You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (28 page)

But actually, because of homuncular flexibility, any part of reality might just as well be a part of your body if you happen to hook up the software elements so that your brain can control it easily. Maybe if you wiggle your toes, the clouds in the sky will wiggle too. Then the clouds would start to feel like part of your body. All the items of experience become more fungible than in the physical world. And this leads to the revelatory experience.

The body and the rest of reality no longer have a prescribed boundary. So what are you at this point? You’re floating in there, as a center of experience. You notice you exist, because what else could be going on? I think of VR as a consciousness-noticing machine.

Remember the computer graphics in the movie
Terminator 2
that made it possible for the evil terminator to assume the form and visage of any person it encountered? Morphing—the on-screen transformation—violated the unwritten rules of what was allegedly possible to be seen, and in doing so provided a deep, wrenching pleasure somewhere in the back of the viewer’s brain. You could almost feel your neural machinery breaking apart and being glued back together.

Unfortunately, the effect has become a cliché. Nowadays, when you watch a television ad or a science fiction movie, an inner voice says, “Ho hum, just another morph.” However, there’s a video clip that I often show students and friends to remind them, and myself, of the transportive effects of anatomical transformation. This video is so shocking that most
viewers can’t process it the first time they see it—so they ask to see it again and again and again, until their mind has expanded enough to take it in.

The video was shot in 1997 by Roger Hanlon while he was scuba diving off Grand Cayman Island. Roger is a researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole; his specialty is the study of cephalopods, a family of sea creatures that include octopuses, squids, and cuttlefishes. The video is shot from Roger’s point of view as he swims up to examine an unremarkable rock covered in swaying algae.

Suddenly, astonishingly, one-third of the rock and a tangled mass of algae morphs and reveals itself for what it really is: the waving arms of a bright white octopus. Its cover blown, the creature squirts ink at Roger and shoots off into the distance—leaving Roger, and the video viewer, slack-jawed.

The star of this video,
Octopus vulgaris
, is one of a number of cephalopod species capable of morphing, including the mimic octopus and the giant Australian cuttlefish. The trick is so weird that one day I tagged along with Roger on one of his research voyages, just to make sure he wasn’t faking it with fancy computer graphics tricks. By then, I was hooked on cephalopods. My friends have had to adjust to my obsession; they’ve grown accustomed to my effusive rants about these creatures. As far as I’m concerned, cephalopods are the strangest smart creatures on Earth. They offer the best standing example of how truly different intelligent extraterrestrials (if they exist) might be from us, and they taunt us with clues about potential futures for our own species.

The raw brainpower of cephalopods seems to have more potential than the mammalian brain. Cephalopods can do all sorts of things, like think in 3-D and morph, which would be fabulous innate skills in a high-tech future. Tentacle-eye coordination ought to easily be a match for hand-eye coordination. From the point of view of body and brain, cephalopods are primed to evolve into the high-tech-tool-building overlords. By all rights, cephalopods should be running the show and we should be their pets.

What we have that they don’t have is neoteny. Our secret weapon is childhood.

Baby cephalopods must make their way on their own from the moment of birth. In fact, some of them have been observed reacting to
the world seen through their transparent eggs before they are born, based only on instinct. If people are at one extreme in a spectrum of neoteny, cephalopods are at the other.

Cephalopod males often do not live long after mating. There is no concept of parenting. While individual cephalopods can learn a great deal within a lifetime, they pass on nothing to future generations. Each generation begins afresh, a blank slate, taking in the strange world without guidance other than instincts bred into their genes.

If cephalopods had childhood, surely they would be running the Earth. This can be expressed in an equation, the only one I’ll present in this book:

Morphing in cephalopods works somewhat similarly to how it does in computer graphics. Two components are involved: a change in the image or texture visible on a shape’s surface, and a change in the underlying shape itself. The “pixels” in the skin of a cephalopod are organs called chromatophores. These can expand and contract quickly, and each is filled with a pigment of a particular color. When a nerve signal causes a red chromatophore to expand, the “pixel” turns red. A pattern of nerve firings causes a shifting image—an animation—to appear on the cephalopod’s skin. As for shapes, an octopus can quickly arrange its arms to form a wide variety of forms, such as a fish or a piece of coral, and can even raise welts on its skin to add texture.

Why morph? One reason is camouflage. (The octopus in the video is presumably trying to hide from Roger.) Another is dinner. One of Roger’s video clips shows a giant cuttlefish pursuing a crab. The cuttlefish is mostly soft-bodied; the crab is all armor. As the cuttlefish approaches, the medieval-looking crab snaps into a macho posture, waving its sharp claws at its foe’s vulnerable body.

The cuttlefish responds with a bizarre and ingenious psychedelic performance. Weird images, luxuriant colors, and successive waves of what look like undulating lightning bolts and filigree swim across its skin. The sight is so unbelievable that even the crab seems disoriented; its menacing gesture is replaced for an instant by another that seems to say,
“Huh?” In that moment the cuttlefish strikes between cracks in the armor. It uses art to hunt!

As a researcher who studies virtual reality, I can tell you exactly what emotion floods through me when I watch cephalopods morph: jealousy.

The problem is that in order to morph in virtual reality, humans must design morph-ready avatars in laborious detail in advance. Our software tools are not yet flexible enough to enable us, in virtual reality, to improvise ourselves into different forms.

In the world of sounds, we can be a little more spontaneous. We can make a wide variety of weird noises through our mouths, spontaneously and as fast as we think. That’s why we are able to use language.

But when it comes to visual communication, and other modalities such as smell and spontaneously enacted sculptural shapes that could be felt, we are hamstrung.

We
can
mime—and indeed when I give lectures on cephalopods I like to pretend to be the crab and the cuttlefish to illustrate the tale. (More than one student has pointed out that with my hair as it is, I am looking more and more like a cephalopod as time goes by.) We can learn to draw and paint, or use computer graphics design software, but we cannot generate images at the speed with which we can imagine them.

Suppose we had the ability to morph at will, as fast as we can think. What sort of language might that make possible? Would it be the same old conversation, or would we be able to “say” new things to one another?

For instance, instead of saying, “I’m hungry; let’s go crab hunting,” you might simulate your own transparency so your friends could see your empty stomach, or you might turn into a video game about crab hunting so you and your compatriots could get in a little practice before the actual hunt.

I call this possibility “post symbolic communication.” It can be a hard idea to think about, but I find it enormously exciting. It would not suggest an annihilation of language as we know it—symbolic communication would continue to exist—but it would give rise to a vivid expansion of meaning.

This is an extraordinary transformation that people might someday experience. We’d then have the option of cutting out the “middleman” of symbols and directly creating shared experience. A fluid kind of concreteness might turn out to be more expressive than abstraction.

In the domain of symbols, you might be able to express a quality like “redness.” In postsymbolic communication, you might come across a red bucket. Pull it over your head, and you discover that it is cavernous on the inside. Floating in there is
every
red thing: there are umbrellas, apples, rubies, and droplets of blood. The red within the bucket is not Plato’s eternal red. It is concrete. You can see for yourself what the objects have in common. It’s a new kind of concreteness that is as expressive as an abstract category.

This is perhaps a dry and academic-sounding example. I also don’t want to pretend I understand it completely. Fluid concreteness would be an entirely new expressive domain. It would require new tools, or instruments, so that people could achieve it.

I imagine a virtual saxophone-like instrument in virtual reality with which I can improvise both golden tarantulas and a bucket with all the red things. If I knew how to build it now, I would, but I don’t.

I consider it a fundamental unknown whether it is even possible to build such a tool in a way that would actually lift the improviser out of the world of symbols. Even if you used the concept of red in the course of creating the bucket of all red things, you wouldn’t have accomplished this goal.

I spend a lot of time on this problem. I am trying to create a new way to make software that escapes the boundaries of preexisting symbol systems. This is my phenotropic project.

The point of the project is to find a way of making software that rejects the idea of the protocol. Instead, each software module must use emergent generic pattern-recognition techniques—similar to the ones I described earlier, which can recognize faces—to connect with other modules. Phenotropic computing could potentially result in a kind of software that is less tangled and unpredictable, since there wouldn’t be protocol errors if there weren’t any protocols. It would also suggest a path to escaping the prison of predefined, locked-in ontologies like MIDI in human affairs.

The most important thing about postsymbolic communication is that I hope it demonstrates that a humanist softie like me can be as radical and ambitious as any cybernetic totalist in both science and technology, while still believing that people should be considered differently, embodying a special category.

For me, the prospect of an entirely different notion of communication is more thrilling than a construction like the Singularity. Any gadget, even a big one like the Singularity, gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us.