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115-638: The North American Confederacy is an alternate history series of novels created by L. Neil Smith . The series begins with The Probability Broach and there are eight sequels. The stories take place in a fictional country of the same name. The ostensible point of divergence leading to the North American Confederacy (NAC) is the addition of a single word in the preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence , wherein it states that governments "derive their just power from

230-523: A Megaduke and commander of its armies and manages to fight off the invading Ottoman armies of Mehmet II . He saves the city from Islamic conquest , and even chases the Turks deeper into lands they had previously conquered. One of the earliest works of alternate history published in large quantities for the reception of a large audience may be Louis Geoffroy 's Histoire de la Monarchie universelle : Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832) (History of

345-431: A multiverse of alternative worlds, complete with the paratime travel machines that would later become popular with American pulp writers. However, since his hero experiences only a single alternate world, the story is not very different from conventional alternate history. In the 1930s, alternate history moved into a new arena. The December 1933 issue of Astounding published Nat Schachner 's "Ancestral Voices", which

460-681: A Bat? ", consciousness can refer to the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences, or as some philosophers refer to them, " qualia "—in other words, the ability to have states that it feels like something to be in. Some philosophers, notably Colin McGinn , believe that the physical process causing consciousness to happen will never be understood, a position known as " new mysterianism ". They do not deny that most other aspects of consciousness are subject to scientific investigation but they argue that qualia will never be explained. Other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett , argue that qualia

575-455: A POD only to explain the existence and make no use of the concept, or may present the universe without explanation of its existence. Isaac Asimov 's short story " What If— " (1952) is about a couple who can explore alternate realities by means of a television-like device. This idea can also be found in Asimov's novel The End of Eternity (1955), in which the "Eternals" can change the realities of

690-412: A Pennsylvania State Police officer, who knows how to make gunpowder, is transported from our world to an alternate universe where the recipe for gunpowder is a tightly held secret and saves a country that is about to be conquered by its neighbors. The paratime patrol members are warned against going into the timelines immediately surrounding it, where the country will be overrun, but the book never depicts

805-460: A Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg. When a story's assumptions about the nature of time travel lead to the complete replacement of the visited time's future, rather than just the creation of an additional time line, the device of a "time patrol" is often used where guardians move through time to preserve the "correct" history. A more recent example is Making History by Stephen Fry in which

920-439: A basis for determining which entities deserve moral consideration , particularly in utilitarianism . In Asian religions, the word "sentience" has been used to translate a variety of concepts. In science fiction , the word "sentience" is sometimes used interchangeably with " sapience ", " self-awareness ", or " consciousness ". Some writers differentiate between the mere ability to perceive sensations, such as light or pain, and

1035-465: A bitter war with the "Spanish" in Mexico (the chief scientist at the laboratory where the experiment occurred is described as a Gnostic, and references to Christian Gnosticism appear repeatedly in the book). Although not dealing in physical time travel, in his alt-history novel Marx Returns , Jason Barker introduces anachronisms into the life and times of Karl Marx , such as when his wife Jenny sings

1150-412: A certain drug, and the agent is constantly trying to maximize the consistency of behavior among his alternate selves, attempting to compensate for events and thoughts he experiences, he guesses are of low measure relative to those experienced by most of his other selves. Many writers—perhaps the majority—avoid the discussion entirely. In one novel of this type, H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen ,

1265-546: A character in Ada makes a long-distance call, all the toilets in the house flush at once to provide hydraulic power. Guido Morselli described the defeat of Italy (and subsequently France) in World War I in his novel, Past Conditional (1975; Contro-passato prossimo ), wherein the static Alpine front line which divided Italy from Austria during that war collapses when the Germans and

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1380-618: A different history. "Sidewise in Time" has been described as "the point at which the alternate history narrative first enters science fiction as a plot device" and is the story for which the Sidewise Award for Alternate History is named. A somewhat similar approach was taken by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 novelette Elsewhen in which a professor trains his mind to move his body across timelines. He then hypnotizes his students so that they can explore more of them. Eventually, each settles into

1495-764: A divided United States , in which the Empire of Japan takes the Pacific states, governing them as a puppet, Nazi Germany takes the East Coast of the United States and parts of the Midwest , with the remnants of the old United States' government as the Neutral Zone, a buffer state between the two superpowers. The book has inspired an Amazon series of the same name . Vladimir Nabokov 's novel, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969),

1610-487: A machine conscious in exactly the way humans are is not one that we are equipped to take on." Indeed, leading AI textbooks do not mention "sentience" at all. Digital sentience is of considerable interest to the philosophy of mind . Functionalist philosophers consider that sentience is about "causal roles" played by mental states, which involve information processing. In this view, the physical substrate of this information processing does not need to be biological, so there

1725-474: A nation. It assumes that by giving a nation an alternative history, alternative values can be made to grow." In the English language, the first known complete alternate history may be Nathaniel Hawthorne 's short story " P.'s Correspondence ", published in 1845. It recounts the tale of a man who is considered "a madman" due to his perceptions of a different 1845, a reality in which long-dead famous people, such as

1840-446: A peaceful end to slavery in 1820. Jefferson is also responsible for developing new systems of weights and measures ( metric inches and pounds, among others) in 1800. He also devises a new calendar system to honor the birth of liberty as the old year 1776 becomes Year Zero , Anno Liberati's ( Latin for Year of Liberation). When Jefferson first proposes the new calendar system in 1796, he originally marks it as Gallatin's ascension to

1955-637: A sixteen-part epic comic book series called Captain Confederacy began examining a world where the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War . In the series, the Captain and others heroes are staged government propaganda events featuring the feats of these superheroes. Since the late 1990s, Harry Turtledove has been the most prolific practitioner of alternate history and has been given

2070-592: A staple of the alternate history genre. A number of alternate history stories and novels appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see, for example, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin 's The Ifs of History [1907] and Charles Petrie 's If: A Jacobite Fantasy [1926]). In 1931, British historian Sir John Squire collected a series of essays from some of the leading historians of the period for his anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise . In that work, scholars from major universities, as well as important non-academic authors, turned their attention to such questions as "If

2185-619: A third. Robinson explores world history from that point in AD 1405 (807 AH ) to about AD 2045 (1467 AH). Rather than following the great man theory of history, focusing on leaders, wars, and major events, Robinson writes more about social history , similar to the Annales School of history theory and Marxist historiography , focusing on the lives of ordinary people living in their time and place. Philip Roth 's novel, The Plot Against America (2004), looks at an America where Franklin D. Roosevelt

2300-503: A time machine is used to alter history so that Adolf Hitler was never born. That ironically results in a more competent leader of Nazi Germany and results in the country's ascendancy and longevity in the altered timeline. While many justifications for alternate histories involve a multiverse , the "many world" theory would naturally involve many worlds, in fact a continually exploding array of universes. In quantum theory, new worlds would proliferate with every quantum event, and even if

2415-558: A timeline for the history of the United States which comprises a listing of those who followed Washington and Gallatin as the Presidents . In this history, the United States merges with several other North American nations to form the North American Confederacy in 1893. From that point, the individuals listed here are considered Presidents of the NAC. Many of these individuals are prominent in the history of either anarchism or libertarianism and are

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2530-411: A tyrannical US Government brushes aside the warnings of scientists about the dangers of time travel and goes on with a planned experiment - with the result that minor changes to the prehistoric past cause Humanity to never have existed, its place taken by tentacled underwater intelligent creatures - who also have a tyrannical government which also insists on experimenting with time-travel. Time travel as

2645-427: A vehicle to expound them. This book introduced the idea of a person being transported from a point in our familiar world to the precise geographical equivalent point in an alternate world in which history had gone differently. The protagonists undergo various adventures in the alternate world, and then are finally transported back to our world, again to the precise geographical equivalent point. Since then, that has become

2760-531: A verse from the Sex Pistols 's song " Anarchy in the U.K. ", or in the games of chess she plays with the Marxes' housekeeper Helene Demuth , which on one occasion involves a Caro–Kann Defence . In her review of the novel, Nina Power writes of "Jenny's 'utopian' desire for an end to time", an attitude which, according to Power, is inspired by her husband's co-authored book The German Ideology . However, in keeping with

2875-475: Is Herodotus 's Histories , which contains speculative material. Another example of counterfactual history was posited by cardinal and Doctor of the Church Peter Damian in the 11th century. In his famous work De Divina Omnipotentia , a long letter in which he discusses God 's omnipotence , he treats questions related to the limits of divine power, including the question of whether God can change

2990-501: Is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly and collectively describes sentience plus further features of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity , intelligence , sapience , self-awareness , and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). These further features of consciousness may not be necessary for sentience, which is the capacity to feel sensations and emotions. According to Thomas Nagel in his paper " What Is It Like to Be

3105-405: Is a story of incest that takes place within an alternate North America settled in part by Czarist Russia and that borrows from Dick's idea of "alternate-alternate" history (the world of Nabokov's hero is wracked by rumors of a "counter-earth" that apparently is ours). Some critics believe that the references to a counter-earth suggest that the world portrayed in Ada is a delusion in the mind of

3220-505: Is another attempt to portray a Utopian society. In Aristopia , the earliest settlers in Virginia discover a reef made of solid gold and are able to build a Utopian society in North America . In 1905, H. G. Wells published A Modern Utopia . As explicitly noted in the book itself, Wells's main aim in writing it was to set out his social and political ideas, the plot serving mainly as

3335-625: Is concerned that AI sentience would be particularly easy to deny, and that if achieved, humans might nevertheless continue to treat AI systems as mere tools. He notes that the linguistic behaviour of LLMs is not a reliable way to assess whether they are sentient. He suggests to apply theories of consciousness, such as the global workspace theory , to the algorithms implicitly learned by LLMs, but noted that this technique requires advances in AI interpretability to understand what happens inside. He also mentions some other pathways that may lead to AI sentience, such as

3450-467: Is declared null and void, and Gallatin is proclaimed the second president. In 1795, a new caretaker government is established, and a revised version of the Articles of Confederation is ratified in 1797, but with a much greater emphasis on individual and economic freedom. After the war, Alexander Hamilton flees to Prussia and lives there until he is killed in a duel in 1804. Over the ensuing century,

3565-477: Is defeated in 1940 in his bid for a third term as President of the United States, and Charles Lindbergh is elected, leading to a US that features increasing fascism and anti-Semitism. Michael Chabon , occasionally an author of speculative fiction, contributed to the genre with his novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), which explores a world in which the State of Israel was destroyed in its infancy and many of

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3680-494: Is entitled, at a minimum, to protection from unnecessary suffering , though animal-rights advocates may differ on what rights (e.g., the right to life) may be entailed by simple sentience. Sentiocentrism describes the theory that sentient individuals are the center of moral concern. Gary Francione also bases his abolitionist theory of animal rights, which differs significantly from Singer's , on sentience. He asserts that, "All sentient beings, humans or nonhuman, have one right:

3795-550: Is found in Livy 's Ab Urbe Condita Libri (book IX, sections 17–19). Livy contemplated an alternative 4th century BC in which Alexander the Great had survived to attack Europe as he had planned; asking, "What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in a war with Alexander?" Livy concluded that the Romans would likely have defeated Alexander. An even earlier possibility

3910-443: Is no theoretical barrier to the possibility of sentient machines. According to type physicalism however, the physical constitution is important; and depending on the types of physical systems required for sentience, it may or may not be possible for certain types of machines (such as electronic computing devices) to be sentient. The discussion on the topic of alleged sentience of artificial intelligence has been reignited in 2022 by

4025-551: Is not a meaningful concept. Regarding animal consciousness , the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness , publicly proclaimed on 7 July 2012 at Cambridge University, states that many non-human animals possess the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states, and can exhibit intentional behaviors. The declaration notes that all vertebrates (including fish and reptiles) have this neurological substrate for consciousness, and that there

4140-422: Is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" Richard D. Ryder defines sentientism broadly as the position according to which an entity has moral status if and only if it is sentient. In David Chalmer's more specific terminology, Bentham is a narrow sentientist , since his criterion for moral status is not only the ability to experience any phenomenal consciousness at all, but specifically

4255-402: Is related to the concept of ahimsa , non-violence toward other beings. In some forms of Buddhism, plants, stones and other inanimate objects are considered to be 'sentient'. In Jainism many things are endowed with a soul, jīva , which is sometimes translated as 'sentience'. Some things are without a soul, ajīva , such as a chair or spoon. There are different rankings of jīva based on

4370-664: Is set in Europe following the Nazi victory. The novel Dominion by C.J. Sansom (2012) is similar in concept but is set in England, with Churchill the leader of an anti-German Resistance and other historic persons in various fictional roles. In the Mecha Samurai Empire series (2016), Peter Tieryas focuses on the Asian-American side of the alternate history, exploring an America ruled by

4485-467: Is strong evidence that many invertebrates also have it. David Chalmers argues that sentience is sometimes used as shorthand for phenomenal consciousness , the capacity to have any subjective experience at all, but sometimes refers to the narrower concept of affective consciousness , the capacity to experience subjective states that have affective valence (i.e., a positive or negative character), such as pain and pleasure. The sentience quotient concept

4600-488: Is suggested that, had Gordon Banks been fit to play in the 1970 FIFA World Cup quarter-final, there would have been no Thatcherism and the post-war consensus would have continued indefinitely. Kim Stanley Robinson 's novel, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), starts at the point of divergence with Timur turning his army away from Europe, and the Black Death has killed 99% of Europe's population, instead of only

4715-429: Is whether the way these noxious stimuli are processed within the brain leads to a subjective experience of pain. To address that, researchers often look for behavioral cues. For example, "if a dog with an injured paw whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, we have reasonable grounds to assume that

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4830-643: The Crosstime Traffic series for teenagers featuring a variant of H. Beam Piper's paratime trading empire. The concept of a cross-time version of a world war, involving rival paratime empires, was developed in Fritz Leiber 's Change War series, starting with the Hugo Award winning The Big Time (1958); followed by Richard C. Meredith 's Timeliner trilogy in the 1970s, Michael McCollum 's A Greater Infinity (1982) and John Barnes' Timeline Wars trilogy in

4945-469: The Empire of Japan and the Germans (and doing almost as much harm as good in spite of its advanced weapons). The series also explores the cultural impacts of people with 2021 ideals interacting with 1940s culture. Similarly, Robert Charles Wilson 's Mysterium depicts a failed US government experiment which transports a small American town into an alternative version of the US run by Gnostics , who are engaged in

5060-530: The Libertarian Futurist Society . The Nagasaki Vector , Tom Paine Maru , The Gallatin Divergence and The American Zone were all Prometheus Award finalists. Alternate history Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, some alternative history stories have featured the tropes of time travel between histories, the psychic awareness of the existence of an alternative universe by

5175-755: The Worldwar series , in which aliens invaded Earth during World War II . Other stories by Turtledove include A Different Flesh , in which the Americas were not populated from Asia during the last ice age ; In the Presence of Mine Enemies , in which the Nazis won World War II; and Ruled Britannia , in which the Spanish Armada succeeded in conquering England in the Elizabethan era , with William Shakespeare being given

5290-466: The brain emulation of sentient animals. a. Quote: "The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing

5405-571: The time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp in which an American academic travels to Italy at the time of the Byzantine invasion of the Ostrogoths . De Camp's time traveler, Martin Padway, is depicted as making permanent historical changes and implicitly forming a new time branch, thereby making the work an alternate history. In William Tenn 's short story Brooklyn Project (1948),

5520-531: The unanimous consent of the governed ." Inspired by this wording, Albert Gallatin intercedes in the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 to the benefit of the farmers rather than the fledgling United States government as he does in real life. This results in the rebellion becoming a Second American Revolution, which ultimately leads to the overthrow of the government and the execution by firing squad of George Washington for treason . The United States Constitution

5635-522: The "fair world" parallels our history, about fifty years out of step, there is functional magic in the fair world. Even with such explanation, the more explicitly the alternate world resembles a normal fantasy world, the more likely the story is to be labelled fantasy, as in Poul Anderson's "House Rule" and "Loser's Night". In both science fiction and fantasy, whether a given parallel universe is an alternate history may not be clear. The writer might allude to

5750-538: The 1920s. In Jo Walton 's "Small Change" series, the United Kingdom made peace with Hitler before the involvement of the United States in World War II, and slowly collapses due to severe economic depression. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen have written a novel, 1945 , in which the US defeated Japan but not Germany in World War II, resulting in a Cold War with Germany rather than

5865-484: The 1980s; Chalker's G.O.D. Inc trilogy (1987–89), featuring paratime detectives Sam and Brandy Horowitz, marks the first attempt at merging the paratime thriller with the police procedural. Kurland's Perchance (1988), the first volume of the never-completed "Chronicles of Elsewhen", presents a multiverse of secretive cross-time societies that utilize a variety of means for cross-time travel, ranging from high-tech capsules to mutant powers. Harry Turtledove has launched

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5980-468: The 1990s. Such "paratime" stories may include speculation that the laws of nature can vary from one universe to the next, providing a science fictional explanation—or veneer—for what is normally fantasy. Aaron Allston 's Doc Sidhe and Sidhe Devil take place between our world, the "grim world" and an alternate "fair world" where the Sidhe retreated to. Although technology is clearly present in both worlds, and

6095-465: The AI system excels at this, providing answers to challenging topics about the nature of emotions , generating Aesop -style fables on cue, and even describing its alleged fears. Nick Bostrom considers that while LaMDA is probably not sentient, being very sure of it would require understanding how consciousness works, having access to unpublished information about LaMDA's architecture, and finding how to apply

6210-509: The American Civil War (named the "War of Southron Independence" in this timeline). The protagonist, the autodidact Hodgins Backmaker, travels back to the aforementioned battle and inadvertently changes history, which results in the emergence of our own timeline and the consequent victory of the Union instead. The American humorist author James Thurber parodied alternate history stories about

6325-412: The American Civil War in his 1930 story "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox", which he accompanied with this very brief introduction: " Scribner's magazine is publishing a series of three articles: 'If Booth Had Missed Lincoln', 'If Lee Had Won the Battle of Gettysburg', and 'If Napoleon Had Escaped to America'. This is the fourth". Another example of alternate history from this period (and arguably

6440-721: The Austrians forsake trench warfare and adopt blitzkrieg twenty years in advance. Kingsley Amis set his novel, The Alteration (1976), in the 20th century, but major events in the Reformation did not take place, and Protestantism is limited to the breakaway Republic of New England. Martin Luther was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church and later became Pope Germanian I. In Nick Hancock and Chris England 's 1997 book What Didn't Happen Next: An Alternative History of Football it

6555-570: The EU and its member states to "pay full regards to the welfare requirements of animals". Nociception is the process by which the nervous system detects and responds to potentially harmful stimuli, leading to the sensation of pain . It involves specialized receptors called nociceptors that sense damage or threat and send signals to the brain. Nociception is widespread among animals, even among insects. The presence of nociception indicates an organism's ability to detect harmful stimuli. A further question

6670-620: The Hawaiian Islands. Perhaps the most incessantly explored theme in popular alternate history focuses on the aftermath of an Axis victory in World War II . In some versions, the Nazis and/or Axis Powers win; or in others, they conquer most of the world but a "Fortress America" exists under siege; while in others, there is a Nazi/Japanese Cold War comparable to the US/Soviet equivalent in 'our' timeline. Fatherland (1992), by Robert Harris ,

6785-601: The Imperium is one of the earliest alternate history novels; it was published by Fantastic Stories of the Imagination in 1961, in magazine form, and reprinted by Ace Books in 1962 as one half of an Ace Double . Besides our world, Laumer describes a world ruled by an Imperial aristocracy formed by the merger of European empires, in which the American Revolution never happened, and a third world in post-war chaos ruled by

6900-508: The Japanese Empire while integrating elements of Asian pop culture like mechas and videogames. Several writers have posited points of departure for such a world but then have injected time splitters from the future. For instance James P. Hogan 's The Proteus Operation . Norman Spinrad wrote The Iron Dream in 1972, which is intended to be a science fiction novel written by Adolf Hitler after fleeing from Europe to North America in

7015-460: The Jews and Israel, Chabon also plays with other common tropes of alternate history fiction; in the book, Germany actually loses the war even harder than they did in reality, getting hit with a nuclear bomb instead of just simply losing a ground war (subverting the common "what if Germany won WWII?" trope). The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a boom in popular-fiction versions of alternate history, fueled by

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7130-571: The Moors in Spain Had Won" and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness". The essays range from serious scholarly efforts to Hendrik Willem van Loon 's fanciful and satiric portrayal of an independent 20th-century New Amsterdam , a Dutch city-state on the island of Manhattan . Among the authors included were Hilaire Belloc , André Maurois , and Winston Churchill . One of the entries in Squire's volume

7245-474: The Myriad Ways , where the reality of all possible universes leads to an epidemic of suicide and crime because people conclude their choices have no moral import. In any case, even if it is true that every possible outcome occurs in some world, it can still be argued that traits such as bravery and intelligence might still affect the relative frequency of worlds in which better or worse outcomes occurred (even if

7360-742: The Soviet Union. Gingrich and Forstchen neglected to write the promised sequel; instead, they wrote a trilogy about the American Civil War, starting with Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War , in which the Confederates win a victory at the Battle of Gettysburg - however, after Lincoln responds by bringing Grant and his forces to the eastern theater, the Army of Northern Virginia is soon trapped and destroyed in Maryland, and

7475-667: The Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) (1836), which imagines Napoleon 's First French Empire emerging victorious in the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule. The Book of Mormon (published 1830) is described as an "alternative history" by Richard Lyman Bushman , a biographer of Joseph Smith . Smith claimed to have translated

7590-511: The ability to perceive emotions , such as fear or grief . The subjective awareness of experiences by a conscious individual are known as qualia in Western philosophy . "Sentience" was first coined by philosophers in the 1630s for the concept of an ability to feel, derived from Latin sentiens (feeling). In philosophy, different authors draw different distinctions between consciousness and sentience. According to Antonio Damasio , sentience

7705-486: The ability to experience conscious states with negative affective valence (i.e. suffering). Animal welfare and rights advocates often invoke similar capacities. For example, the documentary Earthlings argues that while animals do not have all the desires and ability to comprehend as do humans, they do share the desires for food and water, shelter and companionship, freedom of movement and avoidance of pain. Animal-welfare advocates typically argue that any sentient being

7820-471: The absence of a direct equivalent of the neocortex in their brain, was used as an argument against sentience. Jennifer Jacquet suggests that the belief that fish do not feel pain originated in response to a 1980s policy aimed at banning catch and release . The range of animals regarded by scientists as sentient or conscious has progressively widened, now including animals such as fish, lobsters and octopus. Digital sentience (or artificial sentience) means

7935-569: The basic right not to be treated as the property of others." Andrew Linzey , a British theologian , considers that Christianity should regard sentient animals according to their intrinsic worth, rather than their utility to humans. In 1997 the concept of animal sentience was written into the basic law of the European Union. The legally binding protocol annexed to the Treaty of Amsterdam recognises that animals are "sentient beings", and requires

8050-481: The cause of a point of divergence (POD), which can denote either the bifurcation of a historical timeline or a simple replacement of the future that existed before the time-travelling event, has continued to be a popular theme. In Ward Moore 's Bring the Jubilee (1953), the protagonist lives in an alternate history in which the Confederacy has won the American Civil War. He travels backward through time and brings about

8165-489: The claims made about Google 's LaMDA ( Language Model for Dialogue Applications) artificial intelligence system that it is "sentient" and had a " soul ". LaMDA is an artificial intelligence system that creates chatbots —AI robots designed to communicate with humans—by gathering vast amounts of text from the internet and using algorithms to respond to queries in the most fluid and natural way possible. The transcripts of conversations between scientists and LaMDA reveal that

8280-570: The concept is related to the Bodhisattva , an enlightened being devoted to the liberation of others. The first vow of a Bodhisattva states, "Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to free them." Sentience has been a central concept in the animal rights movement, tracing back to the well-known writing of Jeremy Bentham in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation : "The question

8395-435: The copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen." This view is perhaps somewhat too abstract to be explored directly in science fiction stories, but a few writers have tried, such as Greg Egan in his short story The Infinite Assassin , where an agent is trying to contain reality-scrambling "whirlpools" that form around users of

8510-647: The disintegration of the US Federal Government after Albert Gallatin joins the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and eventually leads to the creation of a libertarian utopia. In the 2022 novel Poutine and Gin by Steve Rhinelander, the point of divergence is the Battle of the Plains of Abraham of the French and Indian War. That novel is a mystery set in 1940 of that time line. A recent time traveling splitter variant involves entire communities being shifted elsewhere to become

8625-517: The document from golden plates, which told the story of a Jewish group who migrated from Israel to the Americas and inhabited the region from about 600 B.C. to 400 A.D., becoming the ancestors of Native Americans . In the 2005 biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling , Bushman wrote that the Book of Mormon "turned American history upside down [and] works on the premise that a history—a book—can reconstitute

8740-715: The dog is indeed experiencing something unpleasant." Avoiding painful stimuli unless the reward is significant can also provide evidence that pain avoidance is not merely an unconscious reflex (similarly to how humans "can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building"). Animals such as pigs , chickens , and fish are typically recognized as sentient. There is more uncertainty regarding insects , and findings on certain insect species may not be applicable to others. Historically, fish were not considered sentient, and their behaviors were often viewed as "reflexes or complex, unconscious species-typical responses" to their environment. Their dissimilarity with humans, including

8855-553: The emergence of the prolific alternate history author Harry Turtledove , as well as the development of the steampunk genre and two series of anthologies—the What Might Have Been series edited by Gregory Benford and the Alternate ... series edited by Mike Resnick . This period also saw alternate history works by S. M. Stirling , Kim Stanley Robinson, Harry Harrison , Howard Waldrop , Peter Tieryas , and others. In 1986,

8970-518: The first that explicitly posited cross-time travel from one universe to another as anything more than a visionary experience) is H.G. Wells ' Men Like Gods (1923) in which the London -based journalist Mr. Barnstable, along with two cars and their passengers, is mysteriously teleported into "another world", which the "Earthlings" call Utopia. Being far more advanced than Earth, Utopia is some 3000 years ahead of humanity in its development. Wells describes

9085-404: The following: The North American Confederacy is much more advanced in science and technology and much wealthier than our Earth, implying the author's view that libertarianism is a superior political order. Smith states that his novels are written with the purpose of promoting libertarianism. The Probability Broach won the 1982 Prometheus Award , an award created by Smith himself and given by

9200-436: The greater primates are granted citizenship rights equivalent to all races of humans . Later on, dolphins , porpoises , and orcas revealed their sentience and joined the land civilizations. In 1888 (112 A.L.), Thomas Edison invents electrically heated streets. In 1947 (171 A.L.), colored television is invented. In 1993 (217 A.L.), mastodons are cloned back to life with frozen tissue. The Probability Broach includes

9315-402: The hero (another favorite theme of Dick's novels ). Strikingly, the characters in Ada seem to acknowledge their own world as the copy or negative version, calling it "Anti-Terra", while its mythical twin is the real "Terra". Like history, science has followed a divergent path on Anti-Terra: it boasts all the same technology as our world, but all based on water instead of electricity ; e.g., when

9430-413: The historical record, before the time in which the author is writing; (ii) A change that would alter known history; and (iii) An examination of the ramifications of that alteration to history. Occasionally, some types of genre fiction are misidentified as alternative history , specifically science fiction stories set in a time that was the future for the writer, but now is the past for the reader, such as

9545-449: The inhabitants of a given universe, and time travel that divides history into various timestreams . Often described as a subgenre of science fiction , alternative history is a genre of fiction wherein the author speculates upon how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had an outcome different from the real life outcome. An alternate history requires three conditions: (i) A point of divergence from

9660-401: The neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates." b. Quote: "Granted, these animals do not have all the desires we humans have; granted, they do not comprehend everything we humans comprehend; nevertheless, we and they do have some of

9775-443: The new Year Zero . The absence of government interference creates a libertarian utopia where science and medicine advance at a pace significantly greater than in our baseline history. As Elisha Gray had already invented the telephone in 1867 (91 A.L.), Alexander Graham Bell instead develops a voder technology that allows chimpanzees , gorillas , orangutans , and other simians to communicate and prove they are sentient, and

9890-434: The novel's anachronisms, the latter was not published until 1932. By contrast, the novel's timeline ends in 1871. Sentience Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness , reasoning , or complex thought processes. Sentience is an important concept in ethics , as the ability to experience happiness or suffering often forms

10005-453: The novels 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Arthur C. Clarke , 1984 (1949) by George Orwell and the movie 2012 (2009) because the authors did not alter the real history of the past when they wrote the stories. Similar to the genre of alternative history, there is also the genre of secret history - which can be either fictional or non-fictional - which documents events that might have occurred in history, but which had no effect upon

10120-610: The number of senses it has. Water, for example, is a sentient being of the first order, as it is considered to possess only one sense, that of touch. Sentience in Buddhism is the state of having senses. In Buddhism, there are six senses, the sixth being the subjective experience of the mind. Sentience is simply awareness prior to the arising of Skandha . Thus, an animal qualifies as a sentient being. According to Buddhism, sentient beings made of pure consciousness are possible. In Mahayana Buddhism, which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism ,

10235-701: The past, for example, bringing about that Rome was never founded: I see I must respond finally to what many people, on the basis of your holiness's [own] judgment, raise as an objection on the topic of this dispute. For they say: If, as you assert, God is omnipotent in all things, can he manage this, that things that have been made were not made? He can certainly destroy all things that have been made, so that they do not exist now. But it cannot be seen how he can bring it about that things that have been made were not made. To be sure, it can come about that from now on and hereafter Rome does not exist; for it can be destroyed. But no opinion can grasp how it can come about that it

10350-480: The philosophical theory to the machine. He also said about LLMs that "it's not doing them justice to say they're simply regurgitating text", noting that they "exhibit glimpses of creativity, insight and understanding that are quite impressive and may show the rudiments of reasoning". He thinks that "sentience is a matter of degree". In 2022, philosopher David Chalmers made a speech on whether large language models (LLMs) can be conscious, encouraging more research on

10465-460: The poets Robert Burns , Lord Byron , Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats , the actor Edmund Kean , the British politician George Canning , and Napoleon Bonaparte , are still alive. The first novel-length alternate history in English would seem to be Castello Holford 's Aristopia (1895). While not as nationalistic as Louis Geoffroy 's Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–1823 , Aristopia

10580-402: The point of view of an alternate history is variously known as " recursive alternate history ", a "double-blind what-if", or an "alternate-alternate history". Churchill's essay was one of the influences behind Ward Moore 's alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee in which General Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg and paved the way for the eventual victory of the Confederacy in

10695-476: The presidency. However, Gallatin protests that the real revolution was in 1776 and that the Federalist period should be regarded as an aberration and that commemorating, even by implication, the overthrowing and execution of George Washington might set a hideous precedent (as Gallatin insisted that historians should still count Washington as the first President). Jefferson and Gallatin compromise and utilize 1776 as

10810-543: The protagonist's doppelganger. Philip K. Dick 's novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962), is an alternate history in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II. This book contains an example of "alternate-alternate" history, in that one of its characters authored a book depicting a reality in which the Allies won the war, itself divergent from real-world history in several aspects. The several characters live within

10925-415: The reality that is most suitable for him or her. Some of the worlds they visit are mundane, some are very odd, and others follow science fiction or fantasy conventions. World War II produced alternate history for propaganda : both British and American authors wrote works depicting Nazi invasions of their respective countries as cautionary tales. The period around World War II also saw the publication of

11040-442: The recorded historical outcome. Alternative history also is thematically related to, but distinct from, counterfactual history , which is a form of historiography that explores historical events in an extrapolated timeline in which key historical events either did not occur or had an outcome different from the historical record, in order to understand what did happen. The earliest example of alternate (or counterfactual) history

11155-556: The remnants of central government dissipate. The government can no longer create money, and only individual people can, it being backed by gold , silver , wheat, corn, iron, and even whiskey. In 1803, Gallatin and James Monroe arrange the Louisiana Purchase from the French Empire , borrowing money from private sources against the value of the land. Thomas Jefferson successfully leads an abolitionist movement that brings

11270-704: The sentience of artificial intelligences . The question of whether artificial intelligences can be sentient is controversial. The AI research community does not consider sentience (that is, the "ability to feel sensations") as an important research goal, unless it can be shown that consciously "feeling" a sensation can make a machine more intelligent than just receiving input from sensors and processing it as information. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig wrote in 2021: "We are interested in programs that behave intelligently. Individual aspects of consciousness—awareness, self-awareness, attention—can be programmed and can be part of an intelligent machine. The additional project making

11385-453: The slaughter of the innocent thus entailed, remaining solely in the timeline where the country is saved. The cross-time theme was further developed in the 1960s by Keith Laumer in the first three volumes of his Imperium sequence, which would be completed in Zone Yellow (1990). Piper's politically more sophisticated variant was adopted and adapted by Michael Kurland and Jack Chalker in

11500-429: The subject. He suggested that current LLMs were probably not conscious, but that the limitations are temporary and that future systems could be serious candidates for consciousness. According to Jonathan Birch , "measures to regulate the development of sentient AI should run ahead of what would be proportionate to the risks posed by current technology, considering also the risks posed by credible future trajectories." He

11615-570: The task of writing the play that will motivate the Britons to rise up against their Spanish conquerors. He also co-authored a book with actor Richard Dreyfuss , The Two Georges , in which the United Kingdom retained the American colonies, with George Washington and King George III making peace. He did a two-volume series in which the Japanese not only bombed Pearl Harbor but also invaded and occupied

11730-462: The theoretical computational limit of the entire universe. On a logarithmic scale it runs from −70 up to +50. Eastern religions including Hinduism , Buddhism , Sikhism , and Jainism recognise non-humans as sentient beings. The term sentient beings is translated from various Sanskrit terms ( jantu, bahu jana, jagat, sattva ) and "conventionally refers to the mass of living things subject to illusion, suffering, and rebirth ( Saṃsāra )". It

11845-528: The title "Master of Alternate History" by some. His books include those of Timeline 191 (a.k.a. Southern Victory, also known as TL-191), in which, while the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War , the Union and Imperial Germany defeat the Entente Powers in the two "Great War"s of the 1910s and 1940s (with a Nazi-esque Confederate government attempting to exterminate its black population), and

11960-445: The total number of worlds with each type of outcome is infinite, it is still possible to assign a different measure to different infinite sets). The physicist David Deutsch , a strong advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, has argued along these lines, saying that "By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all

12075-522: The unwitting creators of new time branches. These communities are transported from the present (or the near-future) to the past or to another timeline via a natural disaster, the action of technologically advanced aliens, or a human experiment gone wrong. S. M. Stirling wrote the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, in which Nantucket Island and all its modern inhabitants are transported to Bronze Age times to become

12190-559: The war ends within weeks. While World War II has been a common point of divergence in alternate history literature, several works have been based on other points of divergence. For example, Martin Cruz Smith , in his first novel, posited an independent American Indian nation following the defeat of Custer in The Indians Won (1970). Beginning with The Probability Broach in 1980, L. Neil Smith wrote several novels that postulated

12305-480: The world's Jews instead live in a small strip of Alaska set aside by the US government for Jewish settlement. The story follows a Jewish detective solving a murder case in the Yiddish-speaking semi-autonomous city state of Sitka . Stylistically, Chabon borrows heavily from the noir and detective fiction genres, while exploring social issues related to Jewish history and culture. Apart from the alternate history of

12420-513: The world's first superpower. In Eric Flint 's 1632 series , a small town in West Virginia is transported to 17th century central Europe and drastically changes the course of the Thirty Years' War , which was then underway. John Birmingham 's Axis of Time trilogy deals with the culture shock when a United Nations naval task force from 2021 finds itself back in 1942 helping the Allies against

12535-514: The world, without people being aware of it. Poul Anderson 's Time Patrol stories feature conflicts between forces intent on changing history and the Patrol who work to preserve it. One story, Delenda Est , describes a world in which Carthage triumphed over the Roman Republic. The Big Time , by Fritz Leiber , describes a Change War ranging across all of history. Keith Laumer's Worlds of

12650-451: The writer explicitly maintains that all possible decisions are made in all possible ways, one possible conclusion is that the characters were neither brave, nor clever, nor skilled, but simply lucky enough to happen on the universe in which they did not choose the cowardly route, take the stupid action, fumble the crucial activity, etc.; few writers focus on this idea, although it has been explored in stories such as Larry Niven 's story All

12765-487: The writer uses human decisions, every decision that could be made differently would result in a different timeline. A writer's fictional multiverse may, in fact, preclude some decisions as humanly impossible, as when, in Night Watch , Terry Pratchett depicts a character informing Vimes that while anything that can happen, has happened, nevertheless there is no history whatsoever in which Vimes has ever murdered his wife. When

12880-543: Was Churchill's "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg", written from the viewpoint of a historian in a world in which the Confederacy had won the American Civil War . The entry considers what would have happened if the North had been victorious (in other words, a character from an alternate world imagines a world more like the real one we live in, although it is not identical in every detail). Speculative work that narrates from

12995-416: Was introduced by Robert A. Freitas Jr. in the late 1970s. It defines sentience as the relationship between the information processing rate of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit, and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass). It was proposed as a measure for the sentience of all living beings and computers from a single neuron up to a hypothetical being at

13110-578: Was not founded long ago... One early work of fiction detailing an alternate history is Joanot Martorell 's 1490 epic romance Tirant lo Blanch , which was written when the fall of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe . It tells the story of the knight Tirant the White from Brittany who travels to the embattled remnants of the Byzantine Empire . He becomes

13225-450: Was quickly followed by Murray Leinster 's " Sidewise in Time " (1934). While earlier alternate histories examined reasonably-straightforward divergences, Leinster attempted something completely different. In his "World gone mad", pieces of Earth traded places with their analogs from different timelines. The story follows Professor Minott and his students from a fictitious Robinson College as they wander through analogues of worlds that followed

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