Echopraxia (48 page)

What telltale signatures might these bugs be targeting? Consciousness appears to be largely a property of distributed activity—the synchronous firing of far-flung provinces of the brain
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,
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—but it is also correlated with specific locations and structures.
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In terms of specific cellular targets I'm thinking maybe “von Economo neurons” or VENs: disproportionately large, anomalously spindly, sparsely branched neurons that grow 50 to 200 percent larger than the human norm.
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,
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They aren't numerous—they occupy only 1 percent of the anterior cingulate gyrus and the fronto-insular cortex—but they appear to be crucial to the conscious state.

Zombie brains—freed from the metabolic costs of self-awareness—exhibit reduced glucose metabolism in those areas, as well as in the prefrontal cortex, superior parietal gyrus, and the left angular gyrus; this accounts the fractionally-reduced temperature of the zombie brain. Interestingly, the same metabolic depression can be found in the brains of clinically insane murderers.
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PORTIA

I'd like to start this section by emphasising how utterly cool
Portia
's eight-legged namesake is in real life. That stuff about improvisational hunting strategies, mammalian-level problem-solving, and visual acuity all contained within a time-sharing bundle of neurons smaller than a pinhead—God's own truth, all of it.
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,
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,
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,
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That said, the time-sharing cognitive slime mold at Icarus is even cooler. Given the limitations of Human telematter technology at the end of the twenty-first century—and given that
any
invasive agent hitching a ride on someone else's beam would be well-advised to keep its structural complexity to a minimum—the capacity for some kind of self-assembly is going to be highly desirable once you reach your destination. Miras et al describe a process that might fit the rudiments of such a bill, at least.
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,
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Once it starts assembling itself, I imagine that
Portia
might function something like Cooper's “iCHELLs”
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: inorganic metal cells, capable of reactions you could call “metabolic” without squinting too hard. Maybe with a sprinkling of magical fairy-dust plasma
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(although I'm guessing those two processes might be incompatible).

ADAPTIVE DELUSIONAL SYSTEMS …

An enormous amount of recent research has been published about the natural history of the religious impulse and the adaptive value of theistic superstition.
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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,
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It's no great surprise that religion confers adaptive benefits, given the near-universality of that impulse among our species.
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,
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,
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,
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If you're interested and you've got ninety minutes to spare, I'd strongly recommend Robert Sapolsky's brilliant lecture on the evolutionary and neurological roots of religious belief.
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It's not all food taboos and slashed foreskins, though. Far more relevant to the current discussion is the fact that religious minds exhibit certain characteristic neurological traits.
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Believers, for example, are better than nonbelievers at finding patterns in visual data.
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Buddhist meditation increases the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula (structures associated with attention, interoception, and sensory processing).
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There's even circumstantial evidence that Christians are less ruled by their emotions than are nonbelievers
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(although whether the rules they follow instead are any more rational is another question). Certain religious rituals are so effective at focusing the mind and relieving stress that some have suggested coopting them into a sort of “religion for atheists.”
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An obvious significant downside is that most religious beliefs—gods, souls, Space Disneyland—are held at best in the complete absence of empirical evidence (and are more frequently held in the face of
opposing
evidence). While it remains impossible to disprove the negative, for most practical purposes it's reasonable to describe such beliefs as simply
wrong
.

It was only during the writing this book that it occurred to me to wonder if one couldn't say the same about science.

Lutterodt's comparison of religious faith with the physiology of vision came to me while I was reading Inzlicht et al,
55
a paper that describes religion as an internal model of reality that confers benefits even though it's wrong. While that idea is nothing new, the way it was phrased was so reminiscent of the way our brains work—the old survival-engines-not-truth-detectors shtick—that I had to wonder if the whole right/wrong distinction might be off the table the moment any worldview passes through a Human nervous system. And the
next
paper
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I read suggested that certain cosmic mysteries might not be a function of dark energy so much as inconstancies in the laws of physics—and if that
were
the case, there'd really be no way to tell …

Of course, there's absolutely no denying the functional utility of the scientific method, especially when you compare it to the beads and rattles of those guys with the funny hats. Still, I have to admit: not entirely comfy with where that seemed to be heading for a bit.

… AND THE BICAMERAL CONDITION

The Bicameral Order did not begin as a hive. They began as a fortunate juxtaposition of adaptive malfunctions and sloppy fitness.

The name does not derive from Julian Jaynes.
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Rather, both Jaynes and the Order recall a time when paired hemispheres were the only option: the right a pragmatic and unimaginative note-taker, the left a pattern-matcher.
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Think of “gene duplication,” that process by which genetic replication occasionally goes off the rails to serve up multiple copies of a gene where only one had existed before; these become “spares” available for evolutionary experimentation. Hemispheric lateralization was a little like that. A pragmatist core; a philosopher core.

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 noise
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—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.
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Strokes provoke bursts of artistic creativity,
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frontotemporal dementia supercharges some parts of the brain even as it compromises others.
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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.
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Schizophrenics are immune to certain optical illusions.
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At least some kinds of synesthesia confer cognitive advantages
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(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 timelines
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). And—as Daniel Brüks reflects—brain damage is actually a prerequisite for basic rationality in certain types of decision-making.
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The Bicamerals set out to damage their brains, in very specific ways. They manipulated the expression of NR2B,
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tweaked TRNP-1
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production, used careful cancers to promote growth (their genes tagged for easy identification,
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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.
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They improved their pattern-matching skills to a degree almost inconceivable to mere baselines.

Such enhancements come at a cost.
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,
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Bicamerals have lost the ability to communicate effectively across the cognitive-species divide. It's not just that they've rewired their speech centers
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”
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(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.
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Throttle that pipe and it should be possible to retain individuality while accessing memories and sensory data from your fellow nodes.
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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.
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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.
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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.