Mindscan

25

A gilded cage is still a cage.

I was fine now, with decades of life ahead of me. And I didn’t want to spend it here at High Eden.

And—I was fine, wasn’t I? I mean, Chandragupta’s technique had supposedly cured me. But…

But my head was still throbbing. It came and it went, thank God; I couldn’t take it if it was like this all the time, but…

But nothing was helping. Not for long, not for good.

And I didn’t trust the doctors here. I mean, look at what had happened to poor Karen! Code Blue my ass…

And yet—

And yet, I had to do something. I wasn’t a machine, a robot. I wasn’t like that other me, that doppelganger, free from aches and pains. My head hurt. When it was happening, it hurt so fucking much.

I left my suite, bouncing along in the lunar gravity, heading for the hospital.

Our next witness was Andrew Porter, who had come down from Toronto, joining the half-a-dozen Immortex suits already here. “Dr. Porter,” said Deshawn, “what is your educational background?”

The witness stand was a little small for someone of Porter’s height, but he scrunched his legs sideways. “I have a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Master’s degrees in both Electrical Engineering Science and Computer Studies from CalTech.”

“Have you had any academic appointments?”

Porter’s eyebrows were working, as always. “Several. Most recently I was a senior research fellow with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

“Now, I rather enjoyed Ms. Lopez’s coin trick earlier,” said Deshawn. “But I understand you have a real gold medallion, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, I do. Or, at least, I’m part of the team it belongs to.”

“Did you bring it with you? May we see it?”

“Certainly.”

Porter pulled a large case out of his jacket pocket, and opened it.

“Plaintiff’s three, your honor,” said Deshawn.

There was the usual back-and-forth, then the exhibit was admitted. Deshawn held the medallion up to a camera, showing first one side then the other; the images were projected on the wall screen behind Porter. One side showed a three-quarters view of a young man with delicate features, and was inscribed with the italic quotation, “Can Machines Think?” and the name Alan M. Turing. The other side showed a bearded man with glasses and the name Hugh G. Loebner. Both sides were labeled “Loebner Prize” in letters following the curving edge of the disk.

“How did you come by this?” asked Deshawn.

“It was awarded to us for being the first group ever to pass the Turing Test.”

“And how did you do that?”

“We precisely copied a human mind—that of one Seymour Wainwright, also formerly of MIT—into an artificial brain.”

“And do you continue to work in this area?”

“I do.”

“Who is your current employer?”

“I work for Immortex.”

“In what capacity?”

“I’m the senior scientist. My exact job title is Director, Reinstantiation Technologies.”

Deshawn nodded. “And how would you describe what it is you do in your job?”

“I oversee all aspects of the process of transferring personhood from a biological mind into a nanogel matrix.”

“Nanogel matrix being the material you fashion artificial brains out of?” said Deshawn.

“Correct.”

“So, you are one of the developers of the Mindscan process that Immortex uses to transfer consciousness, and you continue to oversee the transference work that Immortex does today, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” said Deshawn, “can you explain for us how it is that the human brain gives rise to consciousness?”

Porter shook his long head. “No.”

Judge Herrington frowned. “Dr. Porter, you are required to answer. I don’t want to hear any nonsense about trade secrets, or—”

Porter tried to swivel in his chair, but couldn’t really manage it. “Not at all, your honor. I can’t answer the question because I don’t know what the answer is. No one does, in my opinion.”

“Let me get this straight, Dr. Porter,” asked Deshawn. “You don’t know how consciousness works.”

“That’s right.”

“But nonetheless you can replicate it?” said Deshawn.

Porter nodded. “And that’s all I can do.”

“How do you mean?”

Porter did a good job of looking as though he was trying to decide where to begin, although, of course, we had rehearsed his testimony over and over again. “For over a century now, computer programmers have been trying to duplicate the human mind. Some thought it was a matter of getting the right algorithms, some thought it was a matter of mathematically simulating neural nets, some thought it had something to do with quantum computing. None succeeded. Oh, there are lots of computers around that can do very clever things, but no one has ever built one from scratch that is self-aware in the way you and I are, Mr. Draper. Not once, for instance, has a manufactured computer spontaneously said, ‘Please don’t turn me off.’ Never has a computer spontaneously mused upon the meaning of life. Never has a computer written a bestselling novel. We thought we’d be able to make machines do all those things, but, so far, we can’t.” He looked at the jury, then back at Deshawn. “But the transfers of biological minds that we have produced can do all those things, and more. They are capable of every mental feat that other humans can perform.”

“You say other humans?” asked Deshawn. “You consider the copies to be human?”

“Absolutely. As that medallion proves, they totally, completely, and infallibly pass the Turing Test: there is no question you can ask them that they don’t answer indistinguishably from how other humans answer. They are people.”

“And are they conscious?”

“Absolutely. As conscious as you or I. Indeed, although the voltages differ, the electrical signature of a copied brain and an original brain are the same on properly calibrated EEGs.”

“But—forgive me, doctor, I don’t mean to be dense—but if you don’t know what causes consciousness, how can you reproduce it? How do you know what to reproduce?”

Porter nodded. “Consider it like this: I don’t know anything about music. When I was in school, they thought I’d be a menace to every hearing person if they gave me a musical instrument to play, so I was assigned to the vocal class, along with all the other tone-deaf people. So, I know nothing at all about what makes Beethoven’s Fifth a great piece of music. But as an engineer, if you brought me a CD recording of it, and asked me to copy it onto a MemWafer, no problem—I could do that. I don’t look for the ‘musical’ stuff on the CD; I don’t look for the ‘genius’ on the CD. I just copy everything to the new medium. And that’s exactly what we do when we’re transferring consciousness.”

“But, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, isn’t it possible you’ve missed something key?”

“No. Most psychologists would say that even if all we did was transfer a map of the interconnections between neurons, and the various levels of neurotransmitters, we’d have captured everything meaningful in the brain. And we certainly do that.”

“It sounds like an enormous amount of data is involved,” said Deshawn.

“It’s not as much as you might think,” replied Porter. “We’ve found fractal resonances in a lot of it—that means that the same patterns are repeated over and over again at different levels of resolution. The data would compress very nicely if one were inclined to keep a record of it.” I sat up in my chair as he said this, but, since I was behind Karen, there was no way for me to catch her eye.

“And so by copying this information, you’ve copied consciousness as well?” asked Deshawn. “Simply by copying the neural networks and neurotransmitter levels?”

“Well, some argue that those things aren’t the true physiological correlates of consciousness—that is, that they aren’t in and of themselves the physical indications of conscious thought—and they point to paramecia as proof.”

“Paramecia?” repeated Deshawn.

“Yes. Um, your honor, if I may…?”

Herrington nodded, and Porter got up out of the witness stand, looking relieved to no longer be squashed. He pulled a small remote control from his jacket’s other pocket, and images started appearing on the wall screen.

“A paramecium,” said Porter, “is a kind of protozoan—a one-cell lifeform. Paramecia don’t have a nervous system, since nervous systems are made up of specialized nerve cells, and obviously a one-celled lifeform can’t have any specialized cells. And yet, without neurons or neurotransmitters, a paramecium can learn. Not much, I grant you—but it can learn. You can teach it that if it comes to a divided pathway, going left will always result in a mild shock and going right will always result in getting food.” The images on the wall illustrated this. “Somehow, the paramecium learns this despite having no nervous system at all. And that at least suggests the possibility that neural nets are not actually what’s responsible for our awareness.”

“Well, then,” said Deshawn, “how does awareness come about?”

Different visuals appeared on the screen.

“One argument,” said Porter, “is that the microtubules that make up the cytoskeleton of a cell are where the awareness, the infinitesimal consciousness, of a paramecium—or a human—resides. Microtubules are like hollowed-out cobs of Indian corn: they have an empty center, but are covered with kernels. And, just like in Indian corn, the kernels can form patterns. Some argue that those patterns move and replicate like cellular automata, and—”

“Cellular automata?” said Deshawn.

More visuals, like animated crossword-puzzle boards.

“Yes, indeed,” said Porter. “Consider the microtubule’s surface to be a grid of squares rolled into a tube. Imagine some of the squares are black, and some are white—that’s the Indian corn appearance I was referring to a moment ago. Imagine, too, that the squares respond to simple rules, such as this: if you’re a black square, and at least three of the eight other squares surrounding you are also black, then you should turn white.” The visual display illustrated this.

“See?” said Porter. “A very simple rule. But from out of such rules, complex patterns appear on the grid. For instance, you can get boomerang shapes made up of a consistent pattern of squares that actually move across the grid—every time the basic rule is applied, the whole cluster might move one space to the left. You also get shapes that devour other shapes, and big shapes that split into two smaller, but otherwise identical shapes.” We all watched as these things happened on the screen.

“Now, consider that,” said Porter. “The patterns are responding to stimulus in the form of the rule that is being applied. Well, response to stimulus is one of the standard criteria for life. The patterns are moving, and, again, movement is also one of the standard criteria of life. The patterns are devouring other patterns, and, again, eating is a third standard criterion of life. And the patterns are reproducing, and, of course, doing that is also one of the standard criteria of being alive. Indeed, cellular automata are one form of what’s long been called artificial life, although I’d argue that the word ‘artificial’ is unnecessary. They are life.”

“And so your Mindscan process copies the patterns of cellular automata?” said Deshawn.

“Indirectly, yes.”

“Indirectly? If there’s a chance that you’ve missed something—”

“No, no. We get the information copied with absolute fidelity, but it’s physically impossible to actually scan the configuration of cellular automata.”

“Why?”

“Well, as I said, we record the configuration of the neural networks—the positions and interconnections of every neuron in your brain—but we don’t record the pattern of cellular automata on the surface of the microtubules within those neurons. See, tubulins—the little kernels that make up the microtubule cob—can flip between two states, which I’ve been showing as black and white in the graphics, here, so that they make the complex animated patterns you’ve seen the surface of the microtubule. But the two states aren’t really black and white. Rather, they’re defined by where an electron happens to be—in the tubulin’s alpha subunit pocket, or in its beta subunit pocket.” He smiled at the jurors. “I know, I know—it sounds like gobbledygook. But the point is that this is a quantum-mechanical process, and that means we can’t even theoretically measure the states without disturbing them.”

Porter turned back to face Deshawn. “But as our quantum fog condenses into the nanogel of the brain, it is briefly quantally entangled with the biological original, and so the cellular-automata patterns precisely match. And, if micro-tubules are indeed the source of consciousness, then that’s when the consciousness is transferred to the duplicate. Of course, the entanglement quickly breaks down, but by the time it does the rules are being applied again in the new cellular automata, so that, to go back to our earlier metaphor, the squares are flipping back and forth from state to state.”

Porter looked now at Karen, sitting at the plaintiff’s table. “So whatever it is that makes up consciousness—neural nets, or even cellular automata on the surface of microtubules—it doesn’t matter; we make a total, complete, perfect transference of it. The new artificial brain is as self-aware, as real, as conscious as the old—and it is every bit the same person. That lovely woman sitting there is, without a doubt, Karen Bessarian.”

Deshawn nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Porter. No further questions.”

I’d been told we’d never be allowed any contact with people back on Earth, but for once Immortex was bending its vaunted rules. As I sat in a chair in Dr. Ng’s office, the chiseled, bearded face of Pandit Chandragupta looked up at me from her desktop monitor. He was now back in Baltimore—on Earth, lucky bastard—while I was still stuck up here on the moon.

“You should have said something sooner, Mr. Sullivan,” he said. “We can only treat that which is brought to our attention.”

“I’d just had brain surgery,” I replied, exasperated. “I thought headaches went with the territory.”

I waited while my words reached Earth and his made their way back to me. “No, these should not be occurring. I suspect they will indeed go away. The cause, I think, is a neuro-transmitter imbalance. We have radically altered the blood-flow pattern to your brain, and I suspect that reuptake is being interfered with. That can certainly cause headaches of the type you’ve described. Your brain will adjust; everything should go back to normal eventually. And, of course, Dr. Ng, I’m sure, will prescribe something for the pain, although that will treat only the symptom, not the underlying cause.” He shifted his gaze to look at the woman seated next to me. “Dr. Ng, what have you got there?”

“My thought would be to give him Toraplaxin, unless you can think of a reason why it’d be contraindicated in this case.”

A pause again, then: “No, no. That should be fine. Say 200 milligrams to start, twice a day, yes?”

“Yes, yes. I’ll get our dispensary to—

But Chandragupta, down on Earth, hadn’t intended to yield the floor, I guess, because he was still talking. “Now, Mr. Sullivan, there can be other problems associated with large fluctuations in neurotransmitter levels. Depression, for one. Have you felt any of that?”

Anger was more like it—but my anger, of course, was fully justified. “No.”

The time-lag pause, then a nod, and more words: “Another possibility is sudden mood swings. Have you experienced any signs of that?”

I shook my head. “No.”

The pause, then: “Any paranoia?”

“No, nothing, doctor.”

Chandragupta nodded. “Good, good. Let us know if anything like that develops.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

The trial had recessed for lunch—or at least for a noontime break; neither Karen, nor I, nor Malcolm ate anything, of course, although Deshawn downed two cheeseburgers and more Coke than I would have thought it possible to fit in a human stomach. And then it was Maria Lopez’s turn to take a whack at Porter.

Porter seemed implacable, although, as always, his eyebrows were in constant motion. He also had the advantage of being a good half-meter taller than Lopez; even seated, he seemed to loom over her.

“Mr. Porter,” she began—but Porter cut her off.

“Not to go into picayune distinctions,” he said, smiling at the judge, “but it’s Dr. Porter, actually.”

“Of course,” said Lopez. “My apologies. You said you are an employee of Immortex, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Are you also a stockholder?”

“Yes.”

“How much is your Immortex stock worth?”

“About eight billion dollars, I think.”

“That’s a lot of money,” said Lopez.

Porter shrugged amiably.

“Of course, it’s all on paper, isn’t it?” asked Lopez.

“Well, yes.”

“And if Immortex stock takes a hit, your wealth could evaporate.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” said Porter.

Lopez looked at the jury. “And, so, naturally, you want us to believe that the Immortex process actually does what you say it does.”

“I’m sure if you have experts that disagree with me, you will call them to the stand,” said Porter. “But, in fact, I do believe—as a person, as a scientist, and as an engineer—everything I testified.”

“And yet you testified that you don’t know what consciousness is.”

“Correct.”

“But you’re sure you’re copying it,” said Lopez.

“Also correct.”

“Faithfully?”

“Yes.”

“Accurately?”

“Yes.”

“In its entirety?”

“Yes.”

“Then, tell us, Dr. Porter, why don’t your robots sleep?”

Porter was visibly flustered; his eyebrows were even quiescent for a moment.

“They’re not robots.”

“Well,” said Lopez, “all people sleep. But I’ll withdraw the term. Why is it that reinstantiations of human minds in your artificial brains do not sleep?”

“It’s—it’s not necessary.”

“So we’ve been told by Ms. Bessarian—who doubtless read that in your sales literature. But what is the real reason they don’t sleep?”

Porter looked wary. “I—I’m not sure I understand.”

“Why is it that your uploads don’t experience sleep from time to time?”

“It’s as I said: they don’t need it.”

“Perhaps that’s true. But they don’t need to have sex, either—after all, they cannot reproduce via that method, or any other. And yet your uploads are prepared to have intercourse, aren’t they?”

“Well, people enjoy sex, and—”

“Some people enjoy sleeping, too,” said Lopez.

Porter shook his head. “No, they don’t. They enjoy being restored to their previous state of vigor, but sleep in and of itself is just unconsciousness.”

“Is it, Doctor? Is it really? What about dreaming? Is that an unconscious state?”

“Well…”

“Come now, Doctor. This can’t be a novel question in your field. Is dreaming an unconscious state?”

“No, it’s not generally classified as such.”

“Deep, dreamless sleep with steady delta waves and no rapid-eye movement is an unconscious condition, isn’t that right? But dreaming is not, correct?”

“Well, yes.”

“There’s a sense of self in dreaming; there’s an awareness.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“You’re the brain specialist, Dr. Porter, not I. Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“Dreaming is a form of conscious activity, correct?”

“Well, yes.”

“Because there is an identifiable sense of self, correct?”

“Yes.”

“But your robots—forgive me, your reinstantiations—don’t dream?”

“Not all forms of conscious activity are desirable, Ms. Lopez. It’s my fervent hope that none of our reinstantiations experience terror or have a panic attack, either—and those are conscious states.”

“Oh, very clever, Dr. Porter,” said Lopez, making a show of clapping her hands slowly. “Bravo! But, in fact, you’re avoiding the question. Dreaming is different from other conscious states in that it’s entirely internal, isn’t that true?”

“More or less.”

“Much more than less, I think. Dreams are the very essence of our inner life, no? Real consciousness, the kind that the biological Karen Bessarian had, included the ability to conceptualize internally in the absence of environmental cues. And your creations fail to have that sort of consciousness.”

“That’s not—”

“Isn’t it true that you don’t let them sleep, because were they to sleep, they’d expect to dream, and when they awoke, and remembered nothing of their dreams, it would soon be apparent that they did not dream? That the most intimate part of our inner lives—dreaming—is completely absent? Isn’t that true, Dr. Porter?”

“I … it’s not like that.”

“But if they were, in fact, accurate copies, they would dream, wouldn’t they? You said they’d answer any question exactly as a human would—that’s what you won that fancy medallion for, right? But what if you asked them about their dreams?”

“You’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” said Porter, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

Lopez shook her head. “Oh, I’d never dream of doing that. But I would dream of other things—unlike that construct over there pretending to be Karen Bessarian.”

“Objection!” said Deshawn. “Your honor!”

“Save it for closing arguments, Ms. Lopez,” said Herrington.

Lopez bowed graciously toward the bench. “Of course, your honor. No further questions.”