1. Can a Machine be Conscious?
Although Neuromancer (1984) portrays a world of cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences and humanoid constructs in the all-encompassing matrix of cyberspace, Gibson does not qualify as a posthumanist to the same extent as Haraway or Hayles. The novel takes a distinctly ambivalent attitude toward technology, even though its computers seem to rival human memory and other cognitive abilities. Neuromancer delights in an imaginative universe with its fascinating technological toys, but this technology can also be alienating and threatening for both characters and reader. Significantly, the technology in the novel tends to be run down and in need of human attention, either for repair or upgrading, suggesting that whatever machines can do, they are not self-sufficient. Even Wintermute, the Artificial Intelligence or “AI” computer and arguably the novel’s main protagonist, seeks to improve itself by transcending its present condition. As Adam Roberts says,
The fact that his [Gibson’s] technology is always what antique dealers call
‘distressed,’ that is to say the creation of a sense of rough edges, broken components and all-around decay, is one of the most noteworthy features of the Gibsonian style. (2000: 169)
The potential for technology to become distressed poses an obvious risk for those involved in a machine/biology symbiosis. As Csicsery writes, Gibson seems “fundamentally ambivalent about the breakdown of the distinctions between human and machine, between personal consciousness and machine consciousness” (1992: 191). Gibson’s technology bashing in the novel manifests itself in many forms,
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including technological paranoia, struggling to survive in an urban jungle, the dangers of cyberspace, and the trauma of becoming a computer “construct” after dying or a near-death experience.
Gibson thus takes a different view of technology than Haraway, who says,
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of science fiction. [. . .] [W]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are all cyborgs. (1991: 149-50)
Speculating on the merger between human/machine, nature/
technology, Gibson suggests not only that machines are becoming more like humans, but also that humans, regardless of Haraway’s stance, could pay a heavy price for becoming more like machines. As I argue, computers will never be able to replicate human brain functioning to the point of reflecting purusha consciousness, and in turn humans may radically undermine their innate capacity for this state if they over extend themselves through bionic technology.
Especially damaging would be the kind of invasive technology Gibson portrays in his story “Johnny Mnemonic,” in which the lead character loses his sense of identity after a brain implant enables him to upload data directly from the web into his brain. The sheer volume of data from cyberspace replaces his childhood memories, thereby encroaching on his sense of self. This technological overload, as I argue in Chapters One and Two, can also interfere with the normal functioning of human physiology. In Neuromancer, Gibson portrays just this kind of distressed machine/biology symbiosis.
The novel unfolds around an elaborate scheme by Wintermute, built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A., to upgrade itself in order to emulate if not exceed humans, although ironically it can only do this with the help of Case and other people. This plot underlies the novel’s technological paranoia, the fear that machines can’t be trusted because they may take over the world. As a twenty-four year old “console cowboy,” Case is “one of the best in the Sprawl. [. . .] He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” (1984, 5). A thief who works for other, wealthier thieves,
Case also has the potential to transcend his socially constructed identity through cyberspace. He “lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace,” and in his “relaxed contempt for the flesh” he felt that the “body was meat” (6). When he stole from his employers, however, they made sure he would never work again by damaging his nervous system with a Russian mycotoxin. The novel begins with Case seeking a cure in Japan and trying to deal with being reduced to meat, a condition that precludes his projection through the matrix as a
“disembodied consciousness.” Nevertheless, the cyborgs Molly and her boss Armitage who takes orders from Wintermute recruit Case to work on a secret assignment. In exchange for his help in stealing the code Wintermute needs to upgrade itself, Armitage pays to have Case’s neural damage corrected, but in the process also has his repaired liver and new pancreas designed to bypass the recreational drugs Case habitually likes to use. From Molly, Case learns how Wintermute had rescued Armitage from a French hospital in his former incarnation as the human named Corto, who was nearly killed as a pilot in the failed Screaming Fist operation against Russia. All the characters we meet in the novel are embroiled in Wintermute’s intricate plot, including several who are also mouthpieces or fronts for Wintermute itself.
Throughout the novel the traditional notions of character come under scrutiny, with the either/or status of human/machine identity pushing against the boundaries of neither/both. Some characters, especially Case, have bimodal identities: a socially constructed aspect determined by their merger with technology; and a potentially un-constructed aspect induced by the effect of cyberspace on consciousness. As we shall see, the problem for Case is that his bimodal identities do not always interconnect self-reflexively. As a computer, Wintermute was designed to emulate not only the constructedness of identity but also the essence of human nature.
Wintermute realizes it lacks a personality, but hopes by merging with its other half called Rio, also known as Neuromancer, it will succeed in upgrading itself and thus more fully dominate the matrix.
Neuromancer, who tries to prevent this, explains its name to Case:
“Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend [. . .] I am the dead, and their land”
(235, original emphasis). By implication, a computer as a “dead”
object may never achieve the status of the living. This chapter will
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examine why a computer like Wintermute can never become a conscious entity. Some cognitive scientists believe that AI or computers can emulate the human brain, but Gerald Edelman, the Nobel-Prize winning biochemist, argues that the brain does not function like a computer, and that a computer will therefore never be able to achieve consciousness. Edelman asserts “that computer or machine models of the brain and mind do not work” (2004: 114).
As evidenced by the Turing machine, technology can go a long way in simulating human behavior, enhancing cognition and performance and even modifying identity as in the case of Armitage and Dix. Nonetheless, there is a sharp contrast between brain and computer. As Edelman says, in computer models of the brain and mind,
signals from the environment carry input information that is unambiguous, once contaminating noise is averaged away or otherwise dealt with. These models assume that the brain has a set of programs, or so-called effective procedures, which are capable of changing states based on the information carried by the inputs, yielding functionally appropriate outputs. [. . .] These models do not deal, however, with the fact that inputs to the brain are not unambiguous—the world is not like a piece of tape with a fixed sequence of symbols for the brain to read. [. . . ]
There are also a set of functional issues that make computer models unlikely. For example, the mapped connections from the sense of touch in the hand through the thalamus to the region of somatosensory cortex are variable and plastic, even in adults. (2004: 35)
Edelman goes on to describe how the brain interacts with the environment in a way that a computer cannot. The “brains of higher-level animals autonomously construct patterned responses to environments that are full of novelty. They do not do this the way a computer does—using formal rules governed by explicit, unambiguous instructions or input signals”; he repeatedly emphasizes that “the brain is not a computer, and the world is not a piece of tape”
(2004: 58-59). Although Alan Turing showed how a Turing machine can simulate human responses by carrying out computations based on algorithms, Neuromancer dramatizes the limitations of these machines.
Clark, as discussed earlier, talks about the posthuman fusion of brain, body and world that generates an embodied cognition. In this view,
“cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven
mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind” (Varela et al.
1991: 9). While this may apply for a human mind, it would not apply for a computer. As Hubert Dreyfus notes, “whatever the mind is, it is by no means obvious that if functions like a digital computer. This makes practically unintelligible the claims by those working in Cognitive Simulation that the mind can be understood as processing information according to heuristic rules. The computer model turns out not to be helpful in explaining what people actually do when they think and perceive” (1979: 189). This argument applies even more strongly to higher consciousness. Even though cyborgs can pass for human, and Wintermute can bring back the nearly dead through the simulation of constructed identity, one thing computers certainly cannot do is attain an un-constructed identity or reflect purusha consciousness.
2. Memory and Identity
One of the nearly dead in the novel saved by computer technology is Corto, who after the failed Screaming Fist was “shipped to a military hospital in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw” (80). Armitage is a kind of flesh construct based on a ROM personality built around the fragments of Corto’s “real” personality.
Another construct and former mentor of Case is McCoy Pauley, known as Dix Flatline. Case contacts Dix to help him and Molly break through the ICE (intrusion countermeasures electronics) of Tessier-Ashpool to steal the code they need for ungrading Wintermute. As a cyborg programmed to kill, Molly is enhanced with mirrorshaded eyes, retractable razor claws, and brain sockets for accessing the matrix, and for the prosthetic device that allows Case to experience her physical sensations through a form of telepresence called simstim (simulated stimulation). Wintermute, Armitage, Dix and Molly are all cybernetic discontents hardwired to behave and react in a particular way, existing mainly on the surface of reality devoid of any real psychological depth.
Except for Case they are largely cut off from reflexion or self-transcendence, although Wintermute aspires to go beyond its present condition.
In defining character, Neuromancer blurs the boundary between humans and machines or cyborgs, but only in terms of their physical
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parameters. As argued here, the defining element of humanity is the ability to access pure consciousness as the internal observer. Although Wintermute as a computer is hardwired to seek transcendence, it can only transcend from one level of physical being or physical extension to another; it cannot transcend physicality altogether into the spiritual dimension. The only two characters who express any desire for real transcendence are Case and Dix. But Dix can only long in vain for transcendence based on his memory of what it was like to be a living human. Case “lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace” (6), which is not the same thing as being disembodied or flatlined like Dix.
Once Case’s nervous system is damaged by the Russion mycotoxin, he “fell into the prison of his own flesh” (6) and could no longer project his “disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was cyberspace” (5). But the concept of a
“disembodied consciousness” needs to be clarified. When Case projects into cyberspace, his consciousness does not lose contact with his body, but rather reflects its physiological condition. In other words, the extent and quality of the projection of consciousness exhibits the purity of its physiological embodiment, or the lack thereof as in the case of the Russian mycotoxin. From an Advaitan perspective, if we distort normal physiological functioning, as through neural damage, drugs or excessive technological overload, we risk dulling the mind so it can no longer clearly reflect consciousness in its purity as a void of conceptions. In this case we would lose the ability to transcend to the witnessing self. Dix is truly disembodied because he is dead, kept
“alive” only as a ROM construct, an abstract memory of what it was like to be a human being.
Posthumanists may question whether Dix is any less real than Case, but while they resemble each other in being able to think and remember phenomenal experience, Dix lacks the mind/body complex necessary for embodied consciousness. Case in fact is troubled by Dix’s disembodied state, finding it disturbing to think of him as a construct, “a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses”:
He coughed. “Dix? McCoy? That you man?” His throat was tight.
“Hey, bro,” said a directionless voice.
“It’s Case, man. Remember?”
“Miami, joeboy, quick study.”
“What’s the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?”
“Nothin’.”
“Hang on.” He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. “Dix? Who am I?”
“You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?”
“Ca—your buddy. Partner. What’s happening, man?”
“Good question.”
“Remember being here, a second ago?”
“No.”
“Know how a ROM personality matrix works?”
“Sure, bro, it’s a firmware construct.” . . .
“Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?”
“If you say so,” said the construct. “Who are you?” (76-77)
As a construct Dix lacks volition. When Case asks him if he is game for sleazing over to London to “access a little data,” Dix replies, “You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?” (77). Gibson makes a loose connection between memory and identity. But even though Dix’s program still remembers how to hack into computers, its artificial memory comes laden with gaps. By momentarily disconnecting Dix, who afterwards cannot recall what they were just talking about, Case demonstrates that computer memory does not provide continuity between events.
Unlike human memory, computer memory does not function by interacting reciprocally with an unpredictable environment. As Edelman says, computer memory would be representational, “like a coded inscription cut into a rock that is subsequently brought back into view and interpreted” (2004: 52). But human memory is nonrepresentational and does not repeat the same dynamic patterns responsible for its initial input. Edelman gives an analogy of nonrepresentational memory as “a glacier influenced by changes in the weather, which are interpreted as signals” (ibid.). As the glacier melts and refreezes there are changes in the synaptic responses, with different rivulets descending the glassier representing the different neural pathways of memory that will “join and associate in novel ways” (ibid.). Memory in this context depends on perception and gives rise to what William James called the “specious present,” which Edelman calls “the remembered present” and defines as “the dynamic interaction between memory and ongoing perception that gives rise to consciousness” (55).
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In his “theory of neural group selection” (TNGS), Edelman distinguishes two forms of consciousness: “primary consciousness,”
defined as a fundamental consciousness based on the “interaction of value-category memory with systems of perceptual categorization”
(172: 180); and “higher-order consciousness,” defined as “the capability to be conscious of being conscious” (161), which would corresponds to the mind or phenomenal consciousness in Advaita Vedanta. He does not talk about pure witnessing consciousness as a void of conceptions, or purusha consciousness. In the absence of pure consciousness and with only a simulated version of higher-order consciousness, the memory of Gibson’s constructs splinters into a series of fragments. This form of memory may provide the basis of a posthuman identity construct, but not the identity of a complete human. Wintermute may possess a form of primary consciousness, which allows one to interact with the environment for the sake of survival, but it lacks the neural core for higher-order consciousness.
Still, even though the brain is not a computer, Wintermute was designed to simulate the attributes of higher-order consciousness, which include “the ability to imagine the future, explicitly recall the past, and to be conscious of being conscious” (Edelman 2004: 58-59).
But for Wintermute, to be conscious of being conscious merely entails what Dennett calls the self-monitoring of a zimbo, which has “internal (but unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about its other, lower-order informational states” (1991: 310). Memory without higher-order or pure consciousness, even when enhanced through the matrix, has difficulty organizing information into a coherent whole and can easily collapse under the mass of data. In one of Case’s experiences of memory enhanced by cyberspace, for instance,
“Something cracked [. . .] shifted at the core of things. [. . .] The weight of memory came down, an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a Microsoft into a socket. Gone” (115). Given that it is Case and not Dix who experiences this collapse of memory, Neuromancer like “Johnny Mnemonic” suggests that to enhance the phenomenal mind through computer prosthetics beyond normal physiological capability will only put the mind/body complex under extreme pressure and lead to its possible collapse.
3. Awareness without Thought
Marie-France of Tessier-Ashpool may have wanted to eliminate this kind of weakness when she created the Artificial Intelligences Wintermute and Neuromancer. “She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness. . . . Animal Bliss” (209).
Case and Wintermute both long for awareness without thought, or the void of conceptions (Maitri Upanishad 6:18-19; Hume 1921: 436).
But while Case has the innate potential to empty conscious content and experience a void of conceptions on the basis of higher-order consciousness, Wintermute, which does not possess higher-order consciousness, has no awareness upon which to be conscious of being conscious or to transcend conscious content. As Edelman notes, an AI to begin with lacks the underlying neural core processes necessary for higher-order consciousness and the potential for transcendence. Early in the novel, Case has a glimpse of the attenuation of mental content toward a void of conceptions in his sexual climax with Molly, which qualifies as a form of Animal Bliss: “his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips” (33). The physical rapture Case and others enjoy, however, represents transcendence for the mind only; it does not constitute transcendence of the mind/body complex altogether into pure awareness, only an absorption into the physical. Nevertheless, to an extent Case does transcend the mind/body identity in cyberspace when he finds release from the mundane concerns of survival and the prison house of meat. When he throws himself “into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set
But while Case has the innate potential to empty conscious content and experience a void of conceptions on the basis of higher-order consciousness, Wintermute, which does not possess higher-order consciousness, has no awareness upon which to be conscious of being conscious or to transcend conscious content. As Edelman notes, an AI to begin with lacks the underlying neural core processes necessary for higher-order consciousness and the potential for transcendence. Early in the novel, Case has a glimpse of the attenuation of mental content toward a void of conceptions in his sexual climax with Molly, which qualifies as a form of Animal Bliss: “his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips” (33). The physical rapture Case and others enjoy, however, represents transcendence for the mind only; it does not constitute transcendence of the mind/body complex altogether into pure awareness, only an absorption into the physical. Nevertheless, to an extent Case does transcend the mind/body identity in cyberspace when he finds release from the mundane concerns of survival and the prison house of meat. When he throws himself “into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set