Triggering a perception of humor without circumstances we normally consider funny is perhaps disconcerting (although personally, I find it humorous). Humor involves a certain element of surprise. Blue elephants. The last two words were intended to be surprising, but they probably didn’t make you laugh (or maybe they did). In addition to surprise, the unexpected event needs to make sense from an unanticipated but meaningful perspective. And there are some other attributes that humor requires that we don’t understand just yet. The brain apparently has a neural net that detects humor from our other perceptions. If we directly stimulate the brain’s humor detector, then an otherwise ordinary situation will seem pretty funny.
The same appears to be true of sexual feelings. In experiments with animals, stimulating a specific small area of the hypothalamus with a tiny injection of testosterone causes the animals to engage in female sexual behavior, regardless of gender. Stimulating a different area of the hypothalamus produces male sexual behavior.
These results suggest that once neural implants are commonplace, we will have the ability to produce not only virtual sensory experiences but also the feelings associated with these experiences. We can also create some feelings not ordinarily associated with the experience. So you will be able to add some humor to your sexual experiences, if desired (of course, for some of us humor may already be part of the picture).
The ability to control and to reprogram our feelings will become even more profound in the late twenty-first century when technology moves beyond mere neural implants and we fully install our thinking processes into a new computational medium—that is, when we become software.
We work hard to achieve feelings of humor, pleasure, and well-being. Being able to call them up at will may seem to rob them of their meaning. Of course, many people use drugs today to create and enhance certain desirable feelings, but the chemical approach comes bundled with many undesirable effects. With neural implant technology, you will be able to enhance your feelings of pleasure and well-being without the hangover. Of course, the potential for abuse is even greater than with drugs. When psychologist James Olds provided rats with the ability to press a button and directly stimulate a pleasure center in the limbic system of their brains, the rats pressed the button endlessly, as often as five thousand times an hour, to the exclusion of everything else, including eating. Only falling asleep caused them to stop temporarily.25
Nonetheless, the benefits of neural implant technology will be compelling. As just one example, millions of people suffer from an inability to experience sufficiently intense feelings of sexual pleasure, which is one important aspect of impotence. People with this disability will not pass up the opportunity to overcome their problem through neural implants, which they may already have in place for other purposes. Once a technology is developed to overcome a disability, there is no way to restrict its use from enhancing normal abilities, nor would such restrictions necessarily be desirable. The ability to control our feelings will be just another one of those twenty-first-century slippery slopes.
So What About Spiritual Experiences?
The spiritual experience—a feeling of transcending one’s everyday physical and mortal bounds to sense a deeper reality—plays a fundamental role in otherwise disparate religions and philosophies. Spiritual experiences are not all of the same sort but appear to encompass a broad range of mental phenomena. The ecstatic dancing of a Baptist revival appears to be a different phenomenon than the quiet transcendence of a Buddhist monk. Nonetheless, the notion of the spiritual experience has been reported so consistently throughout history, and in virtually all cultures and religions, that it represents a particularly brilliant flower in the phenomenological garden.
Regardless of the nature and derivation of a mental experience, spiritual or otherwise, once we have access to the computational processes that give rise to it, we have the opportunity to understand its neurological correlates. With the understanding of our mental processes will come the opportunity to capture our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experiences, to call them up at will, and to enhance them.
Spiritual Experience Through Brain Generated Music
There is already one technology that appears to generate at least one aspect of a spiritual experience. This experimental technology is called Brain Generated Music (BGM), pioneered by NeuroSonics, a small company in Baltimore, Maryland, of which I am a director. BGM is a brain-wave biofeedback system capable of evoking an experience called the Relaxation Response, which is associated with deep relaxation.26 The BGM user attaches three disposable leads to her head. A personal computer then monitors the user’s brain waves to determine her unique alpha wavelength. Alpha waves, which are in the range of eight to thirteen cycles per second (cps), are associated with a deep meditative state, as compared to beta waves (in the range of thirteen to twenty-eight cps), which are associated with routine conscious thought. Music is then generated by the computer, according to an algorithm that transforms the user’s own brain-wave signal.
The BGM algorithm is designed to encourage the generation of alpha waves by producing pleasurable harmonic combinations upon detection of alpha waves, and less pleasant sounds and sound combinations when alpha detection is low. In addition, the fact that the sounds are synchronized to the user’s own alpha wavelength to create a resonance with the user’s own alpha rhythm also encourages alpha production.
Dr. Herbert Benson, formerly the director of the hypertension section of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital and now at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston, and other researchers at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel, discovered the neurological-physiological mechanism of the Relaxation Response, which is described as the opposite of the “fight or flight,” or stress response.27 The Relaxation Response is associated with reduced levels of epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline), blood pressure, blood sugar, breathing, and heart rates. Regular elicitation of this response is reportedly able to produce permanently lowered blood-pressure levels (to the extent that hypertension is caused by stress factors) and other health benefits. Benson and his colleagues have catalogued a number of techniques that can elicit the Relaxation Response, including yoga and a number of forms of meditation.
I have had experience with meditation, and in my own experience with BGM, and in observing others, BGM does appear to evoke the Relaxation Response. The music itself feels as if it is being generated from inside your mind. Interestingly, if you listen to a tape recording of your own brain-generated music when you are not hooked up to the computer, you do not experience the same sense of transcendence. Although the recorded BGM is based on your personal alpha wavelength, the recorded music was synchronized to the brain waves that were produced by your brain when the music was first generated, not to the brain waves that are produced while listening to the recording. You need to listen to “live” BGM to achieve the resonance effect.
Conventional music is generally a passive experience. Although a performer may be influenced in subtle ways by her audience, the music we listen to generally does not reflect our response. Brain Generated Music represents a new modality of music that enables the music to evolve continually based on the interaction between it and our own mental responses to it.
Is BGM producing a spiritual experience? It’s hard to say. The feelings produced while listening to “live” BGM are similar to the deep transcendent feelings I can sometimes achieve with meditation, but they appear to be more reliably produced by BGM.
The God Spot
Neuroscientists from the University of California at San Diego have found what they call the God module, a tiny locus of nerve cells in the frontal lobe that appears to be activated during religious experiences. They discovered this neural machinery while studying epileptic patients who have intense mystical experiences during seizures. Apparently the intense neural storms during a seizure stimulate the God module. Tracking surface electrical activity in the brain with highly sensitive skin monitors, the s
cientists found a similar response when very religious nonepileptic persons were shown words and symbols evoking their spiritual beliefs.
A neurological basis for spiritual experience has long been postulated by evolutionary biologists because of the social utility of religious belief. In response to reports of the San Diego research, Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford, said through a spokesman that “it would not be surprising if God had created us with a physical facility for belief.”28
When we can determine the neurological correlates of the variety of spiritual experiences that our species is capable of, we are likely to be able to enhance these experiences in the same way that we will enhance other human experiences. With the next stage of evolution creating a new generation of humans that will be trillions of times more capable and complex than humans today, our ability for spiritual experience and insight is also likely to gain in power and depth.
Just being—experiencing, being conscious—is spiritual, and reflects the essence of spirituality Machines, derived from human thinking and surpassing humans in their capacity for experience, will claim to be conscious, and thus to be spiritual. They will believe that they are conscious. They will believe that they have spiritual experiences. They will be convinced that these experiences are meaningful. And given the historical inclination of the human race to anthropomorphize the phenomena we encounter, and the persuasiveness of the machines, we’re likely to believe them when they tell us this.
Twenty-first-century machines—based on the design of human thinking—will do as their human progenitors have done—going to real and virtual houses of worship, meditating, praying, and transcending—to connect with their spiritual dimension.
LET’S JUST GET ONE THING STRAIGHT: THERE’S NO WAY I’M GOING TO HAVE SEX WITH A COMPUTER.
Hey, let’s not jump to conclusions. You should keep an open mind.
I’LL TRY TO HAVE AN OPEN MIND. AN OPEN BODY IS ANOTHER MATTER. THE IDEA OF GETTING INTIMATE WITH SOME GADGET, NO MATTER HOW CLEVER, IS NOT VERY APPEALING.
Have you ever spoken to a phone?
TO A PHONE? I MEAN I TALK TO PEOPLE USING A PHONE.
Okay, so a computer circa 2015—in the form of a visual-auditory-tactile virtual reality communication device—is just a telephone for you and your lover. But you can do more than just talk.
I LIKE TO TALK TO MY LOVER—WHEN I HAVE ONE—BY PHONE. AND LOOKING AT EACH OTHER WITH A PICTURE PHONE, OR EVEN A FULL VIRTUAL REALITY SYSTEM, SOUNDS PRETTY COZY. AS FOR YOUR TACTILE IDEA, HOWEVER, I THINK I’LL STICK TO TOUCHING MY FRIENDS AND LOVERS WITH REAL FINGERS.
You can use real fingers with virtual reality, or at least real virtual fingers. But what about when you and your lover are separated?
YOU KNOW, DISTANCE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER. ANYWAY, WE DON’T HAVE TO TOUCH ALL THE TIME, I MEAN I’LL BE ABLE TO WAIT UNTIL I GET BACK FROM MY BUSINESS TRIP, WHILE HE’S TAKING CARE OF THE KIDS!
When virtual reality does evolve into a convincing, all-encompassing tactile interface, are you going to go out of your way to avoid any physical contact?
I SUPPOSE IT WOULDN’T HURT TO KISS GOODNIGHT.
Ah-ha—the slippery slope! So why stop there?
OKAY, TWO KISSES.
Sure, like I just said, keep an open mind.
SPEAKING OF AN OPEN MIND, YOUR DESCRIPTION OF THE “GOD SPOT” SEEMS TO TRIVIALIZE THE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE.
I wouldn’t overreact to this one piece of research. Clearly, something’s going on in the brains of people who are having a spiritual experience. Whatever the neurological process is, once we capture and understand it, we should be able to enhance the spiritual experiences in a re-created brain running in its new computational medium.
SO THESE RE-CREATED MINDS WILL REPORT HAVING SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES. AND I SUPPOSE THEY WILL ACT IN THE SAME SORT OF TRANSCENDENT, RAPTUROUS WAY THAT PEOPLE DO TODAY WHEN REPORTING SUCH EXPERIENCES. BUT WILL THESE MACHINES REALLY BE TRANSCENDING, AND EXPERIENCING THE FEELING OF GOD’S PRESENCE? WHAT WILL THEY BE EXPERIENCING, ANYWAY?
We keep coming back to the issue of consciousness. Machines in the twenty-first century will report the same range of experiences that humans do. In accordance with the Law of Accelerating Returns, they will report an even broader range. And they will be very convincing when they speak of their experiences. But what will they really be feeling? As I said earlier, there’s just no way to truly penetrate. another entity’s subjective experience, at least not in a scientific way. I mean, we can observe the patterns of neural firings, and so forth, but that’s still just an objective observation.
WELL, THAT’S JUST THE LIMITATION OF SCIENCE.
Yes, that’s where philosophy and religion are supposed to take over. Of course, it’s hard enough to get agreement on scientific issues.
THAT OFTEN APPEARS TO BE TRUE. NOW, ANOTHER THING I’M NOT TOO HAPPY ABOUT IS THESE PILLAGING NANOBOTS THAT ARE GOING TO MULTIPLY WITHOUT END. WE’LL END UP WITH A HUGE SEA OF NANOBOTS. WHEN THEY’RE DONE WITH US, THEY’LL START EATING EACH OTHER.
There is that danger. But if we write the software carefully ...
OH SURE, LIKE MY OPERATING SYSTEM. ALREADY I HAVE LITTLE SOFTWARE VIRUSES THAT MULTIPLY THEMSELVES UNTIL THEY CLOG UP MY HARD DRIVE.
I still think the bigger danger is in their intentional hostile use.
I KNOW YOU SAID THAT, BUT THAT’S NOT EXACTLY REASSURING. AGAIN, WHY DON’T WE JUST NOT GO DOWN THIS PARTICULAR ROAD?
Okay, you tell that to the old woman whose crumbling bones will be effectively treated using a nanotechnology-based treatment, or the cancer patient whose cancer is destroyed by little nanobots that swim through his blood vessels.
I REALIZE THERE ARE A LOT OF POTENTIAL BENEFITS, BUT THE EXAMPLES YOU JUST GAVE CAN ALSO BE ADDRESSED THROUGH OTHER, MORE CONVENTIONAL, TECHNOLOGIES, LIKE BIOENGINEERING.
I’m glad you mentioned bioengineering, because we see a very similar problem with bioengineered weapons. We’re very close to the point where the knowledge and equipment in a typical graduate-school biotechnology program will be sufficient to create self-replicating pathogens. Whereas a nanoengineered weapon could replicate across any matter, living and dead, a bioengineered weapon would only replicate across living matter, probably just its human targets. I understand that’s not much comfort. In either case, the potential for uncontrolled self-replication greatly multiplies the danger.
But you’re not going to stop bioengineering—it’s the cutting edge of our medical research. It has already greatly contributed to the AIDS treatments we have today; diabetic patients use bioengineered forms of human insulin; there are effective cholesterol-lowering drugs; there are promising new cancer treatments; and the list of advances is rapidly growing. There is genuine optimism among otherwise skeptical scientists that we will make dramatic gains against cancer and other scourges with bioengineered treatments.
SO HOW ARE WE GOING TO PROTECT OURSELVES FROM BIOENGINEERED WEAPONS?
With more bioengineering—antiviral drugs, for example.
AND NANOENGINEERED WEAPONS?
Same thing—more nanotechnology.
I HOPE THE GOOD NANOBOTS PREVAIL, BUT I JUST WONDER HOW WE’RE GOING TO TELL THE GOOD NANOBOTS FROM THE BAD. ONES.
It’s going to be hard to tell, particularly since the nanobots are too small to see.
EXCEPT BY OTHER NANOBOTS, RIGHT?
Good point.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1999
THE DAY THE COMPUTERS STOPPED
The digitization of information in all of its forms will probably be known as the most fascinating development of the twentieth century.
—An Wang
Economics, sociology, geopolitics, art, religion all provide powerful tools that have sufficed for centuries to explain the essential surfaces of life. To many observers, there seems nothing truly new under the sun─no need for a deep understanding of man’s new tools─no requirement to descend into the microcosm of modern electronics in order to comprehend the world. The worl
d is all too much with us.
—George Gilder
If all the computers in 1960 stopped functioning, few people would have noticed. A few thousand scientists would have seen a delay in getting printouts from their last submission of data on punch cards. Some business reports would have been held up. Nothing to worry about.
Circa 1999 is another matter. If all computers stopped functioning, society would grind to a halt. First of all, electric power distribution would fail. Even if electrical power continued (which it wouldn’t), virtually everything would still break down. Most motorized vehicles have embedded microprocessors, so the only cars that would run would be quite old. There would be almost no functioning trucks, buses, railroads, subways, or airplanes. There would be no electronic communication: Telephones, radio, television, fax machines, pagers, e-mail, and of course the Web would all cease functioning. You wouldn’t get your paycheck. You couldn’t cash it if you did. You wouldn’t be able to get your money out of your bank. Business and government would operate at only the most primitive level. And if all the data in all the computers vanished, then we’d really be in trouble.