Archive for neuro

You Are All Terminators. (I Am Not.)

Way back in grad school— when VHS was a thing and computer screens were all monochrome and a 20-Megabyte hard drive was the kind of thing only supervillains could afford—a bunch of us rented “The Terminator” for the weekend and watched it between bouts of AD&D. Inevitably we came upon the iconic first-person T-800 view. […]

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The Pong Imperative: Driving Dishbrain to Suicide.

Achilles Desjardins had always found smart gels a bit creepy. People thought of them as brains in boxes, but they weren’t. They didn’t have the parts. Forget about the neocortex or the cerebellum—these things had nothing. No hypothalamus, no pineal gland, no sheathing of mammal over reptile over fish. No instincts. No desires. Just a […]

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The Aspirational Zombie.

Long-time readers of the ‘crawl might remember that I’ve never had much patience for the AI’s Just Wanna Live trope. I put my bootprint on it in my very first novel— “Expert defense witnesses, including a smart gel online from Rutgers, testified that neuron cultures lack the primitive midbrain structures necessary to experience pain, fear, […]

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Parts of People.

“My life has been 107 hours long,” says Ms. Casey, Wellness Counselor at Lumon Industries, moments after learning she won’t be making it to 108. “Of all that time, my favorite was the eight hours I spent in Macrodata Refinement. You could say those were my Good Old Days.” Of course, Ms. Casey—or whatever her […]

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What Dreams May Come.

Interrogating the Dream Anyone who caught my talk at Ratio back in 2017 might vaguely recall a curious claim: that the Human corpus callosum—that bundle of neurons connecting our cerebral hemispheres—has a bandwidth in the same ballpark as that of a modern cell phone, once you take noise correction and synaptic redundancy into account. I […]

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Debunking the Debunkers: Free Will on Appeal.

If you read The Atlantic, you may have heard the news: A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked! Libet’s classic eighties experiments, the first neurological spike in the Autonomist’s coffin, has been misinterpreted for decades! Myriad subsequent studies have been founded on a faulty and untested assumption, the whole edifice is a house […]

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HemiHive, in Hiding

If you’ve been following my writing for any length of time, you’ll know how fascinated I am by Krista and Tatiana Hogan, of British Columbia. I’ve cited them in Echopraxia’s end notes, described them in online essays; if you caught my talk at Pyrkon last year you might remember me wittering on about them in […]

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Arc Weld

“Language is a virus from outer space” —William S. Borroughs Chest-thump to start off the year: Last year’s “ZeroS”, appearing in Jonathan Strahan’s Infinity Wars, made it into a couple of (late-breaking update: into three!) Year’s Best collections: Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year (Vol. 3), and another couple I hesitate to name […]

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My Dinner with Ramez: or, The Identity Landscape.

A week or two ago— just before all the stuff with Kevin went down— I hung out with Ramez Naam for an evening. (If you know who I am you certainly know who he is; his Nexus trilogy burned across the charts in a way I can only dream of.) We snarfed. We drank. We […]

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Lizards in the Sink with David.

(A Nowa Fantastyka reprint) Back when I was in grad school, I built an electric water pipe out of Erlenmeyer flasks, rubber stoppers, and an aquarium air pump. It fed into an inhaler that dangled over my bed like the deployed O2 mask of a falling airliner— right next to the control panel that ran […]

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