by Joel Garreau
To describe his version of transcendence in a Prevail Scenario without falling off his tightrope, Lanier likes to talk about octopi. Actually, he also likes to talk about the psychology of early childhood, as well as the day that aliens visit the earth and perceive human nature for the first time. But these to him are all stories about the same thing—a steadily increasing ramp to transcendence that leads to deeper and better ways of bridging the interpersonal gap.
Lanier’s Prevail Scenario is the search for a complex, evolving, inventive transcendence. Because it is an infinite game, it never goes into a Singularity, as in the Heaven and Hell Scenarios. Because it’s fundamentally imaginative, it doesn’t have any such simple measurement. It just expands forever. Human connectedness is “a much more profound kind of ramp,” Lanier believes. “The thing about a Singularity hypothesis is that it’s profoundly uncreative.”
He begins his tale by saying, “We have a certain bag of tricks that was bequeathed to us by our evolutionary past. In many ways we are very lucky in terms of what evolution gave to us. I love the opposable thumb, for instance. It’s great. Lots of great things. Don’t want to complain. Feel grateful for all of it. But there are a couple of ways in which we are unlucky. The business of being sacks of skin separated by air is one of them.
“Let me start with the Martians, if I could. So one day the Martians are on their own super version of Star Trek out exploring the universe and they come to Earth and they are going to send a report back home. I think this is what the Martians would say:
“‘You know, this place is kind of touching, but mostly it’s just sad. You know these earthlings—they call themselves people. They are—you’re not going to believe this, and you might be grossed out, but here’s what they are like. They’re separated from each other in these sacks of skin. There are often many feet of air between them when they are communicating. Just atmosphere. Yet they are conscious, they form relationships, they think, they long for one another. But they aren’t connected. They can’t do mind melds like us. So what do they do—okay, here comes the gross part. Just hold on to your stomach and try not to get too grossed out. So there is an orifice and it’s an orifice that they eat with and they breathe with it and they can make these weird sounds out of this same orifice. Now I told you not to get sick, okay? Space exploration is a tough game, and you just have to deal with it, okay? If you can’t deal with it, get interested in something else.
“‘Then they have these other orifices, called ears, where sounds go in, and they have this code system and they communicate that way. It’s awkward and it’s weird and it’s disgusting, but it’s what they have. I mean, we can only sort of feel for them.’”
End report to the Commandress of the Fleet.
Lanier continues:
“This is how I think we would seem to aliens. I’m presuming these particular aliens have some form of connection where they’re entering each other’s dreams and so forth. They have much fuller contact between minds. So that sets the tone for this idea about the ramp that I care about—the connectivity ramp.
“You can imagine the ramp starting long ago with the advent of spoken language. You can see it continuing with the advent of reading and writing. You can see it continuing further with the rise of art forms and things like drama.”
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, humanoids could talk, even with relatively primitive brains. This means spoken language and the brain co-evolved. They became increasingly complex together. Relatively recently, however, when reading and writing were invented, the brains that were around were the same as ours. “If you had a time machine, you could pluck a baby from back then and raise it now and they’d be the same people,” Lanier says.
“So what happened? The only explanation is that the very design of reading or writing was opportunistic. It took advantage of an innate potential in the brain. It was wired in such a way that, given time, one could discover a type of written language that could work in it. So we found that language. I think in a similar way this process can continue. I think actually we’re seeing one right now with kids and computers.”
He’s talking about us transcending by going through something as significant as learning to write—the beginning of civilization, and hence cultural evolution. The biggest thing in 10,000 years. He moves on to another story.
“So this is the one about kids. If kids are little enough, they have trouble distinguishing between the inside and the outside of themselves. They have trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy. Obviously at some point that becomes less so or they don’t grow up. For the vast majority of kids, the recognition that the outside and the inside are different really sucks, big time. The reason is that if the whole world is the same thing as fantasy, then you’re sort of in this God-like state where you just have to imagine something and it’s real. Suppose there was this 200-foot-tall giraffe made of sapphires that could talk like a Power Ranger. It puffs into existence. If you don’t know the difference, it’s like it’s real.
“Now, when you start to realize that there is reality, all of a sudden you enter a different world. It’s not so much that it’s impossible to do things, but you’re just very weak. Everything is really hard. Could you work your whole life and corner the market on sapphires and get city council approval to build this big thing and all that? I mean, yeah, maybe. But it’s just like this huge pain in the butt.”
Here’s one of Lanier’s punch lines:
“But there is an interesting thing. The reason you enter reality even though it is a pain in the butt is that it is someplace where you are not alone. It’s a place where Mom is real and other people are real and food is real. There are benefits to reality. A very significant one is, you are not alone.”
In this view, the fundamental dilemma of childhood—the fundamental choice between two unpalatable alternatives—is this: “You can stay inside your fantasy world and be God-like. But you are terribly lonely. You are also vulnerable in important ways. Or you can enter the real world, where the transition to weakness is not just slight—it’s huge. It’s going from Lord of the Universe to this pathetic little pink thing that wets itself. There is no bigger gap in status. In order to enter the real world, kids have to lose the largest amount of status that it is possible to lose. They hate it, hate it, hate it. If they can accept that, there is one other little nasty pill to come along, which is mortality. You got those two, you have made it to adulthood. It takes a really long time to get there. I feel like lately in America it takes 40 years to get there. You can think of the connectivity ramp I was talking about as a way of trying to soften the blow of becoming an adult.”
The world people are entering today with their computer games is a transcendent step up this connectivity ramp, Lanier believes. “I would argue that when kids respond to online gaming and generate this extraordinary enthusiasm and adeptness at computers—as if out of nowhere—this is what they are really responding to. It’s a third way that avoids the dilemma of childhood. If you’re in a virtual world with other people, they’re real. The virtual world between you and them exists in the same way that the real world exists between you and them. But if you do some weird thing in it, like make a giant sapphire giraffe or whatever, it’s real for the other people. So you get the connection and you get rid of the solipsism”—the proposition that nothing exists or is real except one’s own self.
“But you keep the imaginativeness. You keep your level of power. You can go in and make the world you imagine but without losing the other people. The virtual world is the first place that’s ever been like that—that it gives both things. Games surpassed movies back when games had no production values—when they were just bleeps and bloops. Pac-Man—even Pong. I think this is the explanation. This is what people are really looking for. They sense that there is a kind of reality that has the flexibility of imagination and the potential, at least, for lack of solipsism. I think that’s the explanation for kids and computers. Virtual reality is the
strongest case.”
It’s the first major bump up the connectivity ramp in millennia, Lanier feels. It’s “some sort of important transcendence involving computers.”
“Here is I guess a reasonable place to bring up the cephalopods.”
It is? Isn’t that kind of a neck-snapping transition?
“It’s a very gentle one—you’ll see. So cephalopods are our tentacled friends in the sea. They are the fanciest of mollusks. The well-known cephalopods include the octopus and the squid, and there is another one that is similar to each of those called the cuttlefish. That’s a favorite of mine.
“They are the most alien creatures of intelligence on this planet. Of the creatures that display intelligence as a survival mechanism, most of the ones that we study are actually not that different from us.” Dolphins have different flippers than we do, but they’re mammals and vertebrates, like us, like the great apes. They’re cousins.
“Cephalopods survive by their wits. Evolution made the trade-off where they lost their body armor and they became soft and vulnerable. Their energy went into being smart instead. They have fantastic eyes and fantastic brains and it all evolved along a separate track, independently. So it’s the closest thing to an alien we have to compare ourselves against. We’re tremendously lucky to have them on this planet. They give us the best tool we have to gain some insight into what we might be and what we might become. They are the control experiment, the only one we have so far.
“There are a few species that exhibit an incredible behavior that really gives you a picture of a different path toward communication and connection. If you’ve ever snorkeled and you look at an octopus or a squid in the wild, you might notice that a lot of species can change colors. The way that works is that there are cells in the cephalopods’ skin called chromatophores. A chromatophore is a cell with a pigment in it with a particular color and the cell can expand or contract when it’s excited. If it expands all the red ones at once, the animal will turn red in the skin. So that’s how the trick works. There are a few species—and I’ll mention the giant cuttlefish and I’ll mention the mimic octopus—where there are individual nerve pathways to each chromatophore. So they have a big map display.
“For instance, in the giant cuttlefish they have an extra lobe in their brain which is a chromatophore lobe. A thought in that brain lobe is immediately projected as animation on the surface of their body. So when you watch them, they can animate their skin—a moving animation. They are comparable in many ways to current laptop screens in their capabilities, except it’s their whole skin.
“Now one of the things you might be wondering is, ‘Why haven’t I heard of this?’ The reason you haven’t heard of this is that the full range of their capabilities was only documented by camera after computer morphing became popular. When people see it they assume it’s a computer graphic. So it’s never really had the impact it would have, had they been filmed earlier. If they had been filmed earlier, they would have been the most famous animals for years. I show people, and they simply don’t believe it’s real. They can change shape. They are morphers. But they can also display things on their skin. Complex patterns. Their camouflage is so good—I have some footage and you will just not believe a computer didn’t make it. You can go up to them and it just looks like whatever is there. There will be this thing like a little bit of a rock and a little bit of a plant. It just turns into an octopus and it zips away. You can also watch one settle down and just turn into things. It’s amazing. It’s wonderful.
“If you watch how a cuttlefish hunts, it goes up to its prey—now remember the cuttlefish, like a person, has a soft body that is vulnerable. So it has to use its wits to hunt. What does it do? It goes up to a giant crab, which it wants to eat. You can see the crab sense that there is a predator. So the crab snaps into this defensive posture, anticipating a fight. The cuttlefish isn’t impressed. The cuttlefish turns on a psychedelic light show. It starts morphing and putting up patterns and it really looks a lot like a ’60s concert stage light show or something.”
You’re making this up.
“I’m not making this up! In fact, I’m probably understating it. You can see the crab look at the cuttlefish and the crab just goes, ‘Uhhhhh. . . ’” The crab is completely confused. The crab is looking at this psychedelic light show, and just as this crab is at its maximum state of confusion the cuttlefish pounces and goes for the equivalent of the jugular. The cuttlefish has a beak, and it just goes in for a kill point on the crab, and the crab doesn’t know what hits it.
Wow.
“So it’s using art to hunt. But the most interesting behavior is that they animate at each other to communicate. If you look at two of them together, one will make a pattern and then the other one will make a pattern and then they make these patterns and they synchronize and they are animating at each other. There is a cuttlefish animation pattern dictionary in the works. It has over 90 entries now at Woods Hole.”
What are some of the things they say?
“Well, the usual stuff. ‘Where is the food?’ ‘Want to mate?’ ‘Did you hear about Fred? Boy, was he fucked up last night.’” Lanier laughs.
“They have fantastic nervous systems, and the reason they are not running the planet—because I think in quite a few ways they are better set up than we were to evolve. The thing that we have that they don’t, is that they don’t have childhood. They raise themselves. They are born out of the egg and they live on instinct. If they had childhood and they nurtured their young, then they would have eventually developed culture. Then they would have taken off, started up their own ramps, and I think we’d all be living in the zoos that they are in. They don’t have culture. They don’t have nurture. They only have nature. If they learn new patterns, they don’t pass it on to their young. They start over again with each life. So that’s given us the room to get where we’ve gotten. Otherwise we would have been screwed.
“If you can imagine a version of the cuttlefish with childhoods and they grow up being nurtured and having play and having culture and all this, that would be another path to getting to the same place that I think human children long to get to. They would be born with the ability to turn into what they would want.”
That is where Lanier sees The Prevail Scenario intersecting with the power of The Curve in a creative way. In his Prevail Scenario, we use technologies to share means of connecting that in the past were beyond our wildest imagination—like that of the cuttlefish. We use the GRIN technologies—genetics, robotics, information and nano technologies—to devise new realities that are equally inventive. In this way we forge multiple ways of creating success, of rising to transcendence.
THERE ARE UNLIMITED VERSIONS of The Prevail Scenario. Lanier’s is merely one of the better-articulated. They all, however, start with these principles:
• Humans have an uncanny history of muddling through—of forging unlikely paths to improbable futures in defiance of historical forces that seem certain and inevitable.
• The wellspring of this muddling through, of this prevailing, is the ability of ordinary people facing overwhelming odds to rise to the occasion because it is the right thing—for example, the British “nation of shopkeepers” that defied the Third Reich.
To these, Lanier starts by adding one more proposition:
• Even if technology is advancing along an exponential curve, that doesn’t mean humans cannot creatively shape the impact on human nature and society in largely unpredictable ways.
Thus, Prevail is an odd combination of the marvelously ordinary and the utterly unprecedented. It is so common and so rare—so old and so new—that the history of The Prevail Scenario is less well defined than that of the Heaven or Hell Scenario.
When he complains that he finds the Heaven and Hell Scenarios “unheroic,” for example, Lanier implies that he sees something brave, noble and epic in Prevail. Indeed, “there is good reason that hero stories are our favorite story form. They have survival value,” notes t
he scenarist Brian Mulconry. “When we step out against all logic to save the world, we save ourselves.”
Yet many hero myths are not Prevail myths. Jason and the Argonauts, Ulysses, and even the Alamo are not stories about ordinary people. From Hercules to Davy Crockett, their protagonists had already transcended to the glorious, to the larger than life, even before they stepped up to their greatest challenges.
Exodus is closer to Prevail. It is a tale of people so abundantly ordinary that even Yahweh can’t take it. At one point he sends an angel to lead them, saying, “Go on to the land where milk and honey flow. I shall not go with you myself—you are a headstrong people—or I might exterminate you on the way.” They certainly discovered the non-obvious path. Six hundred thousand families, their flocks and herds in immense droves, kvetching and wailing all the way, spend forty years getting to Canaan despite considerable odds for a much earlier arrival. The Sinai is not that big a desert. From the Nile Delta, if instead of following a pillar of fire you just walk toward the rising sun, the Promised Land is on your left, hard to miss. An Israeli tank can make the trip in a day. The length of that journey did bind the people, however, scouring the memory of slavery from those who would found Jerusalem—a critical element of their prevailing.
Huckleberry Finn may be the archetypal Prevail hero when, in the pivotal moment of “his” novel, he considers struggling no longer against the great forces of civilization and religion arrayed against him. He thinks about how society would shame him if it “would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom”:
