Think Tank: Writing the Superhuman

[bluntblade]

Seeing as I'm starting to contribute to another alt-Heresy project, it seemed like a good time to revisit the Think Tank threads and really grasp a nettle: how to characterise a superhuman individual, particularly superhuman intelligence. Now, we're leaving military tactics to the side here, and getting into characterisation instead. Let's dive right in and start with the biggest pitfalls:

 

Everyone Else Being Dumb Does Not A Genius Make

No one in the real world is as smart as a Primarch. No one. Maybe a very few are as sharp as a Space Marine. Which is at the root of the problem when depicting their genius. This leads to things like Roomsky's epic rant about Vulkan teaching people that "if everyone helps each other, things will be better" (I can't find it, but every now and again I flash back to SO. WISE. and titter). Knocking everyone else's IQ down to room temperature doesn't make a Primarch look brilliant, it just makes them look like the lead in Idiocracy.

 

Cheating With Events

This is a big, knotty one, but important to keep in mind. It's tempting to contort the plot into circumstances which guarantee your genius is always right. For example there's The Book of Henry, in which a convenient case of terminal brain cancer spares our eleven-year-old savant the inconvenience of having to try and buy a gun, rather than having his mother do it from beyond the grave. This is especially inexcusable when you're in a setting where superhuman intelligence is really quite common among the characters on the page.

 

The flipside of events bending over backwards to accommodate a plan is writer clairvoyance, illustrated deftly by Sansa in the last series of Game of Thrones when she distrusts and dislikes a character who hasn't done anything seriously wrong yet. It's lazy, it doesn't come from your character, they're not deducing it from the environment, and it's inadvisable as a way of demonstrating their wits.

 

Just Tell Us They're Brilliant!

No. I refer you to False Gods, when Horus can't tell that Erebus is manipulating him. I guess he can't see the villainous smirk on Erebus' face under the moustache he's twirling. Because someone as amazingly genius as Horus should see that coming a mile off.

 

And now I'll open the floor, looking for things we can actually be constructive with.

Edited April 8, 2020 by bluntblade

[Mazer Rackham]

I happened to be passing by and felt like exploring this, so warning: wall of text! 

 

I agree, writing others dumb to elevate 'superhuman' is unwise and does your characters no credit, but I would take this further, confining it of course to the realm of Astartes, that they aren't 'superhuman intelligent'.  They start off as basic humans, then are subjected to a regimen of training by rote, alchemical compounds and hypnogogic manipulation.  Each Marine is supposed to have an eidetic memory, so whatever he is taught he retains.

 

But how do you get away with this?  It builds a ridiculous character.

 

A Marine can recite the works of Shakespeare, can compose sonnets (Blood Angels), do amazing calculus, perform open heart surgery with a spoon, it goes on.  Such a character cannot be fooled, because repeated experience will eliminate possibilities for that.  They may have read Machiavelli after all, or just the Bible (I use this only because of the old saw that everything is in it).

 

Further, I propose superhuman intellect is a pipe dream, because we do not know how to show it, we merely know how to tell it.  We do not know what it looks like.  Of course, we have fine examples of massive intellect, Einstein, Hawking and others, people great in their field, but when it all comes down to it, the characters can only be as intelligent as the author.

 

So how?

 

We exemplify the reaction speed of the Astartes, how quickly they assimilate things, such as new weapons, new languages, battle sign and how they adapt their tactics to new situations.  This we certainly can amplify to make them more than human mentally.  Just have them reaching conclusions faster, be more insightful, be more proactive.  Mental agility and experience is more than superhuman to a fresh grunt of the Imperium, without demeaning them.

 

Wow, that was longer than I expected!  Hope it fires some neurons!

 

MR.

[Brother-Captain Gilead]

Seeing as this is my first think tank thread I might make the mistake of treading on ground well tread, but it bears keeping in mind that what we speak of as intelligence is a variety of talents and skills and when we move this to the superhuman area I think it is a good idea to consider which of these talents and skills actually get superhuman and also from the point of view of the fiction you are writing also serve as good examples to illustrate that someone is working on a whole different level. So here are my two cents which you will hopefully find to be of use. I will go through things that usually fall under the umbrella of intelligence and then discuss what heightening them to superhumanity would be like:

• Ability to intake information and data rapidly
  • This is something where we know from the lore that space marines are acting on this level, because their armor is constantly feeding them all sorts of information that they are also able to process without it overwhelming them as they are also participating in warfare. The higher up you go the more pronounced this ability must be, because we are told that space marine commanders receive all of the information from their own armor and additional information from the people under their command, and additional information from higher ups in the command chain yet still they are able to also personally participate in the fighting and lead by example
  • This is, I feel, one of the harder areas of intelligence to illustrate in writing, since even the most basic space marine is already operating on a level that is beyond the experience of most humans, so how to illustrate that someone is acting on a level that is beyond a space marine? The boring answer would be that that individual would be receiving information from operations on a planetary scale while still somehow comprehending it and not being overloaded with it, but then the question becomes how to write that in a compelling way? I am not imaginative enough to come up with any ideas
• Ability to process data rapidly into conclusions
  • This is what many people think of as intelligence and this is actually an area where I feel that even the superhumans that the space marines are have been portrayed in the stories to have been somewhat human, with some portrayed as struggling to understand that they have been betrayed / they are being lied to even when all the data is pointing to that as the obvious conclusion
  • This is one area where I feel it is easier to portray someone as being smarter than everyone else in the room without making everyone else feel like an idiot. You just have him reacting faster and with more insight to new incoming data than anyone else or even have him dropping some preconceived notion earlier than anyone else since that preconception is no longer compatible with what he has learned.
• Ability to recall previously learned information
  • This is again an area where we know from the lore that space marines are teetering on the edge of superhuman since it has been noted that many space marines have eidetic (or photographic) memory, which some people have in the real world, but it is definitely rare and at least to me one of those real life superpowers
  • Someone in your story being able to act as a walking encyclopedica imperium is a boring but somewhat effective way of portraying someone as superhumanly intelligent. I would spice it up by bringing in more of that eidetic memory flavor, where he is able to learn and memorize something that he only witnessed in passing, like seeing something scroll rapidly in a computer screen or what he saw of the navcomputer just before the Thunderhawk crashed etc.
• Ability to plan ahead
  • Of this we have a lot of examples where we are told that someone is able to plan ahead and is brilliant in it, but in actuality they still seem to be wrong-footed at times. Sometimes this is because of the rules of dramatic fiction of course, if the Lion would actually be able to plan everything and account for every contingency, it would very easily devolve into a somewhat boring tale of "just as planned" overtaking everything
  • I think with this one the challenge is having the ability to plan ahead stay reasonable, but also have it operate on a level that no human could actually reach. When you start planning for all eventualities, the potential permutations veer towards infinity really quickly, so having your character able to plan ahead for the most likely situations and complications which arise from his original plan would probably be the safest way to do it

There, this is too much of a text wall already and I didn't even cover all of the areas that wikipedia considers to be part of intelligence (skipped out on self-awareness, emotional knowledge and creativity, although the last one is certainly part of the ability to plan for even creative situations and complications). I hope some of my musings can be of some help when considering what angle to take your superhumanly intelligent characters to.

[calgar101]

This is a very hard subject and I dont think there is a magic answer to it but it is a very interesting topic indeed. The writer has to try and show how the Primarch can think faster and exercise their more powerful brains but without begging down in too much detail. For example you could have Guilliman solve a super complex maths problem in 0.5 second and have a Mechanicum Adept be amazed or have Fulgrim recite all of William Wordsworth's poems. How would that fit in a story? I am not sure, that is a way to highlight the potential of their brains but it is clunky to fit in a story.

The easiest aspect of their super human abilities to show is their combat prowess; having them were through foes like a hot knife through butter is the most easy thing to do. They are biologically superior and that is much easier for us to understand and depict.

My reply seems a bit rubbish as I read it back but I hope it helps. This is definitely an interesting and useful topic.

[Lucerne]

I'd have the character be "out of focus" for Primarchs- nothing ruins mystique quite as fast as a direct look at their thought process.

 

Also, Primarchs being "high Int, low Wis" child kings is a good workaround- they're talented but emotionally stunted.

 

What doesn't work is these ridiculous scenarios where the Primarchs are supposed to be outarguing humans...but the writer obviously wasn't up to the task of showing that.

 

If anything, borrowing from the "Holmes" style of depicting intelligence might work? An "elementary, my dear Watson..." approach where the Primarch is obviously talking down to the other party.

 

So for Vulkan, have him rebuild the society from scratch, while having it be out of focus. Have him casually show that he's crafted tools and solutions for them- think Tony Stark. Have characters realize long after the fact that he set things up for them and nudged them towards self-discovery.

 

For False Gods, have Horus see that Erebus is playing games...and intentionally play along, because by the facts he has on hand, treachery should be unthinkable, but he's well aware Erebus has an agenda- that given the information he has on hand, he assumes is some sort of Legion office politics- and Horus wants to find out what the game is without being too blunt about it. That shows that Horus is politically savvy, prideful and naive enough to assume nothing harmful will happen to him at the hands of a Space Marine, and that he simply doesn't have the out of universe perspective to realize just how high the stakes are and the threat posed to him, personally. Hubris rather than naivete.

 

"Erebus is playing his own game, and for now I will play along. And when this is over, my brother Lorgar and I will have words about the presumption of his subordinates."

Edited April 8, 2020 by Lucerne

[Bryan Blaire]

It’s definitely an interesting intellectual exercise, and not something that I think will have a satisfactory answer really.

 

- Wall o’ Text Warning -

 

Something to keep in mind is that the Imperium doesn’t have access to all the books and information that folks have cited here (maybe they have snippets, mistranslations of older texts, altered works due to years of copying by hand, etc.) - it’s a place you can really open up on - is the 13,000 year old “Catechism of Comprehension” something only those that have augmented minds from the Mechanicum have the capability to retain/ruminate on? Well, such and such Marine has gone through it and gets the gist of 75% of it - something no human can do. Whip out a phrase from it or something.

 

Eidetic memory also doesn’t mean that you comprehend things - Marines may store a library’s worth of information in their mind, but that doesn’t mean that they are all super-geniuses or have the capability of putting all of that information to use. They are going to be hypnoindoctrinated with mostly practical things - you aren’t going to have Random Marine Y213 from 4th Company sitting there ruminating on the vagaries of transdimensional molecular adhesion theory or reciting complex poetry from 38,000 years in the past. The Internet is a vast repository of information, but that doesn’t mean it is itself an advanced intelligence.

 

With regards to emotional things - Marines are taken as adolescents and programmed to think a certain way - they may not be programmed to properly recognize the entirety of humanity’s deceptive qualities (much less the concept of self-deception) or even the function of deception well, and there are likely other emotional qualities they are also not trained/programmed with. After all, if they were all geniuses at emotional intelligence, wouldn’t the first few Marines reacting to the Lion have made some other decisions when it very much looked like they weren’t being told things? Yes, they are living beings, but they are living weapons that are created by other living weapons - a somewhat reduced emotional intelligence is more likely a hallmark of a typical Marine, especially a younger one, and the concept is one of the balances IMO to off-set the “space magic” nature of their physical and combat gifts. If anything, I find the human level of most 40K Marine depictions too human, but that’s a failing of humans writing post-human bio-weapons.

 

Now, most of this likely wouldn’t apply to the Primarchs (which is what I believe bluntblade was actually trying to discuss), so in that case, I think that you’re going to have to go back and look at the actual education process of the Primarch in question. One of the hallmarks of genius is the appication of principles from one conceptual education realm (such as math or art) to another, or recognizing a method of application that is not typically considered due to the outlandishness of the situation (why would you want to look for a line that touches a curve at only one point, etc.) - what would this do for a Primarch? Honestly it depends on how he’s educated. Some Primarchs may have been geniuses, but truly are just faster thinking 3K normal people because of the abysmal education systems they were brought up in. You can put a LOT of things together in new ways, but only if you are able to learn those things. If you can’t be taught them, then you may have to educate yourself - a Primarch may have actually had to reinvent calculus, because the place he grew up didn’t even have the concept of calculus (after all, you don’t need to take an active role in science or engineering when your planet doesn’t use either one). Truthfully I’m there with Lucerne - just don’t try to do it - don’t try to “write the genius” directly, show the thought patterns, etc., it’s probably going to come out gack. Frankly, for most genius, most of us probably wouldn’t comprehend how the solution to X was achieved in the first place, connections we don’t understand would be made, logical leaps that their minds process for them without them even being fully aware, etc. Honestly the cheat of “I just got to Y and it works” may be the best illustration of how a genius does it and you don’t necessarily need them to “Oxford/Harvard/M.I.T./your familiar highest education institution Professor” it for your readers.

 

In the end, a massive amount of available information doesn’t make something smart by itself, and a lack of information doesn’t make something “not a genius”. You have to remember the setting you are writing for and take your seeds from that - in 30K, it may have been leading to the Great Crusade, but it was doing so with a lot of knowledge and information already behind the veil, and even those that deal with the curtain don’t necessarily comprehend what they are working with, much less have the capability to teach an actual understanding about it to someone else - if they would even be willing to try. Reinventing something that all of us recognize, but took us several hundred years to understand, when a Primarch pieced it together and re-invented it in a single lifetime is an achievement of above-genius magnitude, even if it doesn’t seem that special to the reader.

[bluntblade]

I think a large part of it should be emotional intelligence and the ability to read people - it's for this reason that I unironically recommend Terry Pratchett, especially the Sam Vimes books.

 

Lucerne, I would say that "talking down" has its own dangers. Dark Compliance walks the tightrope very nicely though - Argonis is shown to be intelligent and tactically savvy, as indeed is Kadith, but Horus is streets ahead of both.

 

Another thing French utilises in Slaves to Darkness is sense. We've had scenarios elsewhere in which a Primach spots that something is wrong before everyone around him, but French gives us an idea of the sheer scope of Horus' senses, to the extent of him reining it in while he's dealing with admin. We see something similar in Solar War from the outside, which adds the intellectual and emotional context of a mortal observing it. The way Dorn can just absorb the information of the strategic holos is unnerving to Su-Kassen.

[Bryan Blaire]

There are plenty of geniuses that do not really understand people, or at the very least they may understand, but don’t truly interact with that understanding in the same way - sometimes the way the mind works can actually get in the way of other things.

 

Genius is also not all-encompassing, even a super-human shouldn’t be expected to be.

 

Like I said, there’s going to be a lot of formation of the genius depending on the environment in which he is raised. It’s going to be very important to develop good backstory on exactly what would be going on in the raising environment - for instance, early emotional or mental abuse of the Primarch could lead to a place where the Primarch specifically forgoes use of emotional intelligence, or misprocesses it and reacts in a way that makes the reader go “Why the heck would they do that?” With more work and interaction, maybe they can learn to process a different way if the environment were changed enough, but early formed instincts/trauma reactions are just as applicable to a super-human as they would be to a normal human.

[jaxom]

 

With regards to emotional things - Marines are taken as adolescents and programmed to think a certain way 

I can't remember the exact source, but at some point someone referred to it as (paraphrasing) taking boys at the age when they still have childish cruelty but have also developed a budding teens sense of invulnerability and freezing their mindset there.

 

I've three things to add which folks might find useful when considering how a superhuman intellect might be portrayed or stymied.

 

Executive functioning a modern model on applied cognitive function. Each function (see below) works together in different combinations to either motivate behavior or for problem-solving.

• Activation - Organizing, prioritizing, and activating to work.
• Focus - Focusing, sustaining, and shifting attention to tasks.
• Effort - Regulating alertness, sustaining effort, and processing speed.
• Emotion - Managing frustration and modulating emotions.
• Memory - Utilizing working memory and accessing recall.
• Access - Monitoring and self-regulating action.

Any behavior touching on these could be taken to superhuman extremes. Many have already touched upon memory and processing speed. Another example would be a marine's ability to dedicate to task with no hesitation and then maintain focus for prolonged periods regardless of the ups-and-downs is superhuman. Superhuman cognition may not allow for procrastination (positive or negative). It may make organizational tracking better, etc.

 

Problem-solving starts with problem recognition:

1. Perceptually recognizing a problem.
2. Representing the problem in working memory.
3. Considering relevant information in working and long-term memory that applies to the current problem.
4. Identifying different aspects of the problem.
5. Labeling and describing the problem.

Out of these five steps, superhuman cognition would only help with number 2 and the recall in number 3. The part of discerning relevant information, identifying aspects and labeling them is trickier and leads us to different problem-solving strategies.

• Algorithms - A step-by-step procedure that will always produce a correct solution.
• Heuristics - A mental rule-of-thumb procedural that may or may not work in certain situations.
• Trial and Error - Try out different solutions and eliminate the ones that don't work.
• Insight - A process that generally occurs outside of awareness.

A superhuman brain would do great at the speed it can apply these methods, but none of them guarantee success. To use the Horus/Erebus example: Horus applied a heuristic solution for "politics" but it didn't work out because Chaos politics is not the same as Legion politics. Perturabo's siegecraft was algorithm-based. Guilliman's supply line calculations were algorithms. The Codex Astartes is heuristics masquerading as algorithms. "Choppa the shooty thing and shoot the choppy thing" is heuristics - note how it depends on that first perception step: what are you dealing with, shooty or choppy? It's also useful to know some of the flaws that can pop up:

•  Functional fixedness - A tendency to view problems only in their customary manner.  
• Irrelevant or misleading information - Focusing on information irrelevant to the problem or misleading.
• Assumptions - Assuming properties about obstacles or constraints which leads to "properties" which prevent certain solutions.
• Mental set - Using only solutions which have worked in the past.

Back to Horus, Erebus, and now joined by the Anatheme. Horus has functional fixedness (see the problem as customary Legion politics), regards the Anatheme as irrelevant so he ignores it as part of the problem (i.e. how to fight the governor), because he assumes something looking like a dinky rock-knife is not a threat. Meanwhile, the Codex Astartes or traditional Imperial strategies is a great example of mental set.

 

Last, cultural and military stagnation and/or stasis. Why is this important? In a time period where very little changes functional fixedness and mental set become extremely entrenched. Think of a worker-placement game - there are optimal solutions which always work for given starting conditions. Only new rules or a genuinely novel starting condition promote an alteration from what has worked in the past.

[bluntblade]

Thinking about Primarchs though, they definitely should have emotional intelligence. And if nothing else, an Astartes officer should have a handle on how to make people do what he wants them to. A great example of this is actually in Wrath of Iron, with an Iron Father - who represents one of the least empathetic and emotional Chapters around - who gives a rousing speech despite knowing that the Guardsmen and militia will break when they hit the daemons on the other side.

Edited April 8, 2020 by bluntblade

[jaxom]

Quick note regarding emotional intelligence. It's possible to have social emotional intelligence (the ability to perceive, model and act upon other's emotions and thoughts; aka extended theory of mind) while having poor cognitive emotional intelligence (becoming easily frustrated or overly excited in response to a task). 

[bluntblade]

True, but in the case of the Primarchs they are at least meant to have that capacity.

[Brother-Captain Gilead]

Frankly, for most genius, most of us probably wouldn’t comprehend how the solution to X was achieved in the first place, connections we don’t understand would be made, logical leaps that their minds process for them without them even being fully aware, etc. Honestly the cheat of “I just got to Y and it works” may be the best illustration of how a genius does it and you don’t necessarily need them to “Oxford/Harvard/M.I.T./your familiar highest education institution Professor” it for your readers.

 

I kind of agree with this reading and I would like to build on it a bit. I have read somewhere that the Lion was able to calculate warp jump trajectories in his head faster than a computer, which while impressive is also kind of stupid, because why would the Lion waste brainspace and time to calculate something when actual computers are actually more than fine in doing calculations (at least as long as the Machine spirit is not feeling angry / humorous at the time). Remembering that and reading this got me thinking that maybe what actually happened was that the Lion was not actually just doing complex arithmetics inside his head but was instead intuitively acting more like a quantum computer, all of the possible solutions collapsing away one by one until the solution in his mind was clear as day whereas the Mechanicum-blessed computer was acting like a normal computer and just crunching away at the complex arithmetics until it reached a solution. Portraying a primarch as possessing this type of mental acumen where he is able to intuit answers to extremely complex looking problems (say there is a cave system that you need to collapse with limited explosives and the primarch is rapidly able to recognize the optimal location for whatever explosives they had available) could potentially be a way to illustrate their brains working on a different level from the rest of us without making the people around them look like fools. Some examples of this type of thinking already exist, since both Perturabo and Dorn have been portrayed as having a natural knack for understanding architecture, both for erecting things and in tearing them down.

 

The danger in writing fiction however is in finding a balance between making that seem believable while sufficiently unbelievable that the reader will be impressed by it. Writing a story where the primarch is able to intuit that by hitting this rock with his fist the entire complex will collapse will be too unbelieavable, but also writing a story where the primarch is able to intuit that the single pillar holding up the roof is the one that you need to blow up to bring the complex down just makes everyone else look like idiots for not figuring that out. Depending on the problem, making it seem like the primarch is not cheating, but also not dealing out idiotballs for everyone else can be somewhat difficult.

 

One final thing that could be used to in-universe explain how the primarchs know things even in situations where the technological and knowledge base might have been destroyed is that we have the in-universe idea of the Akashic reader, a device that can read the collected knowledge of humanity that is floating away in the warp. Since humanity in the Dark Age of Technology pretty much figured everything out about everything and the primarchs are all somewhat in touch with the warp, who is to say that they can't just tap into portions of that collected knowledge subconsciously?

[bluntblade]

It's a tricky balance. I think the other thing is that the Primarchs need to have a certain character to their dialogue, a particular level of sophistication - even, to a degree, in the likes of Angron.