Under the Hood
What's Behind the Story?
Profoundest Hell
Spoiler Alert: In Profoundest Hell, the protagonist is a disembodied brain sentenced to imprisonment in a computer simulation.
Where Have We Seen This Before: HP Lovecraft's story, The Whisperer in the Darkness (Weird Tales, August, 1931) includes a disembodied brain, and I notice the idea of boxing a brain as punishment appears in John Scalzi's Old Man's War (Tor Books, 2005). The underlying concept of feeding simulated sensory information into a brain to reproduce an artificial environment have been explored often, as in Philip K Dick's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (F&SF, April, 1966). There's a much more complete entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia web page on these topics.
Gimmes: A key plot point in Profoundest Hell is some apocalyptic disaster that has taken place in the real world outside the computer prison. What's the nature of the disaster? Why didn't it damage or end the simulation? How is the protagonist's brain being maintained? Fine questions... now forget them.
Enabling Technologies: Decerebration, Direct sensory input, and Computer-generated Virtual Reality.
Decerebration - the disconnection of a living brain from its body while keeping it alive - isn't particularly far-fetched, although the details are devilish. Keeping cells and even organs alive in an oxygenated medium is a current practice, known as perfusion. Keeping organs alive in an oxygenated, nutrified liquid, washing away the waste products, is something we can do pretty well right now. A machine to perform this function was innovated by Dr Alexis Carrel, along with aviator/inventer Charles Lindbergh, in the early 20th century, although the process wasn't routinely used in organ transplantation until the 21st. So far, so good... but when it comes to the brain, things are a bit more complicated.
The brain is tied in very heavily to the body's network of nerves, constantly receiving billions of impulses not only from sensory organs such as eyes, ears, nose, and skin, but also important information from every internal organ. Most of these happen below the conscious level, but what would happen to the brain without these stimuli? How would it feel, for example, if the constant input you're receiving from your pancreas or your lungs were to cease? We don't seem to notice these inputs now, but if they went away, would we interpret that as pain? Or just continue not to notice? Certainly the brain will require a lot more connectivity with outside resources than just a suspended organ in a jar, if we mean for the brain to function at all.
Even more complex are the chemical interactions. Gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA), seratoning, dopamine, glutamate, epinephrine, and norepinephrine are just a few of the better-known chemicals, enzymes, hormones and neurotransmitters neede for the brain to function. There are at least dozens if not hundreds of others. Much of our moods, and consequently our thoughts, derive from levels of these chemicals.
Direct sensory input - filling the brain with computer-generated sensory inputs to simulate an artificial reality - is another technology that isn't very far-fetched, but we're certainly not there yet. There're two key components to this tech: 1) Creating a virtual reality that's compellingly detailed and realistic, and 2) inputting it into the subject's sensory system.
The first is often just accepted as a Gimme in SF, and given the emergence of "deep fakes" and increasingly realistic video games, many just accept that a realistic simulated environment would be pretty easy. In fact, it's probably impossible with current technology. In my stories, a key enabling technology that's often in the background is high-powered quantum computers, or just qomputers, as I call them. Quantum computing does have the potential to unlock extremely fast, extremely realistic modeling, and that's the tech I rely on in most of my futuristic fiction.
Inputting data (such as the sensations from a computer simulation) directly into a nervous system is also often taken for granted in fiction. It, too, is actually incredibly complicated. The bandwidth required is staggering. The human brain can accept input from millions of neurons every second, but those are made out of meat and are connected to nerves that are also made of meat. You can't just clip a wire onto a million different nerve endings and have them run on electricity. Making a disembodied brain believe that it is really seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting simulated sensations (while also maintaining a sense of proprioception, kinesthesia, and internal physical sensations) would mean replacing the inputs for every nerve. There's no reason why that couldn't be done (millions and billions are large numbers, sure, but if McDonald's can make a trillion hamburgers, somebody could probably make a billion neural connections). Realistically, however, it would likely remain an expensive and unusual process, and is likely to be irreversible.
Plot Holes: Keeping a brain alive indefinitely outside the human body is generally viewed as plausible, but it's certainly highly impractical for now and would require an extremely elaborate electro-chemical maintenance regime. Although I use the concept of decerebration as a key enabling technology for my poor prisoner in Profoundest Hell, it probably wouldn't ever be something used by a real authoritarian regime. Even if the technological difficulties could be overcome (very possible), the benefits over traditional imprisonment or execution aren't obvious. As expensive as it is to maintain a prisoner alive in a Supermax prison ($50,000 to $120,000 per year), paying for all the delicately balanced chemicals, power, and computing time needed to keep a decerebrated prisoner alive and thinking might not be much less. Further, since reversing the process - restoring the brain to a living body - would be much, much more complicated and expensive, it's not clear that this would really be an alternative to execution.
Spoiler Alert: In Profoundest Hell, the protagonist is a disembodied brain sentenced to imprisonment in a computer simulation.
Where Have We Seen This Before: HP Lovecraft's story, The Whisperer in the Darkness (Weird Tales, August, 1931) includes a disembodied brain, and I notice the idea of boxing a brain as punishment appears in John Scalzi's Old Man's War (Tor Books, 2005). The underlying concept of feeding simulated sensory information into a brain to reproduce an artificial environment have been explored often, as in Philip K Dick's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (F&SF, April, 1966). There's a much more complete entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia web page on these topics.
Gimmes: A key plot point in Profoundest Hell is some apocalyptic disaster that has taken place in the real world outside the computer prison. What's the nature of the disaster? Why didn't it damage or end the simulation? How is the protagonist's brain being maintained? Fine questions... now forget them.
Enabling Technologies: Decerebration, Direct sensory input, and Computer-generated Virtual Reality.
Decerebration - the disconnection of a living brain from its body while keeping it alive - isn't particularly far-fetched, although the details are devilish. Keeping cells and even organs alive in an oxygenated medium is a current practice, known as perfusion. Keeping organs alive in an oxygenated, nutrified liquid, washing away the waste products, is something we can do pretty well right now. A machine to perform this function was innovated by Dr Alexis Carrel, along with aviator/inventer Charles Lindbergh, in the early 20th century, although the process wasn't routinely used in organ transplantation until the 21st. So far, so good... but when it comes to the brain, things are a bit more complicated.
The brain is tied in very heavily to the body's network of nerves, constantly receiving billions of impulses not only from sensory organs such as eyes, ears, nose, and skin, but also important information from every internal organ. Most of these happen below the conscious level, but what would happen to the brain without these stimuli? How would it feel, for example, if the constant input you're receiving from your pancreas or your lungs were to cease? We don't seem to notice these inputs now, but if they went away, would we interpret that as pain? Or just continue not to notice? Certainly the brain will require a lot more connectivity with outside resources than just a suspended organ in a jar, if we mean for the brain to function at all.
Even more complex are the chemical interactions. Gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA), seratoning, dopamine, glutamate, epinephrine, and norepinephrine are just a few of the better-known chemicals, enzymes, hormones and neurotransmitters neede for the brain to function. There are at least dozens if not hundreds of others. Much of our moods, and consequently our thoughts, derive from levels of these chemicals.
Direct sensory input - filling the brain with computer-generated sensory inputs to simulate an artificial reality - is another technology that isn't very far-fetched, but we're certainly not there yet. There're two key components to this tech: 1) Creating a virtual reality that's compellingly detailed and realistic, and 2) inputting it into the subject's sensory system.
The first is often just accepted as a Gimme in SF, and given the emergence of "deep fakes" and increasingly realistic video games, many just accept that a realistic simulated environment would be pretty easy. In fact, it's probably impossible with current technology. In my stories, a key enabling technology that's often in the background is high-powered quantum computers, or just qomputers, as I call them. Quantum computing does have the potential to unlock extremely fast, extremely realistic modeling, and that's the tech I rely on in most of my futuristic fiction.
Inputting data (such as the sensations from a computer simulation) directly into a nervous system is also often taken for granted in fiction. It, too, is actually incredibly complicated. The bandwidth required is staggering. The human brain can accept input from millions of neurons every second, but those are made out of meat and are connected to nerves that are also made of meat. You can't just clip a wire onto a million different nerve endings and have them run on electricity. Making a disembodied brain believe that it is really seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting simulated sensations (while also maintaining a sense of proprioception, kinesthesia, and internal physical sensations) would mean replacing the inputs for every nerve. There's no reason why that couldn't be done (millions and billions are large numbers, sure, but if McDonald's can make a trillion hamburgers, somebody could probably make a billion neural connections). Realistically, however, it would likely remain an expensive and unusual process, and is likely to be irreversible.
Plot Holes: Keeping a brain alive indefinitely outside the human body is generally viewed as plausible, but it's certainly highly impractical for now and would require an extremely elaborate electro-chemical maintenance regime. Although I use the concept of decerebration as a key enabling technology for my poor prisoner in Profoundest Hell, it probably wouldn't ever be something used by a real authoritarian regime. Even if the technological difficulties could be overcome (very possible), the benefits over traditional imprisonment or execution aren't obvious. As expensive as it is to maintain a prisoner alive in a Supermax prison ($50,000 to $120,000 per year), paying for all the delicately balanced chemicals, power, and computing time needed to keep a decerebrated prisoner alive and thinking might not be much less. Further, since reversing the process - restoring the brain to a living body - would be much, much more complicated and expensive, it's not clear that this would really be an alternative to execution.