ability to tell stories and to connect those two together. So Arula, thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you for your work and the narrative worlds that you invite us into.
Ratnakar: Oh, thank you so much. This was lovely.
Armstrong-López: Visit our show notes to find links to Arula Ratnakar’s story, “Coda,” and the response essay by Cristopher Moore. Do you have a speculative fiction story you’d like to pitch? Reach out to imagination@asu.edu.
Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. And write to us at podcast@issues.org with your thoughts and ideas for topics express to cover. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach, and our audio engineer, Shannon Lynch. I’m Mia Armstrong-López, an editor of Future Tense. Thanks for listening.