The Red Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

which corresponded to the macroscopic wave functions of reality, he forgot
about it completely. These new concepts were so complex that it was as if his brain was reluctant to understand itself.
    One Friday afternoon, the entire intake was corralled into a meeting room. The men gravitated toward the back of the room, their arms crossed, their expressions sceptical. Morton Eakins slipped
into the gathering and threw a balled-up screen from the back of the room onto the front wall. Slowly this screen spread across the entire surface from floor to ceiling, then the lights dimmed, and
the screen filled with the Monad brand. It resembled a stick man with one central eye and a semi-circle partially eclipsing the forehead. This circle, or head, was set on a cross, which at first
glance could be seen as an arms and torso, except that the horizontal line crossed the mid-point of the vertical, contrary to the traditional stick man, where the arms are drawn slanting downwards
from the neck. Either side of the base of the cross, there was a quarter-circle.
     

    The logo was more complicated than the usual corporate identity, and reminded Raymond of a glyph or sigil.
    Morton Eakins pointed at the brand.
    ‘This is Monad.’
    He exhaled, an evangelist’s awe at what he was about to impart.
    ‘What is it?’ asked Eakins.
    Some of the intake went to answer, but he was too quick for them.
    ‘Monad is the new new thing. Monad is a mystery.’
    On the screen, the Monad logo morphed into a question mark.
    ‘Why has Monad employed you? What does Monad want you to do? Where did Monad come from and where is it going?
    ‘This past week, we’ve laid on a crash-course in philosophies of the self, the latest research into consciousness, neuroscience and the cultural construction of the self, and the
implications of artificial intelligence. But we have not answered the big question: what are you lot doing here?’
    His hairline was retreating. Unfortunate deposits of fat gave him dugs and a double chin. There was a hairless, beardless babyish quality to Morton; his black company fleece and black moleskin
trousers resembled a funereal romper suit.
    ‘What if your consciousness could be uploaded into a computer? It’s a common idea in science fiction. It proceeds from the assumption that the mind like the computer is a consequence
of computation. If you are merely a collection of neurons firing in a network, then it is simply a matter of recording the position of these neurons and mapping their locations onto a model which
interprets them as thoughts, memories, the qualia that is the ineffable you.
    ‘Over the last five days, we’ve raised these kind of speculations and hopefully you’ve understood that it’s impossible to upload your mind into a computer using current
technology.
    ‘We could analyse your entire brain. Peel it like an onion and record the contents of every slice of tissue with an electron microscope. It would kill you, and to what purpose? In every
cubic millimetre of brain matter there are ten-to-the-power-of-five neurons and ten-to-the-power-of-nine synapses. That is before we even get onto the nervous system. Or chemical and hormonal
activity. How would we reassemble a map of the brain into a mind? Where would we get the model which could run that program? What computer could possibly contain such an immensity of
information?
    ‘To create a model of the mind, we could take a baby, a
tabula rasa
, and expose it to carefully controlled stimuli while recording the development of the brain and the growth of
their consciousness every day for the first five years of their life. We could show the child their mother’s face, note down the concomitant swell of neural activity. Would that give us the
information required to reconstruct consciousness from a brain scan?
    ‘Then there are broader philosophical problems. Consciousness can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation, a survival mechanism that has allowed