Scenario: Human Mind Project 2
From Future
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[edit] Page 2 (Previous Page: Scenario: Human Mind Project)
[edit] The Initiation
Arousal's Tip, the first major breakthrough in our Human Mind Project, paved the way for the next step, during which several more discoveries would be made, each step bringing us closer and closer to the final goal.
That day, before we returned to our homes, Andarin told us to meet exactly one week from then, at a particular site labeled with nothing but GPS coordinates. We were to arrive at that place--somewhere in China's Himalayas--and would then "enter Andarin's Mansion". But when I quickly glanced on the map (projected by Wikipedia), I saw nothing but barren mountains covered perpetually in ice. Certainly Andarin would not make this place his mansion?
When Andarin saw me gazing at the map, I said, "I can't find it on the map..."
Andarin: Trust me, it's there."
And so it was that we gathered in the middle of China's Mustang Province, what was once the highest-situated kingdom in the world and which had now been united with the Republic of China, whose president was the most powerful man in the world. Little did we know, that there was indeed something hidden in that barren cold wasteland.
[edit] What We Saw at Mustang
What existed at Mustang, when we got there the next week, was--Oh well, I should first tell you how we got there. Mustang borders Tibet and Nepal, and was considered the Lost Kingdom, the highest kingdom in the world, until its unification with China in the late 2030's. To get to the site Andarin called for, we had to go via rocket-plane. It seemed all so very empty, mountain after valley after mountain. And it was all covered in ice. The place was barren... or so we thought.
When we got there as a group, we waited. We did not know if Andarin was tricking us, though we thought that he wouldn't. Maybe he had some secret that he had to show us, we thought. So we stayed, and about half an hour later when the final member of us arrived suddenly Andarin seemed to appear. Of course, he did not just appear, but we only then saw him, so bored were we of the desolate wasteland and the frosty cold. We asked where Andarin came from, since we did not hear the high shriek of any rocket-planes just then.
Andarin seemed to press a certain invisible keypad in the middle of the air, and suddenly a door-sized panel seemed to scintillate, revealing an atrium within. At this point we must have all thought, we were so stupid! We had been just standing here for half an hour waiting, and now Andarin was out to prove our stupidity by emerging from a cloaked building only a few feet away. We knew then that Andarin was sincerely disappointed with our group. Not only had we made one advancement in our project over the past eight years, but we had not discovered this secret.
As we entered the atrium, Andarin boomed in his rather loud voice: "I'm very disappointed with you so-called experts. Every other project that we've been working on has yielded fruit and have therefore been moved to my mansion here. Your group is the largest in number of people, yet the last group to enter my confidence. Even the one contribution you did manage to obtain was possible only through my quick thinking. You have yet to prove yourselves."
Beyond the atrium, we finally realized the size of Andarin's mansion. It was a biosphere of its own--undoubtedly, the colonization of space was on his agenda--and the immense complex hosted various buildings within them. Each building was devoted to one of his projects and was a good-sized lab. The technology here was incredible, and in the center of the entire facility loomed Andarin's secret fusion power plant, capable of sustaining all this activity. The ground beneath us sounded hollow from our steps, and I quickly surmised from what I saw that it was where light bulbs were facilitating plant synthesis for the foods that supported this community.
Here was the greatest community of experts in all fields combined, all of them working under the sole direction of Andarin. To a doctor of philosophy, it was the most that one could wish for. It was--utopia.
[edit] Biosphere V
What Andarin had constructed was, in effect, the fifth biosphere (after the Earth and three failed ones), and although it was supposed to be separate from the rest of the world, we were still able to enter and exit. It it was one of the world's largest research institutions, and it was entirely funded by Andarin's book sales.
We were introduced to our research facility, one of many buildings inside Biosphere V. Technology had indeed increased; there were control panels on every wall, robots performing every task, and eye jewels worn by every person. These people subvocalized to their eye jewels and their surroundings, and it was immediately apparent that our project, should it succeed, result in their liberation from endlessly forming their thoughts--which were becoming ever more complex through the last decades--into words that simply could not fully represent what they had to say.
We were served a very satisfactory meal by several robots after touring our research facility. We were not shown any of the other facilities; Andarin clearly thought that it was not our business to meddle in other researchers' affairs. During lunch, Andarin spoke from his seat:
"You may wonder why I had not brought you here much earlier, as doing so would have certainly made it faster for you to perform your duty, and our breakthrough may have come quite some time earlier. I reply to you that this is because of my precautions. I knew, as you all now know in retrospect, that some of the people that had been among you would try to sabotage the research project, but would be incapable of waiting more than a few years, and thus by doing what I have done I have eradicated the threat that they pose. Now, only a few of us would wish to harm any of my projects. I have placed so much at risk with Biosphere V that I have taken the precautions necessary to reduce that risk as much as possible."
And at that time, we were once again amazed at Andarin's talent for manipulation. We were even more unhappy with the progress we had made, and were even more determined to prove that Andarin was wrong. We went to work after lunch. As a futurologist, I had very little to commit to the project, but I predicted in my periodically updated Future Wikia (online open-source project that had by then greatly expanded into a major place of collaboration of futurologists from all over the world, of which I was one of them) that in six years--2044--the human mind project would be complete. It was a challenge to our group, as Andarin had clearly stated that he did not expect the project to finish until 2045. Our unit members took up the challenge eagerly. They hated to be viewed as incapable by Andarin, who had suddenly become the one person to whom everyone wanted to prove their ability.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty. In retrospect, we knew that what Andarin had said and done all the while was to goad us to work harder so that we could indeed complete the project faster. We thought we had understood Andarin now, after so many times of believing this. Yet we were still mistaken. Andarin was, for the moment, unfathomable.
[edit] No Pain, Gain
It was soon apparent from our visits to Biosphere V that there was still much work to do. Arousal's Tip was but the first step in a long journey...into the murky depths of the mind. The common refrain we adopted was "No pain, no gain". That is, until we encountered Andarin again and someone accidentally let loose this motto. Andarin immediately became genuinely annoyed. Said he:
"No pain, gain, you fool! Don't you so-called Doctors of Philosophy ever outgrow your outdated slogans? Everything I've done that has gotten me to where I am now had no pain in it. If you stick to that motto you will simply slow yourself down."
We were very annoyed with Andarin's condescension, and thought to ourselves, we shall not let him say that of us. Yet we had no idea of what to do exactly until one of the members of the Theophilus Group suddenly made the connection between Andarin's statement and a possible breakthrough.
She explained it like this: Let's use genetic engineering capabilities developed over the last two decades to change mice so that they would feel no pain. One major difference that this action would cause would be to remove the feedback loop that pain could cause, because the mice had never before had any pain and therefore would not anticipate it (in the human sense, we anticipate pain by flinching and twitching). This feedback loop could not yet be modeled to any existing algorithm and thus would prove to be troublesome unless we could somehow eradicate it. Pain's Second Tip, as we called it, was the answer.
Over the next few weeks the biologists in our unit produced a certain gene fragment that could be injected into the mice that they had recently obtained (from another research facility in Biosphere V, which meant that some remotely similar project was underway under Andarin's command). A few minutes of communication, and the one who had introduced Pain's Second Tip was given a few crude nanorobots to deliver the DNA. The mouse embryos developed, over the period of several weeks, into full-grown adult mice who knew no pain. Before long, we were ready for the next step forward.
[edit] Titan
Titan was the newer version of Colossus, combining several times the processing and data obtainment ability of the old model with the helmet-sized structure of the latter. Titan was fully nanotechnological, and it had been constructed not long before our introduction to Biosphere V by the nanotechnology team, which had come here earlier. The eight years had wrought dramatic changes in size and scale. Unlike Colossus, which required that we roll the subject on a stretcher into the machine, Titan could be strapped on over the head. It used greatly reduced energy for greatly enhanced data and clarity concerning the processing of the mind. What power it needed for one scan could be provided by the nearby fusion power plant once every six hours. Therefore, while the Theophilus Group was busy developing new techniques and strategies, the diligent engineers tested a person's mind twice every day.
By the time the Pain's Second Tip strategy was ready for testing, the engineers had already obtained scans on twice as many patients as they had studied over the past eight years.
[edit] Pain's Second Tip
Unlike the first, this one was successful. After testing the mice with Titan, the researchers were able to formulate a new theory, called the Theory of Feedback. As with the other concepts that would be established during the course of this project, this theory had been expected several years ago, but only through interpreting the data with various algorithms through a seemingly endless trial-and-error method could the computer programmers in our unit devise a proper algorithm that could compensate for the basics of the process of feedback.
Feedback can be explained as a cycle of thoughts leading to other thoughts, much like the idea of eternity and circular logic. It is important in its two basic forms, positive feedback such as during childbirth and negative-feedback such as maintainence of balance. Yet these were the most simplistic of feedback loops, and the problem in this section was the deduction of what the feedback cycles were like. The loops were not simply affirmative nor negative; indeed, much of the human mind's capability to reason and process data is based off the feedback loops' diversity. So many different apparent forms exist that simple generalizations would fail.
By comparing the sequences of neural activity in individual cells in the brain between ordinary mice and the painless mice, we were able to gradually understand the influence of pain in the feedback loops. The one difficulty we came up against was that we did not know if the lack of pain also resulted in some other change in the DNA which could result in different phenotypes in the individuals. Realizing that the entire project was based on guesswork, we did indeed make great progress with this advancement.
[edit] Pathway's Key
Inspired by Pain's Second Tip, another member of the Theophilus Group devised another strategy. It involved using various pathways in the neuron to predict the path that neural impulses flow. Up to this point in our project, we had some basic understanding of how the mind worked, and of how the neurons worked. However, we did not comprehend the complexity of the neuron. It seemed that the signals were not transmitted in a straight line from axon to dendrite to axon to dendrite. In fact, seemingly similar impulses in one neuron would be treated differently, and there seemed to be no explanation for this phenomenon. It was something never before encountered in our understanding and interpretation of the workings of the mind.
The biologists now concentrated on working with various pathways. First, they isolated neural cells and developed them in microculture plates. The objective was to produce a small group of neural cells that could send signals in rather reliable patterns. In doing so, the signals could be traced back to various, limited factors, which could then be assembled into a primieval algorithm. To some of us, it may have seemed a step backward. After all, we had been working on the human mind up to only a few months ago. Then we had worked on mice. Now, the focus of our attention was just a few neurons.
Yet this was the path that we had to take, because now the pathways were predictable. Due to our work in this sub-project, we were able to enhance the feedback loops. Only by repeated trials involving application of the same stimulus were we able to detect similarities in the pattern. By the end of 2039, we had generated a vastly complex theorem that could predict the activity of the mind, but only to an extent. There seemed to be some serious problem with the algorithm, and no slight changes of that algorithm seemed to get us any further.
[edit] Theories of Change
Meanwhile the Theophilus Group was busy again at developing an algorithm that would reliably model the mind for beyond a few split seconds. Pathway's Key helped us gain valuable information concerning the nature of the human mind, but it seemed as if we were once again going in the wrong direction, or else on a tangent, for it really did not matter what patterns we obtained from the one mind--we could not apply it anywhere else, could not use it to sort out our confusion in regards to the rest of the body. This was because the very rules that the brain followed seemed to change over even the smallest increments of time.
We had to come up with a technique that would allow us to compensate for all of this annoying, frustrating change. It took several weeks of labor to produce anything even partially effective, and even these seemed to fail. It was as if the very process by which we processed the changes in the algorithms was flawed. In the same way that meteorologists could not predict with any accuracy the weather a week or two from the present, so we could not predict with any reliability the path the mind would take.
Another baffling factor was the ability of the human mind--and many other minds as well--to make decisions. According to the concept of free will, which had shattered the belief in a deterministic universe, whatever a person did was his or her own decision, something that we could not predict using any technology whatsoever, because for whatever we predicted the person could simply do something different. The result was that all these possibilities for change and disruption--which were creeping up for the first time, it seemed--seemed to create questions faster than they answered them.
[edit] The Grand Theorem
The Theophilus Group was totally exhausted with its work at the end of six months of pondering and trial-and-error. As we sat down for dinner one day, Andarin visited us. It had been so long that, even though we knew he was still somewhere in the world directing the project, he seemed to be totally disconnected with all life happening here, a mere specter. We had made some advances in the months before, but we had not made a total breakthrough, and surely, as everyone winced, Andarin would capitalize on that fact to poke at our pride in ourselves.
Of course, we told him what we had accomplished. Andarin simply looked, saying nothing. Before long we knew that something was wrong. One of the presenters gave up mid-sentence, staring into those gorgon eyes (they weren't always as such) and stood frozen, unable to continue. The man definitely was not paralyzed, but he had given up just then. He had been a person we could trust, the one who found Pain's Second Tip, and now he stood rather speechless, unable to decide what to do.
Andarin retrieved his fan (which, we knew, was quantum-electronic) and immediately it began flashing as do computer monitors on our tables. Strange algorithms floated past, and for a moment we were all caught up in the mystery, the total despairing mystery of Andarin's forceful mind. The other two times when Andarin had propelled the group forward were seemingly coincidences. But they weren't. At last, I understood. Andarin had purposefully waited those eight years with almost nothing happening, not because he could do nothing to prevent that from occuring, but because he wanted just that to result. I knew this, because this algorithm that he was unveiling was to become the next step in our project, and it was definitely not coincidental. It was the working of a mighty mind.
Andarin: "Fools! All fools! Toiling away night and day with all these basic algorithms destined to fail! You should know more than all others that the human mind is a complex being, and is not meant to be tackled so lightly!"
Andarin stretched forward his arm so that we could all look carefully at the algorithm. Its text was flashing at several kilobytes each second, scrolling down the database stored within.
Andarin: "Within this fan lies the Grand Theorem, upon which is based the enormous complexity on which life is modeled."
And thus Andarin tossed the fan onto the table before him, and left the dining hall. He was being characteristically rude, but he had given us his fan, and that meant something: he did not totally disdain us. We were quick to realize that he meant us no ill will, that he only sought to make us work harder. This was Andarin's game, and we were being asked to take part in it. When we plugged his algorithm into Titan's scanned results, the resulting match between prediction and actuality was perfect.
[edit] Titan Delouser
Andarin's Grand Theorem opened the doorway for eliminating all those troublesome factors. No questioning Andarin's ability at this point, though with awe we all tried to analyze it. To say the truth it was nearly unlockable, even though its outline was right there in the eye-jewel-view in front of us.
The engineers were back to work now, as the rest of us departed for home sweet home.
When we returned a month later (as we were meeting much more often now), the engineers had proclaimed the completion of what they dubbed the "Titan Delouser". From what I gathered that day, delouser referred to something that could clean house, removing all the pests and making life much more bearable. In practice, when attached to Titan it effectively removed all of the unwanted signals that we had been receiving the past ten years, and produced the results of the scan in a what we considered docile manner. It was the breakthrough that we had been waiting for for so long.
We felt that the end of the project was near. After all, there hadn't been that many hurdles; and most of them would not have existed had we been using our head properly, as Andarin demonstrated to us. Victory tasted extremely sweet, perhaps even more so because of Andarin's constant nagging and crudeness of speech. Humbling, yet enlifting: we knew after this leap that everything was possible, should humanity set its mind to it. The project seemed almost over now. Clearly, humanity's mind power would be able to come together as never before.
And we were at the center of it all. While we all detested Andarin's attitude and domineering condescension, we nevertheless thought inwardly: he is my hero. And yet, we were at the center of it all.
