Peter Watts - Firefall

Zombie brains—freed from the metabolic costs of self-awareness—exhibit reduced glucose metabolism in those areas, as well as in the prefrontal cortex, superior parietal gyrus, and the left angular gyrus; this accounts the fractionally-reduced temperature of the zombie brain. Interestingly, the same metabolic depression can be found in the brains of clinically insane murderers. [28] Adrian Raine, Monte Buchsbaum, and Lori Lacasse, “Brain Abnormalities in Murderers Indicated by Positron Emission Tomography,” Biological Psychiatry 42, no. 6 (September 15, 1997): 495–508, doi:10.1016/S0006-3223(96)00362-9.

I’d like to start this section by emphasising how utterly cool Portia ’s eight-legged namesake is in real life. That stuff about improvisational hunting strategies, mammalian-level problem-solving, and visual acuity all contained within a time-sharing bundle of neurons smaller than a pinhead—God’s own truth, all of it. [29] Duane P. Harland and Robert R. Jackson, “Eight-legged Cats and How They See—A Review of Recent Research on Jumping Spiders (Araneae: Salticidae),” Cimbebasia 16 (2000): 231–240. , [30] D. P. Harland and R. R. Jackson, “A Knife in the Back: Use of Prey-Specific Attack Tactics by Araneophagic Jumping Spiders (Araneae: Salticidae),” Journal of Zoology 269, no. 3 (2006): 285–290, doi:10.1111/j.1469-7998.2006.00112.x. , [31] M. Tarsitano, “Araneophagic Jumping Spiders Discriminate Between Detour Routes That Do and Do Not Lead to Prey,” Animal Behaviour 53, no. 2 (n.d.): 257–266. , [32] John McCrone, “Smarter Than the Average Bug,” New Scientist 191, no. 2553 (2006): 37+.

That said, the time-sharing cognitive slime mold at Icarus is even cooler. Given the limitations of Human telematter technology at the end of the twenty-first century—and given that any invasive agent hitching a ride on someone else’s beam would be well-advised to keep its structural complexity to a minimum—the capacity for some kind of self-assembly is going to be highly desirable once you reach your destination. Miras et al describe a process that might fit the rudiments of such a bill, at least. [33] H. N. Miras et al., “Unveiling the Transient Template in the Self-Assembly of a Molecular Oxide Nanowheel,” Science 327, no. 5961 (December 31, 2009): 72–74, doi:10.1126/science.1181735. , [34] Katharine Sanderson, “Life in 5000 Hours: Recreating Evolution in the Lab,” New Scientist 209, no. 2797 (January 29, 2011): 32–35, doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(11)60217-0. Once it starts assembling itself, I imagine that Portia might function something like Cooper’s “iCHELLs”: [35] Geoffrey J. T. Cooper, “Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells: iCHELLs,” Angewandte Chemie International Edition 50, no. 44 (2011): 10373–10376. inorganic metal cells, capable of reactions you could call “metabolic” without squinting too hard. Maybe with a sprinkling of magical fairy-dust plasma [36] V. N. Tsytovich, “From Plasma Crystals and Helical Structures Towards Inorganic Living Matter,” New Journal of Physics 9, no. 8 (August 1, 2007): 263. (although I’m guessing those two processes might be incompatible).

An enormous amount of recent research has been published about the natural history of the religious impulse and the adaptive value of theistic superstition. [37] Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality,” Science 322, no. 5898 (October 3, 2008): 58–62, doi:10.1126/science.1158757. , [38] Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta, “Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior,” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 12, no. 6 (2003): 264–274, doi:10.1002/evan.10120. , [39] Jesse M. Bering, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29, no. 5 (2006): 453–462, doi:10.1017/S0140525X06009101. , [40] Azim F. Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, “God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game,” Psychological Science 18, no. 9 (September 1, 2007): 803–809, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01983.x. , [41] Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, and Gilbert Roberts, “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting,” Biology Letters 2, no. 3 (September 22, 2006): 412–414, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2006.0509. , [42] Azim F. Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, “Mean Gods Make Good People: Different Views of God Predict Cheating Behavior,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 21, no. 2 (2011): 85–96, doi:10.1080/10508619.2011.556990. , [43] Jeffrey P. Schloss and Michael J. Murray, “Evolutionary Accounts of Belief in Supernatural Punishment: A Critical Review,” Religion, Brain & Behavior 1, no. 1 (2011): 46–99, doi:10.1080/2153599X.2011.558707. , [44] …to name but a few. It’s no great surprise that religion confers adaptive benefits, given the near-universality of that impulse among our species. [45] Eckart Voland and Wulf Schiefenhovel, eds., The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior , 2009, http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/evolutionary+%26+developmental+biology/book/978-3-642-00127-7 . , [46] Justin L. Barrett, “The God Issue: We Are All Born Believers,” New Scientist 213, no. 2856 (March 17, 2012): 38–41, doi:10.1016/S02624079(12)60704-0. , [47] Paul Bloom, “Is God an Accident?,” The Atlantic , December 2005, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/12/is-god-an-accident/304425/?single_page=true . , [48] Elizabeth Culotta, “On the Origin of Religion,” Science 326, no. 5954 (November 6, 2009): 784–787, doi:10.1126/science.326_784. If you’re interested and you’ve got ninety minutes to spare, I’d strongly recommend Robert Sapolsky’s brilliant lecture on the evolutionary and neurological roots of religious belief. [49] Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s Lecture About Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity , 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI&feature=youtube_gdata_player .

It’s not all food taboos and slashed foreskins, though. Far more relevant to the current discussion is the fact that religious minds exhibit certain characteristic neurological traits. [50] Sam Harris et al., “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief,” PLoS ONE 4, no. 10 (October 1, 2009): e7272, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007272. Believers, for example, are better than nonbelievers at finding patterns in visual data. [51] Lorenza S. Colzato, Wery P. M. van den Wildenberg, and Bernhard Hommel, “Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 11 (November 12, 2008): e3679, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003679. Buddhist meditation increases the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula (structures associated with attention, interoception, and sensory processing). [52] Sara W Lazar et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Increased Cortical Thickness,” Neuroreport 16, no. 17 (November 28, 2005): 1893–1897. There’s even circumstantial evidence that Christians are less ruled by their emotions than are nonbelievers [53] Laura Saslow, “My Brother’s Keeper?: Compassion Predicts Generosity More Among Less Religious Individuals,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 4, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 31–38. (although whether the rules they follow instead are any more rational is another question). Certain religious rituals are so effective at focusing the mind and relieving stress that some have suggested coopting them into a sort of “religion for atheists.” [54] Graham Lawton, “The God Issue: Religion for Atheists,” New Scientist 213, no. 2856 (March 17, 2012): 48–49, doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(12)60708-8.