ear Meredith,
I write to you spurred by a 75,000-word neuroscience dystopia I’ve written that falls within the genre conventions of science fiction.
In a near future, writing has been replaced by a dream-language that has destroyed books as effectively as by burning. Some have fused their minds to an artificial intelligence that harnesses humanity’s sleeping brain for meaning-making, while others perform manual labor under remote neural control.
Isaac is a teenager, groomed for a system he increasingly sees as oppressive. Will he join the Mindnet? Or will he forsake his privilege for love, learn to read, and spend the rest of his life remote controlled by those in power: choosing either poverty or the struggle against the Mind-eating pull toward the dreamscape? But if his limbic connection is removed, can his conditioned brain even learn to regulate itself? Or will he end up a lúcido: the shell of a person who lives to consume dreams?
Now you may be wondering, is this a word of hard science fiction? I have done my research: I have a B.A. in Cognitive Science, and as an autodidactic computer programmer, I’ve been able to keep up with the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. To answer the question: my work is rooted in the psyche—the human—and the story it tells is cribbed from my autobiography. If I have succeeded, I have neither subordinated the poetry to its machine-parts nor machine-parts to the poetry.
There is a long controversy that scientists in the field of neuroscience are resolving: are affects a suitable scientific subject? For most of us in the world, this is a question from the lunatic fringe. Regular humans do not share neuroscience’s disinterest in the affects—this was a scientifically necessary conceit designed to root the field in biology without being swayed advanced psychoanalytic theory. The question for us humans has always been how our affects correspond to neural activation regions. But psychoanalytic theory and neuroscience are merely sniffing one another’s tails and have yet to enthusiastically procreate. So yes, my novel is bi-directional: from the psyche and the introspection of consciousness downwards, and from the traceries of neurons and their electrical firings upwards. (has yet to inspire a child).
The problem is that if one were to truly implant a chip in the brain of a human with electrodes spidering into the deepest brain-parts, we’d have no free will. “Free will,” or executive function, is (posited to be) located in the frontal lobe, and cannot reliably stimulate other neural regions like an electrode can. So the struggle against one’s neural implant breaks from the paradigm of hard science—in order to create a feasible character and plot.