David Brin - Earth

From the Net she drew references stretching back to Minsky and Ornstein, Pastor and Jaynes — and even poor old Jung — examining how each thinker had dealt with this peculiar notion… that one could somehow be many , or many combine to make one.

Her young student Nelson Grayson had really hit on it with his fixation on “cooperation versus competition.” The dichotomy underlay every human moral system, every ideology and economic theory, from socialism to free-market libertarianism. Each tried to resolve it in different ways. And every attempt only dredged up more inconsistencies.

But what if it’s a false dichotomy, after all? What if we’ve been seduced by those deducers, Plato and Kant and Hegel? By the if-and-therefore of linear logic? Perhaps life itself sees less contradiction than we do.

The motto on the old American coin haunted her. “From many, one.”

Our subselves usually aren’t distinct, except in multiple personality disorder. Rather, a normal person’s drives and impulses merge and cleave, marry and sunder, forming temporary alliances to make us feel and act in certain ways.

So far so good. The evidence for some form of multimind model was overwhelming. But then came the rub.

If I consist of many, why do I persist in perceiving a central me at all! What is this consciousness that even now, as I think these thoughts, contemplates its own existence ?

Jen remembered back when Thomas had tried to interest her in reading novels. He had promised that the best ones would prove enlightening. That their characters would “seem to come alive.” But the protagonists were never realistic to Jen. Even when portrayed as confused or introspective, their thought processes seemed too straightforward. Too decisive. Only Joyce ever came close to depicting the real hurricane of internal conflict and negotiation, those vast, turbid seascapes surrounding an island of semi-calm that named itself “me.”

Is that why I must imagine a unitary self? To give the storm a center? An “eye” to revolve around? An illusion of serenity, so the storm might be ignored most of the time?

Or is it a way to rationalize a semblance of consistency? To present a coherent face to the outside world?

Of one thing Jen felt certain. The universe inside a human mind was only vaguely like the physical one outside, with its discrete entities, its species, cells, organs, and individuals. And yet, the mind used those external entities as metaphors in the very models it used to define itself!

Today, Nelson had gotten worked up about one such model. Government , he said, consists of a nation’s effort to settle the differences amongst its component parts — its citizens. In olden times, the resolution was a simple matter of the imposition of fiat by a king or ruling class.

Later still, majority rule improved matters a little. But today even small minorities could make bombs and death bugs, if they got angry enough! (The blueprints were all there in the net, and who dared claim the role of censor?)

So compromise and consensus were absolutely essential, and governments could only tread carefully, never imposing solutions. Serving instead as forums for careful rapprochement.

In other words, the ideal government should be like a sane person’s conscious mind ! It was a fascinating comparison. Almost as interesting as the next one Nelson spun out.

The World Data Net , he said, was the ultimate analog. Like a person, it too consisted of a myriad of tiny subselves (the eight billion subscribers), all bickering and negotiating and cooperating semi-randomly. Subscriber cliques and alliances merged and separated… sometimes by nationality or religion, but more often nowadays by special interest groups that leaped all the old borderlines… all waging minuscule campaigns to sway the world’s agenda and to affect their lives in the physical world.

Astonishing , Jen thought. The boy had made a major metaphorical leap.

Of course, the government analogy was a little overextended. But the notion that consciousness is out way of getting all our secret selves out into the daylight, so they’ll either cooperate or compete fairly — that’s the important part. It explains why a neurosis loses most of its power once it’s known… as soon as all the mind gets to see those dark secrets one isolated part had kept hiden from the rest.

Walking past the busy technicians, Jen sat down at her display and resumed working on her model, modifying it along lines inspired by Nelson’s insight. The subvocal was the only input device fast enough to follow her driving pace. Her teeth clicked and her larynx bobbed as she almost spoke words aloud. The machine skimmed those phrases faster than she could have pronounced them, and it extrapolated, drawing from its capacious memory bits of this and that to fit into a growing whole.

Those bits were mostly object blocks taken from the very best intelligence-modeling programs around. That cost money, of course, and over in one corner Jen saw her personal account dip alarmingly. But each of the programs had something to recommend it. Each had been slaved over by teams of talented researchers with private theories they wanted to prove — each ostensibly contradictory, incompatible with the others.

At that moment, however, it had ceased mattering to Jen whose doctrine was closer to correct. Suddenly, it made perfect sense to merge them, combine them — to try to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

By the Mother… what if they’re all right? What if self-similarity and recursion can’t typify a living system without yet a third attribute — inclusion ?

There was certainly a precedent for such a melange… the human brain, the physical organ itself, was built in layers. Its newest evolutionary innovations hadn’t replaced earlier sections. Rather, each in turn was laid over older parts, joining and modifying them, not canceling or superseding.

Most recent were the prefrontal lobes, tiny nubs above the eyes which some called the seat of human personality… the latest floor of rooms added to a skyscraper of mind. Underneath lay the mammalian cortex, snared with man’s closest cousins. Lower then, but still useful and functional, the brain portions appropriate to reptiles still performed useful chores, while under those pulsed a basic reflex system remarkably like that found in primitive chordates.

So it would be with her model. Gradually pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The Berkeley Cognition Scheme, for instance, mated astonishingly well with the “emotional momentum” models of the Beijing University behaviorists. At least it did if you twisted each of them a bit first, in just the right way.

Of course, whenever she ventured into the net to seek these and other programs, she had to experience firsthand what was going on out there. It was utter chaos! Her early ferrets got completely lost in the maelstrom. She had to write better ones just to reach the big psychology library clearinghouse, in Chicago. And even then it took several tries before the emissaries came back with what she needed. The latest retrieval had taken seven whole seconds, causing her to smack the console in irritation.

By now Jen realized — with perhaps a pang of jealousy — that her own grandson had achieved unrivaled heights in the art of stirring people up, far exceeding her own modest accomplishments. The Net spumed with ferment over events Alex Lustig had set off. Somewhere, sometime soon, len figured the whole Rube Goldberg contraption had to blow a fuse.

Watch it, old girl. Your own metaphors give away your age.