Peter Watts - Firefall

Such enhancements come at a cost. [71] Fabienne Samson et al., “Enhanced Visual Functioning in Autism: An ALE Meta-Analysis,” Human Brain Mapping 33, no. 7 (2012): 1553–1581, doi:10.1002/hbm.21307. , [72] Deborah Halber, “Gene Research May Help Explain Autistic Savants,” MIT’s News Office , 2008, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/savants-0212.html . Bicamerals have lost the ability to communicate effectively across the cognitive-species divide. It’s not just that they’ve rewired their speech centers [73] Fumiko Hoeft et al., “Functional and Morphometric Brain Dissociation Between Dyslexia and Reading Ability,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 10 (March 6, 2007): 4234–4239, doi:10.1073/pnas.0609399104. and are now using different parts of the brain to talk; they think now almost entirely in metaphor, in patterns that contain meaning even if they don’t, strictly speaking, exist.

Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one’s mind even at today’s rudimentary levels of connectivity. The “transactive memory system” called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database. [74] B. Sparrow, J. Liu, and D. M. Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” Science 333, no. 6043 (July 14, 2011): 776–778, doi:10.1126/science.1207745. And Google doesn’t come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.

Which is not to say that hive minds aren’t already a ubiquitous part of Human society. You are a hive mind, always have been: a single coherent consciousness spread across two cerebral hemispheres, each of which—when isolated—can run its own stand-alone, conscious entity with its own thoughts, aesthetics, even religious beliefs. [75] V. S. Ramachandran and Stuart Hameroff, “Beyond Belief: Science, Reason, Religion & Survival. Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Nov 5–7, 2006 (Session 4),” The Science Network , 2006, http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-science-religion-reason-and-survival/session-4-1 . The reverse also happens. A hemisphere forced to run solo when its partner is anaesthetised (preparatory to surgery, for instance) will manifest a different personality than the brain as a whole—but when those two hemispheres reconnect, that solo identity gets swallowed up by whatever dual-core persona runs on the whole organ. [16] Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Quill, 1999). Consciousness expands to fill the space available.

The Bicameral hive takes its lead from Krista and Tatiana Hogan, conjoined craniopagus twins whose brains are fused at the thalamus. [76] Jordan Squair, “Craniopagus: Overview and the Implications of Sharing a Brain,” University of British Columbia’s Undergraduate Journal of Psychology (UBCUJP) 1, no. 0 (May 1, 2012), http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/ubcujp/article/view/2521 . Among other things, the thalamus acts as a sensory relay; the twins share a common set of sensory inputs. Each sees through the other’s eyes. Tickle one, the other laughs. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they can share thoughts, and although they have distinct personalities each uses the word “I” when talking about the other twin.

All this resulting from fusion at a sensory relay. Suppose they were linked farther up? A thought doesn’t know to stop and turn back when it reaches the corpus callosum. Why would it behave any differently if it encountered a callosum of a different sort; why should two minds linked by a sufficiently fat pipe be any more distinct than the halves of your own brain?

Sufficiently high bandwidth, therefore, would likely result in a single integrated consciousness across any number of platforms. Technologically, the links themselves might exploit so-called “ephatic coupling” [77] Costas A. Anastassiou et al., “Ephaptic Coupling of Cortical Neurons,” Nature Neuroscience 14, no. 2 (February 2011): 217–223, doi:10.1038/nn.2727. (in which direct synaptic stimulation is bypassed and neurons are induced to fire by diffuse electrical fields generated elsewhere in the brain). Synchrony is vital: unified conscious only exists when all parts fire together with a signal latency of a few hundred milliseconds, tops. [23] Giulio Tononi and Gerald M. Edelman, “Consciousness and Complexity,” Science 282, no. 5395 (December 4, 1998): 1846–1851, doi:10.1126/science.282.5395.1846. , [24] Jaakko W. Långsjö et al., “Returning from Oblivion: Imaging the Neural Core of Consciousness,” The Journal of Neuroscience 32, no. 14 (April 4, 2012): 4935–4943, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4962-11.2012. Throttle that pipe and it should be possible to retain individuality while accessing memories and sensory data from your fellow nodes. [78] Kaj Sotala and Harri Valpola, “Coalescing Minds: Brain Uploading-Related Group Mind Scenarios,” International Journal of Machine Consciousness 04, no. 1 (June 2012): 293–312, doi:10.1142/S1793843012400173.

I’ve kept the extent of Bicameral hive integration flexible, allowing internode connections to throttle up and down as the need arises—but whether those bandwidth-versus-dialup decisions are made by the nodes themselves or by something more inclusive remains ambiguous. If you want some hint of the ramifications of total cognitive integration, I point you to the (apparently) catatonic Moksha Mind of the Eastern Dharmic Alliance. [79] The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, “An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century (An Internal Report to the Holy See),” (Internal Report, 2093).

However the hive links up—whatever its degree of conscious coherence—it is a religious experience. Literally.

We know what rapture is: a glorious malfunction, a glitch in the part of the brain that keeps track of where the body ends and everything else begins. [80] A. B. Newberg and E. G. d’ Aquili, “The Neuropsychology of Religious and Spiritual Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, no. 11–12 (November 1, 2000): 251–266. When that boundary dissolves the mind feels connected to everything, feels literally at one with the universe. It’s an illusion, of course. Transcendence is experience, not insight. That’s not why Bicamerals feel the rapture.

They feel it because it’s an unavoidable side effect of belonging to a hive. Sharing sensory systems, linking minds one to another—such connections really do dissolve the boundaries between bodies. Bicameral spiritual rapture isn’t so much an illusion as a bandwidth meter. It still feels good, of course, which has its own implications. Bicams rap out when they hook up to solve problems. They actually get off on discovery; if baselines got those kind of rewards they wouldn’t need tenure.

The side effect has side effects, though. The activation of rapture-related neurocircuitry generates glossolalia even in baseline brains; [81] Andrew B. Newberg et al., “The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow During Glossolalia: A Preliminary SPECT Study,” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 148, no. 1 (November 22, 2006): 67–71, doi:10.1016/j.pscychresns.2006.07.001. , [82] M. A. Persinger, “Striking EEG Profiles from Single Episodes of Glossolalia and Transcendental Meditation,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 58, no. 1 (February 1984): 127–133. given the modifications that Bicamerals use to enhance transcendence, [83] Cosimo Urgesi et al., “The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence,” Neuron 65, no. 3 (February 11, 2010): 309–319, doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.01.026. , [84] Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al., “Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity,” PLoS ONE 4, no. 9 (September 28, 2009): e7180, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007180. the occasional bout of speaking in tongues is pretty much a given. Brüks should be thankful the hive doesn’t just scream all the time.