Sentience explored by a marine biologist in the future with her AI co-worker.
A well-paced exploration of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and self, without the same genre tropes we’ve seen over and over.
The book is set in the near future and follows a handful of characters. Mostly Dr. Ha Nguyen, a marine biologist who specializes in cephalopod intelligence, and Evrim, the world’s only sentient artificial intelligence. Together they attempt to research and communicate with a species of octopus that have possibly developed sentience, culture, and language. The Mountain in the Sea explores what each of those monoliths mean for humanity, what they could mean once we remove our projected experience from them.
The book is personal. The book is humanity under a microscope. The book frequently quotes two non-exstant books that I wish I could read, How Oceans Think and Building Minds.
The end goal of The Mountain in the Sea is to answer the question, what is consciousness? I like the answer that is reached.