The Silicon Brain

The Silicon Brain

Author : P.S. Huang

May 25, 2014

                      July 5, 2048

  Hugo Nuland woke up fuzzy with every part of his body ached like burning.  He tried to recall what had just happened to him, but his brain hurts like there’s an hive in it, and the wasp herd went berserk whenever he tried to get focused. He is not the kind of person who get depressed easily, but this time he felt all his energy is drained in a way he’d never experienced before. For the first time in his 80 years’ legendary careers of multiple professions, he sensed a hint of terror residing in the dark corner in him. He tired to move his burning limbs, which responded him with severe cramps. He couldn’t help groaning out, only bitterly finding his throat too weak and too dry to utter a sound. He thought challengedly that he would die from fatigue, pain, and thirst in a minute, and he hated this arrangement of destiny not because of fear of death, his has indomitable courage, but he had a world changing secret needed to be told. Despite his strong motive of survival, he blacked out.    

    If there were not the ‘beep’ sounds hovering in the background constantly, one could even hear a needle drop off on the polished mozaic tiled floor. The place is freezing as if refrigerated that white, thick fog forms from people’s breath. A faint spotlight shed right from the centre of the dome, on to the centre of the room, where a egg-shaped capsule lays. Edges of the room is indiscernible. Darkness engulf everything.

     ‘Doctor, Nuland woke up.’  says a female voice apathetically. She is looking straight to the front, where nothing but other ‘mind workers’ seating in couches. In fact, they all look exactly identical with her. Every one got head shaved with finger-thick cords connect to back of their necks. All of them looks similar— pale skin and pale emotion. 

   Countless diagrams and curves are jumping in a small monitor embedded in the egg-shaped semitransparent capsule lying in the centre of the concentric circles of couches.  

  ‘ How is his sync value ?’ asks the deep, stern voice sent out from speaker , after a  short peak of electrical noise. Contrasting to the flat female voice, the man’s voice contains strong vigour. The voice echoes in the dark hall, then rippled away to the abyss of shear void.

  ‘99.9% Synced, Doctor. No special anomaly observed. We are at the finishing line. Congratulation, Doc. ’ The female voice rises again. It would be a sweet, cheering voice, were it not for its absence of soul. 

  ‘ Prepare for the unmount of the chip in 30 seconds, S.’  The man is calling the female, whose previous name is Sandra Pfizer. 

  ’ 16, 15, 14.’ As S counted, numerous black-suited people are watching all of this from a height.  Behind a curved glass shield, the unnoticeable space provides an hawk-eye view that snipes every moves under the dome.

‘ Here,’ the same deep, stern voices now sounds somewhat softened.

‘ Is where we call “Dome”, the very central kernel of the whole project.’ The ‘doctor’ proudly announces to his secret guests. ‘ Its capability will going to save millions of people from suffering both mental and physical illness.’ ‘ Handicap, paralysis, and muscle degeneration can be cured COMPLETELY.’ Doctor tries to induce interests of his private guests with this opening. ‘What is more, this technology will be a gospel to patients of mental illness. There will be no more people suffering depression, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease.’  His bold claim seems to seize some curiosity of his audience, and as expected, he also notice some people stare at him in disbelief. 

‘Should you feel unconvinced of what I said, gentlemen.  May I invite you to have a short journey with me,’  When he voice ceases, he turn around to the glass shield, ‘Shall we ?’ he smiles, looking down everything beneath his feet.

‘3,2,1, zero.’ S counted with serene voice, like a responsible timer. ‘This will definitely sweep their mind.’ Doctor mutters, as he adroitly put on his gloves as rehearsed. 

‘How about you, G?’  Doctor’s deep voice rises again after a short pause.  G, a stout bald guy subconsciously nods his head, making the cord adjoint to his neck sways like a jumping rope.   

 ‘G, show his life index on the main screen. Tell me you’ve started scanning EET and NIRS already.’ 

‘ You don’t expect me to wait for you and your dumbass crew, do you?’  Doctor growls as he hurriedly leans forward onto the front penal which showed up from nowhere on the glass windshield, separating them form the refrigerated, bacteria free dome.

’ Scanning is already on the way, doctor.’  G, the little figure in a white robe suddenly speaks, making some shocked guests jumped from their toes. This incident make some other guests giggles. A few people glare at them indignantly.  

‘You’d better.’ The Doctor replied indifferently.  ’You don’t screw up this time, G.’ ‘ Aren’t they all robots ? Doctor ?’  One of the guests asks suspiciously, ‘How can it possibly err? ’ ‘ In some way, they preserved some human quality,’ Doctor explains carelessly, for he knows he has to leave his concentration to the big show. ‘It helps them perform better, believe it or not.’  

Next second, with a sharp beep, an animated 3D brain image around a football size is brought to their view, with some spots of the image are glowing, while the brightness fluctuates with rhythm. The blue coral reefs like image is so vivid, that sometimes people doubt if it is an illusion. ‘ Ultra Definition Holographic Interactive System,UDHIS’ Doctor explained with humble smile, ‘Another invention of our institute. It exploits an sophisticate instrument coverages two orthogonal polarised light of the same objects, in short.’ He speaks while pushing the “brain” away, right towards a guest in the crowd. Too late to dodge, the brain passes though a guests’s chest, and shows up from the other side.  ‘Holy God! ’ Cry out the startled guest, while all the other guests draw a step back from the brain. ‘Don’t be afraid, It won’t bite.’ Doctor smiles at his panicking audience amusingly, he never get tired of this trick.

 ‘Watch carefully, gentlemen.’ Doctor lowers his voice like a  game show host. ‘THIS is the legendary Hugo Nuland’s brain, gentlemen.’ He try to make himself not sound too excited. ‘We captured him just last month.’ 

He nods his head affirmatively to the guests, who are the delegates of  Peace-Prosper Committee of the Global Union. ‘What? How dare you!’ The dark-skinned Indian delegate protests. ‘His rights are protected by the Constitution of the Earth! It’s a criminal act!’ The former Minister of Humanity of Southern Asia cried out shockingly, several of his colleges nodded with agreement.   

  ‘ Mr. Sunjishran, my esteemed friend. ’ Doctor interrupts the gentleman from his endless complaints. ‘ I respect your opinion, and I admire your noble integrity,’ Doctor speaks mildly, holding his hands before his chest. ‘ But Mr. Nuland is not a human.’ Doctor’s words are almost a sigh but it can not be clearer. ‘ I will prove it to you.’ 

  He holds up a crown-like headset assembled with gadgets, ready to commence the surgery.      

   The coral of brain shimmers a splendid rainbow of sapphire blue, its valleys are darker than deepest water of Pacific Ocean. Streams of lights bustling around the network of bright spots, like traffics in a big city at night.

The beautiful image don’t seems to draw the doctor’s attention at all. his eyes narrowed drastically, reading the image carefully, as if he is searching for something very important.

Then, something grasps his attention. The doctor raises his arm, with both of his hands wearing black rubber gloves, and starts making gestures as if he is manipulating something invisible in front of him. 

More interestingly, the 3D image of the big blue brain floating above the screen starts to rotates, even being cut into half and showing the cross-section of the brain. As the doctor’s gestures flying in air , different graph and information jumps out or folded swiftly simultaneously.   

‘ Scale 10 electro pulse at G3 in motor cortex, Bryan.’ ‘ Regina, more sodium sulphide composite ! ’ The doctor yells at his people without looking away from the image. Apparently, there must be a surgery under operation with remote controlled robot hands and sensors, in a bacteria free operation room somewhere else, and the surgery must be very important and difficult or it wouldn’t require hundreds of people work together.  

A shimmering tiny object is slowly 

‘We will provide this service to the needed people in government, army, and intelligent agency first.  ’ ‘Within 5 years, this technology ’

   

   

‘ Give him one dose GABA and Dopamine, drop his body temperature to 30 degree.’  ordered the man forcefully. The progress of the recovery of 

   

  

Everything around him is shaded in dark, thick gloom.

I hope  it is the lapse my eyes    My eyes were still sore as if I haven't slept for a thousand year, and my spine twitched badly just like someone had pierced a whole box of steel nails into it. The night wasn't passed easily, to be honest, and anyone knows me knew I am not exaggerating at the strictest sense. I still managed to maintain my marine quality . Time was harder then, but I was, and always will be the kind of man who wouldn’t make the slightest frown when facing the strongest difficulties and most relentless menace. The pain really killed me that I have to grasp the sheet tight that I could reach my feet down to the floor.

I took the pills that I used abusively these days from the fridge to sooth my backache, and I dropped some eye-drops and ointment into my swollen eyes.  I checked my face in the mirror, the eyes were yellowish grey, the pupils blurred and lifeless.  wrinkles and stains scattering across my face and dark veins crawling underneath my transparent skin exposed the profoundest lethargy of a 86 years old man. I had once been young and strong like a howling river, but the river was bleak like desert. life had once been beautiful and precious, but now it mean nothing more than torture.           

Consciousness in terms of physicalism. Science of subjective experience

What is consciousness ? I mean, what is the movie playing in your head everyday since you were aware of it after you were born? The movie not only deliver you the most real visual, audial excitation which you might have experienced when watching a 3D movie, but also gives you all physical sensation that feels like you are in a virtual reality simulator. What is the movie, aside from its multiple sensory stimulations and never-ending story, in which you experienced emotions, desires, and spirituality, and the only protagonist in the story is ‘you’ ? 

Consciousness in the description above can be concisely summarized as ‘the collection of all subjective feelings induced by our experience.’  One may see it absurd and impractical to try to deal with subjective feelings in terms of physicalism because for hundreds of years the two main streams of etymology are idealism and physicalism, which are thought to be incompatible to each other. Despite the success of science, or its under-lied belief in physicalism, it has not provide yet a convincing explanation for the mechanism of our subjective experience. The term subjective explains itself: what happens in mind. How can we measure something that happened in our mind objectively after all?

   

However, the enormous success of scientific methods and its flourishing achievements make physicalism a universal belief. The most faithful believers of physicalism- scientist - have virtually become prophets of modern era.  For any devotee to physicalism, who believes mechanical universe and dismiss super-nature phenomenon, what can be harder to accept than a truth that our minds are not part of this universe ?  

Indeed, neuroscientists have discovered many valuable facts about our brains- how areas of brains correlate to difference mental processes- but they simply have no clue which area is in charge of our subjective feelings. Some scientists thus suggest our mental processes are not only a result from the teamwork of each functional brain areas, but also a quintessential ‘emergent phenomenon’ plays behind the scene. 

Emergent phenomenon is basically a belief that cortical neural network is neither centralized nor localized as brain scientists observed on EEG or fMRI. Cortical neural network works as a decentralized, integrated whole where every ensemble of interactions of nodes and connections represents a specific mental state.    

 Then, how come this two seemingly contradictory views, either of which is supported by considerable evidences, can be fused into a unifying, self-rounded theory of brain ? Some scientists lay their hope in the complex system. Complex systems, which is neither centralized nor decentralized, exhibit hierarchical structures. The hierarchy is not built block by block on account of genetic blue map, but self-organized. The neural network is organized via its agents performing certain simple rules, instead of being dictated or supervised by an external higher being. The most famous rule of such is Hebbien Rule, usually described as ‘fire together, wire together.’

When I was organizing my thoughts about ‘what is consciousness ?’  It was clear to me that most of my inspirations should be credited to Jeff Hawkins and his philosophical but realistic booklet on Intelligence.  His book delineate why intelligence is making prediction and how the cortical neuron might have achieved that. He proposed a group of simultaneously fired neuron may stand for one basic element of our world, and an ensemble of similar elements will be categorized into a superior concept, which will be represented by another group of neuron in a higher layer of neocortex.  For example, our ears first receive a vibration of waves when we listen to a speech. The vibration is then transformed to an electric signal of sound, which to bottom layer of cortex may sounds like alphabet. When it adaptation to the certain combination of alphabets, which always occur consecutively,  it recognizes the combination, the word, with a group of sync-fired neuron. Likewise, it recognizes patterns of combinations of words in to sentence in next layer. Finally, the meaning of the speech is captured through this hierarchical information processing system. Most tasks are well-learned patterns, are trivially predicted in lower layers of cortex, so it never cross our mind. Namely, only fresh, novel stimulation will finally enter the highest layer of neocortex, where our awareness functioned.  Hawkins’s theory is fascinating because it consists with our experiences and easy to understand. It can be easily tested by simply recall you did not really think about the pronunciation of words when you are reading this article. Sometimes you did not even noticed misspellings or grammar error because you subconsciously predicted what the word means. However, we are aware of the spelling of words, and have difficulties understand sentences some times when we are listening to unfamiliar foreign languages. Allow me call the theory above ‘Intelligence theory.’

I think Jeff Hawkins has explained how intelligence works pretty clearly, given how ignorant we are to it previously. He also mentioned he has not figured everything out about consciousness, since it absolutely has something to do with cerebellum, thalamus, and hippocampus, etc. The picture of consciousness is incomplete without a complete understanding of emotions, animal instincts, and their interactions with intelligence. Jeff Hawkins just explained the new brain (neocortex ) , leaving the old brain undiscussed.

To understand subjective experience