Laconia 2 - The unsaid, the unseen, and the unheard

1. This chapter is meant to act as a big plot-dump.
2. Is CRW's role too cliche?

(Background, nowhere in general)

The lawyers had not woken up to the reality of Brain-Tap until it was too late. But they could not really be blamed for this - most research in neuro-electrics had been classified top-secret. Even the researchers working on the projects didn't know until then that there were some research topics that needed approval from some agency called the Confidential Research Wing, or the CRW. The Government didn't acknowledge their existence (nor was it clear how they obtained funding, without mention in the national budget), but it appeared that they were an independent organization reporting directly to the Home Ministry and the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. They could declare which journals were "permissible" to publish research results, and even say that some research was outright "unpublishable." It appeared that research in atomic and nuclear sciences was regulated by the CRW, but all this was mere speculation, since CRW agents never spoke about their other work. The scientists working on Brain-Tap couldn't care less - the CRW appropriated funds (which were in surprisingly large amounts for a government-funded project) and provided test subjects (who were surprisingly numerous for such "dangerous" human experimentation).

The first test subjects were not humans, but members of a phylum called Cnidaria, or jellyfish, as the public better knows them. With just a few hundred neurons, they have the simplest structures that can still be called nervous systems. For every 10 terabytes of neuro-imagery that a human produces, a jellyfish produces just a few hundred kilobytes. The devices for nervous sensing and algorithms for data compression were tried and perfected on these creatures before more ambitious projects were undertaken. Working upwards, later subjects had more complex nervous systems, and finally a device was made that could work on mammals like mice, cats and dogs. Progress ended here, and the device that was made so far could not really read an organism's thoughts - nobody knew what that cat sitting on the table was thinking (even when it occasionally bit the lab technician - was it angry, or just being playful?), and so nothing further could be done. Scientists didn't even know whether the cat was "conscious," as humans claim to be. It was only after Brain-Tap started working on humans did scientists see patterns that were possibly due to consciousness. Before any research could be initiated on this matter - both checking whether they truly represented consciousness dancing around in the brain, and whether they were present in other organisms - neuro-electrics research was outlawed. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Basically, without human test subjects, it was difficult (impossible?) for neuro-electrics to develop. Scientists needed to know whether their data compression was sufficient for industrial applications, whether their devices were sensitive enough. More importantly, the pattern of human thought had still to be decoded. Without an understanding of how the neurons represent "thought", the 10 terabytes of data gathered each second simply represented a meaningless sequence of numbers. Most importantly, the ultimate goal of neuro-electrics was to have devices that worked on humans. One really can't say that there is a device that works on them, without first testing the device on them.

The first human subjects were convicted terrorists, on death row. They were supposedly housed in isolated confinement in the most secure of prisons, so nobody knew if they weren't there, but in a small laboratory that wasn't supposed to exist. Nobody cared. There were only a few days left for them to live, so there was no fear that they would cry foul. While working on them, "thought" was suddenly decoded. Connections were immediately made to AI - since we knew what thinking meant, we could now easily write computer programs that thought on their own. Even before that, we could make models of the nervous system (at least in principle) and observe a thinking brain, but without knowing what "thought" was, it was like knowing the answer to a question we didn't know. Man had solved the problem of producing artificial intelligence - this research was simplified (most of the innovations were omitted) and published in an obscure journal on the subject. Programs were written that went on to win the Loebner Prize, but since most researchers in AI think that the prize is a publicity stunt, it turned out nobody was paying any attention. The decoding of human thought was a most momentous discovery, but since the research wasn't supposed to have occurred, nobody was there to clap.

With the success of the first human trials, the CRW (must have) published a memo detailing the developments and requesting other similar top-secret departments for human subjects. This second wave of volunteers came from the Home Ministry, from terrorists who were caught, and who were going to prosecuted. The scientists were requested help in interrogation, immune as they were to other methods of coercion - torture, polygraph and narco-analysis. The courts were told that they were being hospitalized because of sudden illness, the subjects were told that they were being given an MRI scan to check for possible (future) disease - in the process, nobody knew, though some did care.

An interesting aspect of the polygraph test is that it only works because the subject believes that it will. When asked a sensitive question, the subject becomes nervous fearing that he will be caught. Involuntary body responses to this nervousness, such as increased heart rates, sweating, increased muscle tension, and fidgeting, are among the factors polygraph operators look for while detecting lies (The many graphs that are observed during such an examination are what earn the test the name polygraph). Subjects who are sure that the test will fail are so confident that they lie their way through such tests. Subjects who want the test to fail (secretly) cause themselves excruciating pain on all the questions, including the control questions (by hiding a sharp nail inside their shoes, maybe?) - in such cases, the test results are inconclusive.

A similar effect was initially observed when these second-round volunteers were being interrogated. Although it did work extraordinarily well on most subjects, a small but significant minority did something that would have been thought impossible. They concentrated so much on their confidence in beating the test, that researchers could not dig out information regarding their crimes. But neuro-electrics was by now one of the most well-funded fields of inquiry, and this seemed to be too simple a problem to leave unsolved. A solution was figured out, but therein lay the second great vice of Brain-Tap. The idea was to include a small receiver on the device, which interfered with the brain signals. The express purpose of the receiver was to artificially stimulate thoughts of the crime, and thus bring the subject to confessing on Brain-Tap. The problem with this approach is that it provides a trap-door leading to complete brain control.

The CRW now had, at its disposal, a large army of people who would follow its every order. The word army is appropriate in describing the subjects, not just because they were so numerous, but also because in unanimity of thought, they all behaved like disciplined soldiers marching to the front. Of course, in reading about Brain-Tap after it was made public, only a small passing mention was made of the receiver, and it was mentioned only as a stimulant to aid confession. The lawyers who were reading the scientists' descriptions of Brain-Tap were experts in law, not in neuro-science or electrical engineering. The trapdoor (which the scientists knew about, and had written about, but which was top-secret) was conveniently not mentioned.

An important question all this research left unanswered was the position of free will. If the weather all around the world, and at every altitude was known precisely at some instant, then with sufficient computational resources, we could calculate the weather everywhere at every moment of time afterwards. Since the laws governing the behavior of weather systems are now well-formalized in the Navier-Stokes equations, it is a simple matter to simulate the weather right upto some later instant. The problem with this simplified approach is that it ignores an important effect called turbulence, or what is well-known to the mathematicians as chaos. The computers simulating weather systems have only limited precision (even the data coming in is of limited precision), and the nature of the Navier-Stokes equations is such that the error does not stay bounded, but quickly spirals out of control. Even the best of computers working on the most accurate of data can predict the planet's weather for only so long before making no sense at all. A similar effect was thought to occur (although not proved) with the neuro-imagery obtained. Some of the data compression techniques were "lossy," so to speak, and the time at which neural turbulence (as it was called) set in was typically just a few seconds. Of course, the chaotic nature of the brain was not proven, and this was mere conjecture. Even though this meant that a person's actions in the future could not be predetermined in a lab, it did not rule out that they were, in principle, decided well in advance, possibly at the time of his birth. There were a few proposals to solve the problem of the existence of free will (which was, it may be recalled, "Does free-will exist? If so, then where does it reside, and if not, then which side of the bed am I going to wake up on tomorrow morning?"). The most important pro-free-will theory making the rounds was that conscious decisions were made at the time of unexpected stimuli. It was fairly clear to those handling the neuro-imagery that in periods of little stimulus, such as sleep or intense meditation, neural turbulence set in late - the simulated data would stay accurate longer. But at the moments of unexpected stimuli, such as on unexpectedly bumping into an old friend, neural data suddenly needed to be refreshed. It was entirely possible that we did not have sufficiently sensitive devices to decode thoughts during such moments, it was also possible that there were some neuron-level laws that were still undiscovered. The unexpected stimulus free will theory, claimed that it was at these moments that free will manifested itself. Of course, without an understanding of what consciousness means, the free will question also stayed unresolved. The AI programs that were developed either did not accept unexpected stimuli (they only accepted input when they asked a question, or the like) or were designed to respond randomly to such events. In this latter case, they were observed to behave surprisingly well, but nothing could be said in the absence of further inquiry. However it was indeed observed, humorously, that there was never a computer-rights movement, with the computers claiming that since they were also conscious, they should also be provided civil rights.