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Post Symbolic Mind Control

by F. Scott Taylor

What's in a name?

Jaron Lanier is working on a computer language for virtual reality (VR) which, he projects, will allow for a "new form of communication on the same level as speaking and writing." He dubs this "post-symbolic communication," and deems that it will allow us to exchange "experiences" the same way we currently exchange spoken and written testaments.

VR is biofeedback. So is language. Something communicates only to the degree that it transforms it subject and objects. How much communication is there in biofeedback? In what way is biofeedback a tool, and in what way a symbol? VR is itself both a tool and a symbol, just as the person using VR is both a tool and a symbol. Our instrumental attitude toward any technology determines whether or not it is a tool, a symbol or both. So what does Lanier mean when he postulates a "post-symbolic communication?" How is an "experience" non-instrumental and non-symbolic? We experience all new technologies as new experiences, new grammars, new syntax and new cultural semantics. After all, our experience is, by definition, all of our old technologies and their processed co-ordinates, whether such are genetic, verbal technologies or electronic technologies.

Lanier's is not, however, a novel idea concerning the manipulation of thought. For example, J.C.R. Licklider expressed the hope in 1960 that, "...in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human being has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today."

Organisms, presumably since the invention of sex and genetic selection, have been trying to get rid of their interface. Some have also tried to get rid of "The Chain of Being" and if not "The Chain of Being" then simply the "Female," as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) attests. Others have succeeded in supplanting time and space with electronic appliances. more recently, although less successfully, some have attempted to get rid of "The Life Force" by postulating that Artificial Intelligence is Alive. And now, finding that the digital binary code can reduce and abnegate almost anything, Lanier is trying to supersede merely the Symbol or the Symbolic Interface, language -- as if we are not cyborg enough. And he is attempting to replace it with yet another mediating interface.

Then, in the early seventies, while discussing the birth of "Biofeedback Art," tek vet Douglas Davis eagerly blurted, "[I]t seems that the next fusion between man and machine may side-step the intermediary of language." Apparently, by the mid-sixties, composer Alvin Lucier had based his "Music for Solo Performer" on amplified brain-wave patterns, patterns which electronically programmed a battery of percussion instruments. And in 1970, conceptual artist La Fosse exhibited a "Corticalart Chair", wherein a subject sat, applied electrodes and watched her brainwaves change colour-fields over a cathode ray tube.

So how much thinking is bound up in language? Certainly, perceptions may be raw, elementary sensations, but concepts are extraordinarily complex. They are the combined creations of intuitive neurological procedures, acquired symbol and tool-systems, and social transformations all acting in concert over time. Is it possible to "side-step" language? -- especially since it is a genetic determination that all feeling and thought can eventually rise into verbal formulation? Or, is what is truly happening with telecommunications the replacement of human community and human communications with a cybernetic commons and cybernetic communications?

Later in 1970, Jose Delgado, a Harvard medical researcher, announced that he had established a two-way radio-communication between computer and chimpanzee. A chimpanzee had been able to "read" wave patterns and return signals which turned off and on various sections of its brain. Delgado subsequently stressed the possibility of establishing direct, non-sensory, non-verbal communication between man and machine. Moreover, in a book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (1969), he advanced an argument for the technological control of socially-undesirable persons [or, for that matter, "socially"-undesirable societies].

Ah-ha, now we're beginning to get it. "Communications" in the new world order will not exactly "side-step" language or symbolic consciousness. They will be sub-vocal and sub-symbolic, or sur-vocal and sur-symbolic. They will arise from unconscious, subliminal, insensate, senseless, incognizant, unaware, latent, repressed or suppressed physical and psychological structures. They will be inadvertent, unintentional, unwitting, automatic, spontaneous and involuntary. They will be, if nothing else, natural and so, very difficult to detect or criticize from any particular point-of-view, and, consequently, impossible to legislate.

Thought Control or Biocybernetics has been seriously studied by the American Military since 1970. And the military has gone a good way towards producing machine sensors that pick up the brain's electrical activity and create signals for processing by pattern-recognition equipment. Its stated goal was to pilot aircraft and weapons systems by thought, and it has accomplished much of what it set out to do -- hence, the Stealth Bomber -- and possibly much more. Cosmic Rays, Death Rays and now, perhaps, Thought Rays?

So we are already well in advance of a Post-Symbolic Culture. The three-thousand telecommunications satellites are not just about telecommunications, electromagnetic flux, remote sensing, weather and planetary conditions; they are about the potential to transform human unconsciousness and human consciousness through Biocybernetics. Talk about privatisation, destandardization, deregulation, et cetera. Why bother to retain control over superficial control- systems when absolute control over much more sensitive areas of being are at hand? Why not allow the freeplay of Internet, why not allow five-hundred or five-thousand television channels, why not all of the "technologies of freedom?" -- especially when the International Standards Organization is about to open infinite bandwidths on the electromagnetic spectrum?

By the 1980s Lawrence Pinnea of SRI International had engineered a "thinking cap" that monitored a subject's electrical brainwave activity, analyzed the brainwaves and translated them into action. Consequently, Pinneo's subjects were able to "think" a marker through a video maze. Since then numerous universities including M.I.T., U.C.L.A., Rochester and Stanford have produced similar biocybernetic programs. Such programs promise the possibility of constructing fully responsive, interactive environments triggered by telepathy.

This is what we want: infinite public and private bandwidths; instant telecommunication whenever to wherever to whomever; instant access to alternative realities; exact sensory feedback of "experiences;" the illusion of telepathy; interactive environments; and, the direct connection of our nervous systems to the global computer. While it was the American Military which funded the first computer and the Defense Department's Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which created the enabling technologies for the development of personal computers, it was really public appetite for manufactured experience which drove the development of television, video and video games. And it is public appetite which drives the development of VR. Such research and development has moved away from the military to the universities and private corporations.

Richard Bolt and Nicholas Negroponte specifically set up the famous and influential Media Lab at M.I.T. to accommodate the cognitive engineering sciences of what has become VR. At first the practitioners were concerned with Artificial Intelligence and "Control Theory," which deals with the basics of building physical systems which depend on computer communications. More and more, however, the Media Lab engineers developed interest in Intelligence Amplification, that is, direct human/machine symbiosis and human/machine synergists. To that end, M.I.T., M.I.T.I. (the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry) and the general entertainment industry, among others, continue to employ key cognitive engineering scientists.

Okay. Before we get too proud, paranoid or hyper-creative, let's assess the situation. Apparently, the three areas where human minds are more powerful than computer algorithms are all directly and indirectly language and symbol-based. The three are: firstly, in visual, aural and other-sensory pattern recognition; secondly, in experiential qualification, evaluation and priorization, that is, in judgement and decision-making; and, finally, in the overall sense of context and the ability to contextualize. The three areas where computers evince superiority are in computational speed and evaluation, storing data, and retaining exact memory. (To include memory here is a little tricky because neurologist A.R. Luriia studied an extraordinary man over fourteen years and discovered that it was impossible to quantify the amount of information a human being could potentially retain.) The major difference between human memory and machine memory is that human is extremely contextual while machine is abstract. Perhaps we are not as cyborgian as we sometimes tend to think.

Then again, a good deal of what we speculate is specious (false) and spurious (fake). By 1990 Alan Kay was speculating on "[w]hat kind of thinkers [we] would become if we grew up with an active simulator connected, not just to one point of view, but to all the points of view of the ages represented so they could be dynamically tried out and compared." His notion is just so. He does not seem to realize that while a child is capable of symbol-making and using, and tool-making and using, before adolescence no-one is able to make or use concepts, despite the fact that concepts are dependant upon symbols, tools and communicating cultures. He is unaware of the fact that growth in discernment, knowledge and wisdom is dictated by genetics, genetics both in implicit logic and in explicit dialectics or social forms of logic. There is a limit to what we can and cannot do or be. That is our strength. There is a limit to what our machines can and cannot communicate. That is their weakness.

In 1991, Howard Rheingold wrote about the poser of virtual reality to create illusion. It is not surprising to discover that the VR environment has been generated from the large body of knowledge amassed by the U.S. Airforce and N.A.S.A. from experiments with simulators. That knowledge is specifically knowledge about the ways the human senses can be fooled. The human brain projects and extends its powers to such a degree that it is easily fooled by its own illusion. Virtual reality is the simulation of an illusion of reality, not reality itself but an illusion created by a reductionist science acting within the perimeters of a reductionist paradigm. Prophet and virtual artist Myron Krueger speaks well when he says (in Responsive Environments, 1977), VR "...augurs a new realm of human experience, artificial realities which seek not to simulate the physical world but to define arbitrary, abstract and otherwise impossible relationships between action and result."

Hence, Virtual Delusion closely follows Virtual Reality -- and delusions of grandeur, other forms of telecommunication. There is a prudent, realistic fear that too close a conjunction with virtuality of all sorts will further impair human decision-making and governance. Wisdom has always meant acting with discernment rather than upon all we know with all we know. However altruistic and egalitarian, however humanistic or cyborgian, to give our machines more of our ability to perceive and modify perception will only serve to distort our conceptions.

It is in its potential to provide the new age with a master mind/brain/body switching board like that of Delgados's chimpanzee that virtual reality is most ominous. At the moment, our C.A.T.-scans and P.E.T.-scans are predominantly receiving telecommunications, but, imminently, similar machines will be able to send telecommunications, and in so doing will be capable of transforming and psycho-civilizing to a truly extraordinary degree. Much of that capability will be of immeasurable medical value. But what will become of our Chi?

Two areas of the brain, the most recent to evolve, which may be adversely affected or neglected by VR-simulated consciousness are the areas mapped and named by Brodmann Areas 39 and 40.

Area 39 is a neurological hub wherein one human sense is translated into another, into what are called sensory cross-modalities or synaesthetic precepts. Common comprehension of the world is filled with an infinity of such analogical arrangements; in fact, the world wouldn't be comprehensible without them. The fact that VR technology may be able to "grow eyes on the ends of our fingertips" and that cognitive engineers are attempting currently to do just that could cause Area 39 much "simulation sickness." Our own bodies are already doing as much and more; we already have eyes on the ends of our fingertips.

In direct, instant and parallel collaboration with Area 39 is Brodmann's Area 40, perhaps the seat of humanity's greatest inventions: Tools, Languages and Abstract Symbols (writing and numbers). It could be said to be the seat of the symbolic, because the pure symbolic would not be possible without it. Our mind/brain/body holistically contributes to a recreation of an abstract sense of reality. We are already virtual reality engines of a quite unprecedented order and design. Lanier's VR is nothing more or less than a delightfully dangerous toy theatre for further abstraction.

Area 40 helps to determine symbolic analogies for the sensory analogies of Area 39. It is the area which counts names out from what is no longer sensory chaos and sensory catastrophe. Both areas contrive with the other higher cortical faculties (which include, by extension, the general, external community) to create an absolute sensibility for context, meaning and government. But what will context, meaning and government be if the higher cortical faculties are decorticulated or dissociated? What will the resultant "experience" or psychological and sociological impact be? Will we, in fact, want to communicate such "experience?"

Lanier hopes to translate the human experience into digital binary code much the way that the Human Genome Project hopes to translate the human genome into digital binary code. Every individual has an entirely different sequence of codes, whether genetic or experiential. So what a VR- system would need to do to communicate "experience," symbolically or post-symbolically, is map the individual makeup both genetically and neurologically, and, having accomplished that, would have to translate the "experience" genetically and neurologically. It is doubtful that such minute "experience" can be translated exactly, even by digital binary code, or with the added analogical code of neural networks. To be successful such an endeavour would require the fine-tuning of a god, even just a little one, and such a one is not to be readily found.

There is a tribe of people -- the Columbian Kogi -- still living high in the Andes exactly as their Pre-Columbian ancestors lived. Their holy men are kept entirely secluded in their huts behind a blind for their first nine years. All that time they are told as much about the outside world as possible, and are repeatedly asked to imagine the world. At the end of the period they are brought forth to experience the world directly for the first time. They instantly discover that no matter how rich the symbolic narrative, no matter how powerful the imagination, they could not conceive of such infinite varieties of detail. God is in the details.

Some of us fear that we lose earthly detail when we goggle-up in cyberspace. And when human/computer interface designer Brendal Laurel says, quite correctly, "Reality has always been too small for human imagination", we despair. We feel that the only measure of experience that VR and its affiliates can control is not an extension of unified, organic reality, but an extension of electronic, robotic reality behind the blind.

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