10/27/03

It was those scientists again, always getting into trouble trying to figure stuff out. They went to tinkering with earthworm genes and ended up with worms that lived five times as long as they should have. Ummm -- Cream of Worms soup, straight from the can! In a human being that would be what, 350 years? Assuming it worked, that would put me in line to strike up a casual acquaintance with Seven of Nine, wouldn't it? No, wait --

Immortality, or even life extension, is one of those notions that really brings out the boogie in everybody from the mayor on down. It sticks its dirty finger in the eyes of ecology, economics, sociology, philosophy, ethics and so much more. The usual scope of the argument on daytime talk radio (NPR, thank you -- I simply adore right wing drop cases but AM is just too static-cling for my DSP sensibilities) takes this form: all right, so we can make ourselves live for ten generations. Should we? Think of the impact on kids who know they'll be waiting til 2400 to inherit that squinky chest of drawers you promised them. What happens to the environment when there's none of the usual die-off? Are all these guys gonna have 12 kids apiece? Where do we put all the new people? Where do we put all the old people? Clearly there's a lotta unpleasant social issues to address.

But the real stinky question, the one that the Patent Experts In Their Sonorous Dolorous Certitude intone with particular emphasis, is the obvious one: who gets the treatment (not a treat)? It's clear as the boil on a politician's butt that the Fountain of Youth is gonna be some prime real estate, and once the Ponce de Leons of the world get their sticky diamond-encrusted fingers on it they'll hang on for literal dear life. Given that the connections and power that come with age are the key to control, it'd turn into meet the new boss, same as the old boss -- no wait, it is the old boss. If you thought capitalism was inherently monopolistic and prone to black-hole centralization, wait'll you see longevity capitalism. Given that every other Old Dog in the world is potentially competition, the secret handshake would likely remain that way. Or to quote the old spiritual, "If livin was a thing that money could buy/ you know the rich would live and the poor would die…" Or at least it would until somebody's snarky chambermaid spilled the beans to some investigative reporter and blood ran in the streets for a while.

Oh, I'm being too dramatic here, surely. How can we possibly predict what would happen if something as radical and improbable as life extension showed up on the scene? Well, unhappily, we can. We're seeing it right now.

Life extension isn't any faint glimmering star of hope on the human horizon, it's a rain of frogs down our shirts right here and now. Since the advent of the germ theory of disease in the early 1800's, the art of medicine has been going through some mighty upheavals, volcanic blasts of discovery with the concomitant fallout of new treatments. We've seen age-old enemies from tuberculosis to glandular dwarfism quail before the white coated physician legions. And along with all that, there's a steady rise in the average lifespan.

But even in these times of miracles and wonders, there are still only three decent cribs to maximize your chances of a long, healthy life. One is just good luck -- some people don't step on banana peels, or they come from long-lived stock. Another is smarts -- keeping an ear to the ground about the most recent theories, getting enough exercise, eating right, being proactive in your own medical preventative maintenance. But the third, like it or not, is money. You don't have to have any other survival traits at all as long as you have a trust fund at your back. Money can't buy happiness, but you can't buy anything if you're dead.

Right now (and who knows for how much longer) there's one slight exception that proves the rule in this scenario: governments, in their wisdom, provide a certain amount of health care free of charge. If it's a relatively socialistic system, like in Canada, the care is spread a mile wide and an inch deep, and the rich get their care from hoity toity private clinics. In the US, only the indigent qualify. It's a paradox that in America only the extremely wealthy and extremely poor get anything like comprehensive medical care.

So already we're seeing the effects of life extension on society, and they ain't pretty. You gots your AIDS infested Third World on hands and knees with a knife in their teeth to the real drug lords, the corporate ones, you gots the quasimoral/quasiscientific stem cell controversy, with born-again Xtians battling born-again researchers, you gots the universal health-care folks trenched up against the free market boys -- lordy gordy, it's a mess. And all that any of these guys are arguing about is whether and how it's legal or ethical or right to help people live longer, and who deserves to.

Life extension, and by implication medical therapy in general, is a region of knowledge that cuts right through the layer cake of human social studies because it addresses the single most pertinent problem humans face: Why are we born to suffer and die? And ultimately, whether you're a hardline social conservative and think that biomanipulation is the Devil with a blue dress on or a smeary-eyed extropian pining to personally observe the heat-death of the universe, you're liable to be equally dissatisfied with the answer: Because life's not Fair.

10/20/03

In the flush of the industrial revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, mechanics rose from a quaint hobby of tinkering tweakers or the subject of abstract philosophical musing to the veritable engine of progress. With the aid of Doctor Newton's adorable calculus, a dozen areas of engineering went into overdrive all at once. By the end of the 19th century, the subject now known as physics had wiped the floor with all contenders to reign supreme among the disciplines, the wellspring of prosperity and inspiration of philosophy.

If anything, the 20th century was even worse, detaching physic's domination from the merely mechanical into the realm of the theoretical, the subatomic, wresting unimaginable power from the subtlest of observations, the most abstract of calculated obscurities.

Well, I hate to be the one to break it, but physics is so over. Totally like last week, f'sure. It can take a long cruise and start picking out retirement communities. It's not like we don't love it or anything, but that whole particle/wave duality continuum string theory cosmic constant thing, you know? It's like there's like no there there. And they'd agree with you, too. Physics is old. Biology, though -- that's a different story.

Last week saw the advent of what could be a really hot breakthrough in the mind/matter arena (or not...). A wired up monkey learned to operate a moving arm with nothing but its thoughts, monitored through a brain interface and interpreted by a computer. Trained to use a joystick, the simian's neural activity was monitored, recorded and used as a sample for translating further activities. Eventually the monkey dispensed with the joystick entirely and ran the arm as a direct subsidiary of its nervous system.

You think you've heard this story, all you news hounds. But have you? There are two points to the whole event, and the news went batshit over one of them. But it seems to have missed the importance of the other, and that's interesting because it may be the real story after all.

That the monkey was able to abstract to the point that it could treat the mechanical arm as an extension of its body was impressive, and certainly pointed to a number of significant possibilities. But the trick here wasn't that it was done at all, but that it was done as inobtrusively as it was.

There's an intuitive response to working with electronic music production that I'm sure many musicians have had, the thought that this contraption of microphones and boards, recorders, digital interfaces and such is just so complicated -- couldn't there be like a quarter-inch phone jack in my head that I could just plug into the recorder? Huh? I mean, I hear music in my head all day long, clear as clear. How hard can it be? Obviously a sign of a youth misspent in the company of cheap speculative fiction.

Scifi has always been hit or miss when it came to predictions, and brain interfaces are certainly no exception. The usual spoiler (for me, at least) was the depiction in cyberpunk literature of small or superficially intrusive connections for jacking in, typically about the size of a postage stamp behind the ear. Unlikelier still was the tiara-style skull-set that slipped on over your head and didn't even require electrolytic paste. The simplicity of these schemes worked to the benefit of stories driven by the same plots that powered the Arabian Nights, but narrative strength seldom makes good science, although the converse is surprisingly common.

To my phys-psych undergrad sensibilities, the redlight screwup here was the improbability of having any profound interaction with the massively 3D brain from the surface of the cortex. Certainly getting any adequate pan-sensory data input would take enormous bandwidth and access. At the very least, that leetle dustplug-covered socket had to be wired to a gazillion electrodes embedded all through your CNS to the depth of ten or so centimeters and scrupulously positioned to the micrometer. The Matrix's horse-dick brainstem plug seemed a trifle more realistic, if grossly insulting to the cerebellum in its installation. That cute little tiara? Bunkum. Couldn't even get through the scalp.

I was forced to sigh and resentfully accept that I wasn't likely to be able to download sensorium recordings of a juicy night on the Riviera with Susan Sarandon any time soon, let alone afford the million-dollar nerve graft needed to play it back. Worse, the USB port in my forehead for downloading my Inner Beethoven looked to be equally vaporous. Dang! Where's that great big beautiful tomorrow they keep promising me? I want my Neural TV!

But now, I'm beginning to see signs of hope, and this monkey business is a big part of it. In order to couple simian to waldo, all the feckless vivisectionists had to do was lop off a squidge of skull and embed a few hundred skinny needles barely under the surface, no serious positioning, fill it up with jiffycrete and hook the needles up to a computer. Apparently, mental behavior is generalized enough that pretty much any representative set of axons can provide sufficient information for the hookup to work. Not only is it an order of magnitude (at least) easier than the 10,000 Fingers of Dr. Dendrite approach, it's probably cheap enough to commodify.

Like the preacher says, that's good news. Or at least, to us wirehead types it is. Certainly the immediate benefits to the disabled and dismembered can be realized as quickly as Chris Reeves can whisper "power exoskeleton" through his respirator. But the availability of (relatively) safe, cheap and (certainly) demonstrable neural gateways will revolutionize every little jott and tittle of human life the way the automobile only wished it could.

The downside, o'course, is that the latest and greatest fashion trend is gonna turn out to be founded on Pinhead from Hellraiser. But hey -- who said style was supposed to be easy? You'll look great in electrodes, baby.

10/13/03

We live in the belly of the Amurkin Dream, raised on tales of successes achieved by chance or toil or exceptionally, all with the same conclusion: against all odds -- what's your excuse? It's a secular religion, Boosterism. Why fight City Hall when you can be the mayor someday? Everyone makes their own deal with the Hall, and almost everyone gets the stinky end of the stick. No matter what they taught you in school, there isn't always room at the top, not enough. But in the damp afterhours of another fruitless day slugging it out with fate, you begin to wonder how things really are, and how they really could be.

The problem with couldabeens is that they always show you their nice side, like a harlot half-revealed, makeup perfect and clothes nicely disheveled, under a blue streetlight. It's only if you could take her up on that veiled offer in her eyes that you'd get to see the roach-ridden room with the stained sheets and the cracked mirror and that vacant, distant look that flutters across her face like the shadow of a bat in the moment when you discharge yourself. All that stuff never gets into the advertising.

When Sandahbeth and I were running around the country in a variety of peculiar vehicles, ugly trailers and kitties in tow, playing wherever and whatever we could, we weren't all that concerned about our fabulous career. We were just living, informing the role of wandering minstral that we'd each of us in our own way chosen well before we'd ever met. We accepted the synergy of our personalities like we accepted our mutual talents, the blue of the sky, the open road, the kindness of strangers. Still, we could have had a little more sense than we did. There were times in our frolic when palpable doors opened briefly in front of us, windows of opportunity, moments where with a little more savvy, a little guidance, a touch, a push, we could have gone on to -- what? A better deal with the Hall, maybe.

At various points in our travels we lucked into radio shows, long-term gigs in paradise, guest shots on wickedly famous stages and standing ovations at folk festivals. We were introduced to industry figures, well-known artists, movers and shakers. We were feted and flown to private island parties by millionaires. And when it was over we'd be back in our van and trailer headed out of town, for all the world like the Simpsons after being run down by a steamroller or sold to the Martians, every week back on that same couch watching the same tube. We just didn't have the biz wit to punch our way out of the paper bag of our own private road movie.

The movie changed when Sandahbeth got sick. Over a couple of years we were tamed, shorn of our wandering ways, pinned to the mounting board of society with a mortgage and government assistance and physical therapy, herded into respectable, creditworthy involuntary social restraint, poor but honest, challenged but virtuous. From romantic, mythopoeic dream-figures, we graduated to icons of caregiving merit and diligence in the face of hardship. Personally, I preferred the old job -- the fringies were much better.

When you're stuck with a lemon, they say, make lemonade. One of the puny advantages of the static life is stable and even surplus income. I've actually been able to buy a few CD's -- a Zappa here, a Jim Hall there. Last week I picked up Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer's first album, When I Go.

I'm a reluctant fan. $18 CD's at Tower Records are a powerful inducement for me to go home and play my own music on my own instruments. I'm well supplied with free variety every day on the college and public stations on my car radio, more diversity than I can keep track of as a million acts fling themselves at the increasingly desensitized media audience. Few of them show enough muscle to stick in my ear, and virtually none the shine and substance to elicit reaching for my overburdened wallet. But Carter and Grammer had a serious bite that leaped out of the speaker the few times they were played on the local folkie station between pedestrian bluegrass and recycled Woody Guthrie, and finally, excess capital in hand, I coughed.

It's stupid and self-indulgent to rank your artistic talent against someone else's, more like calculators and coyotes than apples and oranges. Thankfully, Carter's pagan genius cowboy rap tunes are far enough from my own authorial sensibilities to be both non-threatening and entertaining, and his and Grammer's vocals and instrumentals cut authentic and deep in genres outside of my specialties. They move me to tears and exclamations of admiration, but not to jealousy.

Inevitably, though, I see lifestyle similarities and make comparisons. Another mystic vagabond musician couple, far from the mainstream, recording their first album in their living room and roving the country. But they took care of business, and they barnstormed folk festivals and won songwriter contests, moved into the forefront of their field and looked to be heading for bigger and better things.

And in the summer of 2002 Dave Carter dropped dead of a heart attack at 49, leaving a classic legacy -- a swell-looking corpse, three albums of near-immortal songs and a grieving widow-lover to carry on. An authentic monument to the beauty and truth of fully-lived lives, and one mother of a good story.

Our story isn't nearly as inneresting as that. Couldabeens drifting away, lost opportunities swallowed by necessity and low tragedy and the grinding wheel of entropy. Not even our choice, really.

But -- given a choice between our lives and theirs...?

10/6/03

As presented on NPR (our equivalent of the crowned heads of Europe), the experiment purported to test the propensity of the subjects to identify conditions they considered inequitable. By offering unequal rewards for equal tasks, the researchers were able to elicit situations in which the test animals all but yelled "Down tools!" and walked out. The head of the project then theorized that a sense of primitive justice and equality were a part of our evolutionary development.

My first response to the whole spiel was to take a pinch of umbrage. While nobody accuses capuchins of overwhelming mental capacity, it struck me at first glance that reducing their awareness of when they're being had to a reflex was a little over-complicated. I mean, this isn't exactly rocket science, kids -- "tread upon a worm..." and all that. But further inspection changed my mind.

As proud possessors of wetware massively-parallel-processing modular neural networks (aka cerebrums), we and the Scarecrow are subject to an enormous number of highly suspect, virtually self-contained operations that go on beneath the seemingly-placid surfaces of our scummy little mental ponds. From memory management to language conditioning, from sound alignment to autonomic respiration, like the Firesigns said, Your Brain is not the Boss. Or, more specifically, that aforementioned scummy little pond isn't. Nope, there are genies and djinns and afreets down there, hard at work doing what you don't have the time or inclination or awareness to do yourself, lazy slob of a consciousness that you are. And those guys aren't exactly the friendliest critters at times, especially if some of the more highly evolved and developed ones start disagreeing with each other.

Despite my desire to raise justice, and hence the cute-but-lowly capuchin's mental stature, to the ranks of ideas nobly created by the nobly creative conscious human (or primate) mind, there's way too much anecdotal evidence linking it more to those preconscious robots of the underworld. Just the infamous legalistic tendencies of even the smallest children and the ubiquity of the playground battlecry "IT'S NOT FAIR!" are enough to set off my detectors. Moreover, the spread of that sense of injustice through the population is greatly varied -- some people could care less if they're being screwed, others could scarcely care more -- and deeply tied to emotional responses, thus giving rise to doormats and punching bags, not to mention drama queens of every persuation (hello, Christians? Jews? Muslims?).

What the monkey business did was try to quantify and isolate the nature of injustice itself (in their case, whether a task was rewarded with a yummy grape or a somewhat less yummy slice of cuke), as opposed to the perception and reaction to it, in order to study the nature of that response in all its primitive (literally!) smarm. And that's exactly where the aid and comfort (remember Alice?) come in.

In my current domestic arrangement, I'm the recipient of an enormous number of blind, brutal, specific injustices, small and large, pertaining to Sandahbeth's ongoing medical hooraw. It's a classic trap: if you care about someone and they become disabled, all too often you end up caring for them as well. I'm far from alone here, and far from the really nasty narrow end of the bell curve of fairness as well, a fact I keep reminding myself of to little avail. Fact is, I spend an inordinate amount of time and energy managing my stupid resentments. I'm past the crying-on-my-friends-shoulders phase (for the most part) and I'm through blaming the victim or the government or the imperfection of the flesh or God, leaving me with, well, me. Most of my current efforts have gone into berating my inability to just get over it.

I was raised in the classic Midwestern school of emotion management, wherein if you have a socially inappropriate feeling, it's your duty and responsibility to take it out behind the barn and put it to sleep. Anything less was considered immature and even deviant. It didn't help that I was a raving screamer who threw temper trantrums as a dedicated profession. I still bear the scar from when I put my hand through a window because my older brother had a nicer slice of toast than me. So okay, eventually I matured, and I'm happy to agree with the notion that the primary difference between an adult and a child is whether and how they handle their feelings. But that doesn't mean I'm not still forced to take The Belt to my snotty, sniveling drip of an inner brat. Gawd help me if I ever had real kids.

But this new research allows me, like the experimenters, to separate my preconscious Injustice-O-Meter from the more considered parts of my self (yeah, right), and more importantly, frees me from another preconscious response, one of guilt and shame and anger at myself for being so immature as to allow such resentments to even exist. It's a process I previously went through with sexual desire, which I can now accept for the indicator of the soundness of my glandular system that it is. Hmm, I'm aroused. Good. Back to work...

And I guess I'm just as glad that my fairness detector is in good, if slightly oversensitive -- okay, real oversensitive -- shape. Or perhaps more correctly, that I'm aware of its condition at all. To be constantly bedeviled by one's preconscious impulses and impressions is a royal pain in the ass, but it's pancakes and maple syrup compared to unthinkingly being driven to stupid destructive actions by them.

Or to put it another way, I'd rather feel like a monkey than be one. Even a capuchin.