Peter Watts - Echopraxia

At any rate, zombies are more relevant to the current tale. Both surgical and viral varieties appear in Echopraxia ; the surgically induced military model is essentially the “p-zombie” favored by philosophers [22] Anonymous, “Philosophical Zombie,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia , October 25, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philosophical_zombie&oldid=576098290 . ; it already got a workout back in Blindsight . Examples of the viral model would include victims of the Pakistan pandemic: “civilian hordes reduced to walking brain stems by a few kilobytes of weaponized code drawn to the telltale biochemistry of conscious thought.”

What telltale signatures might these bugs be targeting? Consciousness appears to be largely a property of distributed activity—the synchronous firing of far-flung provinces of the brain [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. —but it is also correlated with specific locations and structures. [25] Navindra Persaud et al., “Awareness-related Activity in Prefrontal and Parietal Cortices in Blindsight Reflects More Than Superior Visual Performance,” NeuroImage 58, no. 2 (September 15, 2011): 605–611, doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.06.081. In terms of specific cellular targets I’m thinking maybe “von Economo neurons” or VENs: disproportionately large, anomalously spindly, sparsely branched neurons which grow 50 to 200 percent larger than the human norm. [26] Franco Cauda et al., “Functional Anatomy of Cortical Areas Characterized by Von Economo Neurons,” Brain Structure and Function 218, no. 1 (January 29, 2012): 1–20, doi:10.1007/s00429-012-0382-9. , [27] Caroline Williams, “The Cells That Make You Conscious,” New Scientist 215, no. 2874 (July 21, 2012): 32–35, doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(12)61884-3. They aren’t numerous—they occupy only 1 percent of the anterior cingulate gyrus and the fronto-insular cortex—but they appear to be crucial to the conscious state.

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). 16 (2000): 231–240.,” 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. 05 (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 .