Maybe all Lefty needs is a little help.
Malfunctions and breakdowns showed them the way. Certain kinds of brain damage result in massive increases in certain types of creativity.16 Strokes provoke bursts of artistic creativity,[60] frontotemporal dementia supercharges some parts of the brain even as it compromises others.[61] Some autistics possess visual hyperacuity comparable to that of birds of prey, even though they’re stuck with the same human eyes as the rest of us.[62] Schizophrenics are immune to certain optical illusions.[63] At least some kinds of synesthesia confer cognitive advantages[64] (people who literally see time, arrayed about them in multicolored splendor, are twice as good as the rest of us at recalling events from their own personal timelines[65]). And—as Daniel Brüks reflects—brain damage is actually a prerequisite for basic rationality in certain types of decision-making.[66]
The Bicamerals set out to damage their brains, in very specific ways. They manipulated the expression of NR2B,[67] tweaked TRNP-1[68] production, used careful cancers to promote growth (their genes tagged for easy identification,[69] should anything go wrong) and increase neurosculptural degrees of freedom. Then they ruthlessly weeded those connections, pruned back the tangle into optimum, isolated islands of functionality.[70] They improved their pattern-matching skills to a degree almost inconceivable to mere baselines.
Such enhancements come at a cost.[71],[72] Bicamerals have lost the ability to communicate effectively across the cognitive-species divide. It’s not just that they’ve rewired their speech centers.[73] and are now using different parts of the brain to talk; they think now almost entirely in metaphor, in patterns that contain meaning even if they don’t, strictly speaking, exist.
Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one’s mind even at today’s rudimentary levels of connectivity. The “transactive memory system” called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now, those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.[74] And Google doesn’t come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.
Which is not to say that hive minds aren’t already a ubiquitous part Human society. You are a hive mind, always have been: a single coherent consciousness spread across two cerebral hemispheres, each of which—when isolated—can run its own stand-alone, conscious entity with its own thoughts, aesthetics, even religious beliefs.[75] The reverse also happens. A hemisphere forced to run solo when its partner is anaesthetised (preparatory to surgery, for instance) will manifest a different personality than the brain as a whole—but when those two hemispheres reconnect, that solo identity gets swallowed up by whatever dual-core persona runs on the whole organ.[16] Consciousness expands to fill the space available.
The Bicameral hive takes its lead from Krista and Tatiana Hogan, conjoined craniopagus twins whose brains are fused at the thalamus.[76] Among other things, the thalamus acts as a sensory relay; the twins share a common set of sensory inputs. Each sees through the other’s eyes. Tickle one, the other laughs. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they can share thoughts, and although they have distinct personalities each uses the word “I” when talking about the other twin.
All this resulting from fusion at a sensory relay. Suppose they were linked further up? A thought doesn’t know to stop and turn back when it reaches the corpus callosum. Why would it behave any differently if it encountered a callosum of a different sort, why should two minds linked by a sufficiently fat pipe be any more distinct than the halves of your own brain?
Sufficiently high bandwidth, therefore, would likely result in a single integrated consciousness across any number of platforms. Technologically, the links themselves might exploit so-called “ephatic coupling”[77] (in which direct synaptic stimulation is bypassed and neurons are induced to fire by diffuse electrical fields generated elsewhere in the brain). Synchrony is vitaclass="underline" unified conscious only exists when all parts fire together with a signal latency of a few hundred milliseconds, tops.[23],[24] Throttle that pipe and it should be possible to retain individuality while accessing memories and sensory data from your fellow nodes.[78]
I’ve kept the extent of Bicameral hive integration flexible, allowing internode connections to throttle up and down as the need arises—but whether those bandwidth-vs.-dialup decisions are made by the nodes themselves or by something more inclusive remains ambiguous. If you want some hint of the ramifications of total cognitive integration, I point you to the (apparently) catatonic Moksha Mind of the Dharmic Alliance.[79]
However the hive links up—whatever its degree of conscious coherence—it is a religious experience. Literally.
We know what rapture is: a glorious malfunction, a glitch in the part of the brain that keeps track of where the body ends and everything else begins.[80] When that boundary dissolves the mind feels connected to everything, feels literally at one with the universe. It’s an illusion, of course. Transcendence is experience, not insight. That’s not why Bicamerals feel the rapture.
They feel it because it’s an unavoidable side effect of belonging to a hive. Sharing sensory systems, linking minds one to another—such connections really do dissolve the boundaries between bodies. Bicameral spiritual rapture isn’t so much an illusion as a bandwidth meter. It still feels good, of course, which has its own implications. Bicams rap out when they hook up to solve problems. They actually get off on discovery; if baselines got those kind of rewards they wouldn’t need tenure.
The side effect has side effects, though. The activation of rapture-related neurocircuitry generates glossolalia even in baseline brains;[81],[82] given the modifications that Bicamerals use to enhance transcendence,[83],[84] the occasional bout of speaking in tongues is pretty much a given. Brüks should be thankful the hive doesn’t just scream all the time.
In hindsight, it is apparent that describing the Bicamerals as a religious order is a little misleading: the parts of the brain they’ve souped up simply overlap with the parts that kick in during religious neurobehavioral events, so the manifestations are similar. Whether that’s a distinction that makes a difference is left as an exercise for the reader.
The idea of God as a virus only really works if you buy into the burgeoning field of Digital physics.[85] Most of you probably know what that is: a family of models based on the premise that the universe is discrete and mathematic at its base, and that every event therein can therefore be thought of as a kind of computation. Digital physics comes in several flavours: the universe is a simulation running in a computer somewhere;[86],[87],[88] or the universe is a vast computer in its own right, where matter is hardware and physics is software and every flip of an electron is a calculation. In some versions matter itself is illusory, a literal instantiation of numbers.[89],[90] In others, reality is a hologram and the universe is empty inside;[91],[92],[93] the real action takes place way out on its two-dimensional boundary, and we are merely interferences patterns projected from the surface of a soap bubble into its interior. There’s no shortage of popular summaries of all this stuff, either online[94] or off.[95]
60
Helen Thomson, “Mindscapes: Stroke Turned Ex-con into Rhyming Painter - Health - 10 May 2013 - New Scientist,” 2013, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23523-mindscapes-stroke-turned-excon-into-rhyming-painter.html.
61
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62
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63
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67
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68
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69
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71
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72
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76
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77
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78
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84
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85
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86
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91
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