Neuropath (Bakker 2009) is a dramatic demonstration of the eliminative materialism worldview of the author R. Scott Bakker. It's very bloody and rapey, but it's probably necessary to get the radical implications of eliminative materialism across.
If you want to read the novel but are short on time, I recommend that you read the afterword first, where the author overviews what's real and what's not-yet-real (hint: it's too real for comfort). Then read the last chapter, where Neil lectured on and on about his eliminative materialism Argument, accompanied by gripping manipulations on the protagonist's and his ex-wife's brains.
Word list
- Tom Bible/Thomas/Goodbook: protagonist, cognitive psychologist.
- Neil Cassidy/Ocean Voice: neuroscientist, friend of Tom, used to be employed by the NSA, but has gone rogue. Hunted by the FBI throughout the story. Seems to be born with a psychopathic personality.
- Nora: ex-wife of Tom. Neil used to fuck Nora, and that made Tom feel hurt.
- Samantha (Sam) Logan: FBI agent, second protagonist. Very understanding to Tom, kind of a romantic partner to Tom as the story went on. Also an agent of FBI.
- Shelly Atta: FBI agent. Not nice.
- Cynthia Powski "Cream": a porn starlet from Escondido, California. Killed by Neil.
- Theodore Gyges/the Chiropractor: captured by Neil for a demo. His alter-ego is the Chiropractor, a serial murderer who removes the spines from the victims.
- Low-field fMRI: fMRI using magnetic fields that are "low", that is, does not need massive magnets with cooling. Those are small, cheap, and easy to hide. Used by the government to do mindreading, as an extremely advanced form of surveillance cameras.
- Disney world: a phrase used by Neil to refer to the commonsense reality model that normal people construct in their heads. The "Disney world" model is destroyed by a full understanding of neuroscience.
- Moscow: a city destroyed by climate change.
- The Argument: neuroscience shows that eliminative materialism is true, and folk psychology is wrong. Usual morality, based on folk psychology, is also wrong.
- End-user illusion: A metaphor for consciousness. The phrase came from The User Illusion (Nørretranders, 1991), or perhaps Consciousness Explained (Dennett, 1991)
- The semantic apocalypse: Meaning is a brain phenomenon, and with neurotechnology for changing brains, multiple species of humans would appear, such that they are mutually incomprehensible. Their actions would seem meaningless to each other -- a meaning-apocalypse.
- Derealization: effect of bellyfeeling the end-user illusion theory of consciousness. After bellyfeeling it, you would realize that you are in a waking dream. A dream yoked to reality through the sense organs, but still a dream.
- Depersonalization: effect of bellyfeeling the Argument. You realize that there is no "self" or "free will" or just about all the folk psychological concepts. Your self is only a useful model constructed by the brain.
Synopsis
The Argument
Outstanding segments
The woman's braincase had been sawed open. A flea-circus of pins and wires formed a scaffold over the convoluted neural tissue. Lobes glistened in the light.
Neil's experiments on interrogation:
'It started small fry: experimentation with sensory deprivation interrogation techniques. They gave us this theo-terrorist, let's call him Ali Baba, who they thought could be key to unlocking several American Muslim cells. We interviewed him several times via a sham fellow inmate, discovered what he thought his execution would look like, and more importantly, what he thought paradise would look like.
We arranged his sham execution, making sure he recognized it by providing the cues he expected. But instead of killing him we simply put him under-deep under. Then we transferred him to a specially prepared sensory deprivation tank, pumped him full of MDMA variants and opiates, gave his body some time to acclimatize, then woke him up." 'So what happened?' 'He awoke to nothingness, no sound, no light, no smell, no touch, and higher than a fucking kite. He tried screaming, thrashing, and all that- a brain in sensory limbo automatically attempts to generate feedback stimuli- but we'd induced motor paralysis to better prevent him from sensing himself. Besides, he had no choice but to feel good with the mickey we'd slipped him. When the MRI showed us his visual centres spontaneously lighting up, we introduced him to God, this ultra-slick intelligence specialist from Bahrain. Ali Baba literally thought he'd died and gone to heaven. Let me tell you, when God's asking the questions, people answer.
On how to turn off willpower:
That it was his brain I was interested in. That his will was simply one more neural mechanism, and that once it was offline, he would quite happily tell me everything our field operatives needed to know. And I was right. We had moved far beyond sensory deprivation interrogations by that time. Using all the imaging data on the brain's executive functions-you know, Roach's famous experiments on the differences between weak-willed and strong-willed individuals --- we simply isolated the offending circuits and shut them off. It was as easy as flicking a switch.
'That all that evil mind-scanner stuff would be so laughably far from the truth. Why design a machine to read thoughts when all you have to do is shut down a few circuits and have your subject read them out for you?'
Halasz eating a piece of Bobbie's cheek, as part of Neil's argument:
Then he bit into her cheek as though she were an apple. Her shriek was inhuman.
'There are boundaries?' Halasz wailed. 'Limits?'
The girl flopped like a deep-sea fish in his arms. People fought, Thomas numbly realized, as frantic and as vicious as any wild animal.
'NO, CONGRESSMAN,' Ocean Voice said. 'ONLY CIRCUITS AND BEHAVIORAL OUTPUTS. WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHETHER THE INPUTS COME FROM ME OR FROM THE WORLD?'
Halasz shook his head, like a dog rending tendon from bone.
'God's circuits!' he cried, spitting blood like spittle. 'Your perversion!' he sobbed, leaning back to the twitching girl. 'This isn't me! God made me!'
'BUT YOU FEEL IT. YOU CHOOSE.
Drenched in hot blood, Halasz laid the girl on the cement floor before him, weeping.
'Pleeaase,' he hissed, as he started taking off his clothes. 'Pleeeassse,'
'YOU WANT THIS. YOU ACHE.'
On the government just casually mindreading everyone at sensitive locations, much like surveillance cameras:
'Low-fields are pretty much part of any government biometric scan, nowadays, especially at sensitive locations... Would you like to see yours?'
She flashed through an array of windows, entered a code, then scrolled through what looked like dates and times. Another graphic of a brain, this one three-dimensional, popped onto the screen, animated by shifting colors like the temperature contours on a weather map. 'When I logged you in, this snapshot of your noggin was automatically taken.'
On why psychopaths pose a strong challenge to commonsense moral realism:
For Professor Skeat, psychopaths were nothing less than the horsemen of the apocalypse. Contemporary culture had digested the meaninglessness of natural events, the fact they were indifferent to all things human. A few stubborn fools still shook their fists at God, but most simply shrugged their shoulders. Most knew better, no matter how ardently they prayed. What made psychopaths so indigestible, Skeat claimed, what drove culture to slather them with layer after layer of cinematic and textual pearl, was that they were humans that were indifferent to all things human. They were natural disasters personified.
They were walking gnosis, secret knowledge, an expression of the nihilistic truth of existence. And this, Skeat insisted, was why psychopaths were the only holy men, the only real avatars left to humankind.
On Jackie's rapture:
Spit exploded from Jackie's mouth. He went rigid, bent back like a coathanger, then fell thrashing onto the floor. Feces and urine darkened his shift. His shriek was choked into gagging by vomit.
Jackie went slack. 'You sum'bitch,' he sobbed. 'You sum'bitch.'
CALL ON HIM.
Jackie curled into a fetal position. 'Pleasssse!' he hissed.
HIM. CALL ON HIM.
'Pleaaasse, Gawwd!' he bawled. 'PLEEAAASSSE!'
A moment of grovelling silence, then the evangelist jumped, as though surprised by someone tapping his shoulder. He glanced around wildly, then slowly turned his face in the direction of the camera's light. He wiped his nose along his forearm, oblivious to shit smeared across it.
DO YOU SEE?
'H-how?' the trembling lips asked. 'H-ho-how is this possible?'
IS IT GOD?
The face crumpled then went blank. 'Y-yessss!' he gasped. 'I can't see... but I feeeel him... here... so very close...
HOW CAN YOU BE CERTAIN?
'This is beyond your puny questions... beyond... The evangelist's face floated across the screen, greasy and bloated in the glaring light. Surgical steel gleamed. Blood trailed from the screws. His expression had become plaintive in a wheedling, ingratiating way that Thomas found difficult to look at. Plaintive and joyous.
'I knew it... I always knew it!'
A deep shuddering gasp. Fluttering eyelids. A voice capsized by rapture.
'Sweet Jeeeesusss! Haaaw, praise-praise-praise--'
After Neil shot Tom's son in the head, he fixed Tom's affective state to a sense of contentment. A massive amount of creepy confabulation resulted:
'No kidding. There's only one procedure that can undo an affect feedback loop -- at least the devilish way Mackenzie does it.
'What's that?'
'A bullet to the head.'
Thomas snorted with genuine laughter. Intellectually, he knew it shouldn't be funny, but it was... And it seemed the most natural thing in the world that it should be. 'You always were crazy.' Frankie. Poor little kid. He was going to miss the little bugger...
'So all this,' Neil asked curiously, 'seems normal to you?'
Thomas tried to shrug. 'Well, I suppose to an outsider it would seem strange, but it really is quite normal when you think about it.
'How so?'
Thomas flashed him a bright 'Are-you-stupid?' smile. 'We're longtime friends. We always play gags on each other. Though I suppose we're getting a little too old for this.'
Neil scratched behind his ear with a pen. 'But at some level you know what's happening, don't you? You know that I'm stimulating the neural circuits responsible for your feeling of normalcy and ambient wellbeing.
Thomas frowned, happy and perplexed. 'What can I say? You always were elaborate.'
Neil describing what it's like to be a modified human brain that no longer operates with certain illusions:
'Only partially. I still experience things, after all. It's just a radically different experience, one far more sensitive to the fragmentary truth of our souls. One without volition, purpose, selfhood, right or wrong.
Thomas frowned and whistled. Part of him understood the monstrous implications of what Neil was saying, but it seemed little more than an amusing abstraction, like boys with sticks playing guns. The greater part of him wondered, even revered. What would it be like to walk without self or conscience, with plans indistinguishable from compulsions, one more accident in the mindless wreck that was the world? What would it be like to act, not as something as puny or wretched as a person, but as a selfless vehicle, a conduit for everything that came before?
Tom and his ex-wife Nora staring face-to-face, both bound to brain-machine-interfaces. Nora is filled with love for Tom by instruction of the BMI. Tom realizes that love requires us to not know where it came from.
'But where's that feeling coming from? Huh, Nora? You're bolted to a machine for Christ-'
'Stop, Tommy, stop! Who cares where it comes from? Really! If you found a winning lottery ticket in your pocket, what would you do? Fret about where it came from, or cash it in? Really, Tommy. It's as simple as that!'
A cold pit of realization. You spent your whole life with a person, sharing the same inside, too immersed in the intricacies of the relationship to ever clearly comprehend it. It was as if a kind of incapacity was the true measure of belonging to another person, an inability to see the other against the frame of larger events, an inability that found its culmination in the self. ...
'Do I need to tell you what you already know?' Neil continued, watching Nora but obviously speaking to Thomas. 'Everything that happens in the brain of someone who truly loves is happening in her brain right now. Every neurochemical transfer. Every storm of synaptic firings.' He smiled as though she were a prized zoo exhibit as he said this. He turned to Thomas, his eyes bright with arrogance and jubilation, the way they always were when he scored some incontrovertible point.
'True love, Goodbook. She's offering you true love.'
... 'There's nothing true about this,' Thomas spat. 'Nothing. You're controlling her. Forcing her to love.'
His friend shrugged. 'So? What earthly difference does that make? If it wasn't me who tipped the equilibrium in her brain toward the manifestation of bonding behavior, then what would it be other than an accidental collection of stimuli? A rose brought to the door. A lingering kiss. Heartfelt words. A smile. What does it matter if the world pulls her strings directly, or if it pulls her strings through me?'
The author describing his conviction about science and the Blind Brain Hypothesis:
According to the Blind Brain Hypothesis, conscious systems like humans should have an exceptionally difficult time understanding themselves - as indeed happens to be the case. Since the brain only glimpses slivers of its own processes, small fragments that it can only see as wholes, we should expect it not only to be baffled by the findings of neuroscience, but to insist those slivers really are wholes, and as such require some mechanism in the brain to explain them. If the Blind Brain Hypothesis is true, then much of cognitive science could very well be a wild goose chase, a search for 'magic coin circuits'.
The upshot seems to be that consciousness is illusory through and through, as opposed to just here and there, which is why I find myself in the strange position of wanting my own theory to be wrong. We now know that much of what we take for granted, experience-wise, is simply not what it seems, more than enough to ask all the hard questions covered in this book. But if consciousness is fundamentally, structurally deceptive, then the reason we have so much difficulty trying to figure it out could be that we have no way of knowing just what it is we're trying to figure out. And perhaps we never will.
Personally, I am neither an eliminativist nor a nihilist; I genuinely believe that what we experience should trump what we know. But like Thomas, I just can't figure out how to argue this honestly, let alone convincingly.
... [Science is] institutionally and procedurally structured to combat (as opposed to exploit) our shortcomings as believers... And as the book suggests, science doesn't give a damn about what we want to be true. In a sense, this is the key to its power. The world of Neuropath is a world where these 'unwanted truths' have reached critical mass, both socially and spiritually. It's a world where the pace of technologically driven social change has outstripped culture's ability to cope, where the black box of the soul has been laid bare to the appetite of irresistible institutional forces. And it very well could be our world.
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