A year or so ago, I wrote a sci-fi/horror short story that's gotten quite a few (deserved) rejection letters. Some of them were helpful enough to comment on the absurdity of spending five pages of a twenty-six page story talking about the neurological affects of sympathetic vibrations in the insular cortex. Of course, no publisher actually called this length absurd in a form letter. Instead, it was politely rejected and some suggests were made to be more concise regarding the biological mechanisms of the alien. Thankfully, we don't have to dance around it here. We can call it what it is: fucking absurd. Word-count is precious real estate for short stories.
I really wanted to explore the idea of alien life that reproduced in a way that was a significant departure from how we understand procreation. What if you encountered something that used your thoughts to reproduce? I'm not talking about memetic lifeforms, per se. What if this consciousness gestated inside your own, growing with every thought and memory you tried desperately to hold onto, until it was you?
The idea is that this intelligence is a massive stellar object - a blackbody that parks itself in Saturn's LP 3. The location is actually irrelevant to the lifeform - I just wanted somewhere for it to hide, and Saturn's gravity well acts as a time stressor for a decaying research station that's slowly pulled into Saturn's atmosphere and ripped apart. The blackbody itself may not even be the actual lifeform, but a carrier of information that's used to reproduce.
Anyway, scientists naturally get curious and decide to study the blackbody for a few decades. However, the blackbody is also observing and experimenting on them. After a long period of study and some trial-and-error, the blackbody begins to periodically release radiation in the form of a strobing light, which induces sympathetic vibrations within the frontal, insular, and temporal cortices of the observing scientists (the locations of the "language loop" and self-awareness). These vibrations trigger a neuronal cascade that rewrites entire portions of the observer's mind. The blackbody implants the idea of itself, a plutonic representation of its self-ness, that mingles with the representations and symbolic structure of the scientists' "mentalese" and sense of self. The idea of the blackbody gestates, grows, and becomes the subconscious driver, supplanting the subconsciousness of the observer.
Its intelligence and system of reproduction is based on Newell and Simon's physical symbol system hypothesis, in which the physical symbols of a system (in this case, the neurons of a human brain and our personal representations of an exterior world) can be manipulated in order to change the function and/or output of the system itself. For the sake of this idea, reproduction can be reduced to nothing more than recombinant RNA. Since RNA is just the propagation of information within a system, you can condense the blackbody down to an intelligent system whose RNA is carried on a binary system of PSS.
This is the idea I wanted to explore. Note: none of the following explanation made it into the story. All this rambling is just background information for how something like this might be possible (though quite unlikely).
In the 1970s, Jerry Fodor cemented an idea that is now central to cognitive science and general AI. It's called "the language of thought hypothesis." At its most basic, it's the language that you think in, not to be confused with your primary language. Your LOT contains "words" (that are not actually words) that can be arranged and combined to create meaningful ideas. These "words" can be thought of as representations, encoded information of a thing and your own platonic ideal of it. The ideas that these representations create are also representations that are used to create other representations. This matryoshka doll of encoded information happens long before the common idea of the word ever comes to mind.
Think of the word human. To follow these instructions, you must first have a representation of what it means to think. Even before that, you must have a mental representation for what it means to be instructed to do something. In giving you this command, your brain begins (without your input) a flurry of symbol manipulation - both physical manipulation (PSSH) and representational (LOT hypothesis). Neuronal groups blink on and off, trigging well-worn axons that pass off ARC and CPEB proteins - ancient retroviruses that are blasted from synaptic terminal to dendrite. These capsids explode among dendritic branches, spreading RNA throughout the region. The instructions these capsids contain are like memories (in the case of ARC, the capsids are actually memories in physical form). Dendrites absorb these instructions, and pass them along axons to their neighbors who repeat the process ad nauseum. Entire regions of the brain light up, bright like a city viewed from orbit. We can observe this process through fMRI monitoring; we can watch in real-time as de-oxygenated blood gushes out of the region and freshly oxygenated blood pours in to supplement.
All of this happens before the representations beneath the words you read are ever triggered. The Language of Thought forces a biological response which you cannot control. The "you" that's riding along inside your head has no say in the matter. Beneath the meaning, beneath the representation of those meanings, there is a simple binary process of neurons flicking on and off, on and off. Wernicke's area is accessed, mental lexicons are referenced and cross-referenced. Representations transform into the literal meaning of a word. Finally, after all of that, your brain offers you its best approximation of the word human that is based solely on long-forgotten, consciously inaccessible experiences and interpretations of the creature.
And that's just for a word. Imagine entire ideas, pictures, memories. This process happens for all of it.
That's what the "language of thought hypothesis" tries to account for. What is information made of inside our heads? Beneath the semantic, what is the representational? What is the representational made from and how is it manipulated?
This is part of the argument for Fodor's language of thought hypothesis. You are able to understand new ideas because there is a precursor language to your primary language - and that language is the manipulation of symbols and representational structures inside your head, which is first triggered by neurons blinking on and off. Only you know this language. However, the "you," as you define yourself, doesn't actually understand it. Instead, there's something else inside your head that understands this mentalese: it's the Real You, the hidden one that's actually in charge - a You that you are only vaguely acquainted with.
PSSH coincides with the language of thought hypothesis if our mental representations can be physically manipulated. If physical origins or "storage" of our mental representations can be identified, then mental representations can be physically altered by an external force. Dr. Si has some interesting research regarding the prion-like behavior of CPEB. It's compelling reading, and I do it a disservice to only summarize the findings that support my ideas. However, here's the short of it as it pertains to the argument: altering CPEB alters memory. By observing which of these proteins spread when certain memories are triggered, and then targeting those proteins, you can dampen and even remove the memory altogether. Here's a little bit of extra reading on the subject, a chapter from the excellent (and excellently titled) book Proust Was a Neuroscientist. It discusses the manipulation and supplanting of memory.
In any case, Dr. Si, et al, have discovered that by suppressing CPEB and/or ARC, or by toying with the neuronal ensembles associated with heightened levels of activity during recollection of specific memories, memories can be altered. They can be diminished. They can be removed. The emotional associations of memories can also be decoupled. When memories are tampered with, so too are the mental representations that provide a foundational network for those memories.
This is the physical symbol system that can directly alter our mental representations. The only question that remains is how to go about altering these proteins and/or neurons without slicing open the brain or exposing someone to traumatic head injury.
It gets a little easier from here.
Mental representations can be interrupted and even altered using transcranial magnetic stimulation. If you're unaware of the wonders of TMS, it's basically an electromagnet on the end of a wand that can target specific areas of the brain to either stimulate or suppress those areas. In the link above, TMS was used to interrupt visual information encoding centers that correspond with our external visual fields. It's also been used to stimulate involuntary movement within test subjects, and those test subjects swore to high hell at they intended to move the limb that TMS forced them to move. Wild shit.
If neuronal regions can be repressed or stimulated using TMS, then so can the representations carried in those regions. Since one theory of the language of thought is that it uses propositional logic to relate strings of information to one another, by stimulating and/or suppressing neuronal regions in a specific order (this calls back to PSSH), then new representations and associations can be forced within an unwilling subject.
Something similar can be done with a strobing light. Our periodic brain and central nervous system pulses to its own beat. By using strobing lights, sympathetic vibrations can be induced, forcing that beat to synchronize with an external force, resulting in heightened levels of neuronal activity. If these sympathetic vibrations can be targeted at neuronal ensembles that correspond with our mental representations, then once again, new representations and associations can be forced.
We are who we are because of our mental representations. These representations go beyond simple information encoding - they act as the filters of our reality. Everything around us is filtered through these representations to create an inward projection of our world and our orientation within that world. This projection of reality and our place within it is called the phenomenal self-image. Because that image is dictated by how we encode information and the links established by mental representations, altering the fundamental representations alters the self.
If an outside force, like the blackbody, were able to hijack our mental representations using targeted light or TMS, it could re-arrange our representations. It could implant the representation of itself within us and link that representation to every other representation within us.
The "Real You" mentioned earlier, the You that's actually in charge of the identity you associate with, will no longer exist. The blackbody will have taken it over without you ever realizing it. In a sense, the blackbody will have planted the DNA of itself inside our heads, and the linked representations would only grow, forming new chains of their own outside the previous definition of self and subconscious processes that operate behind that self, until a wholly new being emerges from those representations, one that is decidedly not us and is altogether alien.
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