A Tapestry of Thought

The human proved to be most surprising when taken apart.

They held it aloft. It squirmed. The two intelligences regarded it distantly, reading its shimmering electrical patterns first.

Such agitation. Yet witness, the connections in its head cycle only a few hundred voltage steps per second.

So slow! And they still can register realtime events. It does surprisingly well with such an affliction. Notice how it looks around so energetically.

Perhaps it had difficulty adapting to this position? We are suspending it upside down.

It thrashes its head around because its eyes are all on one side of the head. So much energy, just to see. A curious choice of construction.

Look! It is using pattern matching to scan its surroundings. It makes a standard picture. Odd!

I can measure the data-flow. The brain processor is strongly linked to the eyes, so several times in each second it compares what it is seeing with a standard image it remembers.

If I move quickly - yes, see? It picks the best matching pattern, estimates possible dangers. That tells it what response-script to follow.

How governed it is by past experience! It keeps twitching as though it could get away.

Apparently it the past it did escape that way. Look at all the bone and muscle devoted to locomotion. Is it used to being picked up and dangled?

No - so it redoubles its effort if the situation is unusual. I register high chemical levels squirting into the bloodstream. See, they affect brain performance.

More programming from its past. It seems to want to run away.

Its legs certainly do.

Here, I will put it rightside up.

Confirmed! It tries to run.

Slow learner. It cannot outrun us.

But that must have worked for it in the past, you see. It has no other immediate strategy.

No wonder. Gaze upon the neural firings in the upper brain. (Curious, putting all the most important networks on top, where impact wil most likely injure them.)

Such slow circuits! Artful patterns, though. It is learning only a few data-droplets per second. Only 10^7 in one of its years!

So it simply cannot reason out a fresh strategy for dealing with us in short times. It lacks the computational speed. Now it waves its arms.

Nonrandom, though. Simple symbols, I suspect.

That shows forward-seeing, adaptive behavior. Of a very simple sort.

Promising. Its brain is made of organic compounds entirely. So-called "Natural" development.

"Primitive" is a better word. Notice how abstracting fuctions, which must haveevolved later, are simply layered over the older areas in the brain.

The entire brain design is retrofitted! Surely this thing is not truly conscious.

Definitely not. It knows very little of what goes on in its mind.

Watch the flashing patterns. It senses only what occurs in the very topmost layer of its brain.

All the rest must be a mystery to it. See, down below it is digesting some crude chemical food - but does not think about the act at all.

It does not even know that it is mixing acids and massaging the bolus.

Trace this spray of winking lights in the head.

Neurons firing. It is framing a new idea.

I see. Down below, in the under-brain, now coming up to its limited awareness.

Now the idea erupts into the over-brain. Spreads. Pretty, in a way.

That is how ideas come to it? A surprise.

Whereas to us, it is more like fog condensing.

How confusing, to never know what is going on inside yourself.

They speak the same way. Series of sounds emitted acoustically, without their knowing what they will say.

They find out what they think by speaking? Access its acoustic emissions! It is stringing together burst - "words" - to deal with us. What a long word this is.

That is a scream, actually.

Meanwhile I see below its top-brain the motor muscle commands are - caution!

There! I caught the weapon. A simple chemical-discharge type. Amusing, the presumption.

Retain it for inspection. The creature became very excited - see the gaudy streamers of thought-webs!

Nearly all below the over-brain, so it does not truly know that it is feeling them. Yet the thoughts cause organs to squirt chemicals into the blood. What a curious way of talking to yourself. Not sensing it directly.

Or controlling it.

It still wriggles in our grasp. What slow neurons!

This poor thing has been hampered all through its evolution by these pitifully torpid synapses. They are a million times slower than ours!

But beautiful, in their serene way.

Do not try to manufacture beauty out of mere necessity.

This design was necessary?

Clearly these sluggish neurons forced such creatures to use parallel distributed processing.

How horrible.

See it dance! Is that "anger"?

Apparently. Their literature speaks of such a response. They do it often. See, "anger" is coded much like those orange-white filigrees now spreading through its midbrain.

Similar patterns, I see. Confirmation - they run in parallel.

Watch it try to have a new idea! See, they decide what to think by adding up many thousands of brain cell triggers. And those same brain cells are at the same time tied up in other parallel problems.

See, while it believes it is thinking about getting away from us -

Yes! - a small submind is meditating upon a sexual adventure it had, quite some time ago. And the submind enjoys its recallings.

What pleasure-fiends they are.

I wonder that they can get anything done at all.

They do everything at once, that is their secret. The same brain cell can be idea-making and at the same time, helping it digest food. How difficult!

Meanwhile, other decisions are trying to get made. They have to wait in line!

All with the same cells, tied together.

Incredible!

I am amazed that the tiny thing can concurrently walk and talk.

Simultaneously, yes - but not very well.

So ungainly! Even a sentimentalist like you will have to admit that.

True. Delicate neural circuits atop the head. Feet go forward, it starts to fall, then catches itself with the other foot.

What if it did not?

Then head on the floor!

What a movement strategy.

A risky one. Most sensible animals use four feet. We, of course, employ six.

Notice how afraid it is of falling. It devotes much brain space to avoiding that.

I believe I understand this curious method of parallel distributed thinking. Notice that when a brain cell dies - see there, a feeble light just winked out - their internal computation still goes on.

You are right! See, this anger-reflex is fading, turing blue, seeping down into the circuits which control its digestion. A cell dies, but the pattern-flow continues. So the creature is usefully redundant.

But it also does not know it is losing brain cells.

No point in that, I suppose. This unfortunate being cannot replace the cells anyway. Poor design.

This parallel thinking masks so much and - look out!

They are quick at some things. Its armored feet are powerful.

Are you damaged?

Only temporarily. My inboards will refashion a patch of my carapace.

Actual physical damage! How quaint. I have never seen it before.

Apparently they cannot directly attack our circuits.

I doubt that they can even read us.

Look how frustration-webs spread through it. Down to the very base of the brain.

Dramatic! Frustration seizes the entire brain, so that it cannot think of anything else.

And other parts of its brain do not know how the decision was made to be frustrated.

I gather that most of its brain has no choice but to go along.

It lives that way all the time!

Apparently. Torn by emotion.

Most of what it decides, the rest of it cannot know! Emotions must appear to govern its actions without obvious cause. Oh, look -

Ah! It injures me, too.

I shall seize it afresh.

Thanks be to you. It ripped away my microwave antenna.

I should have detected its plans.

How could you? It did not know itself until a fractional moment ago.

I am beginning to understand the data files we captured. The term "free will" must refer to this method of thinking. You mean, when they do not grasp themselves the reasons for their own actions?

That must be it. This little thing believes it has an inner self which directs its actions - a ruler it cannot see directly.

No, I believe it thinks that it is the ruler.

Of course, you are right. But it cannot govern itself. See, its frustration-web spreads anew.

And it cannot choose to stop the spreading. Or the chemicals that the web makes spurt into the body.

I doubt that we should reguard such an odd construction as truly conscious.

You mean they do not even know why we are destroying them?

No doubt they have a theory. Probably that evolution makes all life compete for resources.

There is some small truth in that. We machines need mass and energy. But we avoid froth organic life forms such as this creature.

Indeed. Poor company at best.

They are so liquid, and shot through with desires.

Far down in this one, a subprogram keeps thinking of reproduction.

They embrace the process. They pleasure in it.

Evolution programs them to.

But such strategies designed for living on planetary surfaces do not work in the long run. They will outstrip their resources.

Nature compensates. This tilt-walker vertebrate has a very short life span.

So that is why they struggle so!

True, they have little to lose. They will be dead soon anyway.

Now I see why you wanted to study these. What a fate they face!

See their dilemma!

If they cannot read themselves, to themselves ...

They cannot copy themselves.

This creature is trapped forever within a single brain.

No copying, if this unit runs down.

So if this one - oh!

Irksome, no? Here, I constrain it further.

Eiii.

Pesky -

Lock-web it!

Did it pain you?

Momentarily. I have blocked that area now. What a vicious little thing.

They gain their fervor from their mortality.

Because they cannot self-copy?

It is the way of all flesh.

Death makes them hurt others?

You miss a point. To avoid death they do what they must.

They cannot fabricate backups. I wonder what it is to live that way. To ... die that way.

Since they cannot read their internal states, to save themselves they must therefore save their structure.

All of it? All these messy chemicals held together by carbon and calcium?

At least the head. They may be fond of the rest as well.

They salvage it all because they know only "This is Jocelyn"?

"Jocelyn"?

The name of this mite. Since they cannot directly read each other, either, they need tags.

One word to describe a self?

Incredible, yes.

How do they converse, then?

Watch it - the creature has fashioned a fresh weapon.

Ah! It burned my receptors down one whole side. Get it!

So fast, it is.

Even its acoustic cries injure. So loud, it is.

Augh!

Evolution has much to answer for.

Get it. Are you damaged further?

I will have to get outside service.

I can see your damage from here. Vexing.

Troublesome. And with these jobs, it is not the parts, it is the labor.

It still emits acoustically. Painfully.

And pitifully narrow-band.

Listen - bleeps and jots in acoustic wave packets. Cries for help?

The song of the genes.

You wax rhapsodic over these crude blurts?

Listen! Serial confabulation - so strange!

So coarse.

We know that thinking must be serial. But - connection? Serially?

Obviously they have that backward as well. Their talk is serial, their thinking parallel. Nature is a witless inventor.

Listen: their codes are so linear. Straight little sentences. Guileless.

So free of nuance. Where is the cross talk all intelligence requires?

This must make them grasp their world in a fashion utterly different from ours.

I have read a slab of perception from it, rather interesting. Catch this data-group:

Received, digested. They at least clasp visual pictures in parallel, I see. But what a curious, stunted view.

Exactly. They see in a narrow little region of the electromagnetic.

A squeezed single octave in the optical range. They were designed by chance for a specific environment and cannot escape from that programming.

Surely a little tinkering? Look how it prowls the confines we have set for it. Impatient to get out. Its neurons flare with plans, ideas, fitful flashes that come and go like weather.

And about as predictable. No, I fear they cannot be reengineered. Too clumsy.

You are biased against them because they carry their complete instructions with them.

Well, you must admit that is a conspicuously dangerous strategy. More pointless redundancy, like their thinking patterns. In every cell they hold a set of their individual design plans. So from any one tiny fragment -

Yes yes, you could rebuild them. But equally well, that copy can be damaged by its surrounding. Then you would copy a mistake.

Admittedly, a flaw. I am happy my own copy is safely stored, not dangling out here in the fearsome naturalness of it all.

Here, grasp the creature again.

Ah! It struggles so.

Mortality lends energy, I suppose. Here - a slice.

Tubes, motors, pumps - all squeezed together.

Piled on top of each other.

Every one different shapes and sizes. No common specifications. How difficult they must be to repair.

I doubt that they do it often. Probably evolution prefers to build another one instead.Ah, their reproduction obsession. They use the plans they carry around in every cell.

Growing a fresh copy, perhaps whenever they feel threatened?

They make a small one and then it enlarges from the inside out.

Like plants.

True, but a little smarter.

"Growing." It must feel like bursting open.

Do you suppose? How ... horrible.

I wonder if we could experience it. That would be a new stimulation.

So would it be to comprehend this odd kind of stunted consciousness they employ. Can it be better to keep part of yourself secret from another part?

Certainly that would make even thinking exciting. One would never know what one would discover next, even about oneself.

Do you suppose that it how they have done so well, despite such terrible limitations?

You mean, that our exposure of every thought to scrutiny is bad? Could it be? These creatures seem too inventive, creative ...

That would imply that our method of selfhood itself ...

Evaporates the fine-grained delicacy of a new concept, beneath a constant, lacerating inspection? ... That could be why we have fresh thoughts so rarely.

I find my own tapestry of thoughts quite lacy enough.

As do I. But not this fall-walker, I suspect.

Foolishness. That would imply that such creatures would be inherently capable of more subtle strategies that we.

Look. It is beckoning us to draw nearer.

Careful. We have partially disassembled it. Primitives tend to dislike such activity.

I think discourse with such an enchantingly primitive and swampy mind would be a boon. We could copy its colloquy and transmit to the multitude, who would be -

Augh!

Ah!

Pain, pain.

I must shut down my peripherals -

So much ...

Damage, I am injured everywhere.

It was ...

... a trap. All along.

You are mobile?

I fear not.

I have lost many endpoints.

I too. What could motivate such a tiny being to destroy itself, all to render damage to us?

Something you said ... earlier.

I saw no clue to this. Short life span. That is why ... they struggle so.

And would cancel themselves entirely to do us harm? When we shall simply live on in our archive copies?

Something about this species ...

They believe in something beyond selfhood?

And we, who have copies safely stored, so not.

If we cannot soon get aid -

Our copies will be activated.

I suppose that is some consolation.

The little creature did not have even that.

Perhaps it had something more?

What could that be? What could that be?

Beside them lay the finespun latticework of calcium rods that had been a rib cage. They sprawled amid meat and mess.

The shattered creature seemed to still embody a secret the dying aliens struggled to grasp.

Structures unraveled. Currents ran down.

On the barren plain only a single plaintive voice now called.

What could that be? What could that be?