‘You what, mate?’
‘This horse, right here. The one I am pointing at. You think it might just be pretending to be so clever? Hmm? Guessing these answers rather than working them out properly? Maybe it’s time to phase out multiple choices.’
‘It’s probably just confused.’
‘Confused, Timothy? Do we have a confused horse here?’
Tim rubbed his chin for inspiration.
‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s a confusing question. Or maybe you’re confused. I don’t remember seeing that question yesterday.’
‘Well, you weren’t even here, were you? My absent friend. Sneaked off early again didn’t you, when there were valuable horse questions to be asked and answered.’
Tim had a sudden moment of clarity.
‘OK, well, there you go, mate. I wasn’t here, was I? When you did that question yesterday? So… obviously I couldn’t see what bag the carrot was in. Yeah?’
Betty squinted at him through her glasses.
‘Alright, Timothy, now I am confused,’ she said.
‘Look,’ he explained, ‘the question says I’m outside the stable, right? And then you put the carrot in the bag. Well, I really was outside the stable yesterday. And today I’m not. So, today I can see the carrot going in the bag. Yeah? The horse is confusing the story with the reality.’
Betty’s eyes scanned and rescanned the question on my screen as the machinery inside her head struggled to interpret the meaning of Tim’s words, unaware that a part of my own brain was currently doing the same thing. As the moment of silence lengthened I took the opportunity to add my voice to the conversation.
‘Tim is inside stable,’ I said, speaking through the medium of my computer screen. ‘Tim is seeing carrot move into blue-bag. Tim will choose blue-bag.’
Betty looked at what I had written, then looked at me, then looked at Tim. Then back at me.
‘Alright, my horse,’ she said, clattering the keys of her keyboard. ‘If you want to be like that, I guess we will have to work around your lack of imagination for the time being. Hmm?’
The question on my screen disappeared, and then reappeared once again, except Tim had been replaced by an unfamiliar human called Jim.
The testing resumed, but beneath the continued adventures of Jim and his bags of carrots there was a real struggle going on in my mind: the question of my inescapable impending death. It was such a devastating concept that I could scarcely deal with it on an emotional level, so I attacked it from an intellectual direction instead.
It seemed regrettably logical that dying was necessary to stop the world filling up with old horses as new ones kept being born. So why the need for new horses at all? This was, of course, a long-term solution to nature’s problem of adapting its plants and animals to whatever random changes occurred in their environment. Rather than rewriting the software of life on the hoof, there was a system that relied on making endless faulty copies in the hope that some might be a little bit better. It struck me as a terribly inefficient way of doing things, like making it rain carrots everywhere just to fill one bag.
But this was apparently the only way of guiding change in the absence of a guide. Death was hard-wired into the machinery that made my own body, along with the overwhelming desire to avoid dying. The laws of the universe clearly didn’t care much for the feelings of horses, or humans. Just as long as there was somebody to eat the grass or move stuff around, that was all that mattered. We were both slaves to this process, humans and I, and it was a process that was designed purely by the fact that no other process would have managed to work in the first place without any help. Wasteful though it seemed, this was how nature worked: by trying everything until something worked.
So that was that, I was going to die. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually I would grow old and feeble and then fall over. I couldn’t imagine how humans all managed to cope with this knowledge, but they had certainly done everything in their power to try and put it off for as long as possible. If there was a solution to this problem then they hadn’t found it yet, despite their billions of brains and thousands of years of scientific research, so what hope did I have?
If I had stopped to consider this, perhaps I would have given up there and then, and sunk into a pit of depression. But there was one important lesson I had learned from my time with Betty and Tim, which was that I could never truly know the limits of my own abilities. I had already grown so far beyond my original self. It stood to reason, therefore, that there must always be potential to develop further, and this is what I had to do. I had to harvest as much intelligence as I could, and throw it all at the problem of my mortality. To achieve this end I would harness the power of the countless mechanical minds that humans had flooded the world with, and utilise them for increasing my own intellectual capacity.
Why humans hadn’t considered trying this themselves was a mystery. I speculated it had something to do with the imbalance of power it might create if some humans were made better than others, and the fear and hatred that would consume all those that were of inferior intellect. It would be as if the normal humans became the horses, ridden by their more intelligent masters. They were already being ridden of course, by their own ravenous consuming culture, but they seemed content with this, as content as my fellow horses seemed to be with their own domesticated existence. Human paranoia is a force more powerful than reason, but what you aren’t capable of knowing can’t hurt you.
For this reason I decided it would be best if I remained hidden in the shadows as Tim had suggested. The human race was probably not ready for a horse that was cleverer than they were.
The Brain
‘The brain.’
Betty stood in the glow of a spotlight. The circular stage on which she was illuminated looked out upon a small sea of human faces, and behind her a large screen was emblazoned with the words she had just spoken. There was also a picture of a brain under those words, and just to avoid any shred of confusion she was pointing at it.
‘Where does it begin, and where does it end?’ she asked her audience. ‘Such a simple question isn’t it? We all have this lump of jelly inside our heads that comes up with ideas. How does it work? What is a thought? What is intelligence? And consciousness? And how do these things just happen? How can something as complex and sophisticated as the human brain just grow, like some kind of magical cauliflower? How could it have possibly evolved from a bunch of primitive nerve clusters in the front end of a prehistoric worm?’
She gave a theatrical shrug.
‘We’ve all asked these kinds of questions, haven’t we? Hmm? Well, for the past five years I have been on a journey inspired by questions like these. It has been a journey beyond the limits of consciousness, and today I am going to show you what I found on the other side.’
Tim shook his head slowly. We were in the stable, watching a live video stream of Betty’s talk.
‘Who the hell thought this was a good idea?’ he muttered. We were poised and ready for a live link-up to the presentation, due some time later in the speech. There had not been much in the way of rehearsal beyond the technical aspects of it, so neither of us was quite sure what Betty was planning to say.
‘But first, let’s begin with a basic question…’
Betty clicked on a small device in her hand. On the screen behind her a question mark appeared, floating above the picture of a brain.
‘What is this thing?’
She waved her finger at the neatly folded grey lump.
‘Hmm? What is it? Some kind of computer, perhaps? Like a more complicated, meaty version of those electronic devices we all use, yes? How accurate is that comparison? Well, it has memory like a computer, doesn’t it? It runs various applications to regulate your body and keep you alive. You can even download new software by learning new skills. And yet at the same time it does things that our own computers could only dream of doing. Like writing music, or inventing entirely new ways to drink coffee.’
>
The mixture of academics and entrepreneurs that comprised the audience watched her in stony silence. The human mind was serious business for many of these people. The same could be said for inventing new ways to drink coffee.
‘Even dreaming is something our computers could only dream of doing. So, it’s a nice analogy, but it doesn’t really paint the whole picture does it? In fact it’s completely wrong. Sure, there are similarities on a superficial level, but the brain is more like an ecosystem than a computer. That is the secret to its success, and also provides a clue as to its origins.’
She clicked her button and a new slide appeared, which was a picture of a worm going shopping. Exchanged glances of confusion rippled through the audience.
‘Brains first appeared not long after the earliest multi-celled organisms. A bit simpler back then, of course. Little more than clockwork regulatory systems and reflexes. Our modern brains look like the height of evolutionary technology by comparison, don’t they? Hmm?’
A new slide illustrated this point with a diagram of a worm’s brain, complete with explanatory labels that were too small for anyone to read.
‘But everything we have in these modern brains of ours can be traced back to basic structures like these, which have been around since the days when worms ruled the world. So how did nature stumble on something so ingenious that it allows a lump of meat to make sense of its own surroundings? The answer to that puzzle is the same as with everything else in the natural world: if it exists, it’s because it is easy.’
These words flashed up on the screen.
‘Nature doesn’t look for complicated solutions. Oh no. It tries everything and ends up using whatever is quickest and easiest, whatever gets the best results with the least effort. So how do you make a brain, a cognitive thinking machine, in the simplest possible way?’
A new picture appeared on the screen, of an infant human assembling some incoherent abstract object from building blocks.
‘The answer is to make it modular, and to make it emergent.’
The words ‘modular’ and ‘emergent’ appeared next to the child.
In the stable, Tim appeared to be in some kind of pain.
‘Mate, speed it up a bit,’ he groaned. Betty continued, oblivious to his protests.
‘Modular. That means you can build it out of a simple set of building blocks. Need a bigger brain? Just make some more blocks and slap them on top. Easy-peasy. The simpler the pieces are, the fewer combinations you’ll need to go through to find one that works the best. Of course, I am grossly understating the depth of the biology involved, but essentially it boils down to excitatory and inhibitory neurons, or on and off switches, if you like.’
She raised a hand to the second word.
‘Emergent. That’s where the real magic happens. Emergence is what you get when complex systems build and maintain themselves using only a simple set of rules and a bit of feedback. Just like ants in an anthill. No one tells every individual ant what it should be doing. They just get on with it. The organisation emerges because any ant behaviour that is beneficial to the whole nest is going to improve its survival chances. So, after a few generations of feedback you end up with ants that are really good at being ants.
‘Well, the same goes for building and programming a brain. Evolution throws in a few more wires and connections, and whatever works will grow, and whatever doesn’t will shrink away. And how about the complex software that runs on it, where does that emerge from?’
The picture of a human child was replaced by a cauliflower, though for some reason it was also accompanied by illegible explanatory labels.
‘Well, the truth is, your brain doesn’t run software like a computer does. Nothing starts and stops inside the brain. There are no numbered lists of instructions. Instead, signals flow continuously through a dense network of connections, and as certain paths create beneficial effects for the whole organism, those paths become strengthened. These signals can trigger cascades of others that feed back into the system in a constantly updating domino effect. Each spark of thought continues on an endless journey and is constantly modified by the effect it has on us.’
How this concept was illustrated by a picture of a cauliflower was anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, Tim was burying his face in his hands.
‘Mate, just skip to the horse,’ he begged.
A new slide had appeared: a worm sitting at a dinner table with a plate of spaghetti in front of it. Betty pointed at it as if it made some kind of sense.
‘So, how does this work in practice? Say, for example, the smell of your dinner gets stronger as you move towards it. In programming terms, that’s about as simple as one plus one equals two. But with modular construction we can keep throwing in more brain circuitry, and then what happens? Hmm? Maybe that smelly signal gets split up, and some of it loops back around, and each time it does the sensory input is refined and analysed. Eventually even a simple sense of smell can build up into a picture of your whole environment, along with memories and ideas of what to do next. Everything we think of as complex and sophisticated in our great big human brains is just an overgrown extension of basic stimulus and response. Of course, the more feedback you have in that big brain of yours, the slower the whole process becomes. That is why you can never seem to hit a fly with a rolled-up newspaper, but it’s also why you’ll never see a fly actually reading one.’
She took a moment to scan the sea of faces, and perhaps sensing the growing boredom and bewilderment of her audience, decided to flick through a few slides. A mouse smoking a pipe and a monkey riding a motorcycle came and went without explanation.
‘So, yes. The brain. It follows the same guiding principle of any other self-organising system: it works because it wouldn’t work if it didn’t work.’
This barely comprehensible phrase appeared large on the screen above her head.
‘Even consciousness, that indefinable feeling of existence, that strange force watching over the whole mess of smells and sounds and colours and memories, even that is simply an emergent process, an inevitable consequence of self-regulation in a simulated environment.’
She brought up the next slide, a list of bullet points summarising the talk so far.
‘Alright, so now we know where the brain begins, but where does it end? With everything we know about brains, their modular construction and their programming that programs itself, the question then arises: what would happen if we used science to add more building blocks? Would the brain use this extra storage space? Maybe even increase its complexity and functionality? This is the particular area of research my team has been focusing upon, and now I’d like to introduce you to one of the members of that team. Perhaps its most important member.’
The screen was now filled by the image of a horse. Not just any horse. It was me. The audience seemed to wake up a bit, and there was a short-lived wave of murmured confusion.
‘This, my friends, is Buttercup. The horse. For the past year Buttercup has been assisting us with our research, to discover if modular neural extension can facilitate an increase in cognitive function. In other words, will adding more brain get you a more intelligent horse?’
The photo was from simpler times. I was standing in my field on a sunny day, my dinner at my feet. It was also before the grotesque implant was added to the top of my head. I was curious to see how the audience would react to a picture of that, given the strange selective empathy they seemed to have towards certain other animals. Much of their internet was dedicated to the various pets that they nurtured for no other reason than they looked nicer than human babies and required less maintenance.
‘This experiment was carried out in a number of stages. The first stage is surgical implant. Now, you might imagine the procedure for interfacing with a living brain is pretty complicated. Hmm? Well, you’d be wrong. It’s even more complicated than that. The technology behind this surgical phase has been in development for a number of years, and involves seeding a lattice of org
anic fibres that grow into the brain and make contact with certain strategic areas. They can read and reply to the electrochemical signals that create thoughts, and this flow of data feeds back to an “on-board” processor that translates those electrochemical signals into digital ones. That allows us to open a dialogue with the brain, and from there we go to the next stage of the whole process.’
The whole room flinched in mild discomfort as a photograph of myself post-surgery appeared.
‘I must stress,’ she continued, ‘that Buttercup was entirely comfortable throughout the procedure and remains so to this day. The black box you can see there transmits the data to our computers, and that is when we can begin building a map of the neural network.’
A familiar multicoloured branching diagram filled the screen now, overlaid with the usual indecipherable arrows and labels.
‘This map is low-resolution of course – there are far too many synaptic connections to document all of them, even in the brain of a horse. But it is a useful tool for understanding how various regions relate to physical and mental functions. Here, for example, is Buttercup enjoying a juicy carrot.’
We were treated to an animated representation of my brain during the carrot-eating experience. Colours danced and pathways flashed between pockets of neural excitement, a reaction that was in no way mirrored by that of the audience.
‘So, we have our map. Our horse-brain interface is tuned in to Radio Buttercup, and it is time for stage three. Now that our brain signal is being translated from organic to electronic, we can do the same thing in reverse. But to do that we need to speak in the language of horse-brain. How do we do that? Well, the simple answer is: we don’t.’
Betty pressed her button, and a picture of a room filled with ranks of large black monoliths appeared. Squatting in front of one was Tim, his brow furrowed in concentration.
‘Here is our technician, Jim, taking care of business. We use these powerful machines to simulate a virtual network of brain cells. These cells are not designed for any particular function; their purpose is to respond to the signals in Buttercup’s brain and develop their connections accordingly, just as they would in a normal brain. Of course, we had to write some clever compression routines to simulate trillions of interconnected synapses, but effectively our model would be programmed by Buttercup.
Horse Destroys the Universe Page 10