“Free will is an illusion, one created by our minds to make us feel better about how little control we truly have over our actions.”
A wave passes through the audience, everybody sitting up a little straighter as the words hit home. Intellectual curiosity becomes spiked with a measure of fear as is always the case when something unpalatable issues from the mouth of an incontestable authority.
Alice is sitting near the front of the lecture theatre, within metres of where Professor Maria Gonçalves stands onstage. Her posture is surprisingly meek, like some comfortably obscure academic unused to addressing more than a handful of people at a time. This could not be further from the truth, though perhaps it is reflective of how Professor Gonçalves’s lectures are usually conducted to camera rather than before a live audience. This would also explain why her gestures are modest and intimate, her head seldom rising to meet the gazes of all but the first few rows.
She looks older and tinier in the flesh than Alice was expecting, but then she reminds herself that the woman is pushing ninety years old, and many of the lectures she has seen were recorded as many as three decades ago. Her hair seems whiter than on-screen, her skin darker. Her voice is unmistakable though: quiet but authoritative, her accent an unusual blend of regional remnants smoothed away by decades off-planet.
Among the exclusive privileges afforded by being on CdC, the opportunity to see and hear this living legend of neuroscience in the flesh is up there with floating in microgravity. It is not merely a luxury of being in space, but of Alice’s status amid the incoming FNG delegation, part of the Quadriga’s efforts to roll out the red carpet.
It is also, she suspects, so that certain individuals know where she is, having been carefully chaperoned since she got here. She is currently flanked by Andros Boutsikari, the head of the Seguridad, and Wolfgang Hoffman, the man Alice is here to replace as Principal of the FNG’s Security Oversight Executive.
“Back in the twentieth century, Dr. Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment the consequence of which took us decades to comprehend. It could be argued that we are still digesting it even now. He wired volunteers to an EEG, placed them in front of a clock and asked them to record the precise time when they decided to move a finger. The EEG allowed him to record, to several decimal points of accuracy, when the brain made its decision. What the resulting scans showed was that the brain decided to act three hundred milliseconds before the subject became aware of it. He demonstrated that while the subjects thought they were making a conscious decision to lift a finger, in truth their brains had already ruled on the issue a third of a second ago.
“I want you all to let that sink in for a moment, to truly contemplate the implications. Such as the possibility that I could turn all of you here into my robot slaves. Damn, did I say that out aloud?”
There is a ripple of laughter throughout the auditorium. It punctures the tension, though Gonçalves completely fumbles the line. Alice thinks it sounded scripted, conspicuously for being out of cadence with the rest of her delivery. Some staffer with a grounding in PR perhaps wrote it for her. Not only is Gonçalves unaccustomed to speaking in front of a large live audience, she is also unused to tailoring her content for mass consumption. Just about everybody on the planet knows her name and is aware of the impact of her work, but most people who have heard her speak before will have done so in a purely academic context, watching playback of talks filmed in her lab here on CdC.
Alice has not only seen several volumes of such videos, but has read Gonçalves at length. She strongly doubts that the rest of today’s audience fully appreciate what a privilege they are enjoying, though they will have gladly inferred that it is an honour, as that would be befitting their status. The room is full of senior FNG delegates and Quadriga execs, and though the latter might be only feigning interest in the scientific content of the lecture, Alice has little doubt they could tell her what Gonçalves’s work at the Neurosophy Foundation is worth to them per quarter.
The Quadriga is the consortium of four mega-corporations, formed to pursue the Arca project. Its internal relationships are infinitely complex and sensitive, as is the consortium’s relationship with the Federation of National Governments. Alice knows people who have literally written PhDs on both.
“Of course, I’m not really here to tell you that free will is an illusion,” she goes on. “No. In fact, the truth is more disturbing. It is consciousness itself that is an illusion. When our brains make a decision, our minds create a narrative after the fact, but that process of retrospectively fabricating a continuous narrative is going on at every moment, fooling us into believing we are experiencing the world objectively through our own singular perspective.
“If I may draw upon a comparison that should make sense to most of you here today, people complain about the Quadriga having a Byzantine command structure where it’s seldom apparent who is in charge of what.”
There is another ripple of laughter, this time polite rather than genuine, though to Alice this line sounded more like Gonçalves’s own thoughts.
“Believe me, it’s a paradigm of unified purpose compared to the brain. Multiple competing systems are permanently striving for attention, each of them with its own command centre urgently processing information to offer up in support of its case. It’s been described as a maelstrom, a raging chaos of simultaneous processes and events. As one such command centre temporarily attains primacy over all the rest, the brain retrospectively rationalises the outcome and constructs a narrative to give the impression that a solitary unified entity was at the helm the whole time. In short, consciousness is a lie your brain tells you to make you think you know what you’re doing.”
None of this is new to Alice. It’s kind of a dumbed-down stump speech tailored to the corporate audience. She finds it disappointing to witness some people’s surprise, evidently never having heard this stuff before. Nonetheless their response smacks of curious amusement rather than being intellectually engaged, as though the speaker is sharing mere colourful factoids for their entertainment.
What is truly incredible is that so many people here have willingly adopted Neurosophy’s technology without grasping the first principles of what lies behind it, but she guesses it’s the same as how so few automobile drivers throughout history could have told you about the workings of the internal combustion engine.
Gonçalves is already blowing a few minds but she is merely warming up. As anyone who knows the first thing about her would anticipate, she’s not here to talk about the brain in general, but about memory.
Alice wishes the professor could give her some pointers regarding what is wrong with her own right now. Maybe it’s to do with getting used to space, in combination with an extreme form of jet lag, but just like on the elevator, when she woke up a few hours ago in her room, it was as though her short-term memory needed a reboot. She could recall all the details about her trip, and even the meal she had upon arrival, but she had no recollection of getting undressed and going to bed. This bothers her as she likes to know how long she has slept, to ensure it is within recommended parameters.
“Memory is not a unified process of thought either,” Gonçalves explains, calling up a holographic model of the brain. “There is no single location where the brain stores your memories. Instead, it works a little like the random-access model of computer memory, with the information broken down and distributed to different areas. Where it differs from the computer model, of course, is that word ‘random.’ The brain’s sorting system is more specific. Visual information, for instance, is archived in the occipital lobe, while emotions go to the amygdala.”
Alice is three rows from the front, from where she can see the backs of around thirty heads. The scars are only visible on the close-cropped, but it’s a safe assumption most of them have had the mesh procedure. It is not compulsory for employment aboard CdC—that would be illegal—but if there are two candidates for a post and only one has had a mesh implanted, there’s no contest as to who would get the job. However, it has to be stressed that people don’t regard undergoing the procedure as a price for getting a job up here; rather, they see the opportunity to get it as one of the benefits. These days, just about everybody has a lens rig, but that’s merely a wearable accessory, a data and comms device for rendering second-hand information like its i-ancestors. You can pop out the contacts (though these days you seldom need to for comfort), disconnect from the wrist disc and tap out the sub-vocal. Whether the format be text, pictures, audio or video, it’s still a matter of passive consumption of the information on the part of the user, and what you retain is up to you.
The mesh, however, allows the uploading of information—effectively new memories—directly to the human brain. You don’t need to read or experience new information, you simply know it, and you can’t forget what you learned or choose to switch it off at the end of the day. It’s a whole other level of tech, and if you want that, you need to go to Neurosophy on CdC, because that’s the only place where the implant surgery is legally approved. Technically, those volunteering to undergo it are signing up to be part of a long-term medical trial. The trial itself was only given the go-ahead on the understanding that approval to offer the procedure on Earth would not even be applied for until a sufficient proportion of its first generation of subjects had died of old age without demonstrating side effects or exhibiting behaviour that might offer grounds for concern. And as each refinement or upgrade to the technology effectively resets the clock on that stipulation, the procedure looks like remaining an option exclusive to CdC for a long time yet.
“If you take a single experience, such as a day at the beach, vast quantities of information are processed and filed away in multiple locations.”
As she speaks, different areas of the holographic brain light up, the words Sight, Motion, Smell, Language and others orbiting the organ briefly before pinging off to their respective destinations.
“What makes this such a remarkably efficient storage system is that reliving just one element, the smell of sun lotion for example, can cause the brain to rapidly retrieve all those other constituents to form what feels to us like a unified and vivid memory.
“Where it gets complicated is that all memories are highly subjective and individualised. Two people can have roughly the same experience, but the differing ways their brains categorise that information has consequences for how it is reassembled. That day at the beach, one person merely saw ‘boats.’ The other person is a yacht chandler and thus sub-categorised the information in a way the first couldn’t: she saw skiffs, catamarans, ribs, rigid hull dinghies. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what prevents me from creating my robot army. For those of us in the business of artificially inserting information, it puts intractable limits on what we can achieve.”
Gonçalves smiles at the response. She still seems timid in the face of an auditorium full of people, but despite her shyness there is no mistaking the pleasure she takes in seeing that she is connecting.
It amuses Alice—and, she wonders, does it amuse the professor?—to see people touch the site of the procedure on the backs of their heads each time she mentions robots, or in any way alludes to the risks they don’t like to think about. It’s like involuntarily scratching when someone starts talking about fleas and head lice.
Developed in collaboration with her late colleague Dr. Sandy Shelley, Gonçalves’s revolutionary innovation involves the insertion of an optogenetic mesh between the brain and the meninges, carried out via surgical nanobots through a small incision near the base of the skull. The technology was first proven viable more than three decades ago, but came to a halt after a fire ripped through the Neurosophy Foundation’s original site on Wheel One. It was a sobering demonstration of the limitations of the supposedly foolproof safety systems that were designed to respond to the most feared danger of life in space. The automated response mechanisms contained the blaze and prevented it from spreading beyond the lab where it started, but not without trapping Dr. Shelley inside, with fatal results.
Though Professor Gonçalves was mercifully spared when the tragedy struck, it nonetheless came close to destroying her too. She was devastated by the loss of her closest friend, the person she described as “the real genius in our partnership,” and for a long time was unable to face the onerous task of rebuilding their work from the ashes, alone. Eventually, however, she drew upon the same strength that had seen her survive refugee camps in her childhood, and endeavoured to succeed in lasting tribute to Dr. Shelley’s memory.
“As you are all aware, many of you first-hand, we can now rapidly insert large quantities of new information into the human brain. However, it is this individualised natural storage system that makes it impossible for us to create false memories, or to implant someone else’s memories in your head without you being aware of it. For instance, we can upload highly detailed information about a town so that you know your way around when you get there, but we can’t give you the memory of having been there before.”
That was what concerned everybody when the reconstructed technology was first unveiled: the fear of remembering something that never happened. At a legal level, people were worried about concepts such as falsely providing an alibi for someone or being implicated by their own memory in events they had nothing to do with. More viscerally they were simply squeamish about the possibility of remembering something that never happened—or that happened to somebody else. This had proven to be an unfounded concern, due to the “watermark effect” that people experienced when a non-native memory was accessed by their mesh: a conflict between this new data and what the rest of their brain—and body—was telling them.
Alice understands the principles and does not harbour any irrational fears regarding the implications. Nonetheless, even now that the option is open to her, she has no intention of having the procedure. She wouldn’t let anyone mess with her brain, not even if the mesh was implanted by Professor Gonçalves herself.
In her case this is less a matter of squeamishness than snobbishness.
Since childhood Alice has enjoyed what have been described as prodigious powers of retention, though she would contend that discipline and endeavour have played a major part in this: the more she studies, the more she knows. Some might say her distaste for memory enhancement is like a naturally attractive person being scornful of someone undergoing cosmetic surgery. However, the phrase “easy come, easy go” seems apposite. Alice is a believer in hard work being its own reward, and that you place a greater value on what you know when it has taken genuine effort to learn it.
“Perhaps the best illustration is in the truth behind the mythologised notion—which I believe is widely held on Earth—that a mesh allows you to learn a new language overnight. This is no more true than the notion that you can similarly learn to play the piano overnight or instantly master a technical skill. In these cases, we encounter the issue of muscle memory. When we learn to play an instrument, through repetition and practice, the signals controlling our fingers no longer originate entirely in the hippocampus, but also in the motor cortex, the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.”
Everyone is familiar with the disconnect. Many who had tried it said it was actually more frustrating trying to learn the piano after an upload than it was naturally, because your mind knew what it wanted to do but your fingers wouldn’t cooperate. Thus the mesh works principally as an instant-access reference system for retrieving information, something that is highly desirable in an environment such as CdC, requiring such a volume and variety of technical knowledge.
“In the case of uploading a new language, you cannot speak it because your mouth and your tongue may not know where to begin. What we are uploading therefore is essentially a rapidly accessible translation dictionary, whereby you know what the words mean and can instantly deconstruct much of the syntax and grammar, but crucially what you infer and understand will be different from person to person. This is why, even if you upload the entire dictionary of your native language, the way your vocabulary developed individually means it won’t necessarily occur to you to use these new words in everyday conversation.
“So to reassure you one last time regarding why I cannot create my robot army, the crucial thing about how our technology interacts with the human brain is that the information we insert cannot alter who you are. Rather, it is who you are, your very individuality, that uniquely alters the information.”