Cybernetics in SF Writing

My first-ever guest blog post is up at the Science in Science Fiction, Fact in Fantasy series on Dan Koboldt’s blog! If you want to learn some inside tips on how cybernetics really work — both modern and future-tech — you should follow that link and check it out!

Not only was it a lot of fun to work with Dan, we came to an amazing discovery together as we finalized the post. Once I move to St. Louis at the end of June, we will be working in the same building.

Go follow that link above to read my guest post, if you haven’t already! Because once you’ve read it, you’ll have enough context to understand these bonus bits of cyborg info. Consider this a reward for reading through from Dan Koboldt’s blog to mine!

  • Proprioception is what we call the sense of your body position in space. If your cyber-arm doesn’t have some way to deliver sensation (item #5 in my guest post), this is what you’ll lack. Life without proprioception is not impossible, but it is very hard. If you want to learn more about that life, there’s a 1997 BBC documentary about Ian Waterman, who lost all proprioception after an infection in 1971.
  • “Motor-control part of your brain” is a big but useful simplification. Your entire brain is involved in motor control, as implied by the last item in my guest post. There is one part of the brain that plays the biggest role in direct movement output: primary motor cortex, which controls movement kinematics and some kinds of skill learning, whereas other areas are more involved in motor plans, sequencing, preparation, etc.  However, primary motor cortex isn’t the only area that sends outputs down your spinal cord to your muscles. It’s the biggest source, but it still accounts for only ~40% of those outputs.
  • In the final part of my guest post, I boldly claimed that “cognitive” things like decision uncertainty end up reflected in “motor” things like hand trajectories. This also reveals a theory about the fundamental operation of the brain: we are always developing multiple plans for possible actions, and those plans exist in competition with each other until we select between them. Here is a scientific paper that reviews all these findings in lots more detail.
  • At the very end, I wrote, “Maybe controlling that second pair of arms is more like learning a second language.” Your brain handles things very differently when learned young, and language is just the most obvious example. (All child-learned languages involve a different part of your brain from adult-learned languages.) I’ve also just published a paper illustrating this in the motor system, but that would be a post of its own, if anyone’s interested.

One Sentence

Guess who won Steven Brust’s One-Sentence Worldbuilding Contest?

This writer!

For those of you too lazy to follow the link: I was one of the 5 winners1, with the sentence: “The legionnaires drove the sandgrouse from the oasis, and the spirits from their shrines, but they could not quiet the ghosts on the salt-flat wind.”

It’s the first sentence for a story I never wrote for a deadline in March 2014, so it’s been bouncing around in my head for a while now. I even wrote two different ending scenes for a challenge on the Other Worlds writing group. But that’s as far as the story ever got, beyond a couple-sentence outline in the back of my head. I suppose I should get around to writing the Tragic Salt Mummy story one of these days!

April 2015 update

I guess the biggest news in my personal writing world is that Fictionvale is closing. Sad news! I had such a great editorial experience there. They’re still planning to release the final issue (with my story in it), but there is no official release date yet. So it goes.

I had been pounding through a couple of stories (new and revised both) for the Hidden Youth anthology, but the submission deadline got delayed from 4/30 to 7/31, so I now have a little breathing room to work on some other stuff and return later to my suite of stories about 19th-century Hungarian Jews.

What other stuff? Well, right now it’s back to my Conquistador Dragons story for another revision pass at long last. I’m also working on a short AI Romance piece that I threw together in 4 days for a challenge on the Other Worlds writing group. It needs some serious revision and clarification, but it’s a beauty!

What else? Got a membership for MidAmericon2 next year in Kansas City, got a bunch of rejection letters; excited for 4th Street Fantasy and for my upcoming move to St. Louis. Lots of neuroscience, blah blah day job phantom pain cortical sensory remapping.

Brain Uploading Follow-Up

My last post lead to a fun follow-up conversation on twitter, so here it is for anyone who wants to read more of my thoughts on the topic. Edit: The conversation is embedded at the bottom of the post, but in case your attention span gets diverted by the next paragraph, here’s the link:

https://storify.com/bckinney/brain-uploading

Also, I made a tiny edit to my last post to clarify that I agree with the rest of Athena’s blog post. This whole shindig started with me saying “I think you’re all wrong!” on Twitter… a claim with a Twitter-worthy amount of thought behind it (i.e., none). I get quick on the “UR NEUROSCIENCE IS WRONG” trigger when I’m out there on the internet!

And now, embedded storify:

 

Mind Uploading

This afternoon, I saw a few posts on twitter on the topic of mind uploading, particularly via a link to this blog post by Athena Andreadis. Not sure why a 2011 post appeared on Twitter today, but it got me thinking. As a neuroscientist and SFF writer, I wanted to give my expert(?) opinion.

First off, do go read Athena’s post — it’s very well-written and reasoned. But one part of it concludes that (to paraphrase) “moving the brain into another container is intrinsically impossible,” and I disagree.

Here’s the key paragraph:

Recall that a particular mind is an emergent property (an artifact, if you prefer the term) of its specific brain – nothing more, but also nothing less. Unless the transfer of a mind retains the brain, there will be no continuity of consciousness. Regardless of what the post-transfer identity may think, the original mind with its associated brain and body will still die – and be aware of the death process. Furthermore, the newly minted person/ality will start diverging from the original the moment it gains consciousness. This is an excellent way to leave a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.

Absolutely true. Mind uploading is a vastly harder concept than 1970s computer scientists could have possibly imagined. Consciousness is a property of what the brain is doing. (Most likely for the evolutionary goals of error-checking and causality-determining, but that’s another blog post.) If you somehow copied a mind into a computer, it’d be just that: a copy. This has plenty of interesting implications, but it’s not really a consciousness transfer, and it’s certainly not going to make you immortal — at least, not the current “you.”

But wait…

Let’s now discuss the possible: in situ replacement [of brain cells].

Here’s the fun part. Do brain cells2 regrow during adult life? Generally no, except for a few narrow parts of the brain. There’s no turnover in our brain cells. But I think that a brain could function if the cells did get replaced. After all, we lose brain cells throughout adulthood, yet that doesn’t impinge on our identity. Those cells form new connections, new ways of accomplishing the same things. Some people with strokes or other localized brain damage can relearn the lost skills — for instance, my aunt lost her ability to speak due to a stoke in her 40s, but over the following couple of years she relearned it. She finds herself at a loss for words more often than most people, but you’d never know she had the stroke. The dead cells did not grow back, but the existing ones learned to pick up the slack. What if we put an artificial chunk of brain in there instead, over where the old stuff died?

We could do this at the single-cell level too. What if we could use microsurgery to replace a damaged nerve cell? Put in an artificial cell that has the same connections, responds to inputs in the same ways, etc.3 It’s not a natural neuron, but its functional role is the same: it does the same things. (We are nowhere near the tech level to build such artificial cells, let alone install them, but it’s certainly possible.) If there are any hiccups during the surgery process, it doesn’t matter: the new cell doesn’t have to exactly copy the current state of the old one. The networks will learn to incorporate that replacement cell, and make it a part of the ever-changing symphony of activity in the brain.4

Replace a cell or a small part of the brain. Then another. And another.5 Each replacement part is functionally equivalent to the old one, remember. Eventually, you get a whole brain made out of the new components. Wait, what are the new components made out of? It doesn’t matter. Maybe they’re culture-grown artificial neurons. Maybe they’re 24th-century biopolymers. Maybe they’re silicon.

And now that mind is running on an artificial device, without any interruption in conscious experience.6

As Athena notes, you certainly don’t want to cut the brain off from sensory and motor experience. The brain evolved to help us act adaptively, after all; a brain in a jar is a nonfunctional brain. But that just means you should put your computerized brain in an android body, or in a vat-grown human body, or — if you really want to call it “uploading” — in a software simulation of human sensory and motor feedback. These are all beyond modern science, but probably easier than getting the brain into silicon in the first place.

Therefore: while the “hardware”7 of the brain is critical to our consciousness, it may be possible to replace that hardware with the electronic.

In a couple centuries, anyways!

Victorious Thrones

So, that “piece for a Codex contest” I mentioned? I managed to win the contest! (See “2015 Codexian Idol” here.) I mean, there were only 4 completed stories in my section, but allow me my moment of pride nevertheless.

I’m very excited about this story. “The Empty Throne” centers around the Jewish experience in the aftermath of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution: about faith, progress, and (naturally) revolution. A few months ago I’d been digging into Jewish mythology in search of ideas, and a few stories really captured my interest, but I could never get a solid narrative out of those images. But with the help of the contest’s constraints, seeds, and deadlines, I have a beauty here (if I may be so modest). I’ve already given it a major round of revisions past the contest-winning version, and it’s out for some last critiques before I send it forth into the wild.

March 2015 update

Hello, blog! I have been way too busy cuddling up with rejection letters, buying a new house, and creating a piece for a Codex contest. What with creating a competitive short story from scratch in 4-6 weeks for that last one, I have been productive without a lot of distinct things to report!

I’m hoping to revise and submit 2-3 pieces for end-of-April deadlines (including the Long Hidden anthology), so enough of the blogging and back to the writing!

February 2015 Update

Time for an end-of-February update! Just a quick one, since my blog has been full of posts this week.

I have seven stories out under submission — all of them launched Jan 29 or later — and I think three of them are real winners. (Including my Viable Paradise Thursday story!) None of them are at fast markets, but I should hear about a few by the end of March.

I’m currently working on three pieces, all of which have me very excited:

  • “The Distant Shore,” my VP submission piece, has gotten another deep discussion and rethink, and I have lots of ideas! This is aside for the moment as I focus on…
  • A story I’m writing for a contest at Codex. I don’t want to give a title or anything too identifying, because it’s an anonymous contest and I don’t want any other Codexians to figure out which is mine!  This is my first totally-new piece in months, and it’s full of imagery and tone that I’ve been wanting to use for a long time, so I’m very excited to get back to it.
  • Just this afternoon I set aside “The Promise of Iron,” a major rewrite of the piece shortlisted for last year’s James White Award. It’s still a steampunk piece about Jews in 1850s Budapest, and now more awesome than ever. For a while it was my best story, and I think it’s regained that perch. I plan to send it to Hidden Youth in April.

And my first publication is due to appear in Fictionvale this month! Woo!

Leonard Nimoy: Life, Death, and Purpose

One of my college friends wrote the following about Leonard Nimoy’s death, and I wanted to save and share it here:

Today we’ve lost one of the quintessential icons of contemporary drama and of American Jewry.

You can use a fairy tale to start a conversation about our responsibilities to our fellow human beings. You can be beloved by those from another culture—another planet, another species—without sloughing off your own. And you can change that alien culture to value you and yours just a little bit more.

To boldly teach us that was his 83-year mission. He lived long, and we all prospered.

-Jesse Rosbrow

Chosen Ones and the Power of Love

In “Chosen One” plots, the protagonist has some born-in virtue or heritage that makes her the One Person Who Can Save Us. This is extraordinarily common in fantasy fiction, though it appears in SF as well (e.g. Jupiter Rising). In “Power of Love” plots, love has a spiritual, emotional, or mystical power that can directly affect the world. This is rampant in Hollywood (e.g. Interstellar); possibly less so in books, but that may be my reading tastes.

I see these two plot components — Power of Love and Chosen One — as “the same thing,” because they represent two facets of the same basic story choice. And that choice is pandering.

The common characteristic here is that success comes through no skill, training, or expertise. You could be revealed as the Descendent of the Hero! (You can worry about your training montage after that.) Maybe you love your Cylon enough to make a mixed-species baby possible! This allows the you, the reader, to more easily put yourself in the place of the hero — but it’s a cheap identification. Forget interesting characters, forget engaging stories, just make the hero able to succeed via things the reader could do.

This is why it’s pandering: it’s a lowest-common-denominator viewpoint. Who cares about education and expertise, if all you need is love? And this is also why it’s more common in movies than in books: because movies want to reach a wider audience, and make them leave the theater feeling proud and justified, as if they could’ve saved the world.

There are ways to write good plots with both of these elements. For example, I forgive Harry Potter a great deal for its ability to make a Power of Love plot work intelligently. But personally, I am tired of stories where Expertise Isn’t Necessary.

Edit: Note that pretty much any “instinct and intuition are correct, all the experts and scientists are wrong” storyline also falls under Power Of Love plot. Exact same thing, different flavor text.