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ThalienceThalience is a concept invented by science fiction author Karl Schroeder in his novel Ventus (2000). The idea of thalience has been adopted by some members of the artificial intelligence community to describe the self-organizing properties of fine-grained distributed networks. As presented in the novel, however, the concept is far from clear and there are, in fact, two possible definitions. Sentience One definition of thalience is as the attempt to determine whether non-human sentient systems are truly independent minds, or whether they are merely "parrots" that give back to human researchers what the researchers expect to hear. In this definition, thalience is an ironic counterpart to science, and the novel says that the word was deliberately chosen as an allusion to "silent Thalia", the muse of Nature. Unlike the Turing test, which aims to determine whether an artificial system is conscious, thalience aims to determine whether it is independent of human categories of thought, or merely a mirror of them. This may represent the logical next question to ask after a system has passed the Turing test. In the novel Schroeder alludes to Pinnochio in describing the nature of the question: at what point does Pinnochio become a "real boy"? State of being The other definition of thalience, which the novel uses more consistently, is as a state of being. Entities are considered "thalient" if they succeed in developing their own categories for understanding the world. According to this view, artificial intelligences that inherit humanity's concepts instead of inventing their own are not truly independent beings even if they are conscious. This idea is dramatized in the novel by a global terraforming system driven by intelligent nanotechnology. As this system evolves a crisis point is reached after which it will either be forced to abandon the unique models of the world that it has generated, and become a mirror to human ambitions and prejudices, or it will gain true independence. One implication of thalience is that a truly independent consciousness will be difficult to communicate with because its ideas of reality do not map perfectly to ours. The concept of thalience is related to philosophical notions of the Other.
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