Lemuria

Vigo lay on his bunk and stared at the bulkhead. Am I really the same person who climbed into the encephalogram) 3,000 years ago? The ship’s air smelled musty, like a cocktail of old books and greasy rags. Lit by the dim red florescence of the central crawlspace, crazy elongate shadows crisscrossed his closet-sized cabin. Are these sensations something that would have escaped my notice before? Albert Camus was right, he concluded; “consciousness” is consciousness of something. That elusive quality Descartes defined so circularly and Hegel defined in terms so egocentric they could only be said to apply to Hegel himself, twenty first century scientists finally cracked the riddle. It was a consequence of neurological complexity. A jellyfish possessed a minute quantum of it, a lizard more, and a mouse still more. It could be copied, fabricated, and explained, but never fully understood. Perhaps it was the lack of objectivity inherent in asking the question in the first place. Sentient machines offered no solutions. Lacking in ontogeny and uncertain of their own death, they were even more at a loss to grasp the elusive mystery of their existence.

Tiny cabin. Lying on his back, he could touch the ceiling. To him, small spaces felt most comfortable. In zero-g, the danger of slipping into an open space without a handhold was unnerving. Vigo found it interesting that this mild agoraphobia had survived the transition from human brain to cybernetic-biological composite without any notable change in intensity. Everything seemed “normal”, yet his natural brain had decomposed in a medical waste container centuries ago, and the supercomputer that scanned and translated its pattern of neurons, dendrites, synapses, glial cells, messenger RNA, and the abundance of a hundred different neurotransmitters had been scrapped and replaced soon after that.

He probed the distant edges of his memory. None of those old images felt particularly real. Even this is normal he mused, old memories seldom do feel real. What is it about consciousness that seems “normal”, despite its very nature-the precarious balance of a million contradictory impulses? A biologist, Vigo Vox knew certain aspects of his mind would be different. For the next few weeks, it would be much easier to learn new things. His young biological neurons were still settling into their role alongside their cybernetic counterparts.

Developmental biology was pioneered in the days when science could be pursued as an end in itself. It had an uneven history. Early progress in the twenty-first century met a storm of ethical and religious objections. And yet, research continued, because the same people who objected to the death of a human embryo for research purposes had been the first in line for the lifesaving operations it made possible. Later centuries witnessed disastrous attempts to confer immortality to the rich and powerful, successful but ill-conceived attempts to build super humans, and the extermination of these quasihumans on Earth. Finally, the transfer of a natural mind from biological brain to computer, and from computer to synthetic body became a breakthrough in interstellar travel. Banned for centuries, developmental engineering was revived in the secular 31st century because it challenged the role of religion in conferring life after death.

There was too much to think about.