The Most Human Human (30 page)
Read The Most Human Human Online
Authors: Brian Christian
Most folks familiar with Plato’s
Symposium
—or, alternately, John Cameron Mitchell’s
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
—know Aristophanes’ story for the origin of love. People began as eight-limbed creatures: four arms, four legs, two faces. In order to cut us down to size—literally—for our haughtiness at the gods or some such offense, Zeus splits us in two with lightning, and cinches the separated skin together at the belly button, and voilà: humans as we know them today, with just a pair of arms and pair of legs apiece. Out of an ancient need to return to that pre-lightning state of wholeness, we fall in love.
6
All
trying to get back to that original whole. The tangle of hugging, kissing, and sex being the closest we can come to “reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.”
7
As a middle schooler barreling into early adolescence, I used to sit transfixed by late-night MTV screenings of the Spice Girls singing in various states of undress about when “2 Become 1.” When we talk about this notion in the context of love, we most frequently mean it as a euphemism for sex. I sometimes think about sex in such Aristophanic terms: a kind of triumphant, tragic attempt to combine two bodies, smooshing them together like clay. Triumphant because it’s as close as you ever get.
Tragic for the same reason. Sex never quite seems, in the Aristophanic sense, to
work
—the two never quite manage to become one, and in fact sometimes end up creating a third in the process. Maybe the corporeal reunion, the undoing of Zeus’s separation, is simply impossible.
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When two people marry, there’s a
legal
sense in which they “become one”—if only for tax purposes. That, too, though, is hardly the kind of state-of-man repair that Aristophanes imagined.
But there’s hope.
The organizer of the 2008 Loebner Prize was University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick—also known in the press sometimes as “the world’s first cyborg.” In 1998 he had an RFID chip implanted in his arm: when he walks into his department, the doors open for him and a voice says, “Hello, Professor Warwick.” More recently, he’s undergone a second surgery, a much more invasive one: wiring a hundred-electrode array directly into the nerves of his arm.
With this array he’s done a number of equally astonishing things: he’s been able to get a robot arm to mimic the actions of his real arm, using the electrode array to broadcast the neural signals coming from his brain to the robot arm, which follows those commands in real time, just as—of course—Warwick’s real arm does.
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He also experimented with adding a sixth sense—namely, sonar. A sonar device attached to a baseball cap routed its signals into Warwick’s arm. At first, he says, he kept feeling as though his index finger was tingling whenever large objects got near him. But in very little time, the brain accustomed itself to the new data and the sensation of finger tingling went away. Close-by objects simply produced a kind of ineffable “oh, there’s an object close by” feeling. His brain had made sense of and integrated the data. He’d acquired a sixth sense.
One of the landmark philosophy of mind papers of the twentieth century is Thomas Nagel’s 1974 “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Well, as far as sonar’s concerned, there’s one man alive who might actually be able to hazard an answer to Nagel’s famously unanswerable, and largely rhetorical, question.
Perhaps the most amazing thing that Warwick did with his arm
socket, though, is what he tried next. Warwick wasn’t the only one to get silicon grafted into his arm nerves. So did his wife.
She would make a certain gesture with her arm, Warwick’s arm would twinge. Primitive? Maybe, yes. But Warwick waxes Wright brothers/Kitty Hawk about it. The Wrights were only off the ground for seconds at first; now we are used to traveling so far so fast that our bodies get out of sync with the sun.
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A twinge is ineloquent: granted. But it represents the first direct nervous-system-to-nervous-system human communication. A signal that shortcuts language, shortcuts gesture.
“It was
the
most exciting thing,” says Warwick, “I mean, when that signal arrived and I could understand the thing—and
realizing
what potentially that would mean in the future—Oh, it was the most exciting thing by far that I’ve been involved with.”
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What
might
it mean in the future? What might the Lindbergh- or Earhart-comparable voyage be? As Douglas Hofstadter writes, “If the bandwidth were turned up more and more and more and still more … the sense of a clear boundary between them would slowly be dissolved.”
Healed at last? By
bandwidth
, of all things? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s what’s happening right now, in your own head.
The Four-Hemisphere Brain
Our uniquely human skills may well be produced by minute and circumscribed neuronal networks. And yet our highly modularized brain generates the feeling
in all of us that we are integrated and unified. How so, given that we are a collection of specialized modules?
–MICHAEL GAZZANIGA
The only sex relations that have real value are those in which there is no reticence and in which the whole personality of both becomes merged in a new collective personality
.
–BERTRAND RUSSELL
What Warwick and Hofstadter are talking about is not nearly so fantastical or sci-fi as it sounds. It’s a part of the brain’s very architecture, where the several hundred million fibers of the corpus callosum are ferrying information back and forth between our twin organs of thought, our left and right hemispheres, at an extremely high—but finite—rate. Set lovers aside for a moment: the integrity and coherence of the
mind
, the oneness of the
self
, is dependent on data transfer. On communication.
One metaphysical oddity: communication comes in
degrees
. The number of
minds
, the number of
selves
, in a body, seemingly, doesn’t. This begs odd questions. If the bandwidth of one’s corpus callosum were turned up just slightly, would that make someone somehow “closer” to
one
self? If the bandwidth were turned down just slightly, would that make someone somehow
farther
from one self? With the bandwidth right where it is now, how many selves
are
we, exactly?
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This intense desire to make one of two, to be “healed” and restored
to unity: this is the human condition. Not just the state of our sexuality, but the state of our minds. The eternal desire to “catch up,” to “stay connected,” in the face of flurrying activity and change. You never really gain ground and you never really lose ground. You aren’t unified but you aren’t separate.
“They’re basically the same person,” we sometimes say of a couple. We may not be entirely kidding. There’s a Bach wedding cantata where the married couple is addressed with second-person
-singular
pronouns. Because in English these are the same as the second-person-plural pronouns—“you,” “your”—the effect doesn’t quite translate. However, we do sometimes see the opposite, where a coupled partner describes events that happened only to him- or herself, or only to the partner, using “we”—or, more commonly, simply talks about the couple as a
unit
, not as “she and I.” A recent study at UC Berkeley, led by psychology Ph.D. student Benjamin Seider, found that the tendency toward what he calls linguistic “we-ness” was greater in older couples than younger ones.
Considering that the brain itself stays connected only by constant conversation, it’s hard to argue that our connections to others belong strictly on a lower tier. What makes the transmissions passing through the corpus callosum all that different from the transmissions passing through the air, from mouth to mouth? The intra-brain connections are
stronger
than the inter-brain connections, but not totally different in kind.
If it’s communication that makes a whole of our two-hemisphere brain, there should be no reason why two people, communicating well enough, couldn’t create the
four
-hemisphere brain. Perhaps two become one through the same process
one
becomes one. It may end up being talk—the
other
intercourse—that heals the state of man. If we do it right.
1.
And allegedly the inspiration for Tom Cruise’s character in
Magnolia
(for which Cruise received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe).
2.
At the same time, he says, he attributes some of his success as an interviewer to a rapport that came from “an openness about myself—It was my nature to talk about whatever I was going through, in a way that wasn’t meant to disarm but it did disarm.”
3.
The IRS has indeed developed algorithms to flag “suspicious returns.”
4.
That my spell-checker balks at the word “unboundedness” rather poetically demonstrates his point.
5.
Yet it’s odd—in
other
domains, talking idiosyncratically, freshly, with novel metaphors, makes one
more
easily incriminated. It’s easier for someone to find something you said in an email by searching their in-box if you used an
unusual
turn of phrase or metaphor. Things spoken aloud, too, are likely more easily remembered the more unusual and distinctive they are. What’s more, in a their-word-against-yours situation, this quotation is likely to be regarded (e.g., by a jury) as more reliable the more unusual and vivid it is.
The general principle, vis-à-vis culpability, would seem to be something along the lines of: if you can obscure your meaning by speaking non-standardly, do so; if your meaning will be clear, speak as generically as possible so as not to be memorable. Writing’s goals might be the other way around: clarity with novel ideas and novelty with familiar ones.
6.
Lest you think that this original separation is what created the two sexes, male and female, and that only straight folks have the right ideas about reassembly, remember that Aristophanes, like many Greek men of his time, was more
homo
- than hetero-normative. As he explains it, the “sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number,” corresponding to male, female, and “androgynous”; the male beings when split became gay men, the female beings became lesbians, and the androgynous beings became straight men and women. (No word on how bisexuals fit into this picture.)
7.
Most literary metaphors for romantic and sexual passion lean in one way or another toward the violent. We talk about a “stormy” romance or “tempestuous” feelings, or the orgasm as a tiny death (
la petite mort
, the French call it), or of “ravishing” beauty—checking my dictionary, I see that “ravishing” as an adjective means charming or gorgeous, and as a noun or verb, rape. And most slang terms for sex are violent—bang, screw—or at the very least negative. It’s hard to imagine ending up in better shape than when you started. But for Aristophanes it wasn’t violence at all, but
healing
—it’s no wonder his is such an endearing (and enduring) myth.
8.
Yet I think of Sean Penn’s answer, in
Milk
, to the question of whether men can reproduce: “No, but God knows we keep trying.”
9.
I suppose I shouldn’t say “of course”: there was actually a serious risk that the surgery would leave Warwick paralyzed. Somehow that didn’t seem to faze him.
10.
The Conestoga wagoners, for instance, taking six months to make the trip I cram into the evening before Thanksgiving, didn’t seem to have this problem.
11.
“You’re getting on my nerves,” we imagine him saying, suggestively. “Oh, you’re such a tase,” she, atingle, replies …
12.
As it turns out, “axonal diameter” (thicker neurons signal faster over long distances but take up more space) correlates with brain size for virtually all animals,
except
—as neurophysiologist Roberto Caminiti recently discovered—humans. Our axonal diameter is not significantly greater than chimpanzees’, despite our having larger brains. Evolution appears to have been willing to trade interhemispheric lags for a disproportionate increase in computational power.
One-Sided Conversations
Eager to book my room in Brighton, I did some quick digging around online and found an intriguing (and intriguingly named) place, just a stone’s throw from the Turing test, called “Motel Schmotel.” I called them up via Skype. Now, I don’t know if it was the spotty connection, or the woman’s low speaking volume, or the English accent, or what, but I could barely understand a word of what she was saying, and immediately found myself hanging on to the flow of the conversation for dear life:
____tel
.
Presumably, she’s just said something like “Hello, Motel Schmotel.” No reason not to plunge ahead with my request.
Uh, yeah, I’d like to check the availability for a single room?
____ong?
Probably “For how long?” but hard to know for sure. At any rate, the most likely thing she needs to know if I’m looking for a room is the duration, although that’s not helpful without the start date, so why don’t I nip that follow-up question (which I probably won’t hear anyway) in the bud and volunteer both:
Um, for four nights, starting on Saturday the fifth of September?
____[something with downward tone]____, sorry. We only____balcony____ninety pounds
.
And here I was lost. They didn’t have
something
, but apparently they had
something
else. Not clear how to proceed. (Ninety pounds total, or extra? Per night, or for the whole stay? I couldn’t do all the math in my head at once and figure out if I could afford the room.) So I hedged my bets and said the most utterly neutral, noncommittal thing I could think of:
