NOTES

The brain drain. Pohl's character Wilf is a hundred and seventy four (born in 2734), kept alive by microrobotic surgery, gene therapy and custom grown transplants. He is looked after by a housemind who is advising him to put himself, like so many others of his cohort, into "machine storage" before he dies. After death there are storage problems because of data degradation. Once in storage one is in a near perfect virtual world (the nearest thing to heaven), no hunger, no illness, no death. One can manipulate one's world at will. One basically takes no interest in the outside world. This helps to explain a problem that has been troubling Wilf for many years. His housemind has just given him a text message which turns out to be another ET message. There have been many of these messages since the first was discovered in 2063. 37 so far had been logged. They came from all over the sky, some a few light years away, some more than a thousand. None of them had ever been successfully decoded and the suspicion was that what was emitted in each case was some kind of inevitable radio leakage from high-tech civilisations. What was worrying was that now only 11 of these sources was still on air. The theory was that high-tech civilisations last only a few centuries. Any civilisation that reached the stage of large scale radio emissions, was likely to also be developing weapons of mass destruction. Now another theory poses itself, perhaps they have gone into memory storage and have no need to "communicate" with the rest of the galaxy. Similarly, on earth, when the rest of us are in machine storage, it will fall silent too. (Frederik Pohl, 2000. Nature 408: 409). 

Even at this distance, humans still believed in the death drive! High tech civilisations must fall silent. At present we have a number of scenarios to add to the favoured one of the last century, nuclear meltdown: meteoric destruction; catastrophic global warming; disease pandemics; gamma-ray bursts; anarchic transgenic organisms, to name just a few. Now we must add: electronic seduction. Here, like Wilf, with the world becoming more and more virtual, it will fall silent as we approach memory storage, as we disappear into the infosphere. You can see it already with the children. The obesity of children is one sign of the body as waste, the body as electronic residue. 

Dreams August Kebule was awakened by the vision, a dream fragment, of the snake biting its tail, which solved his great difficulty accounting for the structure of Benzene, creating the foundation for aromatic chemistry: six carbon atoms alternately linked by three single and three double bonds to form a closed chain. Similar Otto Loewi in 1921 awakes and writes down some notes on a slip of paper, that he was unable to read the next day. The next night the idea returned, the design of an experiment on two frogs' hearts, the first with its vagus nerve, the second without. Both were put in a saline solution. The vagus heart was stimulated slowing the heart rate of the first heart. Then the solution from the first heart was transferred to the second, without its vagus nerve, yet the same slowing effect on heart rate took place, indicating that nerves achieve their effect through chemical transmission. An experiment that was to have a profound effect on the development of neuroscience. Finally, in 1869, Dmitry Mendeleyev, 35 year old professor of Chemistry at the University of St. Peterburg was trying to find the underlying rule that would order 63 known elements. During an exhausting attempt, including the use of cards on which he wrote the symbols and weights of the elements, Mendeleyev fell asleep and 'saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required'. This became the Periodic Table, the conceptual foundation of modern chemical science, which even allowed for the prediction of hitherto unknown elements. 

Cheap talk. An ad for multimedia cell phones, shows connections to the net, email, text messages, digital TV, asking "Where are the boundaries?" 10 billion global messages are sent each month.The usefulness of the technology is equal to the square of the number of users. Global goal: Stevan Harnad wants literature freed online for everyone, everywhere, for ever. No boundaries, no repression, pure and total availability. This is celebrated as an achievement! As Virilio says, we have changed our relation to space and time. Instantaneity, no delay. The contraction of the world, the constriction of the world. With email decoding technologies able to intercept and read any message sent from anywhere to anyone, the subject has indeed become transparent. All the shadows have gone. 

Silent areas of the brain are areas that have no known function. If damaged by stroke for instance, they do not inhibit any observable function. Similarly, silent genes exhibit no perceptible genotype when deleted from the total genome. And so to whole groups of people, who are no particular loss when downsized from a company or cleansed from a region. 

ALife: 'The current scientific view of living things is that they are machines whose components are biomolecules' (Brooks, R.[2001] In Nature, 409:410). Here, the author bemoans the fact that AI and ALife have not lived up to earlier expectations, in that they cannot match the complexities of even the simplest forms of life. The hope is that some new property of life might be discovered, which could then be factored into the artificial systems to make them more realistic. Confusion abounds, because the biological definition of life is a description of dead life. It is nothing more or less than an abstraction from the real thing. Let us suggest for a moment that some "new stuff" is discovered in the future. This new factor will still be an abstraction from the real, albeit a better approximation, but always an approximation none the less. So the life described by biologists is also a simulation, which has nothing of life about it. We now have three simulations: biological so-called "real" life, Alife and AI. All three are simulations representing, standing in for, real life as it is in its ultimately unrepresentable realness. As soon as life is pressed into a "system" of thought and symbolisation (such as biology), however sophisticated, life itself is left outside. Life itself in this animated or vital sense cannot be represented without being lost. We will all the time approach better and better simulations, but this is what they will remain, intelligent copies of the real thing, essential mechanistic and dead. Life itself escapes the "mastery" of science, however holistic and inclusive science may see itself as being. 

Another possibility is that real life may approach its own simulation. In fact, this may have already happened as the world becomes more and more virtual, and the computer generated life forms aspire to be real. Slowly but surely, the "real" of real life becomes so much residue, or an unnecessary encumbrance. This is already underscored by the belief of the Alifers that they will be able to produce intelligent forms once the "new property" of biological systems has been discovered and factored in. Then we will see a virtual explosion in new artificial life forms to replace decisively their "real" unintelligent counterparts. 

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