February 28th cyborg to borg—cont’d, with michael chorost

METANOMICS:

CYBORG TO BORG CONTINUED WITH MICHAEL CHOROST

FEBRUARY 28, 2011

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ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Hi. I'm Robert Bloomfield, professor at Cornell University's

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Management at Cornell University. Welcome. This is Metanomics.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Welcome, everyone, to Metanomics. Our guest today is

Michael Chorost, who was on Metanomics last fall, talking about his book Re- Built,

and now we have him back to talk about his next book World Wide Mind, which was

published just recently and has been reviewed. I've seen publications of it in the

New York Times, for example, and I'm sure our very capable staff will get some links

into the chat so you can take a look at those, but we'll have our own conversation

about the book, with Michael Chorost. Michael, welcome back to Metanomics.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Thank you so much, Rob. Glad to be here.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: It's great to have you. Before we get into World Wide

Mind, I just want to catch readers up on your last book Rebuilt, the subtitle of that is

How Becoming Part Computer Made Me a Better Human. I think that that's a very

important subtext for people to understand as they jump into this book. Could you

give us a real quick version of the back story here, as you talk about it in Rebuilt?

MICHAEL CHOROST: I would be happy to do that. Rebuilt is a story me losing

what was left of my hearing, being completely deaf and getting cochlear implants.

It's about the process of learning how to hear all over again. The book is what I call a

scientific memoir because I talk not just about the personal experience, but about

the philosophical issues of having a body that actually has a computer in it and what

that is all about. So Rebuilt covered both of those angles, the cyborg angle, you

might say, and the deafness angle.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: As I was working on our last interview, I ended up

creating a working title for it From Cyborg to Borg because we started by talking

about your book Rebuilt, but you already had your book World Wide Mind well under

way. Now the subtitle to that one is The Coming Integration of Humans and

Machines just makes me think of the Borg, and, in fact, I saw in one of the later

chapters in the book, you even quote Three of Nine or someone like that, from The

Next Generation saying resistance is futile. Let's just jump into the title for starters.

What do you mean by a World Wide Mind?

MICHAEL CHOROST: The worldwide mind would be a consciousness that is

constituted of humans and machines working together. So a nice handy example is

Google's page-bank algorithm. So with Google, you have this incredibly powerful

search engine, but in itself it has no agency or identity, is purely constituted of the

collective decisions of everybody who is creating links on the web. So Google is, in a

sense, a kind of subjectivity that is constituted of us but yet stands apart from us. So

I see a worldwide mind as being an elaboration of that, a more sophisticated version

of what we now see Google doing.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: How much of this is a reframing of things that already

happen? My day job is to study stock markets and, much like Google, there are

institutions that combine the thoughts of many different people mediated through

their decisions to make buy and sell offers on assets. And what we get out of it

though turns out to be an incredibly powerful aggregation of information. Now if I

wanted to, I could think of that as an integration of humans and machines and use

different terms to describe it, but it's still the same stock market they had back in the

Netherlands hundreds of years ago when they brought us the tulip bubbles, for

those who know about those. So to what extent is this just a re-description of the

familiar, and what is it as you see as really being new?

MICHAEL CHOROST: It's a great question because the stock market is perhaps

the best example going, the collective entity emerging from human interaction. You

might call it an epiphenomenon, that it is its own seemingly independent entity that

arises out of many transactions of buying and selling, and yet it has its own behavior

that is not strictly predictable. So it's a really neat example.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: And let me say I'm just delighted to hear the word

epiphenomenon, which is one I don't hear enough since my undergraduate days.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Great word. Of course, it's from Hofstadter, from Gödel,

Escher, Bach, because he talked about it so brilliantly and so eloquently. And he

also talked about the idea of can intelligence emerge out of the aggregated workings

of entities, which, in themselves, are not mindful. So we talked about ant hives or

rather anthills and beehives as examples of epiphenomenal entities, where each

individual, each ant, each bee has no real brain. But you can speak of the hive as

having a mind of its own. So the word epiphenomenon I totally agree with you, it's

such a neat work.

So to come back to the question that you were asking, the place from my book goes

beyond these epiphenomenon that we have now is that I talk about the physical

integration of humans and machines, which is not something that we have now.

What we have now is people working at keyboards and iPhones and all that

collective activity becomes what we see in Google and in various other search

engines. What I'm talking about is a little bit different. So I start with the physical fact

of my own body, the fact that I have a cochlear implant in my head. And what that

means is that I have this firsthand knowledge where you can actually install a

computer into my nervous system and actually does useful work for me. My entire

auditory world is constructed by its stimulation of my auditory nerve. So my sensory

world is created by my integration with a computer. So that's my launching point in

World Wide Mind, basically saying this kind of thing is now possible.

Maybe I'll have to stop here for a moment, let you jump in if you want to pick up on

that before I go to the next step. I'd like to say also at this point I would love to

encourage discussion from the audience so--I'm not really familiar with Second Life

interface, but if anyone wants to put up a virtual hand and ask questions, I'd

encourage people to do so.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Speaking of integrating large groups of people, we do

have quite an active chat channel, and it not only allows people to converse within

Second Life from one region to another, which Second Life itself doesn't directly

support, but it also integrated with the web. So I know we have a number of viewers

on the web right now, and I'm watching the chat scroll by. I share with you that wish,

so those of you who are listening to this, please do provide your questions and

comments, and we'll work them into our conversation.

You talked about your cochlear implant as being much more than just holding a

phone in your hand or something like that and a much deeper level of integration. I

guess this is probably a good time for me to ask this question, which is: Toward the

beginning of the book, you tell the reader that you're going to be making predictions

that may seem very surprising and farfetched, but they're fictions, not lies, which

was a distinction I had not heard before. So could you talk a little bit about that

distinction?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Oh, it's such a wonderful distinction when I first read about it,

and I read about it in this chapter by a guy named Jerry Loeb who is a neural

engineer. He said that an example of a lie is predicting a perpetual motion machine

are faster than light travel, it's something that is not conceptually possible to coin to

the laws of physics as we know them. But a fiction would be some thing like a man

voyage to Jupiter. That is something that we know to be possible, even if we can't

actually do it now. So in the book, I try to tell fictions but not lies. I think that's an

important distinction.

The book is a thought experiment. The contribution I see my book is making is

making a new kind of conversation possible, where instead of talking about World

Wide Mind in a kind of science-fictional idea, with no idea of how it could actually be

realized, I actually suggest specific technologies that could be used to realize it,

specifically optogenetics. I'll talk a little bit more about optogenetics later, but the

basic point for now is that optogenetics is beginning to give scientists a way of

looking at individual thoughts and individual perceptions in the physical substrate of

the brain. And that's something that has not been possible before. It hasn't even

been possible dealing with functional [MRI?] or electrodes.

It gives us an access to these interior states of consciousness. Or, to put it another

way, it allows us to actually draw a direct connection between an internal experience

as seeing something and feeling something and to actually connect that up with a

specific activity of a group of neurons in the brain. And so that allows us to begin

talking about the possibility of building networks that allow information to be taken

out of one brain and transmitted to another brain, in order to allow that other brain to

know what the first brain is seeing or feeling or thinking or experiencing in a very

direct and visceral way.

And, for me, what I found so exciting in the book was simply that I'm able to say this

is now conceptually possible. This could be talked about, not as a fantasy, not as a

lie, but as something that we are beginning to actually being able to do.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: But still fiction. You have a great little vignette. Every

science book has to have a little section of film noire in it, I guess. You've got this

chapter early on of a drug bust that takes place in the future, where you have the

SWAT team that comes in basically is linked. They are able to sense in a very

minimal way, but a sufficient way, they are able to sense the impressions of the

other people on the team. So I don't know if that's something that we can do justice

to in an interview of this style. Would you want to just tell us about the parts of that

story, that really capture your imagination?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Sure. It was important to me to tell that fiction. I mean it's

fiction in that literal sense because I just knew I had to tell the reader pretty early in

the book, "This is what a worldwide mind may actually look like and actually feel

like." I knew that, until I did that, the book would just seem like philosophizing. So

here's a nice way I like to think about it. You know where your hand is, without

having to look at it. You know where your fingers are. It's that sense that we call

proprioception, that your fingers are always communicating with your brain in such a

way that your brain is aware of where they are without you having to look at them.

So you have that kind of intimate awareness of all these different parts of your body.

And without that awareness, your body could not be coordinated. You would not be

able to control your body in any meaningful sense.

So in the scenario, I basically tried to imagine a team of four people who have a

proprioceptive awareness of each other's bodies. So they know the sensations that

those other bodies are having, and they know where those bodies are in spatial

relationship to them, even though they can't see them. So they know that one

person is, say, 20 feet to their left in a different room and roughly parallel with them,

for example, instead of being 20 feet ahead of them. And, if something happens to

them, like if they hit something or someone hits them, they feel that body's sensation

as if it was a sensation that happened to their body. So they have that direct visceral

awareness of each other. That allows them to function as a team, with a speed and

a rapidity that we couldn't possibly accomplish today, with using words or using

video.

That was a very important part early in the book. I was just trying to say to the

reader, "This is kind of what it could look like." Now let me say, there's a couple

scenarios like that in the book, and they were among the hardest parts of the book

to write because it was like trying to imagine the impact of email before email. But

I'm still trying to say this is kind of what I'm envisioning.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Well, first of all, I should also say my hat is off to anyone

who can write fiction of any type. I write what I believe is nonfiction anyway, and it's

challenge enough, and I'm just no good at fiction whatsoever. So you got a couple

chapters of fiction in your book, and my hat is off to you, Michael. A couple things I'd

like to point out, and we also have some questions and comments from the

audience. I'd like to say that one of the things I appreciated in that drug-bust story is

that, while you're making the point right now of how effective this communication

could be, where one person could actually sense that another, I think in the story,

someone gets shot, and so the other people can feel it.

What I thought was so accurate was that really the communication was not

tremendously detailed. I think a lot of sci-fi that we read, it's people being able to

communicate entire sentences. These are really just very, very simple physical and

emotional impressions, which, to me, sounds much easier to pull off and much more

likely to be what we'd see first.

Let's see. We've got a couple comments here. Let me just scroll through for a

second. Here's a question from Nettie B, who's watching on the web, "What about

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Mythology?" Is that something that's familiar to you,

Michael?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Oh, yes. I actually wrote about it in some detail in my first

book. So you thinking of A Cyborg Manifesto, which is a very famous piece back in

the '80s.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yes, exactly. Can you maybe just, for those of us not that

familiar with it, please just tell us a little about it and your thoughts?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Okay. A Cyborg Manifesto, first of all, it's very easily

accessible on the web so you just pull it up and take a look at it. What Haraway is

doing is really very different from what I am doing. For Haraway, she was really

using the word cyborg as a metaphor for a kind of a political conditions, a political

condition of the fact that everyone has a very heterogeneous set of loyalties,

interests and affiliations and relationships and that we're all constituted these very

heterogeneous things. So she wasn't really talking about actual biomedical

technologies. The essay just doesn't touch on that.

So one of the things that I concluded in my first book was, it could, at best, be read

as a metaphorical discussion of the kind of body that I have. So it was just not

something that helped me very much in this second book because I was trying to

describe biomedical technology, without really getting into the kind of sociology

philosophy that Haraway was getting into. So I'd be happy to try to delve deeper into

that, but I just want to make clear that Haraway's discussion of cyborg is very

different from the way I discuss the concepts.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: It sounds like the way you're describing it is the way that I

think of it from, well, so at home we've been watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica

lately. So you've got the Cylons who are essentially an artificial life form with human

elements. So yes, this sounds much more of a metaphorical approach. Where is it

exactly that you see the similarities, the metaphor? So her story is a metaphorical

one, yours is a very concrete one. I guess I'm having a little trouble seeing the link

between them.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Yeah. I would not say that there's an especially important

link between those. But let's come back to what you were saying about the fact that

this SWAT team, their communication was images proprioceptive, emotional, and

my focus was on those kinds of communication. I don't know if that would

necessarily be easier to transmit from one brain to another than verbal

communication. But we already have an excellent technology for conveying verbal

communication: that's the telephone and IP over internet and all sorts of stuff, or

rather voiceover over IP.

MICHAEL CHOROST: So I was trying to think beyond the kinds of technologies we

have now, to imagine a new kind of technology. So to be really concrete about it

because I think until you get concrete, people don't really get what I mean by World

Wide Mind. So basically I explored this technology. In fact, it was rooted in a story I

wrote for Wired Magazine that was published in November 2009. It was about a

technology called optogenetics. So I visited labs at Stanford and MIT, and I learned

that--well, to back up just a step: right now you can very easily make neurons fire by

putting an electrode into the brain and sending a pulse of electricity into brain tissue,

and that will make all the neurons, around the electrode, fire. That's what my

cochlear implant does. It just puts electrodes right near auditory neurons in my inner

ear, force them to fire with a burst of electricity. So that technology has been around

for decades.

The problem with it is, it's several faults. First of all, it's not a very precise

technology. It makes all the neurons, around the electrode, fire, instead of just

particular neurons. Not only that, but there are many different kinds of neurons in

brain tissue, and so, if you fire all the neurons, you get all sorts of side effects as

neurons fire that you don't want to have firing. Finally, you can't inhibit neural firing.

You can't stop neurons from firing.

So electricity, which has been the reigning paradigm neural stimulation for decades,

its limitations are really becoming clear. They've been always clear, but their

limitations are becoming especially problematic now. So with optogenetics, you can

use a virus to insert genes into neurons that come from plants; I mean plants like

chlorophyll, or rather genes that control chlorophyll. You can give a neuron a gene

from a plant, which makes that neuron create proteins that will make the neuron fire

or stop firing when you shine a light on it.

On that first level, it allows you to control neurons just by shining a light on them.

Now that in itself would not be special because it's not so different from electricity.

What is special is that you can add things called promoters that will allow you to fire

only certain genetically distinct kinds of neurons. In other words, you can say, "When

I turn on this blue light, only the Purkinje neurons in this area of brain tissue are

going to fire and nothing else." That's a kind of specificity that we've never had

before.

I dug deeper into that to show in the book is becoming practical in the lab, identifying

the neurons that correspond to a specific perception or a specific memory and, in

theory, to make those neurons and only those neurons fire again. So that's the core

technology that allows me to talk about the fact that you could detect a specific

thought rather than a broad activation of a part of a brain, but a specific thought or

specific perception and then evoke a similar or rather an equivalent neuro pattern of

activity in a different brain that would evoke roughly the same kind of percept. So

that's the scientific basis of World Wide Mind, this technique of genetically modifying

neurons so that they can be controlled very precisely with light. It's a really

mind-blowing technology. It just astounded me when I started to learn about it.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: It's new to me, and I can see actually Jennette Forager,

our producer, helpfully pasted a link from Wikipedia into the chat channel, and so I

can see that it's quite new. The principle of optogenetics was discovered in 2002

and was selected as the Method of the Year in 2010, by Nature Methods, an

organization that I've never heard of.

MICHAEL CHOROST: That's right. It's allowing all sorts of experiments to be

conducted that were just simply not possible before. I want to be clear that I don't

say that, in a few years, we're going to be installing optogenetic hardware in

people's brains and allowing them to do this. The point that I was making was kind of

like the point that I made about Jules Verne's book, in 1865, From the Earth to the

Moon. He envisioned this trip from the earth to the moon almost exactly a hundred

years before one actually happened. And, of course, he didn't know about

technology like rocketry, but he got the basic science right so he was able to explain

very accurately how long such a trip would take, how fast a capsule would have to

move in order to get from the earth to the moon. He wrote about issues like

weightlessness and the need to bring along your own air supply. So I see World

Wide Mind as being a fiction in the same sense that Jules Verne's book was a fiction

back in 1865, and it outlined the conceptual basis of something that actually did

prove to be possible, with later technologies.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: We have a question from Latha Serevi. Latha, I hope I'm

pronouncing that correctly. The question refers to proprioception. So as you

mentioned that's the ability of people to recognize where their hand is and get that

information about their bodily position and tactile experiences. The question from

Latha is, "Our brains have very specific maps into which the proprioception

information is fed. Isn't it a problem that there's no map built in where other people's

positions can be put?

MICHAEL CHOROST: That's a wonderful question. And, in fact, we know that the

brain can very readily create new maps. So let me just give you some great

examples. I'm trying to remember a certain experiment that was done way back

when. But basically, if you tie two of the person's fingers together so that you can't

move those fingers independently, the brain will actually change its internal map of

the hand, in order to reflect the fact that those fingers have changed. It has been

shown that when a person learns a new musical instrument, the map of the brain

relating to the hand actually changes to reflect the new way in which that hand is

being used.

There's an even better example that relates to my own cochlear implant. If I think

about something, my cochlear implant is giving me neural stimulation in ways that

my brain had never experienced before. And some of that neural stimulation was

about pitch perception that I had never heard before. For example, I had a severe

hearing loss in the fairly high-frequency range. So just pulling a number out of a hat,

I would not be able to hear a pitch of, say, 8,000 hertz, which is a fairly high-pitched

note. If the implant is giving me information that corresponds to 8,000 hertz, that's a

tone that my brain has never heard before. But my brain was able to remap its

topography in my auditory cortex so that I was able to learn, okay, "This weird

sensation that I'm feeling, I started to learn to hear, Oh, this is what that particular

high pitch now sounds like." So I literally had to hear all over again.

The day that my implant was first turned on, I turned on the radio, and it sounded

like gibberish. I just had no idea what I was hearing. It sounded like language, but I

could not make out a single word. But over the next three months, six months really,

I started to learn how to pick out consonants, like, "Oh, this is what an S sounds like

now." An S is a relatively high-pitched sound. This is what a T sounds like. So my

brain actually remapped itself. There is all sorts of evidence in neural science the

brain not only can remap itself, but does so routinely. And it is always reconfiguring

its own topography, to make sense of new kinds of inputs.

So I'm actually very confident that, even if you gave your brain a very really unusual

bizarre kind of input, it would learn how to make sense of it, so long as the person

could get some kind of exterior correlative of it, that is, you'd have to learn to

practice. You'd have to see those people at first, to figure out, "Okay, when a person

is 20 feet to my left and they're 20 degrees ahead of me, this is what it feels like."

But once you learn that, that kind of knowledge becomes second nature to you.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: When I was a kid, I used to read these Time Life Science

Books. There is a whole series of them on just about everything that I could imagine

at the time. I believe it was in the book on the brain or maybe it was called the mind,

they talked about research where they would have people or animals wear goggles

that turned everything upside-down. And, after a couple days of wearing them,

people were just fine, and the animals. They seemed to be able to track everything.

Their brain reinterpreted the images.

In your book you talk about a more advanced version of this, which is, people seeing

with their tongues. I did see some research on this a few years ago, where, as I

understand it, there is a camera basically sensing visual stimuli and then translating

it into electrical stimuli that go right onto the tongue because someone is holding

some sort of lollipop-like thing on their tongue. So the brain is clearly very plastic.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Exactly. It's a wonderful example. I've read about those

experiments too. Those blind people who have this device in their tongue, they start

to report after awhile that they actually feel like they're seeing, even though they're

having sensations on their tongue. So yeah, the brain is incredibly flexible and is

able to make sense of new input, so long as it can match that input up with stuff that

it is getting from some other modality.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: We have a question from Tammy Nowotny, which may be

related to some of this because apparently Tammy notes the brain isn't all that

plastic. The question is, "How come the brain has so much trouble filtering out

tinnitus?" if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Yes. That's a very interesting question. Some people do

have trouble, other people don't. There's actually this technique called Tinnitus

Retraining--I forget. It's TRT, I think, like, Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, which does try

to teach people how to [habituate?] the tinnitus, and some people can do it, and

some people can't. But the question is well-taken because we do know that the brain

is not infinitely flexible.

We know, for example, that speakers of Japanese have great difficulty learning how

to hear the difference between an R and an L in English. Even after many years of

practice, they often still can't do it. So there are some limitations to this kind of

mapping. But nonetheless, we do know that the brain is able to make sense, to a

very large extent, as shown by the fact that a Japanese speaker can learn to

understand English, even if they can't make out the differences between all the

syllables.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Let's see. As long as we're talking about

fascinating technology that exists now, you were able to write out the name Amber,

using a mind-reading hat. Can you tell us about that?

MICHAEL CHOROST: That was really fun. This has been a wonderful thing that

happens to you when you go to neuroscience conferences. I went to this demo of

this cap one day, and they had this volunteer come up, put this incredibly bizarre

looking cap on, that looked like a swimsuit with colored Cheerios pasted all over it

and wires coming out of it, mad scientist stuff. And this guy was able to stare at a

screen and spell out, letter by letter, his own name. It looked like magic, just looking

at it from the outside, like, "Oh, my gosh! He's standing there, without saying

anything, and these letters appear on the screen. Wow! It really looks like this thing

is reading his mind."

The next day I was wandering around the exhibit area, and I came to the booth of

this company that had the cap. I said, "Wow! Let me try this." I put the cap on. I had

to take off my processors to do it, by the way, so he had to explain to me the whole

thing before I took my processors off. But it was like a magic trick. When you see it

on the stage, it's like, "Oh, my god! That looks just like magic," and then when you

find out how it's actually done, it's like, "Oh, I could have told you that."

The way this thing worked was the software had all the letters of the alphabet on the

screen, and they were dimmed out, and, one at a time, each letter would flash

brightly, and this would happen very rapidly so that, in less than a second, it would

cycle through all 26 letters of the alphabet. So that if you're looking just at the T, for

example, you see the T light up about once every second. What the cap was doing

was, it was looking for a particular type of brain activity called the P300 Evoked

Response Potential. Basically what that means is, where the brain recognizes a

visually novel stimulus, something new happening, it will reliably generate that wave.

It's called the P300 wave.

So all the cap was doing was waiting for a P300, and it was correlating that with the

letters that I was flashing. So if it saw that you brain generated a P300 every time

the T flashed, it guessed that you were looking at the T. And then you would put

the T on the screen. Then you moved your gaze to the next letter that you wanted to

quote/unquote "write," say, H. It was just looking for that P300 wave. It looked

impressive, and it was impressive. Okay, I'm not denigrating DG, it is impressive

technology, but the computer had no semantic understanding of what I was thinking.

It didn't know that I was trying to spell out a name. It didn't even understand that the

concepts of T and H and Q are distinct concepts. All it was doing was looking for a

ping coming out of the brain, and then it inferred that that meant a certain letter.

I talk about that technology in the early chapters to the book, to say this is the kind of

stuff that we can actually do now. We can actually do mind-reading in this very

restricted sense. It's authentic mind-reading, but it's obviously nowhere near

knowing what someone else is thinking and feeling. So I kind of bring that up in

order to set it aside, to say this is what we can do now, but that's not going to get us

to the kind of technology I’m envisioning in the book. That's where I start to explain

there are much more advanced technologies that let you see what individual sets of

neurons are doing, to start correlating those with feelings and thoughts, which is a

whole order of magnitude more complex that you can do with this kind of

mind-reading cap.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Let's move on to some of the social and psychological

and cultural implications of the World Wide Mind. I'd like to start with a question that

is the title of one of your chapters: Does Electronic Communication Make Us More

Lonely. What's your take on that?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Okay. Well, there has been a whole raft of books, in the past

couple of years, about the social impact of the internet. Actually, it's been the last

couple of decades. But I think the concern about this has really reached kind of a

fever pitch lately. We've seen books, like Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together,

where she marshals a raft of interview evidence. The teenagers who are really

compelled by texting are also spending less time in empathetic and one-on-one

interactions with people. They're actually becoming afraid of intimacy, in a very new

and really kind of alarming way.

There are books like Hamlet's BlackBerry, by William Powers, where he talks about

the almost addictive nature of the internet. One of his solutions is to institute internet

Sabbath, where he doesn't use the internet for one day out of the week, in order to

disconnect from it. So there's this whole culture of deep concern about what our

iPhones and BlackBerries and emails and texts are doing to us, in terms of

distracting us and making us less likely to engage in intimate, emotional and

thoughtful conversations with each others on a one-to-one basis. So there's this

whole background of concern, and that is something that I have to address in the

book, and I do, at length, because we are already addicted to our BlackBerries and

iPhones.

Worldwide mind technology like I'm describing would just make it a thousand times

worse because, if all of a sudden you have this technology in your head, where it's

immediately part of your experience, then who need reality, right? And, of course,

I'm aware that I'm saying to a Second Life audience. I'm sure that everybody in the

audience thinks about these issues and has their own set of concerns and reactions

to them. So I'm sure there'll be a bunch of questions.

MICHAEL CHOROST: But let me just say that, in the book, what I say is that the

answer is not, on the one hand, to stop using the internet. Nobody's going to do that.

Nor is the answer to be completely blasé about it, kind of like the Ray Kurzweil is,

"Oh, it's all very fine." But rather, I try to suggest that there may be a third way that,

instead of seeing the internet as something that detracts us from the lived life of the

body, to rather integrate it into our bodies so that online experience, the face-to-face

experience become really indistinguishable where they complement each other,

rather than take away from each other.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Just to flush this out with a couple stories. One I really

enjoyed in your book; I'm just reading from the section Does Electronic

Communication Make Us Lonely?, and you write, "In 1909, Sigmund Freud duly

observed that while the telephone let distant people communicate, it also let them be

distant. Nearly a hundred years later, the writer Adam Gopnik was appalled to find

his daughter's imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli, could only be reached on her toy cell

phone and was always too busy to play with her."

It's true. That is very much the world we live in now, and Gopnik goes on, you write,

"He suggested that modern technology has created a lifestyle in which people

constantly postpone emotionally authentic communication to a later time, which

never arrives. Like Charlie Ravioli, Gopnik wrote, we hop into taxis, and leave

messages on answering machines to avoid our acquaintances and find that we keep

missing our friends." So I thought that was a very interesting summary and one that

I'll want to track down.

You also tell a story. This was a major excerpt in the New York Times. I believe they

ended up publishing all of Chapter Four of your book, in which, under the heading

The Most Intimate Interface, you interweaved these two very different types of

interfaces. One is the wires that are connected to your neurons, as you've discussed

today, in your cochlear implant. And the other was just the sense of touch, of

touching other people and hugging them in a rather unusual and--what was it called.

I can't remember the name of that; it was like an encounter group or something like

that.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Yes. Well, that's a 1960s term. That's not a term they would

use today.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I read Gay Talese or whatever his name was, a long time

ago. Clearly, my interpretation anyway of that chapter in the context of your larger

point was that, in part, just there is right now no replacement for the human touch,

no substitute for the human touch. But then also, the notion that maybe in the future,

with these very, very intimate interfaces, like the cochlear implant, that there will be

a substitute. Am I misreading you?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Well, you're telling part of the story, but not the whole story.

Yeah, some people are trying to develop these _____ interfaces which would trans

similacrum someone else's touch and actually try to head off that kind of technology

or rather head off the assumption that such a technology would be complete, but

pointing out that communication is not just about touch, but it's also about smell and

eye contact, pheromones and a whole range of things. So you can't really just take

one part of it and assume it's going to do the job for everything else.

But what you say does get me into what's really, I think, the most controversial part

of the book, and it was the part the New York Times was less complimentary about

than the rest of the book. I think the New York Times misunderstood what I was

trying to do. So what I was trying to do in the book is to say, "Well, the kind of

technology I'm talking about, indeed the kind of technology we have now in

BlackBerries and iPhones, is leading us toward a day high-tech, low-touch kind of

world. This is what people are so concerned about--Sherry Turkle, Adam Gopnik, a

lot of people.

In the book I counteracted that or I counterbalanced it by telling a story about a

high-touch, low-tech existence. I went to these workshops in northern California.

Some people might call them encounter groups, and these kind of things do have a

history. These do go back to the '60s and the '70s. I aimed to write about them in a

way in which made them understandable, to say that, in a world where we are so

afraid of losing touch with each other, we can't just theorize about it. And, in

particular, I myself couldn't just theorize about it because I was also technology

addicted and still am really, and I'm also a deaf person who has to work harder than

most people to maintain that sense of connection with another person, just because

I have to work harder to hear.

It's harder for me to feel connected to a group because it's harder for me to hear

people in a group. So I talk about in the book the fact that I've just turned 40 and

never been loved, and I have really struggled with trying to establish intimacy and to

learn how to listen to other people. So I took the risk of going to one of these groups.

But, for me, it was an enormously positive experience. It was very challenging. It

was the kind of thing that not everyone would be comfortable with. But, for me, it

was the exact kind of training I needed to learn to become more comfortable with my

own body, to learn to become more comfortable interacting with other people.

I'll tell you just one little vignette. There's one exercise that we did, where we just

looked into someone else's eyes. Now that sounds all hippy-dippy, right? But it's

actually very profound to do and profound because it's difficult. It's challenging. It

pushes your buttons. You have to overcome your own desire to hide. But hiding is

exactly what our civilization gives us enormous amount of practice in doing. So I

want to counter pose a radical example of refusing to hide and am not hiding, and

I'm learning not to hide.

So these workshops were low tech in the sense that there was no tech. There wasn't

even clothing. It was a clothing-optional environment. Not a sexual environment.

Simply a clothing-optional environment. And the reason for that was very well

thought out because when you don't even have that technology of clothing, you

have to confront your own elemental being. And your own elemental being I found

was the hardest to confront, not so much other people.

So it's a very challenging part of the book, and it was extremely difficult for me to

write because I wanted to make it blend into the overall argument that I was trying to

make. But I think it's an absolutely crucial point to make. The point can really be

boiled down to this: You have to teach people how to communicate with other

people. You can't just assume that they're going to do it on their own and especially

not now when they are distracted by all sorts of gadgets that are presenting them

with the quick allure of easy and addictive textual and auditory and visual

communication.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Continuing with the theme of the cultural implications, you

refer in a later chapter to the contagion that we see of things like habits and

individual traits. So we've seen things like obesity, happiness smoking, many of

these things tend to appear, I guess, to researchers nowadays as being contagious

in the same way that the cold or the flu might be. How do you integrate that

observation into the coming integration and worldwide mind that you envision?

MICHAEL CHOROST: That book by Christakis and Fowler and a title, Connected.

That book really had a profound impact on my thinking. And this research got a lot of

attention when it started to surface two or three years ago. For example, Christakis

and Fowler did these analyses of very large groups, and they started to find things

like, if a friend of a friend of yours is overweight, that increases your statistical

likelihood of being overweight by 25 percent. It's not so surprising if you're

overweight, if just a friend of yours is overweight, because you can see all sorts of

possible causal connections there. But it is surprising if someone whom you don't

know and have never met when their status has a statistical impact on your status.

So the same rule holds true for other things. If you are unhappy or rather if a friend

of a friend of yours is unhappy, your odds of being unhappy are 25 percent larger.

Okay? So their research started to show where it raised the possibility that there are

these threads of communication among us, of which we are really totally consciously

completely unaware. That we simply have no idea that these things are going on,

but yet have a profound impact on our own physical health, on our emotional health.

So we are really much more worldwide minded than we realize. So this kind of

research is going to show these really surprising and fascinating connections.

What I say is that we're really already kind of a worldwide mind. It's just that we're

wound with low bandwidth so we have a relatively limited ability to communicate with

a large number of people. So I say, well, these technologies that I'm imagining as

fictions could allow us to become a real worldwide mind in the sense that we would

interact so richly and so densely that epiphenomenonal consciousness would

emerge, of which we have no conception, that we might not even be able to

recognize what's happening.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: This takes me to another heading of a section in your

book: The Future of Individuality. This has been focusing so much on the unusual

connections that technology can afford us, but what does this mean for the future of

the individual?

MICHAEL CHOROST: This comes back to the Borgs, which you brought up at the

very beginning of this discussion. That's kind of the archetypal nightmare of the

worldwide mind, this fear that technology will turn us all into these emotionless

drones. And so the Borg are really giving voice to this fear which has been

expressed by Sherry Turkle and by books like Hamlet's BlackBerry and so forth. I

think everybody is aware of this. Sherry Turkle tells these heartbreaking stories of

the fact that teenagers get into their parents' car, they're being picked up from the

soccer game, and they have to wait for their parents to stop typing away on their

BlackBerry before they can start talking. So there is this fear that technology is

depersonalizing us.

I make an argument that it really can be just the other way around, that actually

_____ develops, technology's connection make us more human. I was inspired there

by a philosopher named Teilhard de Chardin. I'm not quite exactly sure how the

name is pronounced. I need to look it up a little more closely. He's a very interesting

guy because he was both a Catholic priest and a paleontologist. He was

simultaneously part of a Catholic church that was very suspicious of evolution, and,

at the same time he was a scientist whose research was very much about the

evolutionary process. So he wrote this little visionary book titled The Phenomenon

of Man, which the church forbade him to publish while he was alive. It came out only

after his death. He made the argument that humanity is evolving as a whole and that

that evolution actually enhances individual consciousness at every step of the way,

rather than diminishing it.

One of the parts of the book I try to talk about what that would be like. What does

that mean to become part of a collective but still even more individual, even more of

your own self than you are now. That's a part of the book that I would have liked to

work on for another six months before letting the book out, but I had a deadline to

meet. But I suggested that one analogy is just like being a member of a symphony.

You do not call the violinist diminished because she is contributing to a larger whole,

which is really a transpersonal whole. She's rather realizing her own individuality,

although more intensely becoming a part of this work of art.

I suggested a number of scenarios of how people could brainstorm much more

effectively in a worldwide mind, by sensing each other's feelings of excitement when

ideas are starting to build, and that would give a collective a sense of which ideas

are important and worth pursuing, as opposed to ideas which are not important. I

make the analogy here with António Damásio's books. António Damásio has been

really instrumentally in showing that a lot of what we think of as rational cognition is

really very much based on emotion.

So people who have brain damage that doesn't allow them access to their feelings,

you might think that would make them even more socially effective thinkers, but, in

fact, they're almost completely crippled because they don't have feelings that tell

them what's important. They don't get that sense of excitement saying, "This is

important. This is what I need to focus on." So they become completely fragmented,

completely scattered. They're unable to focus on anything. I suggest that the ability

to share emotions and perceptions might actually allow a kind of higher cognition in

which everybody participates more fully, without becoming depersonalized.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Great. Actually, I didn't realize it, we're to the top of

the hour. I guess we do have a minute, if there's one big takeaway that you'd like to

leave people with, now would be the time.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Well, I would say this book is really about feelings. The

subtitle I don't feel really expresses what the book is about, and, in fact, I had a very

long debate with the publisher about the subtitle. I would have liked to have called it

The Coming Integration of Humanity and Machines: A Love Story because the book

really is a love story. It's a love story of how I met my wife, and that whole story gets

told in the book. So my wife is actually a major character as the book unfolds. And

it's also a love story of what humanity could become, of how it could become a

better, more empathetic, more compassionate, more feeling-oriented collective than

it is now.

So the book is really kind of an ode to the future that I would like to see happen. I

actually talk about these workshops I went to. It's feeling more futuristic to me and

the exotic technologies that I write about as a science writer. So I write for Wired. I

write books on neurotechnology, so I'm no stranger to seeing these incredibly exotic

futuristic technologies. What's in my head is incredibly exotic and futuristic, but I say

in my book that this kind of connected compassionate kind of civilization, to me, is

the most exciting and futuristic possibility of all.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. Great. I would like to leave people with one of my

favorite quotes from the book, where you were comparing the complexity of the

human brain and a galaxy, and you point out that, in many ways, although the

galaxy seems so large and makes us feel so small and irrelevant, in fact, it isn't clear

that the balance goes that way and that the brain is, in many ways, more impressive

than the galaxy. And then here's the quote from the book, "The proof is that when

you say, 'Suddenly I feel so small,' the galaxy has nothing to say back." So I really

enjoyed that quote. I enjoyed our conversation.

So, Michael Chorost, thanks for coming back and joining us again. We've been

discussing, for the most part, the book World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of

Humans and Machines. I'm sorry you lost your battle with the publisher to have the

subtitle be a love story. I'd also like to point viewers to Michael's prior book Rebuilt:

How Becoming Part Computer Made Me a Better Human. And you can see our

discussion of that book in the Metanomics archives.

So again, thank you for joining us, Michael. Thank you for joining us, those of you in

the audience. Some great questions today. Sorry we didn't get to all of them. This is

Rob Bloomfield signing off for Metanomics. Bye bye.

Document: cor1096.doc
Transcribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com

February 28th cyborg to borg—cont’d, with michael chorost

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