As promised, the full-length conversation between David Eagleman and Brian Eno.
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 12:46 AM, David Eagleman wrote:
Dear Brian,
This is David Eagleman, author of Sum and a big fan of your work over the years. First, thank you so much for your kind words about Sum - I'm humbled and gratified that you liked it.
David
p.s. I noticed that you and I were listed contiguously in Brockman's annual question this year.
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On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:39 AM, Brian Eno wrote:
Dear David
thank you so much for getting in touch. As Jamie probably told you, I loved your book - and while reading it I kept texting him to tell him how he should give me two, no five, no twenty more proof copies so that I could make it famous by giving it out to friends who'd blab about it endlessly like I was now doing....
Anyway, the book is such a beautifully simple idea executed with great elegance, wit and economy. And it's very more-ish - your first impulse is to rush through all the stories one after the other like a box of Pringles (I did). But, unlike Pringles, they leave a very compelling aftertaste which is interestingly unsettling. I've since reread all of them.
I enjoy alternative unrealities like these. I wrote a few very short stories some years back that were a little similar in that I was imagining future societies where a couple of details had been changed, and then working out the ramifications of those little changes. Strangely, the stories have all kind of come true in the interim...though they seemed quite preposterous at the time.
Your 'downloading consciousness' essay is interesting - but you hint at what I think is the real complexity by saying that we don't know how much of the body we need to include as part of the brain. A painter friend of mine used to say 'The body is the large brain' and I tend to agree with him. The more relevant question would be 'Is there anything at all we could afford to leave out?'.
I'm currently reading Mark Johnson's The Meaning of the Body which explores the idea that there isn't in any meaningful sense a separation between brain and body - that 'meaning' is generated in what we still call 'body and mind' together. This suggestion, if true, might delay your project for a couple more decades. Perhaps we can agree to leave out fingernails and dead skin...
XXB
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On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 6:34 PM, David Eagleman wrote:
As you probably surmised while reading Sum, the idea behind the book is that I couldn't be certain there is nothing interesting going on out there (after all, as a scientist, I get to revel daily in the depth and vastness of the cosmos), and I also couldn't get myself to believe in anybody's particular idiosyncratic religious story. So I wanted a vehicle to express that there are lots and lots of more interesting possibilities to be explored. None of the stories in Sum are meant to be serious suggestions, of course -- but they are meant, as a whole greater than the sum, to illustrate that the possibility space is bigger than we know.
This book works best with people who like the idea of strapping on a backpack and hiking out to virgin territory, and often those people are the artists and thinkers and scientists. It therefore doesn't surprise me at all that you wrote alternative unrealities. Here's an off-the-cuff analogy to your music career: imagine if everyone coming into the world was told that there was only one song to be played -- and depending on your part of the world, a slightly different variation of that song. The melody becomes nostalgic to you; your parents sung the same melody, as did their parents, linking you to history; you feel comfortable when you meet people who grew up singing the same melody you did, and you are suspicious of those who sing strangely perverted verisons. In that world, wouldn't it be great to pull up to a synthesizer and start tearing around the possibility space? Thank you for exploring that space with your career. (And I'm looking forward to bumping into you in unexplored regions as we both continue to cruise around out there!)
As for downloading consciousness, I agree with you that much of the body will be important (for example, I've taken to referring to the endocrine and immune systems as part of "the greater metropolitan nervous system"). However, I'm pretty sure that not all of the body will need to come along for the ride. If you lose your pinky in an accident, you're sad but cognitively unchanged; if you lose an equivalently-sized piece of brain tissue, you lose your capacity to see color, or make decisions, or name animals, or form new memories. So not all regions of the body are created equal, and brain tissue seems to be the densest concentration of the important stuff. Here in the Texas Medical Center we see people every day who lose a limb in a motorcycle accident, lose one breast or both in a mastectomy, or lose sensation from the neck down as the result of a spinal fracture--and yet (issues of traumatic life-change aside) they tend to be the same person. So it's possible that a downloaded afterlife might reasonably leave a lot of the body behind. Or, as in the Sum story Great Expectations, perhaps people might want to change their bodies when they download into the afterlife (less body fat, better skin, no backhair, etc). ;-)
All best,
David
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On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Brian Eno wrote:
There is a very interesting trend in Counterfactualism at the moment. We have a historian called Niall Ferguson who has written several pieces about how history might have turned out if things had been a little different. I like this kind of thinking because it stresses the contingency of history: that things could have been otherwise. I suppose the reason it appeals is that it questions any 'essentialist' theories of history - those that argue that things HAD to have turned out this way or that because they were in some way predestined.
I'm excited - and liberated, and slightly frightened, I have to admit - by the possibility that tiny differences at source can pan out to huge differences in result. Of course it's an idea we're now familiar with from complexity theory, but it has two ramifications which are slightly overwhelming. The first is that anything you do, or omit to do, could have enormous consequences...and the second is that you are probably not in a position to calculate what those consequences might be.
I have an example from my own life. 38 years ago I stood in Maida Vale tube station waiting for a train. When it arrived, I was positioned exactly halfway between two doors. I chose the one on the left. Upon entering, I found myself standing next to someone I recognised - a chap I'd met at Reading University two years earlier when I was doing a performance of electronic music there. We fell into conversation and he happened to ask if I still had a tape recorder - I'd used one during the performance I'd given. I said I did, and he then asked me if I'd like to record some demos of a new band he'd just joined. And that, to cut a long story short, is how I came to join a band (Roxy Music) and have a career in music. I wonder what would have happened if I'd got into the right-hand door instead.
But of course such wonderings are slightly random since the moment of entering the carriage is only the last and most conspicuous one in a whole series of moments where I could have done something different than what I actually did, stretching back, presumably, to my earliest acts of independent volition.
But 'exploring the possibility space' is valuable. It's the act of imagination which makes us different from other animals - that we can imagine how things could otherwise be. It's something I think about a lot, this strange and wonderful human apparatus which seems happiest when it is indulging in those various activities dignified or denigrated as 'imagination', 'escapism', 'fantasy', 'projection', 'day-dreaming'.
I've recently read a very interesting piece in New Scientist about the medial cortex. The article reports that, during 'day-dreaming' much of the brain goes into a low activity state, but the medial cortex goes into overdrive. there were various suggestions about what it might be doing then (processing, sorting, deciding what to store in long term memory). My own feeling is that it all has to do with what I call 'surrender'...but that's another, longer story.
But I can't leave it hanging like that. My theory is that humans draw on a repertoire of behavioural responses which range from control to surrender. Control is what you use when, for example, you try to design an experiment and try to exclude from it as many contingencies as possible. It's what you use when you know the terms and the context very well, and have the means available to calculate how they will pan out. Surrender is what you do when control isn't available to you, and is summarised in the hippie phrase 'Go with the flow'. Most of the time, we're doing a combination of both, finding a place on that surrender-control axis which is applicable to where we are at that moment. Surfers know about this: they gracefully balance the two (or fall off). Bridge- and ship-builders do it too, when they realise that they have to design the bridge or ship to 'surrender' a certain amount.
But our culture has dignified control (because we're recently so good at it) and tends to regard surrender as passivity, an absence of control. But I would like to see surrender rethought as an active verb, as a choice we make in lieu of useless attempts to control. That too is a human talent - to understand a situation well enough to be part of its dynamics even though they are outside of your control. My feeling is that a lot of optional human activity - art, drugs, religion, sex - is engaged in in order to rehearse this talent - because we have evolved to enjoy the use of it.
But that's enough for one letter.
XXB
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On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 9:26 PM, David Eagleman wrote:
I don’t know if I have English blood, but I did study abroad at Oxford my junior year of college, so I might have picked up an infection of some sort.
Yes! I love the fact that tiny differences in initial conditions change everything later on. Those differences arrive sometimes in obvious moments (like choosing one of several colleges to attend), and more often, as you point out, they are moments that you didn’t even know were moments (like hitting the snooze button, and thereby avoiding a car wreck).
On the other hand, I’ve sometimes wondered about the flip side of chaotic divergence. Could it be the case that you would have been magnetically pulled toward a career in music in any case, even if you had chosen the other door? And instead of Roxy Music you would have ended up with some other group, but nonetheless been driving an equally successful musical career? Had I not found my current literary agent to represent Sum, I darn well would have continued to bang on doors until I found another. Life seems to be a funny game of divergence and convergence of paths, in a language that’s difficult for us to decipher...
By the way, have you read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers? I think you’d really enjoy it. It’s exactly about these issues of causal chains. Specifically, he addresses the fact that we all love success stories (underdog fights hard and gets to the top), but he turns the spotlight onto all the other lucky things that had to be in place for the success to happen. He convincingly illustrates that success is never a road forged alone, but instead it inevitably requires a massive coincidence with the right people and situations and contexts.
As for daydreaming, I happen to be writing a theoretical manuscript on this topic right now, which I’m entitling “How brains simulate future(s)”. The heart of the idea is that prediction is the main business in which intelligent brains are involved. Memory only exists for one reason, and that is to improve our predictions. When you simulate possible futures in your head (like, what would happen if I stepped off this ledge here?) then your hypotheses can die in your stead. So essentially our brains spend a lot of time learning the rules of the world so that they can plug in data (i.e. what’s happening in the present moment) and crank it forward to simulate what is going to happen next. My view is that once our brains developed this capacity, they could then learn how to plug in data from past time points (e.g. what I did last year) and crank forward to simulate possible nows. And this is the basis of counterfactualism: comparing what could have been now to the actual situation. And it all uses the same sort of neural cogs, this forward-cranking medial-frontal machinery that you and I and Niall Ferguson like to flex.
By the way, note that it is not always the case that humans are happiest when indulging in what could have been—this counterfactualism is the necessary basis of regret. But while not enjoyable, regret is deeply important. It may be the most important emotion there is, because it encourages change the next time you come to a similar decision point.
In any case, I agree with you about the importance of flying around in that daydreaming space. It’s the only way that good art and good science ever happen.
D
