Connectome (35 page)

Earlier I claimed that studying mental disorders without connectomics is like researching infectious diseases without a microscope. My claim extends to research on treatments. If you can't even see a connectopathy, it's bound to be difficult to find therapies that prevent or correct it. Furthermore, research on the molecules involved in the four R's of connectome change is likely to be a prime avenue for identifying drug targets. I expect that connectomics will play a central role in developing psychiatric therapies, much as genomics has already taken center stage in pharmaceutical research more generally.

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Curing mental disorders sounds like a worthy goal. So also does rewiring the brain of a soldier traumatized by war, or a child who has suffered severe abuse. Yet the means I've discussed, manipulating the genes and neurons of animals and humans, might provoke a twinge of fear. Anxiety over biotechnology dates back a long time. In his 1932 novel
Brave New World,
the English writer Aldous Huxley imagined a future dystopia based on transforming the body and brain. Humans are born in factories controlled by the state, separated into five biologically engineered castes, and provided with a mind-altering drug called “soma” in place of religion.

While we should be vigilant against potential abuses of biotechnology, I don't think we should be fearful. Because of their complexity, living systems have proven quite difficult to reengineer. It's not impossible to do so, but it generally takes longer than alarmists anticipate. Progress happens slowly, which gives human societies ample time to figure out how to handle it.

Optimism about biotechnology is as old as pessimism. A contemporary of Huxley's, the Irish-born biologist J. D. Bernal, presented an upbeat view in his 1929 essay “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.” He saw humanity's story as a quest for three types of control. Power over “the world” was already growing—this was the goal of the physical sciences and engineering. Control over “the flesh” seemed farther off, but Bernal predicted that future biologists would learn to manipulate genes and cells. His most prophetic remarks were reserved for the third challenge:

 

Why do the first lines of attack against the inorganic forces of the world and the organic structure of our bodies seem so doubtful, fanciful and Utopian? Because we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil, and the devil, for all that he has lost individuality, is still as powerful as ever. The devil is the most difficult of all to deal with: he is inside ourselves, we cannot see him. Our capacities, our desires, our inner confusions are almost impossible to understand or cope with in the present, still less can we predict what will be the future of them.

 

Bernal feared that our mental flaws (“the devil”) would be the ultimate barrier to our progress. The third and final challenge for humanity was to reshape the psyche.

Would Bernal be happy to see how far we've come? We have survived the threat of annihilation by nuclear weapons (until now, anyway). Perhaps we have learned enough that we will never again wage wars as terrible as those of the twentieth century. But Bernal would note that we struggle more than ever to deal with the consequences of our desires. Our control over “the world” has made inroads on the problem of scarcity, but abundance turns out to be dangerous too. Our lack of self-control drives us to pollute the environment and sicken our bodies with overconsumption.

Perhaps we can resist “the devil” by restructuring our economic incentives, reforming our political systems, and perfecting our ethical ideals. These are the time-honored ways of improving our brains. But in time, science will also invent others. Bernal hoped that humanity would triumph over the world, the flesh, and the devil, which he called “the three enemies of the rational soul.” We can express his dream in another way—as the quest to control atoms, genomes, and connectomes.

“Science is my territory,” the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote, “but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.” In the final part of this book, I'll look at two fantasies from our collective dream landscape: cryonics, the practice of freezing a corpse in the hope that it will be resurrected later on by some advanced civilization, and uploading, the idea of living happily ever after as a computer simulation.

Bernal opened his essay with an oracular pronouncement: “There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them.” Since many people wish to live forever, we should be skeptical of cryonics and uploading. Mere wishful thinking is the “future of desire,” a mirage that distracts us from the “future of fate.” To examine these dreams critically, we must reason rather than wish, and our thinking will inevitably turn to connectomes.

Twice in my life I have visited that strange town in the desert called Vegas. Each morning, I luxuriated in the soft sheets of my hotel bed. Each night, glittering spectacles of entertainment held me in thrall. I savored shots of whiskey and blew cigar smoke toward the lofty ceiling of the casino. But the blackjack table and the roulette wheel left me bored and listless.

Games of chance cannot hold my attention—save one, the only gamble that really matters. It is called Pascal's Wager. In 1654 the French genius Blaise Pascal founded the branch of mathematics known as probability theory.
That same year, he also found God. After a searing religious vision,
the focus of his life shifted from science and mathematics to philosophy and theology. His most important work during this period was a defense of Christianity, which was still unfinished when he died prematurely at age thirty-nine. His notes were published posthumously under the name
Pensées
(Thoughts). We encountered the
Pensées
at the beginning of this book. Now we return to them as we near its conclusion.

The
Pensées,
as you might have guessed from the passage I quoted earlier, are full of dread. To Pascal, dread was not a nihilistic end in itself; it was a prelude to religious faith. Pascal was well aware that the greatest affliction of the believer is doubt. How can we be sure that God exists? Many philosophers and theologians had argued that the existence of God can be proven by logic and reason. Pascal, though familiar with their purported proofs, was not convinced.

So he proposed a radically different approach. He gave up trying to banish skepticism, and granted that a rational person could never be certain of God's existence. One could only estimate the
probability
that God exists. Even so, Pascal argued, it made sense to believe in God. His creative stroke was to formulate faith as a gamble. You are faced with two choices: Believe or not believe. There are two possible realities: Either God exists or he does not. The table in Figure 52 shows the four possible outcomes.

 

 

Figure 52. Pascal's Wager

 

On the one hand, if you don't believe in God, you'll get to partake of the sinful pleasures that the nuns in your Catholic school taught you to resist. But you'll also have to risk burning in hell for all eternity. On the other hand, suppose you choose to believe in God. There are costs to belief, such as having to sit on those uncomfortable church pews every Sunday morning when you'd rather be sleeping or playing tennis. But it might be worthwhile if God exists, for then you would receive the fantastic prize of eternal life in heaven.

The table indicates the reward or punishment of each possible outcome. If you were mathematically minded, you would fill in the table with numbers that quantify how much you dislike church, or how hellish you imagine hell to be. You'd also have to estimate the probability that God exists, thus quantifying your skepticism or belief. Then you'd calculate the expected payoffs from believing and not believing, and choose accordingly.

But Pascal saved us from having to calculate so diligently, by pointing out that the result is obvious without our actually doing the numbers. The value of heaven is infinite, since eternal life is infinitely long. Infinity times any number is still infinity. Therefore, the expected payoff from believing in God is infinite, as long as the probability of God's existence is any number greater than zero. The precise values of the other numbers don't matter at all. In short, going to church is like purchasing a lottery ticket. It's worth paying any price for the ticket if the jackpot is infinite.

Centuries have passed since Pascal. Times have changed, and the new millennium has given rise to a new wager. To see the modern gamblers, we must journey to Scottsdale, Arizona, in search of a strange warehouse. Entering the building, we see rows of metallic containers, each a bit taller than a human. The containers are called dewars, and like giant thermos bottles they insulate their contents. Instead of holding a refreshing drink for a summertime hike, the dewars store liquid nitrogen, and instead of ice cubes they contain either four human corpses or six human heads.

This is the headquarters of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. The foundation has about one thousand living members
and one hundred dead ones. You can join the club by guaranteeing a $200,000 payment, to be handed over when you are pronounced legally dead. In return, the foundation promises to preserve your body indefinitely at 196 degrees below zero. (All temperatures are in the Celsius scale.) You can opt to preserve only your head, in which case the price drops to $80,000. The foundation has its own language. The people inside the dewars are not dead; they are “deanimated.” The frozen heads are “neuropreservations,” and the practice is called “cryonics.”

Alcor members are optimists, as is clear from a twenty-eight-minute promotional video called
The Limitless Future
. In the long run, advances in science and technology will enable humans to accomplish what seems impossible today. Humankind's ability to control matter will become so sophisticated that it will eventually be possible to “reanimate” dead bodies. Not only will the frozen corpses in the Alcor warehouse be brought back to life, but their diseases and old age will be reversed. The reanimated will be restored to their youthful vigor.

The physicist Robert Ettinger was the first to bring the idea of cryonics before the attention of the public. Through television appearances and his best-selling 1967 book,
The Prospect of Immortality,
he became a minor celebrity. All the same, it took a number of years and several false starts before cryonics became a reality. In the early years there were some embarrassing episodes in which frozen bodies accidentally thawed and had to be buried just like the corpses of other dead people. Finally, in 1993, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation created the facility in Scottsdale, which seems secure enough to keep bodies frozen for many years.

Ettinger was successful in popularizing his ideas, but he was ridiculed as well. Indeed, it's tempting to dismiss Alcor members as suckers who have been fleeced of large sums of money. But this reaction would be too hasty. Can anyone really prove that reanimation will always be impossible? It seems more reasonable to say that the probability of reanimation is small but nonzero. This opens the door to Pascalian arguments. The expected value of Alcor membership is equal to the probability of reanimation times the value of eternal life. Since eternal life is infinitely valuable, the expected value of Alcor membership is also infinite, and therefore worth every penny of the $200,000 fee. Like Christianity, cryonics is a wager for the jackpot of eternal life. Pascal's Wager asks you to put your faith in God; Ettinger's Wager asks you to put it in technology.

 

The twentieth-century French author Albert Camus opened his essay
The Myth of Sisyphus
with a provocative claim: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” I counter that there is only one truly serious problem in science and technology, and that is immortality. Through his dramatic opening, Camus introduced the question of whether life is worth living, whether life has meaning. It's worth noting that suicide is a purely philosophical problem because there are no practical barriers. If you want to kill yourself, you are in luck—it's easy to find a gun, a rope, a tall building, or poison. But immortality is a technological problem. Even if you want to live forever,
there is no option currently available.

The quest for eternal youth is as old as humankind. My schoolteachers told me that it was while searching for the Fountain of Youth that the Spanish explorer Ponce de León discovered Florida. That charming story is now considered apocryphal, alas,
but historians still seem to believe records of two expeditions commissioned by the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang to find the fabled elixir of life in the third century b.c. With a fleet of ships and a crew of three thousand boys and girls, the court sorcerer Xu Fu
sailed the eastern seas for years without success, and never returned from his second expedition.