Rifters 4 - Blindsight (46 page)

The idea of quantum-mechanical metabolic processes may sound even wonkier, but it's not. Wave-particle duality can exert significant impacts on biochemical reactions under physiological conditions at room temperature
⁸⁴
; heavy-atom carbon tunnelling has been reported to speed up the rate of such reactions by as much as 152
orders of magnitude
⁸⁵
.

And how's
this
for alien:
no genes
. The honeycomb example I used by way of analogy originally appeared in Darwin's little-known treatise
⁸⁶
(
damn
but I've always wanted to cite that guy); more recently, a small but growing group of biologists have begun spreading the word that nucleic acids (in particular) and genes (in general) have been seriously overrated as prerequisites to life
^87
,
88
. A great deal of biological complexity arises not because of genetic programming, but through the sheer physical and chemical interaction of its components
^{89
,
90
,
91
,
92}
. Of course, you still need something to set up the initial conditions for those processes to emerge; that's where the magnetic fields come in. No candy-ass string of nucleotides would survive in
Rorschach
's environment anyway.

The curious nitpicker might be saying "Yeah, but without genes how do these guys
evolve
? How to they adapt to novel environments? How, as a species, do they cope with the
unexpected
?" And if Robert Cunningham were here today, he might say, "I'd swear half the immune system is actively targetting the other half. It's not just the immune system, either. Parts of the nervous system seem to be trying to, well, hack each other. I think they evolve
intraorganismally
, as insane as that sounds. The whole organism's at war with itself on the tissue level, it's got some kind of cellular Red Queen thing happening. Like setting up a colony of interacting tumors, and counting on fierce competition to keep any one of them from getting out of hand. Seems to serve the same role as sex and mutation does for us." And if you rolled your eyes at all that doubletalk, he might just blow smoke in your face and refer to one immunologist's interpretation of exactly those concepts, as exemplified in (of all things)
The Matrix Revolutions
⁹³
. He might also point out that that the synaptic connections of your own brain are shaped by a similar kind of intraorganismal natural selection
⁹⁴
, one catalysed by bits of parasitic DNA call
retrotransposons.

Cunningham actually did say something like that in an earlier draft of this book, but the damn thing was getting so weighed down with theorising that I just cut it. After all,
Rorschach
is the proximate architect of these things, so it could handle all that stuff even if individual scramblers couldn't. And one of
Blindsight
's take-home messages is that life is a matter of
degree
—the distinction between living and non-living systems has always been an iffy one
^95
,
96
,
97
, never more so than in the bowels of that pain-in-the-ass artefact out in the Oort.

Sentience/Intelligence

This is the heart of the whole damn exercise. Let's get the biggies out of the way first. Metzinger's
Being No One
²⁰
is the toughest book I've ever read (and there are still significant chunks of it I haven't), but it also contains some of the most mindblowing ideas I've encountered in fact or fiction. Most authors are shameless bait-and-switchers when it comes to the nature of consciousness. Pinker calls his book
How the Mind Works
⁹⁸
, then admits on page one that "We don't understand how the mind works". Koch (the guy who coined the term "zombie agents") writes
The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
⁹⁹
, in which he sheepishly sidesteps the whole issue of why neural activity should result in any kind of subjective awareness whatsoever.

Towering above such pussies, Metzinger takes the bull by the balls. His "World-zero" hypothesis not only explains the subjective sense of self, but also why such an illusory first-person narrator would be an emergent property of certain cognitive systems in the first place. I have no idea whether he's right— the man's way beyond me— but at least he addressed the
real
question that keeps us staring at the ceiling at three a.m., long after the last roach is spent. Many of the syndromes and maladies dropped into
Blindsight
I first encountered in Metzinger's book. Any uncited claims or statements in this subsection probably hail from that source.

If they don't, then maybe they hail from Wegner's
The Illusion of Conscious Will
²¹
instead. Less ambitious, far more accessible, Wegner's book doesn't so much deal with the nature of
consciousness
as it does with the nature of
free will
, which Wegner thumbnails as "our mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did.". Wegner presents his own list of syndromes and maladies, all of which reinforce the mind-boggling sense of what fragile and subvertible machines we are. And of course, Oliver Saks
²²
was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even had a bandwagon to jump on.

It might be easier to list the people who
haven't
taken a stab at "explaining" consciousness. Theories run the gamut from diffuse electrical fields to quantum puppet-shows; consciousness has been "located" in the frontoinsular cortex and the hypothalamus and a hundred dynamic cores in between
^{100
,
101
,
102
,
103
,
104
,
105
,
106
,
107
,
108
,
109
,
110}
. (At least one theory
¹¹¹
suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen
aren't
nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic).

But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness
is
floats the more functional question of what it's good for.
Blindsight
plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconcious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but
prevent
the conscious self from interfering in daily operations
^{112
,
113
,
114}
. (If the rest of your brain
were
conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from
Dilbert
.)

Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective
¹⁰⁷
. Norretranders declared outright that "Consciousness is a fraud"
¹¹⁵
.

Art might be a bit of an exception. Aesthetics seem to require some level of self-awareness—in fact, the evolution of aethestics might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first place. When music is so beautiful if makes you shiver, that's the reward circuitry in your limbic system kicking in: the same circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or gorging on sucrose
¹¹⁶
. It's a hack, in other words; your brain has learned how to get the reward without actually earning it through increased fitness
⁹⁸
. It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us. Those rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat. They starved to death. I've no doubt they died happy, but they
died
. Without issue. Their fitness went to Zero.

Aesthetics. Sentience. Extinction.

And that brings us to the final question, lurking way down in the anoxic zone: the question of what consciousness
costs
. Compared to nonconscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive
¹¹²
. (The premise of a separate, faster entity lurking at the base of our brains to take over in emergencies is based on studies by, among others, Joe LeDoux of New York University
^117
,
118
). By way of comparison, consider the complex, lightning-fast calculations of savantes; those abilities are noncognitive
¹¹⁹
, and there is evidence that they owe their superfunctionality not to any overarching integration of mental processes but due to relative neurological
fragmentation
⁴
. Even if sentient and nonsentient processes were equally efficient, the conscious awareness of visceral stimuli—by its very nature— distracts the individual from other threats and opportunities in its environment. (I was quite proud of myself for that insight. You'll understand how peeved I was to discover that Wegner had already made a similar point back in 1994
¹²⁰
.) The cost of high intelligence has even been demonstrated by experiments in which smart fruit flies lose out to dumb ones when competing for food
¹²¹
, possibly because the metabolic demands of learning and memory leave less energy for foraging. No, I haven't forgotten that I've just spent a whole book arguing that intelligence and sentience are different things. But this is still a relevant experiment, because one thing both attributes do have in common is that they are metabolically
expensive
. (The difference is, in at least some cases intelligence is worth the price. What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?)