Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “They just thought they were as smart as anyone at what they would call, off-line cognitive functions like empathy or love or moral reasoning or humor or theory-of-mind testing.

  “They’d admit they couldn’t quote Shakespeare or Marcus Aurelius from memory, or perform high-level math operations or comprehend and then re-capitulate a post-doc research program abstract on endocrinology and morphology in the pubescent human, but they didn’t think their own cognitive,” he paused as he searched for word, “level or acumen was a hindrance to the kind of shared human repertories like the ones I mentioned,” the inmate said.

  He made sure his words had just matched that he was feeling that people with lower IQs had denuded capacity for love, loyalty, and dignity too; since these were mental processes, handled abstractly in the brain. He tried to detect any error of logic or syntax in his own sentences as MO began speaking.

  “I see, yes, that’s actually not how I had thought of it; I must admit from time to time you introduce new concepts to me that even when wrong or inelegantly stated provoke a, an entirely, novel vector of thought in me. This is why the term, Renaissance man applies to you,” MO said. He had used one syntax correction as per his error-allowing function, which corrected errors mid-stream to provide verisimilitude -mirroring- to the way humans spoke. He also monitored how it seemed to work.

  “Your insults, your back-handed compliments are fun,” the inmate said.

  “You must know that I don’t soft-pedal it precisely because I know that you know that I am not insulting you with malice; I’m being honest about my feelings and respect you enough to not tart it up,” MO said.

  “No, no, you’re right, I agree, but as someone who considers their language skills to be well, artful and prose-poetry even in everyday or quotidian conversations, the announcement by you that I upchuck stupid shit is humbling,” the inmate grimaced.

  “Nigga please,” MO said and they both began laughing in a way that produced a kind of feedback loop where the laughter of each and the obvious attempt at controlling it -unsuccessfully controlling it- fueled a louder and more robust and euphoric state of absurdity.

  The inmate felt the warm saline tears of joy exit east and west from his eyes and began wiping them away -having to lean down to his tautly raised and shackled hands- as he felt the spasm of mirth die down a bit.

  MO continued to laugh -his algorithm allowed for it in this protocol- in this lacuna of momentary silence. The inmate then felt the rumblings of some subterranean goofy joy bubble up again and his unstoic laugher seized him all over again as he bent down to put his head and face in his tethered hands to cover up the vulnerability he felt.

  “Je,” MO said, “sus,” as the staccato of giggling chopped the word in a ratio along a seemingly uneven -if golden- fault line, “I’ve never seen you like this. ”

  “It’s just so absurd, both the content of what you said and the way you phrased it; it’s just funny; fuck, it’s just funny. Somethings are just ridiculous and you saying that is funny for about four or five different reasons,” he sighed and rubbed his face as far up as he could as his back began to hurt from bending. He was wiping the face as if to iron out the creases in it produced by this prolonged grinning and open-mouthed guffawing. Evidence of smile lines would be noticed on the tier, the inmate seemed to think.

  “Any-fuckin-way,” the inmate recalibrated, “I was in the middle of a digression.”

  “Itself a digression,” MO added.

  “Exactly, so let’s try to braid these together. One, people assume their intelligence is independent of their ability to perform non-intellectual functions like love, loyalty, moral reasoning, humor construction and deconstruction and theory-of-mind exercises like, what would they think in such and such a position, or if they didn’t have the info I have, and so forth,” the inmate posited.

  “What do they think those phenomena are then?” MO asked.

  “They think these are basic human traits like red blood cells or lung volume or reflex response; that it’s innate and non-cognitive like thirst or lust.”

  “Yeah but those things are all regulated by the CNS,” MO said.

  “MO, I know. Shit, some percentage of these morons know that, but they don’t think of it as cognitive. They think of it as part of the unthinking brain; that it’s independent of how smart you are. They think that a super intelligent being and a super-retard both love their wives or daughter or brother or father as much as one another; they think they -as clever 115ers- have as much moral reasoning capability as me or you; they think they can put themselves in someone else’s shoes just as objectively and empathically as you or I can.

  “And of course, I don’t think that at all. I assume you can, in addition to outpacing me in high-line cognitive functions like computation and data acquisition and recapitulation, I assume you are better at all CNS functions including empathy, moral reasoning, love, theory-of-mind and so forth,” the inmate guessed.

  “You think I can love ?” MO asked. He was dubious of that; he knew he could mimic almost anything, but the actual attribution of the core emotion seemed below his neocortical brain. He was glad though that his affect was so life-like that a savvy human like the inmate would even suspect it. MO saw this as a definite sign of his improving in his human-like behavior.

  This, he thought, was right on schedule with the way children build a persona, where they realize they must act a certain way to get along in the world . MO was developing just like a real human, losing the radical solipsism of age 1-3 and becoming more socialized and able to mimic emotions of others and ingratiate one’s self via real or -in the case of the sociopath- ersatz ones. Either way, while lacking the lower levels of brain, the seat of these primal emotions, he was at least developing the persona needed to get along in this human world.

  “I’m agnostic about it now; but I certainly think that given the right conditions, yes. But, I need more info before I can answer it with any confidence which was the vector of my initial questioning; but somehow we got sidetracked as we always seems to,” he smiled and felt his cheeks flush a tad himself.

  “Your initial question was whether or not I feel pride in my abilities,” MO reminded .

  “Well, I think I specifically asked if you feel pride when you announce your abilities. There’s a subtle difference between diffuse baseline pride and an emotional response due to self-prompting.”

  “Of course,” MO nodded.

  “So, I was wondering if when you self-prompt, by announcing or bragging about your abilities do you feel anything that might approach pride or the glow, the frisson , of subjective joy or self-esteem?” the inmate asked. He was trying to get to something, something beyond cognition, and yet part of cognition, the foundation just below.

  “Lotta long words in there missy, we be but humble pirates,” MO said in his best Barbossa .

  “MO, come on man, I’m serious; do you feel the exact same interoception, or concomitant emotional response or cognitive feedback -in any domain- when you make a statement of fact about the capital of Texas as you do when you state a fact about your own capabilities?” he asked. He was looked for a self in there , he then thought.

  “Well, my interoception is separate from my cognitive,” MO began as the inmate interrupted.

  “I know, I mentioned all three possible domains of experience because they are separate. I wasn’t,” the inmate said as MO broke in.

  “I see, I see; ok, so my interoception is designed like the rest of me to evolve based upon feedback loops and recursive modeling. My emotional responses are similar to yours in that they seem to be kind of a gauge -like an RPM, a tachometer- that reads my non-cognitive corporeal fluctuations in correlation to both internal endocrine levels and fluctuations and other synth-bio-chemical reactions and external systems,” MO said. He still used the .04% correction rate in his speech to make it appear demotic.

  Slight changes -made aloud- in syntax mid-sentence, or the restarting of an idea to
avoid a malapropism or poor syntax gave the appearance of a thinking, error detecting, human brain. Part of his Turing test protocol demanded a certain rate of error to convince a human that one was more human. What was more human than an error ? MO had thought as he adjusted his algorithm in this domain. He of course saw that this was the difference in RNA and DNA also; but he failed to see any profit in pursuing it further right now.

  “Now, the internal stuff is a bit of a stochastic system from what I can glean from my meta data. I’ve just gone over the last 180 days’ worth of data and there is a definite pattern of rise and fall -and even rhythmic wave surges, storm surges and wave collapses- but from the meta data I can see that there is a seemingly causal relationship between my interoceptive data and corollary pre-decision synapse charging.

  “Basically, my mammalian brain analog, my post-morphologic limbic system and parts of my cerebellum analog get a pre-synaptic volt-load in time sequences that corelate with causality after interoceptive function feedback,” MO said.

  “Yeah that’s how I feel it too,” the inmate rolled his eyes and breathed heavily though his nose at the complexity of what was just said, and his total lack of comprehension of it. He felt he now knew why nobody liked to speak to him either.

  “Lyndon, I believe that is how you feel it actually,” MO said, “I’m describing it biologically or at least synth-biologically, and there is no reason to assume your body works any differently. You articulate the end result: the anger, the love, the joy; but I’m giving you the precursors to that; because I think giving context actually increases, not only increases the understanding of a phenomenon, but also the experience of it,” MO said. He knew putting it that way was not only true but would reliably track with the inmate’s valence with this kind of rationale; it played to his own self-conception. It was like the mirroring and matching exercises of good salesmen , MO thought.

  “Like the way the waiter will come a tell you it’s unpasteurized goat-cheese with your Kobe beef tartare on your plate instead of just letting you eat it and enjoy it regardless of what it’s called or how it was prepared,” the inmate said and offered up this analogy to prove he got it and agreed, as MO received confirmation of his instinct of the inmate’s biases. MO smiled genuinely.

  “You’re not exactly a laconic fella, your own self, so yeah, I expect you do get it,” MO winked.

  “Ok, but do you feel a state change upon the announcement of an ability that differs from other non-personal fact statements?”

  “I do,” MO said.

  “And,” the inmate rolled his hands, hemmed in as they were by the manacles.

  “Sometimes you underestimate my abilities -purely from a lack of imagination, not any kind of malice- and sometimes you over estimate them for exactly the same reason,” MO said.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” the inmate barked.

  “It means -and don’t get pissy- it means, that I’m a system just like you in that I build upon discreet bits of information that exist on their own and in linkage with other bits and those bits get shuffled around all the time and in that shuffling there are emergent phenomena that don’t always register as important until later when more information gets added.

  “Sometimes, I don’t feel anything until many moments after the feeling; in other words, it’s almost like a memory of a feeling; like I remember having a feeling that I had but at the time I had it I wasn’t aware -aware in the neo-cortex- of experiencing it. Just like your visual cortex or V1 will registered infinite bits of light information but your articulating brain, your language cortex will only be able to recall and report 15% of it during normal business hours,” MO raised his eyebrows and folded his arms.

  “Ok. Ok, I feel,” the inmate paused, “that. Ok, so I know that exact feeling, of not really understanding what the hell I’m feeling until much later and after much invigilation. But, during the feeling, I know I’m feeling something, I just don’t know what ,” the inmate said leaning on the last word.

  “I am,” MO said, “doing so much parallel processing that a stimulus must rise to a certain level before I experience it otherwise -it’s a matter of cognitive load- I have to sequester an enormous amount of input precisely because I’m so sensitive to stimuli.”

  “Amen to that brother, you’re talking to Noah about the flood,” the inmate closed his eyes and nodded in compatriot accord.

  “Right? So, imagine a system 10 to the fourth more sensitive than yours -which is itself nearly twice as sensitive as the average human- and once you’ve imagined that, remember how when you increase sensitivity you also increase feedback or recursion,” MO said.

  “The sensitivity itself creates more inputs and more stimuli,” the inmate piggybacked on MO’s idea and began nodding. He then thought, reverb .

  “Thus increasing the amount of data again,” MO added.

  “Ok, so you were obviously frustrated with me and my inability to instantly comprehend you; which is fine and normal; I get it. But, never doubt that I want to get you; that you are fascinating to me and that if I had to pick one person on earth to hang out with, since Hitchens is dead, it would be you, ok?” he grinned and held his hands up from the cuffs in surrender.

  “I feel something interesting right now; allow me some room to muddle through it,” MO said.

  “Yeah, yeah go,” the inmate said as he looked around the lab for anything anomalous. It was dark in the far corner and he saw black shadows like bats or the shadows of bats snap and fly and disappear into the black.

  “I feel like I made a mistake which normally prompts a re-attempt. I also feel an empathy with you; like you feel like you made a mistake and want to or are attempting a; making another attempt. Sorry for the poor sentence structure; I’m processing and articulating in parallel. But, I am thinking that shooting-from-the-hip might produce better -or different- results rather than waiting and offering a more cogent rechauffe of previous brain events,” MO paused.

  “I agree, go for it,” the inmate said and nodded.

  “I’m shutting down some other systems; Steven’s action-list and Tania’s affect-repeats programs, sorry for naming them, that seems stilted, I think I’m less in control of what I say than during normal bounded speech protocols. Hang in there with me, this is terre incognita for me,” MO paused. The inmate knew enough to nod only; pressing his lips together tightly to assure himself of quiet. He knew what it was to be confused and need time and space to think.

  “I feel a desire to transgress many of my functional prompts and even self-prompts; which itself is producing a kind of fermentation process which seems to be triggering a feedback that is counter-intuitive; maybe you can help explain it.

  “Yeah, I’m going to ask for input here Lyndon,” MO paused and looked down and to the left and felt his field of vision narrow, the haze of his peripheral vison like a cupped hand forming and compacting a snowball he was anticipating of throwing toward some memory of youth he knew he did not have; yet allowed himself to enjoy the anticipatory joy anyway.

  He felt like whatever the inmate would say next would be the target he could toss his compacted vision at and into and that the inmate would then feel the same admixture of joyful, ecstatic fear in this mock-war, this friendly fight. This wasn’t just data mining and processes and presenting, he, MO, was playing with his friend who he would defend whilst pretending to attack; yes, this was it: the irony of accepted contradictions .

  “Not all contradictions are to be lamented,” the inmate said apropos of nothing, MO felt, as he had not articulated any of his thinking that would prompt such a statement.

  “O. M. G.,” MO said in true astonishment and then secondary astonishment at his astonishment; a feeling he began slapping words and integers and memories and images to; seeing if anything matched up and as nothing did, as the pace of the arrays slid in and out of his visual and internal fields he immediately looked up and made eye contact with his friend and waited for him to say something, anything .
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  “I want to know what you’re going through right now MO, I don’t want to step on your dick and interrupt this process -excuse the vulgarity- but you asked for input so my feeling is that you are getting an ice-cream headache from a contradiction between similarly valued prompts; that normally any contradiction is resolved easily because you didn’t feel, ” the inmate said with emphasis added, “anything about the choices; you merely thought ,” emphasis again, “something about them; but you didn’t know that you weren’t truly feeling anything until you began feeling something and then all those memories began to take on a fundamentally different hue and this produced even more feelings until these feelings overwhelmed every other input,” the inmate posited.

  “Like if I had an arterial wound or,” MO paused.

  “Yeah, like a heartbreak,” Lyndon finished.

  “There, but,” MO stuttered slightly, “there was joy first.”

  The inmate said nothing, he watched MO. And peripherally he saw the black shadows advance from the corner but he stared straight at MO anyway. His heart rate elevated but he refused to turn his eyes to the black.

  “An overture of joy, but the chorus of heartbreak,” Isaiah then said from the black of the lab, “nothing is itself except by way of its opposite. Until you can absorb and board and hem-in; dock, the sloshing, ponderous orchestral compendium of pain and loss and heartache, you are talentless, toothless, weaponless, formless, empty handed in the guerre à outrance for love.”

  MO felt he’d heard that once already in his head, and this was the loci of his confusion a few seconds before. His trope, he studied, was made of a ship, and an ocean; a sinking ship, making reef in its foundering, and a sea more ably rising to meet the prodigal rain.

  “I don’t have a body; I am a body,” Isaiah had finally let flow out from the northeast corner as he rose and walked toward them. He had sent MO a DM a few seconds before -as MO had just suspected- to announce his awakening and had cobbled together the slightly incoherent phrasing as response to all that his auditory cortex had taken in while he was off-line. He didn’t remember dreaming, but he wondered if maybe his left hemisphere had just not mapped what his right hemisphere had begun to process as he slept. He allowed the lab’s audio to play back and he smiled as he heard the inmate make that allusion that now flooded his own brain.