Such thinking killed the great project and with it the spread-brain. Men turned to other weird activities and to new conclusions about the nature of experience. But what these were is another story.
Reflections
This weird tale seems at first to be a sly demolition of virtually all the ideas exploited in the rest of the book, a reductio ad absurdum of the assumptions about the relations between brain and experience that had seemed to be innocent and obvious. How might one resist the daffy slide to its conclusion? Some hints:
Suppose someone claimed to have a microscopically exact replica (in marble, even) of Michelangelo’s “David” in his home. When you go to see this marvel, you find a twenty-foot-tall roughly rectilinear hunk of pure white marble standing in his living room. “I haven’t gotten around to unpacking it yet,” he says, “but I know it’s in there.”
Consider how little Zuboff tells us of the wonderful “cartridges” and “impulse programmers” that get fastened to the various bits and pieces of brain. All they do, we learn, is provide their attached neuron, or group of neurons, with a lifetime supply of the right sort of impulses in the right order and timing. Mere beepers, we might be inclined to think. But reflect on what must actually be produced by these cartridges, by considering what would in fact be a vastly “easier” technological triumph. Crippling strikes close down all the television stations, so there is nothing to watch on TV; fortunately, IBM comes to the aid of all the people who are going insane without their daily dose of TV, by mailing them “impulse cartridges” to fasten to their TV sets; these cartridges are programmed to produce ten channels of news, weather, soap opera, sports, and so forth—all made up, of course (the news won’t be accurate news, but at least it will be realistic). After all, say the IBM people, we all know that television signals are just impulses transmitted from the stations; our cartridges simply take a shorter route to the receiver. What could be inside those wonderful cartridges, though? Videotapes of some sort? But how were they made? By videotaping real live actors, newscasters, and the like, or by animation? Animators will tell you that the task of composing, from scratch, all those frames without the benefit of filmed real action to draw upon is a gigantic task that grows exponentially as you try for greater realism. When you get right down to it, only the real world is rich enough in information to provide (and control) the signal trains needed to sustain channels of realistic TV. The task of making up a real world of perception (essentially the task Descartes assigned to an infinitely powerful deceiving demon in his Meditations) is perhaps possible in principle, but utterly impossible in fact. Descartes was right to make his evil demon infinitely powerful—no lesser deceiver could sustain the illusion without falling back on the real world after all and turning the illusion back into a vision of reality, however delayed or otherwise skewed.
These points strike glancing blows against Zubof’s implicit argument. Can they be put into fatal combinations? Perhaps we can convince ourselves that his conclusions are absurd by asking if a similar argument couldn’t be marshalled to prove that there is no need for books. Need we not simply print the whole alphabet just once and be done with all of book publishing? Who says we should print the whole alphabet? Will not just one letter, or one stroke do? One dot?
The logician Raymond Smullyan, whom we shall meet later in this book, suggests that the proper way to learn to play the piano is to become intimate with each note individually, one at a time. Thus, for instance, you might devote an entire month to practicing just middle C, perhaps only a few days each to the notes at the ends of the keyboard. But let’s not forget rests, for they are an equally essential part of music. You can spend a whole day on whole-note rests, two days on half-note rests, four days on quarter-note rests and so on. Once you’ve completed this arduous training, you’re ready to play anything! It sounds right, but, somehow, slightly wrong as well …
The physicist John Archibald Wheeler once speculated that perhaps the reason all electrons are alike is that there is really only one electron, careening back and forth from the ends of time, weaving the fabric of the physical universe by crossing its own path innumerable times. Perhaps Parmenides was right: there is only one thing! But this one thing, so imagined, has spatiotemporal parts that enter into astronomically many relations with its other spatiotemporal parts, and this relative organization, in time and in space, matters. But to whom? To the portions of the great tapestry that are perceivers. And how are they distinguished from the rest of the tapestry?
D.C.D.
D.R.H.
IV
Mind as Program
Now that I’ve won my suit under the Freedom of Information Act, I at liberty to reveal for the first time a curious episode in my life that may be of interest not only to those engaged in research in the philosophy mind, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience but also to the gene public.
Several years ago I was approached by Pentagon officials who ask me to volunteer for a highly dangerous and secret mission. In collaboration with NASA and Howard Hughes, the Department of Defense was spending billions to develop a Supersonic Tunneling Underground Device, or STUD. It was supposed to tunnel through the earth’s core at great speed and deliver a specially designed atomic warhead “right up the Red’s missile silos,” as one of the Pentagon brass put it.
The problem was that in an early test they had succeeded in lodging a warhead about a mile deep under Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they want me to retrieve it for them. “Why me?” I asked. Well, the mission involved some pioneering applications of current brain research, and they had heard of my interest in brains and of course my Faustian curiosity a great courage and so forth.... Well, how could I refuse? The difficulty that brought the Pentagon to my door was that the device I’d been ask to recover was fiercely radioactive, in a new way. According to monitoring instruments, something about the nature of the device and its complex interactions with pockets of material deep in the earth had produced radiation that could cause severe abnormalities in certain tissues of the brain. No way had been found to shield the brain from these deadly rays, which were apparently harmless to other tissues and organs of the body. So it had been decided that the person sent to recover the device should leave his brain behind. It would be kept in a safe place where it could execute its normal control functions by elaborate radio links. Would I submit to a surgical procedure that would completely remove my brain, which would then be placed in a life-support system at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston? Each input and output pathway, as it was severed, would be restored by a pair of microminiaturized radio transceivers, one attached precisely to the brain, the other to the nerve stumps in the empty cranium. No information would be lost, all the connectivity would be preserved. At first I was a bit reluctant. Would it really work? The Houston brain surgeons encouraged me. “Think of it,” they said, “as a mere stretching of the nerves. If your brain were just moved over an inch in your skull, that would not alter or impair your mind. We’re simply going to make the nerves indefinitely elastic by splicing radio links into them.”
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