Mark Changizi

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5/31/2018

HUMAN 3.0, the novel about what's next, after humans.

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When science-fiction authors, Hollywood, technologists, and futurists describe the future, there’s usually a presumption that we’ll have gone beyond our human constraints. Maybe we’ll be genetically enhanced, or perhaps we’ll stick computer implants in our heads – maybe we’ll have artificial intelligence that goes well beyond us, and be building artificial brains that put us to shame. Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity Institute push this sort of view strongly, and have an almost religious following.

I think this is the wrong vision of the future, and many of my pieces “buzz kill” these ideas. See here and here.

But I came to realize that I also have a positive vision of where we’re headed. To understand what’s coming, we need to comprehend how we came to be the way we are today, so radically different from our Homo sapiens ancestors. We’re Human 2.0 today, and the step from (genetically practically identical) 1.0 to 2.0 came via nature-harnessing, namely via the ideas I have put forth in (chapter 4 of) The Vision Revolution and in Harnessed.

We should expect that Human 3.0 in the future will come via the cultural-evolution-for-the-brain mechanisms that have already given us literacy, language and the arts.

The first time I got concrete about this was in 2011 when I wrote a piece forSeed Magazine making this point – it was called “Human, version 3.0,” and it got a virus-load of attention.

​It was then that I realized a novel was in order, for I needed a venue to put forth a more specific illustration of what Human 3.0 might be like. Pointing to the current wavefront of technology and anticipating what they might become in a thousand years is, well, dodgy and lame (although in the Seed piece I do a little of that at the end). I needed to be able to paint a fuller picture of an example future, one where our descendants are seemingly radically beyond us, but are in actuality pulling from the same old wellspring of biological brilliance evolution already has endowed us with. …it’s just being harnessed in fantastically clever new ways.

​Human 3.0, the novel, was born.
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Returned from the earth-covered ruins of the ancient City at six years old, Tye Ilan entered society deeply and permanently handicapped – he lacked language. But something in the City had infected him, and now a new generation as well, and as the world grappled with these new beings, able to wield music to move the world around them, Tye found himself buffeted into the center of the struggle for what comes next, after humans.
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5/27/2018

Oliver Sack’s Mind’s Eye

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We lost Oliver Sacks not too long ago, while I was away from social media, and so I never got around to discussing my experiences of him.

Toward that, here’s a review I wrote about one of his books, although it’s a bit of a review of Oliver himself.
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In The Mind's Eye, the neurologist explores case histories of people with visual disturbances - including his own
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WHAT would it be like to occupy the brain of a non-human being? This is a question that has inspired writers (Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis), philosophers (Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?") and just about every curious human being. It is this curiosity about different forms of being that helps explain our fascination with the writings of Oliver Sacks.

Although Sacks's books generally deal with altered states, this new one on visual experience brings it home more clearly because, for the sighted among us, "what it's like to be" tends to get fleshed out visually. The Mind's Eye takes up stories of individuals who have lost visual capabilities, such as object recognition, face recognition, reading and stereoscopic depth.

The book excels in its descriptions of "altered states", to be sure, but there are other, more obvious, reasons why we like Sacks's writing about neurological disorders. First is that they illustrate how the everyday tasks we carry out are in fact fantastically complex and rely on equally complex brain mechanisms. A close, and related, second is that his stories indicate our brain's specialisations, leading us to respond, "Woah, I didn't even know I had brain regions for that!"

A more emotional attraction to Sacks is that his stories are simply great stories - he even got my neurologist wife and I teary as she read to me on a road trip the case of Patricia H.'s loss of language and her use of gestures to partially compensate. These are stories about the human spirit attempting to overcome a piercing blow to what it means to be human.

The appeal of Sacks's style isn't just that it is neurobiologically illuminating and poignant. It's also grist for the philosopher in us. Wondering what it's like to be an alien, dog or bat can be entertaining, but any answers found are likely fiction. Sacks's stories, on the other hand, get us into the heads of beings who experience a truly alternative form of being and are able to communicate what it's like.

The fact that these alternative forms of being are accidental cases may make it all the more interesting. The space of possible ways of being is vast compared with the space of ways of being that may plausibly be selected for in evolution. For those with an itch for altered states, seamless psychological design and fit with a given habitat can be beside the point.

Among the "accidental ways of being" described in The Mind's Eye, one stands out: Sacks's own struggle with vision loss due to ocular melanoma, including its consequences for visual neglect, stereoscopy and the perception of one's own limbs, including visual phantom limbs.

​One only hopes Sacks's personal tour into altered states is at its end.

Originally published 2010 in New Scientist

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5/25/2018

Next book -- Cool!

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[Note on Dec 7 2018: The book changed it's name. Tentatively now titled FLUSH: How Emotional Expressions Are Bets.)

Happy to announce that the next book is on its way, this one a collaboration with my brilliant 2ai colleague Tim Barber: SURVIVAL of the COOLEST: How Poker is the Secret to Life, Emotions, Cool and Everything

As usual for my books, it's a grand unifying theory, easy reading for anyone, and hopefully funny! This is quite the change-up from my previous books. Not theoretical biology. Not visual perception. Not language. Not harnessing-related. Now it's emotion and cool, all the way down. 

Tim and I had an intuition that we could explain why we have the emotion engine we have, and explain it from first principles. ...and that somehow poker was crucial. But it took us around eight years to pull all the strings together, push the pieces into place, flatten out the shag carpet, etc.

And, there will be some bonus material more akin to the "x-ray" topic in Vision Revolution, but rather than seeing through leaves or one's muzzle, it's about seeing through...one's emotion! It's like the extra bit of cheesecake on the back or your fork you forgot to eat!
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  • Home
  • Who
    • -- About the guy
    • -- Connect
    • -- Industry Resume
    • -- Academic CV
  • Science
    • -- Research lines
    • -- Publications
  • Books
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    • -- HUMAN 3.0
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  • Entrepreneurial
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