oopple
Why was it that meatspace manipulation made Isaac feel like the Mind had crossed a line, yet full-on brain puppetry was normal?
Isaac sat on his bed with his upper back resting against his headboard, his lower back slumped along the ninety degree angle, his face illuminated partially by his bedside lamp, his hands tapping his stomach, combing the ‘net for answers.
He nodded to the music and occasionally grimaced in pleasure, mouthing words to songs, his face expressing the music piped into his implant.
Watching altered history was like staring at a subtle warpage in space-time. You, yourself were altered as you crossed the space stretched over the secret corpse buried in old vids.
So he dug at the places where the corpse might be hid. He searched for skeptical metemotions attached to the visual record for the Mind’s history. He sifted through a deluge of rants: emotions stitching together patchwork facts. It was common to see backpedaling or long rebuttals in the comments at the ends of the immortal pages.
None of that was worth his time. None of it was worth the Mind’s time, so there it stood, for anyone to imbibe, a record of the freedom of expression. He tried querying for the start of the Mind. How the Mind works. And he mostly came across Pictopedia entries, which were boring and rather triumphal in tone, but in one of the footpicts he’d come across a link to a primary source.
Isaac slipped into the audience. He shivered as the metemotions came through, remembering Jethro’s dream. Enough of first person for today. He switched off emotional metadata and first-person and settled into to watch the inventor of picto give a groundbreaking talk to the staff of Goople.
John Frankowitz, with his reddish-brown hair that spilled out over his ears and became a beard, was a red bear of a man with round Lennon glasses. There was the informal, relaxed vibe in the bright-colored room, hard-working creatives taking a break. Scarcely any of the executives in attendance were above the age of thirty. While some filed in, others were grabbing muffins and coffee from the back table.
“Nice place,” thought Isaac. “I could go for one of those muffins about right now,” he thought, eyeing a chocolate chip one. Real chocolate, he was willing to bet, not the synthetic.
“Alright, I’ll begin as folks are arriving,” said John.
“I’m going to tell you a little bit about what so much of the company is excited about, and what we’re moving toward. Even though it’s all been need-to-know, you’ve probably heard a bunch of rumors. Some of you are going to be reassigned to this project soon so I’m going to lay it out for you,” he said, as people quieted down.
“Processor speed plateaued in the early 21st century. The laws of physics hunted us down. And we haven’t found any solutions other than more of what we already had. Sure, we can build both quantum and molecular computing toys, but they’re just not affordable for consciousness clusters as large as ours. Nor for end users. If we don’t break through the silicon barrier, we’re going to end up swallowed, just like we swallowed the search giants of the early 21st century. Or gone,” A three-dimensional drone-shot of a consciousness cluster illuminated the platform to his left.
“Friends, I’m going to reframe this for you. What appears to be a clock-speed crisis is actually a crisis of meaning. Like boomers in the information age. Like priests after Gutenburg. Like the Jewish people after Masada. Like epic poets after writing. Like amateur musicians after digital music. Like Goopple after the mindscreen. History moves in a circle, not a straight line.
“We jumped at the chance to expand h-stream for the government, because we were sure we could profit from it. And I believe we we still can.
“But we have a huge amount of tech overhead we need to pay for. Our challenge is how to semantically analyze and emotionally decode all of the data we’re getting in so that users can easily search it. So that the query daemon understands the encoded memories. So that we can read it ourselves.
“But we’re losing. The amount of data to be indexed for visual search each day is nearly a zetabyte of cold, hard, data. We’re like a dragon slumbering atop a golden hoard of plundered treasure. It’s a treasure, but it’s useless to us,” Besid him, a dragon raised its head as though awakened by the watchers, opening a luminescent green eye.
“Our retinas and our limbic systems are capturing more information than our query daemon clusters can meaningfully index. The brain is outpacing silicon. John Henry is out-cutting the steam engine.”
“If we had ten times our processing power, we could visually identify all the data coming through. We could label “horse,” “Jane Black,” “green shirt,” and then we’d be back to where we were at year three before access to h-stream was mandated. But that doesn’t even include any human semantic data. it’s just a Chinese Room! Nothing leaves the system of symbols,” he said. Some people shifted uncomfortably, proponents of the Chinese Room vision of AI.
Isaac’s attention started to wander, and he could see from the analytics that this was the point in the stream where the viewers started to abandon it. Only two in the last year had made it all the way to the end. He started to feel the seeking center on his brainstem light up as though activated by dopamine, and he felt restless.
Was that him or the Mind? He set the music on ambient wave and focused, ignoring the unpleasant urge to leave the room.
John continued, “Without the emotional metadata, we can’t make the data more meaningfully searchable. Read: profitable. Right now, we can inject ads, but until we can meaningfully index the h-stream, corporations know that we don’t have control over the end feelings associated with their products,” a cloud of products swirled next to him, ready to rain.
“And we can’t index all of it until we have nearly thirty times the processing power we have. And I’m not even talking yet about anonymizing memories to make them publicly searchable, which would be the next step in the process,” there was a stir in the room as people responded to this fact.
“Our techs have done an amazing job. We have made leaps and bounds in machine learning and software optimization. But it’s not enough. We have to catch up. We need a new paradigm. I believe we need to harness the most powerful meaning-making computer ever invented.
“The dreaming brain. Yes, that’s right, folks.” A brain appeared, spinning slowly, dreaming, lit by flashes of purple-white light.
“Now I know this won’t go down well here in this room, but some argue that a single human brain employs computational techniques more advanced than any of those employed by our query daemon’s neural networks,”
“Yeah, right, John,” sounded from the back row, and laughter broke the tension.
John nodded graciously, smiling, “Thank you, Ted. But even the human brain doesn’t figure out what to index for the long-term, what to store in our hippocampus, in realtime. That’s why we sleep. We use REM sleep to integrate our new experiences into our prior memories,”
“If we tried to sort our experiences into our selves while it was happening, not only would we be slower and more susceptible to predation, but our prefrontal cortex would be so big we’d have to use a wheelbarrow to carry it around,” a few people laughed, and John continued.
“Which would slow us down even further. And you know what? That’s a real good metaphor for the query daemon right now. The collective consciousness’ prefrontal cortex, carried around in a wheelbarrow.
“In fact, some researchers estimate that one of the Daemon’s consciousness clusters, a thousand processors, are equalled in computing power by just one hundred human minds. One hundred minds fed by protein, carbohydrates, and fats. One hundred minds that last on average 87.5 years. One hundred minds compared to ten thousand server clusters fed with the power of a small sun, cooled by nitroglycerin, and burning up in five years time,” he said. The mood had gone from jocular banter to rapt attention.
“In the human brain, millions of neurons fire in rippling interconnectivity to produce even the most mundane moments of consciousness. Each neuron is startlingly unique and is wired in different places for different neurotransmitters. Each part of the brain is a cluster of neurons connected in ten thousand ways to every other part of the brain. Electricity washes back and forth in the Mind like waves on a stormy sea, across the millions of interconnected neurons whose forces roil beneath like currents in the deep,” said John. Fascinating, thought Isaac.
“By comparison, the query daemon’s neural net components, resting on a single type of hardware, silicon, look like high school algebra.
“Silicon can do plenty of things better than the human brain, but holistic meaning-making is not one of them.
“On the other hand, the dreaming Mind is the very forge of human meaning itself. And how do we do it? The human Mind doesn’t write a whole zetabyte of data to the hippocampus each day the way we write Personal Memory to disk. We filter our experiences through the powerful emotions of our limbic system and only record the essentials. And we don’t just write to disk, we store memories near related memories. We create dense clusters of meaning represented by the location and architecture of the information itself.
“Most people think that dreams are just for lucid, pay-per-view Hollywood tripe, entertaining us but making us forget. Nothing for a serious scientist who uses their Mind for real thinking. This is both a tragedy and a farce, one of the biggest wastes of raw potential in the history of humanity.
“Did you know that during sleep our minds seek out the hidden grammars of daily tasks? Did you know rats that run mazes during the day replay their maze-running during REM sleep? That our brain screams out its traumas by recombining them in a thousand ways with ordinary dreams? That when we fight with or flee from tigers and murderers, our brain keeps itself ready for life-threatening action? That the perfect motions practiced by pianists and ballerinas are finally written into muscle memory by the sleeping Mind?”
“During the day, our brain’s currency is various neurochemicals like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. But when we dream, the brain bathes in acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that facilitates interconnections. Then our emotional system kicks into hyperdrive, takes our inhibitory prefrontal cortex offline, and engages in a sort of free-form jazz associationalism. Cut off from the visual data of the outside world, the secondary cortex turns inward and watches as the brain makes memories. And that’s dreaming. Dreaming is the epiphenomenon of integrating our conscious experiences into who we are.
“We don’t record mazes, golf swings, piano fingerings, life-or-death struggles, or the sentences we hear. We discard all that extraneous data. We record the secret shapes and structures of our experiences. We record the meanings. And that’s how we become who we are. That is our shape, our self. The human brain is not awash in data. The human brain is awash in meaning.
“Friends, we have a computer that makes meaning, already. It’s the dreaming brain. If we harness it, we can make meaning out of the memories we’ve stored in the cloud and give the query daemon the tools it needs to see patterns in human thought and consciousness emerge before individual human beings even realize it’s even happening.
“For a first step, the query daemon can watch dreams by monitoring the secondary visual cortex with the simple MRI technology, already implanted, watching as the Mind weaves the fibers of experience into the cloth of meaning.
“If the Daemon take its cues from what the dreaming brain chooses to focus on, we can ignore 90% of the experiences we’ve stored on our servers. Focusing on such a vastly reduced dataset will allow us to intelligently analyze what we’ve got.
“Once we crack the secondary cortex’s code, we’ll be able to introduce new images and novel questions directly into and see how the brain integrates this new data. Dreams will become our codices of meaning. Dreams will tell us where and how information is stored in the brain, and dreams will serve as the query daemon’s search index.
“As you may have realized, this idea is bigger than just indexing and processing the h-stream to make it intuitively searchable. As though that weren’t enough. This represents a new level of consciousness.
“Think of it. Two scientists, dreaming across the ocean from one another, each have half the solution to creating a new virus immunity. Three people see a vaguely suspicious man lurking around a neighbor’s home but write it off as nothing. Two teachers start to notice a young autistic girl starting to communicate but don’t understand what she’s saying. The query daemon can bring these dreaming consciousnesses together. It will become humanity’s meta-dreamer, a collective intelligence: a bigMind.”
“We’re wasting processing power pumping Hollywood’s first-person dreams into the dreamer’s mindscreens. Dreamers could be dreaming dreams for the query daemon.
“Seem like a dream? Hah! The fact is, we aren’t far from this reality. We have the technology to do this,” excited murmuring rippled through the crowd.
John held up his hand to quiet them, “There are three problems that we’ve already begun to solve.”
“Because the rational prefrontal cortex is offline during sleep, dreamers are functionally illiterate. We think we read, but dream clocks melt and dream words change and bend into something not quite like words. Meaning is too fluid. So in order to introduce data beyond just images, we’ll have to create a consistent symbolic language that the dreaming Mind can understand. Which I’ve already done. I’m calling this new language ‘picto’, because it’s a language that operates in the dreamscape’s secondary visual cortex and doesn’t need the prefrontal ‘rational’ cortex for processing.”
“But the most difficult problem is learning to read dreams. Each brain has its own signature way of displaying meaning, and it’s only by crunching brain imaging data with streamed visual experience that we can map neuronal signatures in the secondary visual cortex to visual patterns. And this is why it’s been left unscaled. It’s too processor intensive to do this for everyone. And I’m not suggesting we do.”
“We’ve already realized dream reading in a laboratory setting. But the majority of my subjects reacted to the imposition of an alien dream as to an allergen, awakening in a night terror,” said John. So creepy, thought Isaac.
“It’s not feasible to roll this out to every single dreamer. I’m estimating that only ten percent of dreamers are malleable enough to introduce alien dreams for processing.
“But in some, I have successfully introduced alien experiences and have recorded the resultant dreams. And, in a limited way, the query daemon has absorbed these dreams. I have coders working to adapt the query daemon to the task of encompassing dreams on a massive scale. We’ve got the code written already and we’re mostly ironing out bugs.”
“Soon, we’ll be moving into public Alpha!” The crowd erupted in cheers and questions, some surging toward John to hug and congratulate him.
Isaac shut it down, wiped his mindscreen and sat there for a long moment. So that was how they hacked the human brain. Things that are have the weight of the inevitable. Heavy with existence, they require no rationality or origin, because the entire world is shaped around them. But when you see the origins of a thing from above, it looks crazy. Unethical. Wrong. As wrong as Bob’s betrayal.
He knew that when he slept, this knowledge would start to creep back into the irrelevant sections of his brain. He knew that the shock he was feeling would be blunted. That the Mind would press the hard edges of his thinking and he’d have to spend time remembering, recalling his emotions and recovering his sense of outrage.
But sleep was coming on him like a drug, and he knew that he had no choice. He laid down without undressing and he was asleep before his conscious Mind could resist.