Tomorrowland

by Kotler, Steven

  At the same time this science fiction lineage has been unfolding, so has one of scientific fact. Recently, a bevy of new players have gotten involved. In May 2005, for example, IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne announced the Blue Brain project, whose goal is to create a computer simulation of a mammalian cortical column down to the molecular level. A few years later, in July 2009, the NIH entered the game with the Human Connectome Project, the idea here being to construct a “network map” of the brain’s synaptic connectivity — and a big deal in mind downloading, as researchers now believe that memories are encoded at the synaptic level and mapping those connections is the necessary first step to preserving those memories. Then there’s Google’s efforts to build conscious computers, real AI, and, at least in their minds, the end-all-be-all search system if there ever was one.

  When will all this work be completed remains an open question. Peter Cochrane — who is arguably taking a more limited approach to the problem, believing that the combination of sensory experience and the resulting neurochemistry is enough to recreate memory — thinks the Soul Catcher will be working by 2025. In The Singularity is Near, futurist, author, inventor, and director of engineering at Google — and thus the man in charge of building a conscious computer — Ray Kurzweil almost agrees with this timing, arguing that 2029 is the year man and machine will truly merge.

  To many, these predictions seem overly optimistic. For certain, there are long and complicated arguments about the true nature of consciousness and our ability to capture it in a computer. There are even more arguments about whether a self stored in silicon would be our actual essence or some sorely diminished version. Both are fair points. Yet it is worth noting that Moore’s Law states that computers double in power every twelve months, and this is the reason that the cell phone in our pocket is a million times more powerful, and a thousand times cheaper, than a supercomputer from the 1970s. Biotechnology, meanwhile, the field where mind uploading most squarely sits, is currently progressing at five times the speed of Moore’s Law. With this in mind, it is not inconceivable to say that there are people alive today who will live long enough to see their selves stored in silicon and thus, by extension, see themselves live forever.

  3.

  No one knows, exactly, when our omnipresent sense of self-awareness (aka consciousness) first arose, yet we do know that once it appeared, awareness of mortality was not far behind. Sure, the debate rages back and forth about whether animals are aware of death and its, shall we say, lengthy consequences — more and more evidence points to yes — but among our own species there is no discussion. We come with a use-by date and a built-in awareness of this date.

  This terrible knowledge of our eventual end is the so-called human condition. And it is quite a condition. In 1974, psychologist Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, wherein he argues that everything we think of as society — from the cities we construct to the religions we believe in — is nothing more than an elaborate psychological defense mechanism against this knowledge. And a great many researchers agree. Today, our fear of death, what is technically called “death anxiety,” is considered the most fundamental of human motivators, the very drive that drives us most.

  So what happens when we remove that drive?

  Consider how many of our wisdom traditions use the threat of the hereafter to shape behavior in the here and now. Judgment day and all that. But what happens when judgment is suspended indefinitely? What happens to our morality when we achieve immortality?

  Perhaps nothing. After all, for those who toe the Judeo-Christian line, believing that there is a kernel of immortality inside our mortality — that is, a soul — this problem is already solved. It is also solved for those who take the Eastern view — that we are already immortal and must merely remember this fact. Yet, for everyone beyond the truest of true believers, the promise of immortality needs to rest on something stronger than faith. Something tangible and tactile and testable. Something like silicon.

  And silicon is coming.

  So, again, what happens then? We don’t really know. But we do know that with biotechnology accelerating exponentially, sooner or later, we are going to find out.

  4.

  Immortality is one thing — playback is another. See, Cochrane’s idea is not simply to capture a life. He also wants to make that life available to others. Education is the real point of the Soul Catcher. And it will be an education unlike any other.

  Take the late, great physicist Richard Feynman, considered one of the most brilliant minds in recent history. According to biographers, Feynman’s genius was not linear and orderly but rather radical and intuitive. In his mind, A + B did not equal C. It equaled Z. How Feynman’s brain produced such leaps is unknown. But if the physicist had been hooked up to the Soul Catcher — which would record his life — and the Soul Catcher was further connected to some sort of total experience playback device, this might make his A + B = Z intuition not just knowable, but experienceable — meaning teachable.

  Of course, it would have to be a really powerful playback device like, say, the virtual reality systems that are now hitting the market. Cochrane envisions a Tomorrowland version of the Oculus Rift, meaning not the VR system that Facebook just bought for a billion dollars, but the one that’s going to emerge after they spend another billion developing the technology. But the larger point is that the playback device completes the picture. With a robust brain-computer interface, a chip capable of capturing experience, and a damn powerful playback device, the system is in place. Pretty soon, and for the first time in history, a living being will be able to experience the life of a dead one.

  Not surprisingly, Cochrane takes a humanitarian view of all this work. He thinks in terms of preserving the wisdom of the ages, of the chance to interact with the future Einsteins, Sapphos, and Beethovens after their deaths. But he also acknowledges the risks. “I’m sure there will be problems,” he says. “I may turn out to be a little like the guy who invented television. When they asked him what he thought television would be used for, the only thing he could think of was education. Now all we have to watch is crap.”

  How will we sort the potential Edisons from the basement tinkerers? Will we all eventually have our lives recorded for posterity? And forget about the big moral issues, what of the more prosaic possibilities? The brother who takes a peek into his sister’s life and finds that she was a thief; the wife who discovers her husband’s betrayal; and the thousands of other secrets we withhold from one another. They call it disruptive technology for a reason. There may be a dark side to our desire for this kind of “soul-to-soul” union. Sometimes the very things meant to bring us closer together can, in fact, drive us farther apart. Sometimes, what the future holds, well, there’s really no telling.

  Extreme States

  THE BIOLOGY OF SPIRITUALITY

  This is a story about both the science of mystical experience and a tectonic shift in our understanding of ourselves. Before this work had been done, telling a psychologist that you’ve had an out-of-body experience was enough to get you locked in a padded cell. Today, this phenomenon is understood as the product of regular biology.

  This alone is shocking, but it also tells us something far more important: That we have misdiagnosed the upper range of human experience. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have believed in the hedonic principle — that humans want to avoid pain and increase pleasure. But the experiences described herein are far more potent and peculiar than pleasure. They hint at an entirely different realm of possibility, a whole new universe tucked inside ourselves, a universe we are just beginning to explore.

  The other thing worth mentioning is the incredible bravery of the researchers involved. We don’t think about it much today, but back when these efforts were getting going, delving into the “spiritual” was career suicide for scientists. And that’s another testament to these men and women. In less than two decades, their work has b
een so successful that they turned the taboo into the topical and thus paved the way for all generations to follow.

  1.

  I was seventeen years old and terrified. The whole “let’s go jump out of an airplane” concept had been dreamed up at a Friday night party, but now I was Saturday-morning sober and somehow still going skydiving. Making matters worse, this was in 1984. While tandem skydiving was invented in 1977, the concept had yet to make its way to the backwoods airfield in mid-Ohio where I wound up. So my first jump wasn’t done with an instructor tethered to my back handling any difficulties we might encounter on the way down. Instead, I jumped alone, two thousand feet and falling, my only safety net an unwieldy old Army parachute dubbed a “round.”

  Thankfully, nobody expected me to pull my own ripcord. A static line, nothing fancier than a short rope, had been fixed between my ripcord and the floor of the airplane. If everything went according to plan, when I reached the end of my rope, the line would pull taut, and the tug would open the chute. It was just that getting to that point was a little more complicated.

  As the plane zipped along at a hundred miles per hour, I had to clamber out a side door, ignore the vertiginous view, step onto a small metal rung, vise-grip the plane’s wing with both hands, then lift one leg behind me, so that my body formed a giant T. From this awkward position, when my instructor gave the order, I had to jump. If things weren’t bad enough already, the moment I leaped out of the plane — somehow — I also leaped out of my body.

  It happened the second I let go of the wing. My body was already falling through space, but my consciousness was hovering about twenty feet away, just taking in the view.

  During training, the instructor had explained that rounds opened, closed, then opened again in the first milliseconds of deployment. He mentioned that this happened too fast for the human eye to see and that I shouldn’t worry about it. But I was a little worried. Not only was I floating outside my body, I was also watching the chute’s open-close-open routine despite knowing that what I was watching was technically impossible to see.

  While this was all going on, my body started to tip over, tilting into an upside-down sprawl that looked certain to produce serious backbreak when the chute finally caught. In what might best be described as a moment of extracorporeal clarity, I told myself to relax rather than risk whiplash. In the next instant, my chute caught. The jerk snapped my consciousness back into my body and everything returned to normal or as normal as can be expected under some pretty unusual circumstances.

  Not for nothing, I never did get whiplash.

  2.

  Out-of-body journeys — like the one I had while skydiving — belong to a subset of not-so-garden-variety phenomena broadly called the paranormal, though the dictionary defines that word as “beyond the range of normal experience and scientific explanation,” and, as it turns out, these experiences are neither. Despite serious skeptical misgiving, similar events have been reported in almost every country in the world. For centuries, mystics of all faiths, including the world’s five major religions, have told tales of astral projection. Nor is this phenomenon reserved only for the spiritual. The annals of sport are packed with it as well. There are surfers who have been surprised to find themselves hovering above the waves and mountain climbers who have been surprised to find themselves suddenly possessing a bird’s-eye view. Motorcyclists report floating above their bikes, watching themselves ride, and pilots report floating outside their airplanes, struggling to get back inside. In her essay “The Voice,” Grace Butcher, who held the American track and field record for the 880 from 1958 to 1961, described her first major race:

  The starter gave us instructions, and the gun went off. I ran a few steps into a dimension I didn’t know existed. Suddenly I seemed to be up in the rafters of the arena, looking down at my race far below. I could see the black framework of the high catwalks vaguely around me, the cables, the great spotlights, the blazing brilliance of the tiny track so far beneath me, and myself running in the midst of the others in my race that was clearly going on both with me and without me.

  However, most out-of-body experiences don’t take place within such extreme environments; rather, they transpire as part of normal lives. While different surveys have yielded different results, the research shows that one out of twenty of us have a story we can’t quite explain, and those numbers go up substantially when you include the natural extension of the phenomenon: the near-death experience. While the rate of incidence for the near-death experience is slightly less than that for the out-of-body experience — a 1990 Gallup poll found thirty million Americans have had a near-death experience — if you combine these numbers, even the most conservative conclusion finds 10 percent of the planet’s populace has shared in this adventure.

  If you want to investigate this adventure, a good place to start is with Dr. Melvin Morse. In 1982, while working as a brain cancer researcher and finishing up his residency in pediatrics at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital, Morse made extra cash moonlighting for a helicopter-assisted EMT service. One afternoon, he got a call to fly out to Pocatello, Idaho, to perform CPR on eight-year-old Crystal Merzlock, who had spent a little too long at the bottom of a community swimming pool. When he arrived on the scene, Crystal had been without a heartbeat for nineteen minutes, her pupils already fixed and dilated, but Morse was good at his job. He got her heart restarted, climbed into the chopper, and headed home. Three days later, Crystal regained consciousness.

  A few weeks passed. Morse was back at the hospital where Crystal was being treated, and they bumped into each other in the hallway. While they’d never met while Crystal was conscious, the girl still pointed at Morse, turned to her mother, and said, “That’s the guy who put the tube in my nose at the swimming pool.”

  Morse was stunned. He didn’t know what to do. “I had never heard of out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences. I stood there thinking: How was this possible? When I put that tube in her nose, she was brain-dead. How could she even have this memory?”

  Morse decided to make a case study of Crystal’s experience, which he published in the AMA’s American Journal of Diseases of Children. For categorization purposes, he labeled the event a fascinoma, which is both medical slang for an abnormal pathology and a decent summary of the state of our knowledge at the time. But Morse was still curious. He didn’t mind that his was the first published description of a near-death experience in a child; to him it seemed like an interesting first step into a longer research project.

  He started by reviewing the literature, discovering that while out-of-body experiences are defined by a perceptual shift in consciousness, near-death experiences start with this shift and head on down that now-famous dark tunnel and into the light. Along the way, people report love, peace, warmth, welcome, the reassurance of dead friends, dead relatives, and the full gamut of religious figures. Occasionally, there’s a whole life review, followed by a decision of the should I stay or should I go variety. Morse discovered that the near-death experience’s classic explanation as delusion had been recently upgraded to a hallucination produced by a number of different factors, including fear, drugs, and hypoxia, a shortage of oxygen to the brain. But it was drugs that caught his eye. Morse knew that ketamine, used as an anesthetic during the Vietnam War, frequently produced out-of-body experiences. Other chemicals were also suspected triggers. Morse decided to study Halothane, another common anesthetic, believing his research might explain the frequent reports of near-death experiences trickling out of emergency rooms. “It’s funny to think of it now,” Morse told me, “but really I set out to do a long-term, large-scale debunking study.”

  Morse’s 1994 research, commonly referred to as the Seattle Study, spanned a decade. He interviewed 160 children who died and were later revived while in intensive care at Seattle Children’s Hospital. All of these children had been without pulse or breath for at least thirty seconds, some for as long as forty-five minutes. The average was ten to fifteen minu
tes. For a control group, he used hundreds of other children, also in intensive care, also on the brink of death, but whose pulse and breathing had not been interrupted for more than thirty seconds. That was the only difference. In every other category — age, sex, drugs administered, diseases suffered, and setting — the groups were the same. In setting, Morse not only included the intensive care unit itself, but also intimidating procedures such as the introduction of a breathing tube and mechanical ventilation. These are important additions, since fear has long been considered a trigger of out-of-body and near-death experiences and, as Morse later explained, might have been responsible for what happened to me while skydiving.

  Morse graded his subject’s experience according to a sixteen-point questionnaire designed by University of Virginia psychiatry professor Bruce Greyson that remains the benchmark for determining whether or not an anomalous experience should be considered a near-death experience. Using the Greyson Scale, Morse found that out of 26 children who died, 23 reported a classic near-death experience, while none of the other 131 children in his control group experienced anything of the kind. He later videotaped these children recalling these events and making crayon drawings of what they saw once outside their bodies. Many of these pictures included the standard fare: long tunnels, giant rainbows, dead relatives, deities of all sorts. But some also included pictures of the exact medical procedures performed, including elaborate details about doctors and nurses whose only contact with that child took place while that child was dead.