Escaping the Locked Room
"Less primordial but perhaps a nearly universal human quality is the enjoyment of reaching a summit and seeing a view." — D. R. Hofstadter
I. The Locked Room
Let me read you a quote from David Foster Wallace’s classic short story, Good Old Neon:
“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.”
I find this DFW quote especially moving and, frankly, depressing to the very core. Because it’s true: we have these vast, internal worlds within us that we can never adequately describe. We die keeping most of our experiences to ourselves — lost to the universe, like tears in rain. It’s as if we’re on ships passing by each other, able to signal but... unable to step onboard. I could even make the case that all of us are suffering from a kind of locked-in syndrome. Sure, most of us can communicate with others through speech or sign, but, in the grand scheme of things, this is only marginally better than nothing at all. If we compare ourselves to all humans living, and to all humans who have ever lived, it might seem that we’re doing pretty good in this regard — the advent of the semiconductor has done wonders for us.
But it hasn’t fundamentally changed the range of possible expression.
If we compare ourselves to the humans that have yet to be born, I’m afraid we’re still sorely lacking in our ability to share thoughts, feelings and experiences with one another. Perhaps a straightforward way to think of it is in terms of the bandwidth of communication. If we place all humans living today on a spectrum going from no bandwidth to high, all of us would stack up on the low end.
Perhaps that’s what art is for… it breaks us away from the world of words and attempts to show something deeper — something timeless, something more intimate. Artists are people who want to be heard. Wallace, again:
“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
And yet, we can do better. When I read David Wallace, and hear him about that little keyhole in older doors, I don’t take it as nihilism. No, I take it as a call for a research program. I believe that, in fact, we can escape The Locked Room — as I call it — given enough ingenuity.
II. Escape
Imagine a future where we’ve escaped out of our Locked Rooms. What would that future look like?
For one, you could share thoughts instantly. A teacher would be able to communicate a concept directly, exactly as he sees it, in as much resolution as appropriate. Bandwidth constraints would be a thing of the past.
Divergentism — the notion that “as individuals grow out into the universe, they diverge from each other in thought-space” — would no longer be a problem.
As things stand now, I can't fully empathize with someone in a specific area unless I know everything that she knows about that area. Or at least know enough to carry an interesting conversation. And the more adventurous a journey someone takes in thought-space, the more effort it is for someone else to follow.
Say I climbed up a difficult mountain and there's a wonderful view at the top. My urge, naturally, is to share that view with others. So then what can I do? I take a picture of it. I can try to convince others to climb with me. I can make hiking trails or gondolas that make it easier to get up to the mountain. Post signs to guide their way... All of this stuff translates to ideas. What would it be like to take a picture in thought-space? Create hiking trails? Gondolas? Stick around for long enough, and you just might find out.
But state-of-the-art tools for navigating thought-space are not the limit of the affordances we stand to gain. We also stand to gain a dramatic increase in empathy, togetherness and understanding. How many of our conflicts today involve people talking past each other — not realizing they use different terminology for the same ideas, or use the same words to talk about completely different things? How about the people whose network of concepts is so different from ours, that it’s unclear as to how to even start a conversation?
In addition, having access to others’ rooms will help one better glimpse their genius. As James Carse writes in Finite and Infinite Games:
“To be the genius of my speech is to be the origin of my words, to say them for the first, and last, time.”
Genius, to Carse’s way of thinking, is the unique, unrepeatable pattern that is you. Bucky Fuller would agree.
Carse goes on to define two more concepts — touching and moving. They relate to how people interact with genius:
“Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play. I am not touched by another when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center — that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal.”
…
“The opposite of touching is moving. You move me by pressing me from without toward a place you have already foreseen and perhaps prepared.”
With our doors unlocked, it’ll be easier to interact with others as the geniuses they are — to touch.
Perhaps most fantastical, we stand to gain access to a much wider range of conscious experiences, and an ability to control them. When it comes to understanding the mind, we’re very much living in the dark ages. Our default conscious experience is the ultimate Plato’s cave, in a way. There’s so much more we can experience, and escaping The Locked Room would be a path directly there.
III. To Escape the Locked Room, We Need a Key
This seems obvious enough. The question is, how do we engineer one?
Given that my thoughts are in my brain, and your thoughts are in yours, our key actually has to be a bridge — between brains. Or a tunnel, if you wish. To use industry lingo, a brain-brain interface (BBI). An effective BBI is a system of two brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) with the ability to read and write to neurons, plus some kind of communication protocol between them.
Now, the hardware part of this is diligently being worked on — by Neuralink and others. The software side, however, appears to be much quieter. That doesn’t mean that nothing is happening — in fact, a lot is happening. But progress does seem to be further behind when we consider the advancements happening with the hardware.
So how do we make progress on the goal I’m describing — to build a bridge between brains? It’d involve coming up with a human-readable language of neural abstractions.
Some different ways to phrase this might be:
Identifying computational reducibility in biological neural networks.
Finding partial isomorphisms between brains.
Creating the language for hyperinteraction.
Creating an API for the brain.
Knowing the layer of abstractions that make up cognition, we’ll have a clear path toward building a bridge through software. At least as it seems to me, we can formalize, and then digitize those abstractions — a sufficiently-detailed reading of neuron spikes would be able to contain someone’s brain state, or some partial version thereof. A digitized version of a person’s brain state can be modified in any way we see fit, and written back to the neurons — either of the same person, or someone else. We’ll therefore reverse-engineer the mind.
Currently, the tools used to analyze neural spikes are machine learning algorithms, or basic, direct neuron spike analysis. Could we build up higher-level abstractions from the neural data instead of treating the mind as a black box?
The way I’m thinking about it, this problem requires two approaches: one that reaches up and one that reaches down. We have a very good understanding of how our brain works on the level of a few neurons. We also have a fairly good understanding of the high level cognitive properties that emerge out of brain function — the qualia, if you will. The murkiest part of our understanding lies in that middle area: how does the firing of neurons create a ‘stack’ that eventually leads to the experience of complex emotions, perception, etc? To compare our brain to a computer, this would be the equivalent of understanding basic logic gates and digital circuits, plus understanding how the computer functions at the GUI level. In order to figure out that middle area of how the logic gates and the GUI link up, we could either reach down from the GUI level, or reach up from the gates.
Some examples of people doing work in these areas:
Qualia Research Institute (QRI) is reaching down — attempting to come up with mathematical models that describe qualia, and then hopefully correlate said models with data collected from the neurons.
Many in the BCI space are reaching up — current techniques use machine learning to recognize patterns in spikes.
There has also been interesting research done involving artificial neural networks — seeing if they can be analyzed and higher-level abstractions extracted (eg. Olah, Cammarata et al.).
So the trick, then, is to deconstruct qualia into the building blocks that make it up, and hope to recover those building blocks in the neural analysis.
To summarize, we can either reach up or down. Up from the neurons, down the high-level descriptions of cognitive processes. An effective approach will probably use a mix of both. What I hope to help create are human-readable abstractions for brain processes that describe this stack of abstraction from the neurons to qualia. Once we can understand the stack, we can effectively manipulate it. Wouldn’t it be nice to manipulate the mind with a JavaScript library?
By carrying out this work, we stand to increase our empathy and our range of experience, reaching horizons never before seen. To quote Cale, “it would be a stronger world, a stronger loving world, to die in.”
If any of this resonated, don’t hesitate to get in touch! And of course,
Appendix: Ideas That Didn’t Make the Cut
Another quote that has inspired me comes from Hideo Kojima’s sci-fi adventure game Death Stranding. This quote is a little lore-heavy, so I’ll just embed links that you can chase down yourself. This is the character Mama, talking about her sister:
“We knew each other's thoughts without saying a word. My joy was her joy. Her pain was my pain. No distance was too great for us to overcome. Some might call it a kind of telepathy. Divided in body, joined in spirit. We had a Beach, just for us. One we shared. Our own "private chiral network," you might say. With Q-pids, we can build one that will let everyone share what Lockne and I have. I saw it all laid out before me after I signed up with Bridges. A network that could unite everyone, no matter how scattered or different. That would make us whole. It wouldn't be about bringing people into line. It would be about bringing them into the fold, where they would share and share alike. I knew it could change the world.”
Now that I think of it, The Wachowskis’ Sense8 paints the post-Locked Room world quite well.
Tim Urban does quite a stellar job describing the post-Locked Room world in his post on Neuralink. Read the whole thing — it’s very much worth it. If you’re impatient, skip to ‘The Wizard Era: Communication’.
You can also look at these approaches of reaching up and reaching down as the difference between inductive and deductive science — observing reality and seeing if you can formulate theories from your observations versus coming up with the theories first and seeing if they match reality. Einstein, for example, famously favored the deductive approach. From his 1919 essay, Induction and Deduction in Physics:
“The simplest picture one can form about the creation of an empirical science is along the lines of an inductive method. Individual facts are selected and grouped together so that the laws that connect them become apparent ... However, the big advances in scientific knowledge originated in this way only to a small degree . . . The truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a way almost diametrically opposed to induction. The intuitive grasp of the essentials of a large complex of facts leads the scientist to the postulation of a hypothetical basic law or laws. From these laws, he derives his conclusions.”
The idea of hiveminds might’ve come to mind as you were reading this piece. Why didn’t I mention it? The idea of a hivemind — or at least the things it brings to mind — is opposite to the direction I want to head in. When I think hivemind, I usually think of a surrender of individuality and of merging into some kind of superorganism. On the contrary, escaping the Locked Room will enable us to express our individuality more fully. Maybe we’ll experience the best of both worlds, and get some synthesis of extreme individuality with extreme collectivism. But what I can say for sure is that I do not want to live in a world where individuality is stifled and suppressed. Our uniqueness and idiosyncrasy makes us beautiful.
A special thanks to Quentin Wach and Chen Wang for reading early drafts of this post.