Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Ironically, my next novel is most likely going to be a near-future technothriller about a marine biologist.

I am naked as I type this.

I was naked writing the whole damn book.

I aspire to a certain degree of discomfort in my writing, on the principle that if you never risk a face-plant you never go anywhere new. And if there’s one surefire way to get me out of my comfort zone, it’s the challenge of taking invisible omnipotent sky fairies seriously enough to incorporate into a hard SF novel. The phrase “faith-based hard SF” may, in fact, be the ultimate oxymoron—Clarke’s Third notwithstanding—which means that Echopraxia could be my biggest face-plant since βehemoth (especially in the wake of Blindsight, which continues to surprise with all the love it’s garnered over the years). And thanks to a lack of empirical evidence (as of this writing, anyway) for the existence of deities, I can’t even fall back on my usual strategy of shielding my central claims behind papers from Nature .

I can try to shield everything else there, though. Perhaps that will do.

I’m not dwelling too much on consciousness this time around—I pretty much shot my load on that subject with Blindsight —except to note in passing that the then-radical notion of consciousness-as-nonadaptive-side-effect has started appearing in the literature, [1] D. M. Rosenthal, “Consciousness and Its Function,” Neuropsychologia 46, no. 3 (2008): 829–840. and that more and more “conscious” activities (including math! [2] Asael Y. Sklar et al., “Reading and Doing Arithmetic Nonconsciously,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (November 12, 2012): 201211645, doi:10.1073/pnas.1211645109. ) are turning out to be nonconscious after all [3] Ap Dijksterhuis et al., “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect,” Science 311, no. 5763 (February 17, 2006): 1005–1007, doi:10.1126/science.1121629. , [4] Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya, “Attention and Consciousness: Two Distinct Brain Processes,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 1 (January 2007): 16–22, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.10.012. , [5] Ken A. Paller and Joel L. Voss, “An Electrophysiological Signature of Unconscious Recognition Memory,” Nature Neuroscience 12, no. 3 (March 2009): 349+. (though holdouts remain [6] C. Nathan DeWall, Roy F. Baumeister, and E. J. Masicampo, “Evidence That Logical Reasoning Depends on Conscious Processing,” Consciousness and Cognition 17, no. 3 (September 2008): 628–645, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2007.12.004. ).

One fascinating exception informs Keith Honeyborne’s report on “Prismatics,” who nearly drown themselves to achieve a heightened state of awareness. The premise of Ezequiel Morsella’s PRISM model [7] Ezequiel Morsella et al., “The Essence of Conscious Conflict: Subjective Effects of Sustaining Incompatible Intentions,” Emotion (Washington, D.C.) 9, no. 5 (October 2009): 717–728, doi:10.1037/a0017121. , [8] E. Morsella, “The Function of Phenomenal States: Supramodular Interaction Theory,” Psychological Review 112, no. 4 (2005): 1000–1021. is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict—the impulse to withdraw one’s hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you’ll die if you act on that impulse—was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atriedes qualified as “Human” during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert’s Dune. )

Everything else comes down to tricks and glitches. The subliminal “gang signs” Valerie programmed onto the Crown ’s bulkheads seem a logical (if elaborate) extension of the newborn field of optogenetics. [9] Matthew W. Self and Pieter R. Roelfsema, “Optogenetics: Eye Movements at Light Speed,” Current Biology 22, no. 18 (September 25, 2012): R804–R806, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.07.039. The “sensed presence” Dan Brüks and Lianna Lutterodt experienced in the attic results from a hack on the temporoparietal junction which screws up the brain’s body map [10] Shahar Arzy et al., “Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person,” Nature 443, no. 7109 (September 21, 2006): 287–287, doi:10.1038/443287a. , [11] Michael A. Persinger and Sandra G. Tiller, “Case Report: A Prototypical Spontaneous ‘sensed Presence’ of a Sentient Being and Concomitant Electroencephalographic Activity in the Clinical Laboratory,” Neurocase 14, no. 5 (2008): 425–430, doi:10.1080/13554790802406172. (basically, the part of your brain that keeps track of your body parts gets kicked in the side, and registers a duplicate set of body parts off to the side). Sengupta’s induced misiphonia is a condition in which relatively innocuous sounds—a slurp, a hiccup—are enough to provoke violent rage. [12] Joyce Cohen, “For People with Misophonia, a Chomp or a Slurp May Cause Rage,” June 9, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06annoy.html . All of this was inflicted in the service of education, though: as Brüks points out, fear promotes memory formation. [13] Rachel Jones, “Stress Brings Memories to the Fore,” PLoS Biol 8, no. 12 (December 21, 2010): e1001007, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001007. , [14] V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: a Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).

Fear and belief can also kill you, [15] Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills,” The Atlantic , September 14, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/09/the-dark-side-of-the-placebo-effect-when-intense-belief-kills/245065/ . a trick used to good effect in certain religious practices. [16] Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Quill, 1999). And in case you were wondering what was up with the fusiform gyrus there at the end (a couple of my beta readers did), it’s the structure containing the face-recognition circuitry [17] Mark Brown, “How the Brain Spots Faces—Wired Science,” Wired Science , January 10, 2012, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/brain-face-recognition/ . we tweaked to amp up the mutual-agonism response in vampires. It’s part of the same circuitry that evolved to let us see faces in the clouds, involved—once again—in the evolution of our religious impulse (see below).

The brain’s habit of literalising metaphors—the tendency to regard people as having “warmer” personalities when you happen to be holding a mug of coffee, the Bicamerals’ use of hand-washing to mitigate feelings of guilt and uncertainty—is also an established neurological fact. [18] Simon Lacey, Randall Stilla, and K. Sathian, “Metaphorically Feeling: Comprehending Textural Metaphors Activates Somatosensory Cortex,” Brain and Language 120, no. 3 (March 2012): 416–421, doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2011.12.016.

I pulled “induced thanoparorasis” out of my ass. It’s a cool idea, though, huh?

Back in Blindsight I laid out a fair bit of groundwork on the biology and evolution of vampires. I’m not going to revisit that here (you can check out FizerPharm’s stockholder presentation [19] FizerPharm, Inc. “Vampire Domestication: Taming Yesterday’s Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow” 2055. http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm . if you need a refresher), except for the citation in Blindsight implying that female vampires were impossible (the gene responsible for their obligate primatovory being located on the Y chromosome [20] Patricia Blanco-Arias, Carole A. Sargent, and Nabeel A. Affara, “A Comparative Analysis of the Pig, Mouse, and Human PCDHX Genes,” Mammalian Genome: Official Journal of the International Mammalian Genome Society 15, no. 4 (April 2004): 296–306, doi:10.1007/s00335-003-3034-9. ). More recent work by Cheberda et al have established a more general protocadherin dysfunction on both X and Y chromosomes, [21] Alexey Cheberda, Janna Randina, and J. Random, “Coincident Autapomorphies in the γ-PCDHX γ-PCDHY Gene Complexes, and Their Role in Vampire Hominovory,” Vampire Genetics and Epigenetics 24, no. 1 (2072): 435–460. resolving this inadvertent paradox.