Another Muskmelon

Imagine you’ve got a hot date, a camping trip with someone you’ve recently met with whom you’ve established a warm, exciting rapport, and you’ve done all the planning, picked out a nice spot by a river to set up camp, requested time off from work which has been granted, bought all the right equipment and food, but on the morning you planned to leave and pick up your date you feel a strange desire to go to work. You don’t know why, but virtually against your will, you find yourself with a baffling need to get to your place of employment and get to work. You cancel your date, and off you go to sit at your cubicle and pound away at a keyboard instead of hiking a woodland trail with a romantic partner.

The reason for this odd behavior is due to the implantation in your brain of something called a BMI, a brain-machine interface, currently being developed by Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corporation. Neuralink has hired neuroscientists from various universities to help develop this apparatus, a neural lace of extremely thin threads to be inserted through a vein or artery above the cerebral cortex. The goal is to achieve a “symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” Currently, there are neuroprosthetics already in use, allowing disabled people to control their prosthetic arms and legs. Stephan Hawking, who was gradually paralyzed over the decades by a slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, used a computerized interface attached to a cheek muscle that was capable of using pattern recognition to allow him to communicate complex ideas. Elaborate computer algorithms learned to translate binary muscle-twitches into recognizable speech. Although not technically a neural implant, it does show how such devices could be used medically to empower people severely compromised by disease or injury. But the broader use of such devices in the general population have obvious nefarious consequences, particularly in any society already leaning toward a form of corporate totalitarianism.

An article by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek appeared in the July/August issue of Philosophie Magazine from France, “Quand nos cerveaux seront connectés”. The article was translated into French from the English, but I haven’t been able to find the English language version. I did find a recent talk Žižek gave on this subject at the University of Vermont in April, 2019, available on YouTube, but the sound is terrible and the video is frequently and randomly interrupted by ads. The title of the talk, “Hegel in a Wired Brain,” will be available soon in a book. But for now I’ve just got the French article.

Žižek begins the article by questioning the philosophical implications and consequences if such a device is implemented. He describes two stages of development: by plugging a computer into our brain, we can intervene in reality, turn on a TV or change a channel simply by thinking it, turn on a coffee maker or shut off a light. Secondly, we can connect our brain directly with someone else’s brain and transmit our thoughts to them. As he puts it, “if I caress the idea of an intense sexual experience, another individual will be able to share it directly.” Go, Louis C.K.!

This project raises some relevant questions about language and the sanctity of our interior life. Musk believes that our thoughts are independent of language and do not depend on verbalization to be realized, that, in fact, the simplicity and awkwardness of language does as much to distort and fuck them up. Žižek argues that language potentiates the subtlety and richness of our thoughts. He also states, in contradiction to this, that language can reduce the complexity of our thoughts by reducing them to simple words and phrases. Who hasn’t had the experience of trying, unsuccessfully, to find the right word or phrase for a sensation or feeling? And who, at the same time, hasn’t had the delightful experience of finding a thought or feeling enhanced and deepened by language?

A friend recently asked what I made of the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, and my answer vaguely and awkwardly assumed a situation of immersion. Since then, I’ve been able to work it out verbally a little better and feel that I had the right idea: language is a full immersion in which we find ourselves by losing ourselves, and are in some sense swallowed, some might even argue the whale might be a manifestation of Thomas Hobbe’s leviathan, an immersion in a social dynamic in which we’ve surrendered – consciously or unconsciously – our freedoms to an authority, a ruler or decision of a majority, in exchange for protection of our well-being and remaining rights and the maintenance of social order.

I would hasten to add that poetry – the creative and often subversive use of language – can awaken us to that situation and provide release.

Žižek then asks if our individuality would survive this passage to singularity with artificial intelligence. Currently, the technology – and particularly the social media platforms – have led to feelings of alienation. We create identities online that are distant from our authentic selves, fictions that have the capacity to grow toxic when they’re subject to so much artificial inducement and seduction and trolls and data harvesting and propagandistic control by companies such as Cambridge Analytics.

Elon Musk is quoted as saying that people won’t be able to read our thoughts or access our minds if we don’t want them to. But how, Žižek asks, can he guarantee that this won’t happen? Look at the measures Facebook has taken to protect our privacy. It’s been pretty much nil. This is the problem with techno-utopian fantasies. They’re just that: fantasies.

But what, one wonders, is a thought? The brain – interfaced via neural lace to a computer – is read in the strictest, narrowest sense through the neuronal processes at work in the brain. These aren’t thoughts. These are electrical impulses. How would we even know if our interior being is being surveilled by another? And given a situation similar to the one we have now in which we cannot know for sure if we’re being surveilled, or what is being surveilled, the overall effect is one of inhibition and fearfulness. We find ourselves policing our own thoughts.

In 2002, researchers at New York University and Drexel University, used brain implants to produce “robotic” rats that could be used for rescue missions, video surveillance or detecting explosives. They did this by injecting signals directly into sensory and learning areas of the brain, the parts of the brain that affect what the animal senses and how it behaves. The animals could be controlled by an operator with a laptop computer. One can imagine the legal, moral and ethical ramifications of using this technology on humans. If people are a little freaked out by the tactics of an operation like Cambridge Analytics, imagine how unsettling it would be if a substantial number of people decided to go along with this technology.

And how, one wonders, would this feel? Would an impulse to perform an act feel foreign or natural? How would we know whether our actions and words are ours or are being directed from another source? What would be the consequences of this on our notions of free will?

Andrea Stocco, Assistant Professor the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Learnng and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, follows Žižek’s article with an interesting counterpoint. He argues that we already share our thoughts through language. “Marketing, publicity, poetry and literature,” he counters, “are only different modalities of power that we have available to take control of another mind.” “In a sense, one can say that language is, in itself, a brain-to-brain interface: when we exchange words, we exchange circuits of neuronal activity.”

Which is why I plan to continue writing the weirdest poetry imaginable. My intent isn’t to take control of another mind, but to produce imagery that is so strange and a syntactical behavior that is so disrupted and torqued and misshapen that another mind – happily assuming that anyone would want to spend time playing along with this – wouldn’t be burdened with interpretation or feel nudged or guided to share a certain perspective but liberated by the exhilaration of discovering infinite meanings in a finite medium.