by Project Itoh
These killing fields. Were they really because of me?
“Of course. It’s your own free will. Without a shadow of a doubt.” The counselor had smiled as he answered my question. Skillfully, without missing a beat. The interviewer must have been used to all sorts of curveball questions. Why should an existentialist one faze him? Psychology and philosophy have always been bedfellows. When most non-specialists—myself included—thought of psychology, what they usually imagined was an interdisciplinary subject that contained elements of academic psychology. Sociology, epistemology: related, but not psychology per se. Whenever a psychologist appeared on the news, what we really wanted to hear from him was a cocktail of philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines that wouldn’t challenge our preconceptions.
I asked my question of the counselor during the battle preparations that Colonel Rockwell had ordered on the last day of our BEAR neurotreatment—Battle Emotion Adaptive Regulation. The core members of the battle plan were lined up in the offices of a Viennese School clinical psychologist having our mental states adjusted. We had all received sensitivity maskers, local anesthesia to our frontal lobes, and extensive counseling, and now the psychological barriers to optimum performance on the battlefield were reduced to the minimum. We were getting ready to fight.
Special Forces were all subjected to these treatments every time they went into battle. Well, of course we were: we were the elite, the best of the best, so why shouldn’t we use every means at our disposal to maximize our battlefield performance? It was just a series of standard medical procedures after all. And yet, even though I’d undergone the procedure countless times without incident, there was always a lingering doubt, and that was now starting to press on me.
“Without a shadow of a doubt?” I repeated.
The counselor nodded. “Absolutely. It’s a wonderful thing for an emerging young mind to spend time carefully analyzing itself, but out in the real world you soon realize that you simply don’t have time to spare second-guessing yourself.”
He stopped and paused for words, then took a breath and continued. “Think about when you last caught a bad cold. Did you perhaps see a doctor, who prescribed some medicine and gave you advice? You then got some bed rest, took it easy for a couple of days. Now. A question for you, Mr. Shepherd. Who was it who actually cured your cold?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to give a stupid answer and have this young counselor laugh at me.
He pointed theatrically at my chest. “It was you, Captain. You, not the doctor. Your body fought off the infection, but more importantly, it was you who decided to find a cure. You were the one who went to see the doctor, to ask for a prescription. It was your intention, your will, your purpose. The doctor, and the medicine he gave you, were just there to help. People are allowed to use tools in order to help achieve their objectives, are they not? Well, that’s what your frontal lobe masking and counseling sessions are: tools. After all, you were the one who decided that you would fight, long before you first came to us for treatment.”
The counselor was right. What would be the point of deciding to fight in a traumatic theater of war and then choosing voluntarily to experience that trauma, with all its attendant side effects, when there was perfectly good preventive treatment available?
“What we counselors do is regulate your emotions so that they are at their most appropriate for war. You wouldn’t want any ethical noise to creep into your consciousness during the heat of battle—it could result in a split-second delay with lethal consequences for you or your comrades. That’s why we have these mechanisms to filter the world so that your brain receives it in a way that allows it to process information efficiently. That’s all that happens when the frontal lobe module of your brain is masked and you receive your counseling.”
Ethical noise. It was true that the battlefield was neither the time nor the place to be meditating on ethical dilemmas. Emotions were shortcuts to value judgments, whereas working through dilemmas using reason took time and effort. If a person had no values and relied solely on cold hard reason, he would never be able to decide anything. Pushed through to its logical conclusion, a supremely rational being would necessarily take every single little factor into consideration and end up being paralyzed by inertia.
Humans weren’t the same as wild beasts, though. We had to decide who needed to be killed and who needed only to be wounded. A bear could kill, all right, but only humans had the capacity to truly fight. To choose to neutralize the enemy not from base instinct but out of free will.
“Your actions and thoughts derive from a network of extensive modules in your brain. You subconsciously refer to an internal library of judgments and actions. This is true of your conscience. Your nervous system is hardwired to favor cooperation with other people that will mutually enhance your lives and therefore your chances of survival. Well, this conscience manifests itself physically inside your brain. It has a specific set of coordinates.”
“A module?” I asked, and the counselor smiled.
But I already knew all this. How the brain worked. And how unreliable our own sense of self was.
I kept it all pent up inside me, though, and listened to the counselor’s continued explanation.
“Exactly. It’s the same principle as the sensory masking that we use for Special Forces. I’m sure it must be quite unusual at first to have the feeling of pain masked so that only the knowledge of it remains.”
Sensory masking. That grotesque form of preemptive battlefield anesthesia invented by DARPA. It took away any feelings of pain from wounds received on the battlefield so that the soldier could fight on unhindered while at the same time being fully aware of the fact that he had been hurt, so that he could tend to his injuries as appropriate. This bizarre disconnect was only possible because the acts of acknowledging pain and feeling pain occurred in different modules of the brain.
“In other words, if we mask the correct combination of the brains modules, we can do more than just suppress pain. We can also give the person certain behavioral characteristics that will help him succeed in his mission. Despite all the advances in neuroscience, our detailed knowledge of the inner workings of modules is still really only in its infancy, so we’re not able to make precise adjustments, but we can at least do enough to ensure that our heroes in Special Forces aren’t weighed down by an unnecessary emotional burden during battle.”
His explanation of the brain’s inner workings was just the same as the explanation that I had received that summer, in that hospital, back when I chose to kill my mother.
There were forty or fifty cross-sections of my mother’s brain on display in the examining room. The slides were all in square frames, neatly covering the wall, so that from a distance they almost looked like they were a single giant slab of marble.
“So she’s not conscious?” I asked, or rather confirmed, for the umpteenth time. Looking back now, I can’t remember the exact number of times I posed a variation of this question. But it must have been a considerable number. It took me a lot of time and effort to accept that the question itself was flawed, and even after I came round to that fact, I was still never confident in my newfound understanding.
The doctor looked at the slides again and closed his mouth while he was thinking. Eventually, he opened it again.
“Mr. Shepherd. Are you a religious man?”
“No.”
“Well, no matter—even if you were religious, this would still require some explanation,” the doctor said. “It’s true that we used to believe that consciousness was a two-way state: at any given time, a person was either conscious or not. Sleep was, after all, the dominant paradigm and our main frame of reference.”
“Well, yes, people fall unconscious and sleep,” I said, without adding the unspoken third option that they die. “Are you saying that there are other states?”
There were, the doctor told me, and then began explaining some of the developments in neuroscience over the past ten ye
ars. He explained how advances in mapping techniques had allowed medical science to identify which mental processes happened in which parts of the brain, and that so far a total of 572 discrete modules had been identified.
It was easy enough, with modern techniques, to perform sensory masking that blocked out feelings, but there were more interesting developments. For example, there was a documented case of a blind subject being able to consistently dodge a tennis ball thrown at him. The subject himself insisted that he was blind, and as far as he was concerned he did indeed live in a world of darkness. And yet the fact was that he was able to register an object coming toward him. In other words, his mind was unable to process the fact that he was seeing the ball in a different channel.
In this instance, there was nothing wrong with the subject’s optic nerves. The reason for the disconnect was that the act of “seeing” something actually consists of two different components. In other words, the ability to see colors and shapes is processed separately from the ability to notice that something is there in front of you.
Yes, to “see” and to “perceive” are different things, processed in different corners of the brain. We might intuitively think of our sense of sight as being primarily related to the senses: “the apple is green,” “the pillar is rectangular,” and so on, but there is actually another part of sight that isn’t so much a sense as a focus, and the eyes constantly send optic information to this part of the brain too.
So even the simple act of looking at something translates into a complicated series of parallel functions for the brain. It was mind-boggling to think how many different combinations of functions could be identified. Five hundred seventy-two and counting, the doctor had said.
“There are something like twenty different substates between the states that we popularly call asleep and awake. So it’s not as if a person has a fixed sense of self. Some modules can be functioning while others are sleeping. And there are times when a person tries to call upon a module only to find it asleep. That’s how we forget or misremember things. Intoxication by alcohol or drugs also falls into this category. Even as we’re speaking now, your and my consciousnesses are—how to say it—fluctuating? There’s no quality control on consciousness. It’s constantly ebbing and flowing from strong to … dilute.”
“A person is ebbing and flowing?” I said.
The doctor explained that we were now heading into the territory of semantics. A person—Descartes’s “I”—could only be understood as a purely linguistic concept these days.
Take a crowd. If ten thousand people gather together in one place, that’s unmistakably a crowd. Same with a thousand, obviously. So what about a hundred? Fifty? Ten people? How many need to be in a group before it can unequivocally be called a crowd?
This was what the doctor had been driving at. “Consciousness,” “I,” “self”—all became a matter of semantics. How many modules needed to be alive before you could describe someone as being the person you knew and loved? How many modules needed to be functioning before you could decide whether they were “conscious”? Society had yet to come up with satisfactory answers.
Take my mother. Was enough of her “alive” in a meaningful sense that I could still call her my mother?
That was the judgment call that I was being asked to make. How on earth was I supposed to give an answer?
So we had our emotions masked along with our senses.
BEAR was about anesthetizing part of yourself. Deliberately diluting your own essence. The domain of conscience was essentially an emotional function of the brain, not a logical one.
“Emotional judgments play a large role in the act of eliminating your battlefield targets,” the counselor said. The screen in front of me was displaying an array of the world’s horrors: natural catastrophes, towns turned into battlefields, hordes of starving children.
“For example, the act of rescuing bloodied victims with your own hands has an overwhelmingly larger impact on your conscience and emotion modules than a more abstract act, such as sending a donation to hurricane victims. It’s stating the obvious to say that people respond more emotionally to what is happening right in front of their eyes. In contrast, the act of donation is essentially a rational one. But even then, emotion is ultimately responsible for many so-called rational decisions, because emotions form the basis of human value judgments. Most logic is really no more than a posteriori rationalization.”
“So you’re saying that when I kill children on the battlefield it’s not the hammer of cold logic but rather my own emotions that are blasting their brains out?” I decided to try and push the counselor’s arguments through to their violent conclusion.
The counselor just nodded as if this were the most natural question in the world. “Emotion has the ability to shortcut logic and deliver a swift, accurate response to stimuli. Even though people are reluctant to admit it, conscience can be just as powerful a driving force as the intent to kill. It might be fashionable to take the view that humans are fundamentally weak and prone to violence. But the fact is that even soldiers such as yourself are in thrall to the driving—and potentially limiting—force of conscience. It doesn’t sit easily alongside your watchwords of ruthlessness and thoroughness. That’s why it becomes imperative to use the technology at our disposal to temporarily subdue this powerful force, particularly with people such as us who were raised in America with its strong moral values. It goes against the grain, but our lives depend on it.”
“So we’re being brainwashed, basically,” I said.
Again the counselor had an answer—well, this was a question he was used to answering, I was sure. His answer began with a nod. “I can see why you think that, but there’s an important difference. With medicines, they say the poison is in the dose, don’t they? You don’t even need to overdose as such in order to abuse medications. Think of people who use tranquilizers as recreational drugs.”
“So it’s not brainwashing because we’re voluntarily submitting to it?”
“Exactly.”
When you entered a battlefield, you needed to be able to kill people with a light heart. If counseling helped in that then surely it was okay? If that was your intention then it should be fine? Were there no ethical problems about subjugating yourself to a process that suppressed your ethical compunctions, even temporarily? I just didn’t know anymore.
There were actually plenty of my teammates who saw the whole counseling process as a farce from the get-go. What right did scientists have to appropriate tactical decision-making from officers who had earned their stripes the hard way? Soldiers signed up for Special Forces with eyes wide open. Why would they need all this girly counseling to firm up their resolve? If they weren’t prepared for what was ahead, they shouldn’t have signed up in the first place. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
The flip side of the coin was, of course, that Forces provided these counselors for us at great expense because they valued us as soldiers. Or rather they had to value us—public opinion in an advanced capitalist society such as ours had, in the space of a single generation, grown astonishingly intolerant of the idea of any of “our troops” being left to die in foreign climes. It was as if the general public had forgotten the simple fact that, in war, people tend to die. The result of this was that in our military system a soldier became a valuable—and expensive—commodity. Salary, training, the latest technology. Which in turn meant that no standing army could afford to support too many soldiers. So an industry sprang up trying to supply artificial substitutes for human fighters. Most such robotic entities ended up on an ever-growing scrap heap, but a small handful of inventions were granted the honor of a place on the battlefield alongside us human soldiers so that they could help us kill other human soldiers.
Ironically though, the further the field of human neuroscience was explored, the fewer resources there were available for research into artificial intelligence, which as a discipline had become pauperized. Once scientists had
established that strong AI—computers that could replicate the more complex functions of the brain—and relative redundancy in particular were not on the horizon, interest in the field of AI for military purposes had waned. There were still simply too many roles on the battlefield that could only be carried out by humans.
Given the ever-escalating cost of training and maintaining soldiers to full combat effectiveness, governments were understandably loath to lose their prime military workforce to the civilian companies that sought to hire us away, so they began taking measures to prevent a general hemorrhage. One by one, countries enacted “gardening leave” legislation preventing discharged soldiers from joining PMCs before a fixed period of time had passed since their retirement. This, in turn, made it harder for the PMCs to cherry-pick candidates speculatively, so the stock of well-qualified mercenaries had soared.
As a result, no matter where you were in the developed world, a trained soldier was not something that you could afford to have break down on you. Maintenance became a top priority. America had already had some experience of mental health care for its troops, stretching back to the previous century. Veterans of the Vietnam War and the Gulf Wars would return home and be troubled by recurring nightmares. Post-traumatic stress disorder began to eat away at the heart of America’s military, and something needed to be done about it. A cure was needed.
What I was receiving now, though, wasn’t the cure. It was the vaccine.
The goal of my counseling was to make it easier for me to kill.
“Essentially this is no different from an inoculation, Mr. Shepherd. We want you to be able to use your skills on the battlefield to your heart’s content, so to speak. At the same time, it’s important that we reduce your risk of psychological damage to the absolute minimum. When we send you to a country where you are at risk of the effects of infectious diseases, we’re always sure to give you a battery of shots, right? Well, think of the counseling we give you as a vaccine against the effects of war. Now, I understand completely that you might feel you’ve already built up a natural immunity, but just think of this as a sort of booster, a purely precautionary measure.”
