Firefall

by Peter Watts

  Sometimes electrical stimulation of the brain induces "alien hand syndrome"— the involuntary movement of the body against the will of the "person" allegedly in control29. Other times it provokes equally involuntary movements, which subjects nonetheless insist they "chose" to perform despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary30. Put all this together with the fact that the body begins to act before the brain even "decides" to move31 (but see32, 33), and the whole concept of free will—despite the undeniable subjective feeling that it's real—begins to look a teeny bit silly, even outside the influence of alien artefacts.

  While electromagnetic stimulation is currently the most trendy approach to hacking the brain, it's hardly the only one. Gross physical disturbances ranging from tumors34 to tamping irons35 can turn normal people into psychopaths and pedophiles (hence that new persona sprouting in Susan James's head). Spirit possession and rapture can be induced through the sheer emotional bump-and-grind of religious rituals, using no invasive neurological tools at all (and not even necessarily any pharmacological ones)36. People can even develop a sense of ownership of body parts that aren't theirs, can be convinced that a rubber hand is their real one37. Vision trumps propioreception: a prop limb, subtly manipulated, is enough to convince us that we're doing one thing while in fact we're doing something else entirely38, 39.

  The latest tool in this arsenal is ultrasound: less invasive than electromagnetics, more precise than charismatic revival, it can be used to boot up brain activity40 without any of those pesky electrodes or magnetic hairnets. In Blindsight it serves as a convenient back door to explain why Rorschach's hallucinations persist even in the presence of Faraday shielding— but in the here and now, Sony has been renewing an annual patent for a machine which uses ultrasonics to implant "sensory experiences" directly into the brain41. They're calling it an entertainment device with massive applications for online gaming. Uh huh. And if you can implant sights and sounds into someone's head from a distance, why not implant political beliefs and the irresistable desire for a certain brand of beer while you're at it?

  ARE WE THERE YET?

  The "telematter" drive that gets our characters to the story is based on teleportation studies reported in Nature42, Science,43, 44 Physical Review Letters45, and (more recently) everyone and their dog46. The idea of transmitting antimatter specs as a fuel template is, so far as I know, all mine. To derive plausible guesses for Theseus's fuel mass, accelleration, and travel time I resorted to The Relativistic Rocket47, maintained by the mathematical physicist John Baez at UC Riverside. Theseus' use of magnetic fields as radiation shielding is based on research out of MIT48. I parked the (solar powered) Icarus Array right next to the sun because the production of antimatter is likely to remain an extremely energy-expensive process for the near future49, 50.

  The undead state in which Theseus carries her crew is, of course, another iteration of the venerable suspended animation riff (although I'd like to think I've broken new ground by invoking vampire physiology as the mechanism). Two recent studies have put the prospect of induced hibernation closer to realization. Blackstone et al. have induced hibernation in mice by the astonishingly-simple expedient of exposing them to hydrogen sulfide51; this gums up their cellular machinery enough to reduce metabolism by 90%. More dramatically (and invasively), researchers at Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh claim52 to have resurrected a dog three hours after clinical death, via a technique in which the animal's blood supply was replaced by an ice-cold saline solution53. Of these techniques, the first is probably closer to what I envisioned, although I'd finished the first draft before either headline broke. I considered rejigging my crypt scenes to include mention of hydrogen sulfide, but ultimately decided that fart jokes would have ruined the mood.

  THE GAME BOARD

  Blindsight describes Big Ben as an "Oasa Emitter". Officially there's no such label, but Yumiko Oasa has reported finding hitherto-undocumented infrared emitters54, 55 (dimmer than brown dwarves, but possibly more common56, 57) ranging in mass from three to thirteen Jovian masses. My story needed something relatively local, large enough to sustain a superJovian magnetic field, but small and dim enough to plausibly avoid discovery for the next seventy or eighty years. Oasa's emitters suit my needs reasonably well (notwithstanding some evident skepticism over whether they actually exist58).

  Of course I had to extrapolate on the details, given how little is actually known about these beasts. To this end I pilfered data from a variety of sources on gas giants59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65 and/or brown dwarves66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, scaling up or down as appropriate. From a distance, the firing of Rorschach's ultimate weapon looks an awful lot like the supermassive x-ray and radio flare recently seen erupting from a brown dwarf that should have been way too small to pull off such a trick77. That flare lasted twelve hours, was a good billions times as strong as anything Jupiter ever put out, and is thought to have resulted from a twisted magnetic field78.

  Burns-Caulfield is based loosely on 2000 Cr105, a trans-Newtonian comet whose present orbit cannot be completely explained by the gravitational forces of presently-known objects in the solar system79.

  SCRAMBLER ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY

  Like many others, I am weary of humanoid aliens with bumpy foreheads, and of giant CGI insectoids that may look alien but who act like rabid dogs in chitin suits. Of course, difference for its own arbitrary sake is scarcely better than your average saggital-crested Roddennoid; natural selection is as ubiquitous as life itself, and the same basic processes will end up shaping life wherever it evolves. The challenge is thus to create an "alien" that truly lives up to the word, while remaining biologically plausible.

  Scramblers are my first shot at meeting that challenge— and given how much they resemble the brittle stars found in earthly seas, I may have crapped out on the whole unlike-anything-you've-ever-seen front, at least in terms of gross morphology. It turns out that brittle stars even have something akin to the scrambler's distributed eyespot array. Similarly, scrambler reproduction— the budding of stacked newborns off a common stalk— takes its lead from jellyfish. You can take the marine biologist out of the ocean, but...

  Fortunately, scramblers become more alien the closer you look at them. Cunningham remarks that nothing like their time-sharing motor/sensory pathways exists on Earth. He's right as far as he goes, but I can cite a precursor that might conceivably evolve into such an arrangement. Our own "mirror neurons" fire not only when we perform an action, but when we observe someone else performing the same action80; this characteristic has been cited in the evolution of both language and of consciousness81, 82, 83.

  Things look even more alien on the metabolic level. Here on Earth anything that relied solely on anaerobic ATP production never got past the single-cell stage. Even though it's more efficient than our own oxygen-burning pathways, anaerobic metabolism is just too damn slow for advanced multicellularity84. Cunningham's proposed solution is simplicity itself. The catch is, you have to sleep for a few thousand years between shifts.

  The idea of quantum-mechanical metabolic processes may sound even wonkier, but it's not. Wave-particle duality can exert significant impacts on biochemical reactions under physiological conditions at room temperature85; heavy-atom carbon tunnelling has been reported to speed up the rate of such reactions by as much as 152 orders of magnitude86.

  And how's this for alien: no genes. The honeycomb example I used by way of analogy originally appeared in Darwin's little-known treatise87 (damn but I've always wanted to cite that guy); more recently, a small but growing group of biologists have begun spreading the word that nucleic acids (in particular) and genes (in general) have been seriously overrated as prerequisites to life88, 89. A great deal of biological complexity arises not because of genetic programming, but through the sheer physical and chemical interaction of its components90, 91, 92, 93. Of course, you still need something
to set up the initial conditions for those processes to emerge; that's where the magnetic fields come in. No candy-ass string of nucleotides would survive in Rorschach's environment anyway.

  The curious nitpicker might be saying "Yeah, but without genes how do these guys evolve? How to they adapt to novel environments? How, as a species, do they cope with the unexpected?" And if Robert Cunningham were here today, he might say, "I'd swear half the immune system is actively targetting the other half. It's not just the immune system, either. Parts of the nervous system seem to be trying to, well, hack each other. I think they evolve intraorganismally, as insane as that sounds. The whole organism's at war with itself on the tissue level, it's got some kind of cellular Red Queen thing happening. Like setting up a colony of interacting tumors, and counting on fierce competition to keep any one of them from getting out of hand. Seems to serve the same role as sex and mutation does for us." And if you rolled your eyes at all that doubletalk, he might just blow smoke in your face and refer to one immunologist's interpretation of exactly those concepts, as exemplified in (of all things) The Matrix Revolutions94. He might also point out that that the synaptic connections of your own brain are shaped by a similar kind of intraorganismal natural selection95, one catalysed by bits of parasitic DNA called retrotransposons.

  Cunningham actually did say something like that in an earlier draft of this book, but the damn thing was getting so weighed down with theorising that I just cut it. After all, Rorschach is the proximate architect of these things, so it could handle all that stuff even if individual scramblers couldn't. And one of Blindsight's take-home messages is that life is a matter of degree—the distinction between living and non-living systems has always been an iffy one96, 97, 98, never more so than in the bowels of that pain-in-the-ass artefact out in the Oort.

  SENTIENCE/INTELLIGENCE

  This is the heart of the whole damn exercise. Let's get the biggies out of the way first. Metzinger's Being No One99 is the toughest book I've ever read (and there are still significant chunks of it I haven't), but it also contains some of the most mindblowing ideas I've encountered in fact or fiction. Most authors are shameless bait-and-switchers when it comes to the nature of consciousness. Pinker calls his book How the Mind Works100, then admits on page one that "We don't understand how the mind works". Koch (the guy who coined the term "zombie agents") writes The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach101, in which he sheepishly sidesteps the whole issue of why neural activity should result in any kind of subjective awareness whatsoever.

  Towering above such pussies, Metzinger takes the bull by the balls. His "World-zero" hypothesis not only explains the subjective sense of self, but also why such an illusory first-person narrator would be an emergent property of certain cognitive systems in the first place. I have no idea whether he's right— the man's way beyond me— but at least he addressed the real question that keeps us staring at the ceiling at three a.m., long after the last roach is spent. Many of the syndromes and maladies dropped into Blindsight I first encountered in Metzinger's book. Any uncited claims or statements in this subsection probably hail from that source.

  If they don't, then maybe they hail from Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will102 instead. Less ambitious, far more accessible, Wegner's book doesn't so much deal with the nature of consciousness as it does with the nature of free will, which Wegner thumbnails as "our mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did.". Wegner presents his own list of syndromes and maladies, all of which reinforce the mind-boggling sense of what fragile and subvertible machines we are. And of course, Oliver Sacks103 was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even had a bandwagon to jump on.

  It might be easier to list the people who haven't taken a stab at "explaining" consciousness. Theories run the gamut from diffuse electrical fields to quantum puppet-shows; consciousness has been "located" in the frontoinsular cortex and the hypothalamus and a hundred dynamic cores in between104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114. (At least one theory115 suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic).

  But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it's good for. Blindsight plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconcious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations116, 117, 118. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.)

  Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective119. Norretranders declared outright that "Consciousness is a fraud"120.

  Art might be a bit of an exception. Aesthetics seem to require some level of self-awareness—in fact, the evolution of aethestics might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first place. When music is so beautiful if makes you shiver, that's the reward circuitry in your limbic system kicking in: the same circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or gorging on sucrose121. It's a hack, in other words; your brain has learned how to get the reward without actually earning it through increased fitness122. It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us. Those rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat. They starved to death. I've no doubt they died happy, but they died. Without issue. Their fitness went to Zero.

  Aesthetics. Sentience. Extinction.

  And that brings us to the final question, lurking way down in the anoxic zone: the question of what consciousness costs. Compared to nonconscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive123. (The premise of a separate, faster entity lurking at the base of our brains to take over in emergencies is based on studies by, among others, Joe LeDoux of New York University124, 125). By way of comparison, consider the complex, lightning-fast calculations of savantes; those abilities are noncognitive126, and there is evidence that they owe their superfunctionality not to any overarching integration of mental processes but due to relative neurological fragmentation127. Even if sentient and nonsentient processes were equally efficient, the conscious awareness of visceral stimuli—by its very nature— distracts the individual from other threats and opportunities in its environment. (I was quite proud of myself for that insight. You'll understand how peeved I was to discover that Wegner had already made a similar point back in 1994128.) The cost of high intelligence has even been demonstrated by experiments in which smart fruit flies lose out to dumb ones when competing for food129, possibly because the metabolic demands of learning and memory leave less energy for foraging. No, I haven't forgotten that I've just spent a whole book arguing that intelligence and sentience are different things. But this is still a relevant experiment, because one thing both attributes do have in common is that they are metabolically expensive. (The difference is, in at least some cases intelligence is worth the price. What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?)

  While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the
next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a thought experiment, a game of Just suppose and What if. Nothing more.

  On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superiority, a thousand years ago: if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

  Cunningham's stats about self-recognition in primates: those too are real. Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans130, yet orangs consistently recognise themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time131. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys—not the presumably "more sentient" great apes who are our closest relatives132, 133. If you squint, facts like these suggest that sentience might almost be a phase, something that orangutans haven't yet grown out of but which their more-advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to. (Gorillas don't self-recognise in mirrors. Perhaps they've already grown out of sentience, or perhaps they never grew into it.)

  Of course, Humans don't fit this pattern. If it even is a pattern. We're outliers: that's one of the points I'm making.

  I bet vampires would fit it, though. That's the other one.

  Finally, some very timely experimental support for this unpleasant premise came out just as Blindsight was being copy edited: it turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind134. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”135