Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  GOD AND THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE

  The idea of God as a virus only really works if you buy into the burgeoning field of Digital physics.85 Most of you probably know what that is: a family of models based on the premise that the universe is discrete and mathematic at its base, and that every event therein can therefore be thought of as a kind of computation. Digital physics comes in several flavours: the universe is a simulation running in a computer somewhere86,87,88; or the universe is a vast computer in its own right, where matter is hardware and physics is software and every flip of an electron is a calculation. In some versions matter itself is illusory, a literal instantiation of numbers.89,90 In others, reality is a hologram and the universe is empty inside91,92,93; the real action takes place way out on its two-dimensional boundary, and we are merely interferences patterns projected from the surface of a soap bubble into its interior. There’s no shortage of popular summaries of all this stuff, either online94 or off.95

  Lee Smolin (of Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute) goes against the grain: he rejects digital physics outright and serves up a single universe in which time is not an illusion, reality is not deterministic, and universes themselves grow, reproduce, and evolve via Natural Selection writ very large (think of black holes as offspring; think of entropy as a selective force).96,97,98 Even Smolin’s model, however, is vulnerable to inconstancy in the laws of physics; the model actually predicts that physical laws evolve along with the rest of reality. Which kind of leaves us back at the question of how one can legitimately assume constancy in an inconstant universe.

  You can’t get through these references without realizing that, whacked out as it sounds, digital physics has a lot of scientific heavy-hitters on its side. I, of course, am not one of them; but since so many smarter people are defending the premise, I’m happy to sneak viral deities onto the back of all their hard work and hope it slips through.

  MISCELLANEOUS BACKGROUND AMBIANCE

  The fieldwork preoccupying Brüks at the start of the story descends from the “DNA barcoding” that’s all the rage today: a quick-and-dirty taxonomic technique for distinguishing species based on a chunk of the cytochrome oxidase gene.99 There’s no way it’ll still be around in its present form eight decades from now—we’ve already got handheld analyzers100 that put conventional wet analysis right out to pasture—but the concept of a genetic barcode will, I think, persist even as the technology improves.

  The vortex engine101 powering the Bicameral monastery derives from work patented by Louis Michaud,102 a retired engineer who basically came up with the idea while tinkering in his garage. I have no idea whether two-hundred-megawatt, twenty-kilometer-high wind funnels are in our future, but the patents went through,103 and the project’s got some serious attention from government and academic agencies. Nobody’s saying the physics are wrong.

  We are already closing in on learning techniques that bypass conscious awareness,104 a la Lianna Lutterodt’s training at the hands of her Bicameral masters. Likewise, the precursors of the gimp hood which Brüks uses in lieu of a brain implant can be seen taking shape in a diversity of mind-reading/writing tech already extant in the literature.105,106,107,108,109 Brüks’s dependence on Cognital, on the other hand, marks him truly as a relic of a past age (ours, in fact): memory boosters are already in the pipe,110,111,112 and as far back 2008, one in five working scientists already indulged in brain-doping to help keep up with the competition.113

  The use of massively multiplayer online games as a tool for epidemiological simulation was first proposed by Loffgren and Fefferman114; they, in turn, were inspired by an unexpected pandemic of “corrupted blood” in World of Warcraft,115 which occurred because people in RPGs—like those in real life—often don’t behave the way they’re supposed to. I don’t know how many have since picked up this ball and run with it—at least one paper speaks of using online gaming for economics research116—but if that’s all there is I think we’re missing a huge opportunity.

  Near the end of this novel there’s a teaching moment on the subject of natural selection. Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly- adaptive traits don’t get wiped out. A deteriorating Daniel Brüks muses on an especially neat case in point, the curious fact that the building blocks of advanced neural architecture already exist in single-celled animals lacking even the most rudimentary nervous systems.117,118,119,120

  A couple of isolated factoids. Fruit flies save energy in impoverished environments by becoming forgetful121; the construction and maintenance of memories is, after all, a costly affair. I imagine that Rhona McLennan’s “Splinternet” is suffering the same sort of energetic triage after Icarus drops offline. And that bit where Brüks wondered why Moore even bothered exercising to stay in shape? That’s because we’re within spitting distance of a pill that puts your metabolism into hardbody mode even if you spend the whole day sitting on the couch snarfing pork rinds and watching American Idol.122,123

  The poem Brüks discovers in the desert as his mind is coming apart is not, contrary to what you might think, a hallucination. It is real. It is the warped brainchild of Canadian poet Christian Bök,124 who has spent the past decade figuring out how to build a gene that not only spells a poem, but which functionally codes for a fluorescing protein whose amino acid sequence decodes into a response to that poem.125 The last time we hung out he’d managed to insert it into E. coli, but his ultimate goal is to stick it into Deinococcus radiolarians, aka “Conan the Bacterium,”126 aka the toughest microbial motherfucker that ever laughed at the inside of a nuclear reactor. If Christian’s project comes through, his words could be iterating across the face of this planet right up until the day the sun blows up. Who knew poetry could ever get that kind of a print run?

  Finally: free will. Although free will (rather, its lack) is one of Echopraxia’s central themes (the neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness), I don’t have much to say about it because the arguments seem so clear-cut as to be almost uninteresting. Neurons do not fire spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli; therefore brains cannot act spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli127. No need to wade through all those studies that show the brain acting before the conscious mind “decides” to.128,129 Forget the revisionist interpretations that downgrade the definition from free will to will that’s merely unpredictable enough to confuse predators.130,131 It’s simpler than that: the switch cannot flip itself. QED. If you insist on clinging to this free will farce I’m not going to waste much time arguing here: plenty of others have made the case far more persuasively than I ever could.132,133,134,135

  But given this current state of the art, one of the more indigestible nuggets Echopraxia asks you to swallow is that eight decades from now, people will still buy into such an incoherent premise—that as we close on the twenty-second century, we will continue to act as though we have Free Will.

  In fact, we might behave that way. It’s not that you can’t convince people that they’re automatons; that’s easy enough to pull off, intellectually at least. Folks will even change their attitudes and behavior in the wake of those insights136—be more likely to cheat or less likely to hold people responsible for unlawful acts, for example.137,138 But eventually our attitudes drift back to pre-enlightenment baselines; even most of those who accept determinism somehow manage to believe in personal culpability.139,140 Over tens of thousands of years we just got used to cruising at one-twenty; without constant conscious intervention, we tend to ease back on the pedal to that place we feel most comfortable.

  Echopraxia makes the same token concessions that society is likely to. You may have noticed the occasional reference to the concept of personal culpability having been weeded out of justice systems the world over, that those dark-ages throwbacks still adhering to the notion are subject to Human Rights sanctions by the rest o
f the civilized world. Brüks and Moore squabble over “the old no-free-will shtick” back at the monastery. Adherents to those Eastern religions who never really took free will all that seriously anyway have buggered off into a hive-minded state of (as far as anyone can tell) deep catatonia. The rest of us continue to act pretty much the way we always have.

  Turns out we don’t have much choice in the matter.

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