by Peter Watts
The left hemisphere is on a quest for meaning, even when there isn’t any. False memories, pareidolia—the stress-induced perception of pattern in noise59—these are Lefty’s doing. When there are no data, or no meaning, Lefty may find it anyway. Lefty gets religion.
But sometimes patterns are subtle. Sometimes, noise is almost all there is: a kind of noise anyway, at least to classically evolved senses. Smeared probabilities, waves that obscure the location or momentum of whatever you’re squinting at. Virtual particles that elude detection anywhere past the edges of black holes. Maybe, when you move a few orders of magnitude away from the world our senses evolved to parse, a touch of pareidolia can take up the slack. Like the feather that evolved for thermoregulation and then got press-ganged, fully formed, into flight duty, perhaps the brain’s bogus-purpose-seeking wetware might be repurposed to finding patterns it once had to invent. Maybe the future is a fusion of the religious and the empirical.
Maybe all Lefty needs is a little help.
Malfunctions and breakdowns showed them the way. Certain kinds of brain damage result in massive increases in certain types of creativity.16 Strokes provoke bursts of artistic creativity,60 frontotemporal dementia supercharges some parts of the brain even as it compromises others.61 Some autistics possess visual hyperacuity comparable to that of birds of prey, even though they’re stuck with the same human eyes as the rest of us.62 Schizophrenics are immune to certain optical illusions.63 At least some kinds of synesthesia confer cognitive advantages64 (people who literally see time, arrayed about them in multicolored splendor, are twice as good as the rest of us at recalling events from their own personal timelines65). And—as Daniel Brüks reflects—brain damage is actually a prerequisite for basic rationality in certain types of decision-making.66
The Bicamerals set out to damage their brains, in very specific ways. They manipulated the expression of NR2B,67 tweaked TRNP-168 production, used careful cancers to promote growth (their genes tagged for easy identification,69 should anything go wrong) and increase neurosculptural degrees of freedom. Then they ruthlessly weeded those connections, pruned back the tangle into optimum, isolated islands of functionality.70 They improved their pattern-matching skills to a degree almost inconceivable to mere baselines.
Such enhancements come at a cost.71,72 Bicamerals have lost the ability to communicate effectively across the cognitive-species divide. It’s not just that they’ve rewired their speech centers73 and are now using different parts of the brain to talk; they think now almost entirely in metaphor, in patterns that contain meaning even if they don’t, strictly speaking, exist.
Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one’s mind even at today’s rudimentary levels of connectivity. The “transactive memory system” called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.74 And Google doesn’t come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.
Which is not to say that hive minds aren’t already a ubiquitous part of Human society. You are a hive mind, always have been: a single coherent consciousness spread across two cerebral hemispheres, each of which—when isolated—can run its own stand-alone, conscious entity with its own thoughts, aesthetics, even religious beliefs.75 The reverse also happens. A hemisphere forced to run solo when its partner is anaesthetised (preparatory to surgery, for instance) will manifest a different personality than the brain as a whole—but when those two hemispheres reconnect, that solo identity gets swallowed up by whatever dual-core persona runs on the whole organ.16 Consciousness expands to fill the space available.
The Bicameral hive takes its lead from Krista and Tatiana Hogan, conjoined craniopagus twins whose brains are fused at the thalamus.76 Among other things, the thalamus acts as a sensory relay; the twins share a common set of sensory inputs. Each sees through the other’s eyes. Tickle one, the other laughs. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they can share thoughts, and although they have distinct personalities each uses the word “I” when talking about the other twin.
All this resulting from fusion at a sensory relay. Suppose they were linked farther up? A thought doesn’t know to stop and turn back when it reaches the corpus callosum. Why would it behave any differently if it encountered a callosum of a different sort; why should two minds linked by a sufficiently fat pipe be any more distinct than the halves of your own brain?
Sufficiently high bandwidth, therefore, would likely result in a single integrated consciousness across any number of platforms. Technologically, the links themselves might exploit so-called “ephatic coupling”77 (in which direct synaptic stimulation is bypassed and neurons are induced to fire by diffuse electrical fields generated elsewhere in the brain). Synchrony is vital: unified conscious only exists when all parts fire together with a signal latency of a few hundred milliseconds, tops.23,24 Throttle that pipe and it should be possible to retain individuality while accessing memories and sensory data from your fellow nodes.78
I’ve kept the extent of Bicameral hive integration flexible, allowing internode connections to throttle up and down as the need arises—but whether those bandwidth-versus-dialup decisions are made by the nodes themselves or by something more inclusive remains ambiguous. If you want some hint of the ramifications of total cognitive integration, I point you to the (apparently) catatonic Moksha Mind of the Eastern Dharmic Alliance.79
However the hive links up—whatever its degree of conscious coherence—it is a religious experience. Literally.
We know what rapture is: a glorious malfunction, a glitch in the part of the brain that keeps track of where the body ends and everything else begins.80 When that boundary dissolves the mind feels connected to everything, feels literally at one with the universe. It’s an illusion, of course. Transcendence is experience, not insight. That’s not why Bicamerals feel the rapture.
They feel it because it’s an unavoidable side effect of belonging to a hive. Sharing sensory systems, linking minds one to another—such connections really do dissolve the boundaries between bodies. Bicameral spiritual rapture isn’t so much an illusion as a bandwidth meter. It still feels good, of course, which has its own implications. Bicams rap out when they hook up to solve problems. They actually get off on discovery; if baselines got those kind of rewards they wouldn’t need tenure.
The side effect has side effects, though. The activation of rapture-related neurocircuitry generates glossolalia even in baseline brains81,82; given the modifications that Bicamerals use to enhance transcendence,83,84 the occasional bout of speaking in tongues is pretty much a given. Brüks should be thankful the hive doesn’t just scream all the time.
In hindsight, it is apparent that describing the Bicamerals as a religious order is a little misleading: the parts of the brain they’ve souped up simply overlap with the parts that kick in during religious neurobehavioral events, so the manifestations are similar. Whether that’s a distinction that makes a difference is left as an exercise for the reader.
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 flavors: 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 t
his 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 à la Lianna Lutterodt’s training at the hands of her Bicameral masters. Likewise, the precursors of the gimp hood that 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 Lofgren 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 that 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 radiodurans, 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 stimuli.127 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 of 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.
1. D. M. Rosenthal, “Consciousness and Its Function,” Neuropsychologia 46, no. 3 (2008): 829–840.
2. Asael Y. Sklar et al., “Reading and Doing Arithmetic Nonconsciously,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (November 12, 2012): 201211645, doi:10.1073/pnas.1211645109.
3. Ap Dijksterhuis et al., “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-without-Attention Effect,” Science 311, no. 5763 (February 17, 2006): 1005–1007, doi:10.1126/science.1121629.
4. Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya, “Attention a
nd Consciousness: Two Distinct Brain Processes,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 1 (January 2007): 16–22, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.10.012.
5. Ken A. Paller and Joel L. Voss, “An Electrophysiological Signature of Unconscious Recognition Memory,” Nature Neuroscience 12, no. 3 (March 2009): 349+.
6. C. Nathan DeWall, Roy F. Baumeister, and E. J. Masicampo, “Evidence That Logical Reasoning Depends on Conscious Processing,” Consciousness and Cognition 17, no. 3 (September 2008): 628–645, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2007.12.004.
7. Ezequiel Morsella et al., “The Essence of Conscious Conflict: Subjective Effects of Sustaining Incompatible Intentions,” Emotion (Washington, D.C.) 9, no. 5 (October 2009): 717–728, doi:10.1037/a0017121.
8. E. Morsella, “The Function of Phenomenal States: Supramodular Interaction Theory,” Psychological Review 112, no. 4 (2005): 1000–1021.
9. Matthew W. Self and Pieter R. Roelfsema, “Optogenetics: Eye Movements at Light Speed,” Current Biology 22, no. 18 (September 25, 2012): R804–R806, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.07.039.
10. Shahar Arzy et al., “Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person,” Nature 443, no. 7109 (September 21, 2006): 287, doi:10.1038/443287a.
11. Michael A. Persinger and Sandra G. Tiller, “Case Report: A Prototypical Spontaneous ‘Sensed Presence’ of a Sentient Being and Concomitant Electroencephalographic Activity in the Clinical Laboratory,” Neurocase 14, no. 5 (2008): 425–430, doi:10.1080/13554790802406172.
12. Joyce Cohen, “For People with Misophonia, a Chomp or a Slurp May Cause Rage,” New York Times, June 9, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06annoy.html.