6. Alice and the Assault on Reality (Part 6 of 12)
You have landed right in the middle of John Mulholland’s parody of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If you wish to start at the very beginning of their adventures together, you should click here to follow them down the rabbit-hole.
Chapter Six — Pig and Pepper
The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby; the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.
‘There’s certainly too much pepper in that soup!’ Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing.
There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment’s pause.
The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear. [36]
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, babies were cultivated in bottles and a high degree of uniformity in the human product was achieved by using the ova from a limited number of mothers [37].
Each ovum was treated in such a way that it would split and split again, producing identical twins in batches of a hundred or more.
In this way, it was possible to produce standardized machine minds for standardized machines. And not to leave anything to chance, the standardization was perfected after birth by infant conditioning and chemically induced euphoria as a substitute for feeling free and creative [38].
Brave New World presents a somewhat disturbing picture of a society, in which the attempt to recreate humans in the likeness of termites has been pushed to the limits of possibility.
Despite the apocalyptic overtones, information technology is not only transforming the fundamental social and economic structures of society but is also providing the ability to manipulate the genetic code of life itself.
The news that an obscure animal husbandry lab in Scotland had cloned a sheep caused quite a stir, since naturally, the first thing everyone thought was, Now they can clone people [39].
The development of genetics as computational biology reflects the extent to which we assume ourselves to be like machines, whose inner workings can be understood.
“Do we have our emotions,” asks a college student whose mother has been transformed by antidepressants, “or do our emotions have us?” Who do we hear when “listening to Prozac?” [40]
The aim of The Human Genome Project is to establish the DNA sequence and map every gene in the human body. The project is often justified on the grounds that it promises to find the pieces of our genetic code responsible for many human diseases so they can be manipulated by genetic re-engineering. But thinking about people as information also carries with it the risk of impoverishing our sense of the human.
Even as we recognize the risks of reducing people to strings of code, we must remember that we are particularly vulnerable to the message that we and machines are kin.
Oliver Morton draws a clear distinction between two ways of reading these strings of code, ‘the information that animates life’.
“Such an information sequence would be the ultimate ‘map of the human genome’. The mapping analogy explicitly confers on the genome a sense of space.
But to think this space captures life is a profound mistake. The creation of the scientists’ genome space is achieved through a mechanized ‘reading’ of DNA which is a systematic process of abstraction, of simplification, of ignoring the physical in favor of the ideal.
When a cell in the body ‘reads’ DNA, it does not do any of these things. The body’s reading of DNA is a matter of molecular dancing, of attraction and repulsion by the gentlest forces, of the statistical behavior of a large number of chemicals, of continuous creation.” [41]
Much has been said about the ways in which information technology is making technological processes more and more like the processes of biology; of organic growth; of social interaction. Roger Brent from Harvard’s Medical School gives us a taste of things to come.
“The gene itself is nothing but a long string of letters. That’s in the public domain, and you can download it off the Internet. It’s what the gene does that’s important, and how to manipulate that — that’s the art, and art can be patented, in the form of a drug or a technology.” [42]
Will biotechnology be to the coming century what electronics has been for the one now passing?
It is clear that any notions of free will have had to jostle for position against these ideas of the mind as a program and widely accepted ideas about the manipulative power of the gene.
The concept of a ‘psychological self’ is being challenged by the widespread use of powerful psychoactive drugs.
The use of life as a key boundary marker between people and machines has developed at the same time as the boundaries of life have become increasingly contested.
New technologies are available to prolong our lives, sustain the lives of premature babies, and prevent and terminate pregnancies. The question of life has moved to a cultural center stage in debates over abortion, intensive care, and euthanasia.
More and more we find ourselves dwellers on the threshold between Emerson’s ‘dreams and beasts,’ unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along.
We have to know what surrounds us; we have to know how we react to what surrounds us; we have to know what is happening to our bodies; we need to have a clear idea of what we are thinking and feeling, wishing and willing. In other words, we have to obey the old Socratic maxim — Know Thyself.
So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relived to see it trot away quietly into the wood.
‘If it had grown up,’ she said to herself, ‘it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.’
And she began thinking over other children she knew, who would might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, ‘if one only knew the right way to change them when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off. [43]
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked goodnatured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt it ought to be treated with respect.
‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where’ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘-so long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk for long enough.’
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. ‘What sort of people live around here?’
‘In that direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw round, ‘lives a Hatter: and in that direction,’ waving the other paw, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat:
‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ [44]
Next: Chapter Seven — A Mad Tea-Party
References
[36] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.80–81.
[37] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Chatto & Windus Ltd, 1932).
[38] See Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (Chatto & Windus Ltd, 1958), pp.147–162.
[39] See Michael Gruber, Map the Genome, Hack the Genome (Wired 5.10, p.152)
[40] See Peter Kramer, Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Mood-Altering Drugs and the New Meaning of the Self (New York: Viking, 1993).
[41] Oliver Morton, Speaker of the Future Gazers (Design Council, 1996).
[42] Michael Gruber, Map the Genome, Hack the Genome (Wired 5.10, p.152), Roger Brent of Harvard Medical School on the Human Genome Project, pp.154–155.
[43] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), p.88.
[44] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.89–90.
