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.
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 analyzers[100] 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 engine[101] 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] a la Lianna Lutterodt’s training at the hands of her Bicameral masters. Likewise, the precursors of the gimp hood which 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 Loffgren and Fefferman;[114] 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 research[116]—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 forgetful;[121] 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 which 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 radiolarians, 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]
98
Lee Smolin,
99
“DNA Barcoding,”
100
Kevin Davies, “A QuantuMDx Leap for Handheld DNA Sequencing - Bio-IT World,”
101
“Vortex Engine,”
102
Tyler Hamilton, “Taming Tornadoes to Power Cities.,”
103
Kurt Kleiner, “Artificial Tornado Plan to Generate Electricity,”
104
Kazuhisa Shibata et al., “Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation,”
105
Jack L. Gallant et al., “Identifying Natural Images from Human Brain Activity,”
106
T. Horikawa et al., “Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep,”
107
Kendrick N. Kay and Jack L. Gallant, “I Can See What You See,”
108
Thomas Naselaris et al., “Bayesian Reconstruction of Natural Images from Human Brain Activity,”
109
Jon Stokes, “Sony Patents a Brain Manipulation Technology,”
110
Johannes Gräff and Li-Huei Tsai, “Cognitive Enhancement: A Molecular Memory Booster,”
111
Dillon Y. Chen et al., “A Critical Role for IGF-II in Memory Consolidation and Enhancement,”
112
Reut Shema et al., “Enhancement of Consolidated Long-Term Memory by Overexpression of Protein Kinase Mζ in the Neocortex,”
113
Brendan Maher, “Poll Results: Look Who’s Doping,”
114
Eric T. Lofgren and Nina H Fefferman, “The Untapped Potential of Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on Real World Epidemics,”
115
“Corrupted Blood Incident,”
116
John Gaudiosi, “Gameworld:Virtual Economies in Video Games Used as Case Studies,”
117
Alexandre Alié and Michaël Manuel, “The Backbone of the Post-synaptic Density Originated in a Unicellular Ancestor of Choanoflagellates and Metazoans,”
118
P. Burkhardt et al., “Primordial Neurosecretory Apparatus Identified in the Choanoflagellate Monosiga Brevicollis,”
119
X. Cai, “Unicellular Ca2+ Signaling ‘Toolkit’ at the Origin of Metazoa,”
120
B. J. Liebeskind, D. M. Hillis, and H. H. Zakon, “Evolution of Sodium Channels Predates the Origin of Nervous Systems in Animals,”
121
Pierre-Yves Plaçais and Thomas Preat, “To Favor Survival Under Food Shortage, the Brain Disables Costly Memory,”
122
Margaret Talbot, “Brain Gain,”
123
Vihang A. Narkar et al., “AMPK and PPARδ Agonists Are Exercise Mimetics,”
125
Jamie Condliffe, “Cryptic Poetry Written in a Microbe’s DNA,”
127
Yes, there may be random elements—quantum flickers that introduce unpredictability into one’s behavior—but slaving your decisions to a dice roll doesn’t make you free.
128
Benjamin Libet et al., “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (readiness-Potential) the Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act,”
129
Chun Siong Soon et al., “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain,”
130
Björn Brembs, “Towards a Scientific Concept of Free Will as a Biological Trait: Spontaneous Actions and Decision-making in Invertebrates,”
131
Alexander Maye et al., “Order in Spontaneous Behavior,”
132
Anthony R Cashmore, “The Lucretian Swerve: The Biological Basis of Human Behavior and the Criminal Justice System,”
133
David Eagleman,
135