The Turing Option

10 September 17, 2023

Brian came slowly back to consciousness, rising up from a deep and dreamless sleep. Awareness slipped away, came again, sank into darkness again. This happened a number of times over a period of days and each time he remembered nothing of the previous approach to consciousness.

Then, for the first time, he did remain on the borderline of full awareness. Though his eyes were still shut he gradually began to realize that he was awake. And dreadfully tired. Why was that? He did not know, did not really care. Cared about nothing.

“Brian…”

The voice came from a very great distance. At the edge of audibility. At first it was just there, something to be experienced and not considered. But it kept repeating. Brian, then Brian again.

Why? The word rolled around and around in his thoughts until memory returned. That was his name. He was Brian. Someone was speaking his name. His name was Brian and someone was speaking his name aloud.

“Brian — open your eyes, Brian.”

Eyes. His eyes. His eyes were shut. Open your eyes, Brian.

Light. Strong light. Then soothing darkness once again.

“Open your eyes, Brian. Do not keep your eyes closed. Look at me, Brian.”

Glare again, blink, shut, open. Light. Vagueness. Something floating before him.

“That’s very good, Brian. Can you see me? If you can, say yes.”

This was not an easy thing to do. But it was a command. See. Light and something. See me. See the me. See me say yes. What was seeing? Was he seeing? What was he seeing?

It was hard, but each time he thought about it the process became easier. See — with the eyes. See a thing. What thing? The blur. What was a blur? A blur was a thing. What land of a thing? And what was a thing?

Face.

Face! Yes, a face! He was very happy to discover that. He saw that this was a face. A face had two eyes, a nose, a mouth, hair. What about the hair?

The hair was gray.

Very good, Brian. He was doing so well. He felt very happy.

His eyes were open. He saw a face. The face had gray hair. He was very tired. His eyes closed and he slept.

“You saw that, didn’t you!” Dr. Snaresbrook clasped her hands together with excitement. Benicoff nodded, puzzled but agreeing.

“I saw his eyes open, yes. But, well—”

“It was terribly important. Did you notice that he looked at my face after I spoke?”

“Yes — but is that a good response?”

“Not just good, but immensely significant. Think for a moment. You are looking at a young man’s body that for a long time had a disconnected mind — broken into disconnected fragments. But you see what happened now — he heard my voice and turned to look at my face. The important thing is that the brain centers for auditory recognition are in the back half of the brain — but the eye-motion controls are in the front part of the brain. So we must have got the new connections at least partly correct. And there was more. He was trying to obey — to understand my command. This means that a good many mental agencies must have been engaged. And note that he labored very hard, made mental connections, rewarded himself with a feeling of happiness — you saw the smile. This is tremendous.”

“Yes, I did see him smile a little. It’s good that he is not depressed, considering his injuries.”

“No. That’s not the important point at all. If I were concerned about his attitude, I’d prefer for him to be depressed. No, my point is that regardless of whether he’s pleased or annoyed, at least he isn’t apathetic. And if his systems can still assign values to experiences, then he can use those values for self-reinforcement — that is, for learning. And if his systems can learn properly, he’ll be able to help us repair more of the damage.”

“When you put it that way — then I see why it is important. What next?”

“The process continues. I will let him sleep, then try again.”

“But won’t he lose his short-term memories? The memories that you have restored? Won’t they fade away if he sleeps?’

“No — because these are not short-term memories but reconnected K-lines or functions that existed before. K-lines are nerve fibers connected to sets of memories, sets of agents, that reactivate previous partial mental states. Think of them as reconnected circuits. Not reconnected in fragile human synapses, but in tough computer-memory units.”

“If you are right — that means that everything you have done is working out,” Benicoff said, hoping that his lack of enthusiasm did not show in his voice. Was the doctor reading an awful lot into one little flicker of a smile? Perhaps wanting to believe so much that she might be deceiving herself. He had been expecting something more dramatic.

Erin Snaresbrook had not. She had not known what to expect in this totally new procedure, but was immensely satisfied with the results now. Let Brian rest, then she would talk to him again.

A room. He was in a room. The room had a window because he knew what a window looked like. There was someone else in the room. Someone with gray hair and a white thing on her body.

Body? Her? The white thing was a dress and only hers wore dresses.

That was good. He smiled widely. But not completely right. The smile slowly slipped away. It was almost right, he had done well. The smile returned and he slept.

What had happened the night before? He stirred with fear; he couldn’t remember, why was that? And why couldn’t he roll over? He was being held down. Something was very wrong, he didn’t know what. It took an effort of will to open his eyes — then quickly clamp them shut since the light burned them painfully. He had to blink away the tears when he hesitantly opened them again, looked up at the face of the stranger looming close above him.

“Can you hear me, Brian?” the woman said. But when he tried to answer, his throat was so dry that he started coughing. “Water!” A cool, hard tube pushed between his lips and he sucked in gratefully. Choked on it, coughed and a wave of pain swept through his head. He moaned in agony.

“Head… hurts,” he managed to say.

Nor would the pain go away. He moaned and twisted under the assault, pain so great that it overwhelmed all other sensations. He was not aware of the tiny slice of pain when the needle went into his arm, but did sigh with relief when the all-encompassing agony began to ebb.

When he opened his eyes again it was with great hesitation. Blinked tears as he fought to see.

“What… ?” His voice sounded runny but he did not understand why. What was it? Wrong? Too deep, too rasping. Listened as the other voice came from a great distance.

“There’s been an accident, Brian. But you are all right now — you are going to be all right. Do you have any pain? Do you hurt anywhere?”

Hurt? The pain in his head was lessening, was being muffled somehow. Other pain? His back, yes his back — his arm too. He thought about that. Looked down and could not see his body. Covered. What did he feel? Pain?

“Head… my back.”

“You’ve been hurt, Brian. Your head, your arm and back too. I’ve given you something to take away the pain. You’ll feel better soon,” Erin said, looking down at him with grave concern at the white face on the pillow, framed by the crown of bandages. His eyes were open, reddened and black-rimmed, blinking away the tears. But he was looking at her, questioning, following her when she moved. And the voice, the words clear enough. Though wasn’t there a marked Irish accent to what he said? Brian’s accent had changed after all his years in America. But an earlier Brian would certainly have more of the brogue he had brought to this country. This was Brian all right.

“You have been very ill, Brian. But you are better now — and will get better.”

But which Brian was she talking to? She knew that as we grow we learn new things all of the time. But we do not burden our minds with remembering every detail of how we teamed a new process, how to tie a shoe or hold a pencil. The details of remembering belong to the personality that remembered. But this personality is left behind, buried when the new personality develops. How this was done was still unclear — perhaps all the old personalities still existed at some level. If so — which one was she talking to now?

“Listen, Brian. I am going to ask you a very important question. How old are you? Can you hear me? Can you remember your age — how old are you?”

This was much harder than anything he had ever thought about before. Time to go to sleep.

“Open your eyes. Sleep later, Brian. Tell me — how old are you?”

This was a bad question. Old? Years. Time. Date. Months. Places. School. People. He did not know. His thoughts were muddled and this confused him. Better to go back to sleep. He wanted to — but sudden fear chilled him, made his heart hammer.

“How old — am I? I can’t — tell!” He began to cry, tears oozing from his tight-clamped lids. She caressed his sweat-damp forehead.

“You can sleep now. That’s right. Close your eyes. Sleep.” She had come along too fast, pushed him too hard. Made a mistake — cursed her own impatience. It was too early yet to integrate his personality into time. It had to integrate into itself first. But it was coming. Each day there was that much more of a personality present, rather than a collection of lightly linked memories. It was going to work. The process was slow — but she was succeeding. Brian’s personality had been brought as far forward in his own personality time line as was possible. How far that was she still did not know; she had to be patient. The day would come when he would be able to tell her.

More than a month went by before Dr. Snaresbrook asked the question again.

“How old are you, Brian?”

“Hurts,” he muttered, rolling his head on the pillow, eyes closed. She sighed. It was not going to be easy.

As often as she dared she tried the question. There were good days and bad — mostly bad. Time passed and she was beginning to despair. Brian’s body was healing, but the mind-body link was still a fragile one. Hopefully, still hopefully, she asked the question again.

“How old are you, Brian?”

He opened his eyes, looked at her, frowned. “You asked me that before — I remember…”

“That is very good. Do you think you can answer the question now?”

“I don’t know. I know you have asked me that before.”

“I have. It is very smart of you to remember that.”

“It’s my head — isn’t it? Something has happened to my head.”

“That is perfectly correct. Your head has been hurt. It is much better now.”

“I think with my head.”

“Correct again. You are getting much better, Brian.”

“I’m not thinking right. And my back, my arm. They hurt. My head — ?”

“That’s right. You have had head injuries, your back and arm were injured as well — but they are mending very well. But your head injuries were not good, which will give you some confusing memories. Don’t let that worry you because it will come right in time. I am here to help you. So when I ask you a question you must help me. Try to answer — as well as you can. Now — do you remember how old you were at your last birthday?”

There had been a party, candles on the cake. How many of them? He closed his eyes, saw the table, the candles.

“Birthday party. Cake — a pink cake.”

“With candles?”

“Plenty candles.”

“Can you count them, Brian? Try to count the candles.”

His lips moved, his eyes still closed, working at the memory, stirring in the bed with effort.

“Lit. Burning. I can see them. One, two — more of them. All together, I think, yes, there are fourteen.”

The gray-haired woman smiled, reached out and patted him on the shoulder. Smiled down at him when his eyes fluttered open and he looked at her.

“That is good, very, very good, Brian. I am Dr. Snaresbrook. I have been taking care of you since the accident. So you can believe me when I say that your situation is greatly improved — and will improve steadily now. I will tell you about that later. I want you to sleep now—”

It wasn’t easy. At times it seemed to be two steps backward for every one ahead. The pain appeared to be lessening but it still bothered him; at times that was all he wanted to talk about. He had little appetite, but wanted the intravenous drip removed. For one day he just sobbed with fear; about what, she never discovered.

Yet, bit by bit, with dogged insistence, she helped the boy put his memories together. Slowly the tangled and cut skeins of his past were gathered up, rejoined. There were still large sections of memory missing. She was aware of that even if he wasn’t. After all — how can one miss something one does not remember? The personality of Brian was slowly and surely emerging, stronger each day. Until one day he asked:

“My father — Dolly, are they all right? I haven’t seen them. It has been a long time.”

The surgeon had been expecting the question, had prepared a carefully worded answer.

“When you were wounded there were other casualties — but none of them were people you know. Now the best thing for you to do is get some rest.” She nodded to a nurse and out of the corner of his eye Brian could see her inject something into the drip that led to his arm. He wanted to talk, ask more questions, tried to move his lips but plunged down into darkness instead.

When Dr. Snaresbrook next visited Brian she was accompanied by her neurosurgical resident, Richard Foster, who had closely followed the Delaney case.

“I’ve never seen so much recovery from such a grave injury.” Foster said. “Unprecedented. This kind of gross brain damage always leads to major deficiencies. Serious muscle weaknesses and paralyses. Massive sensory deficits. Yet all of his systems seem to be operating. It’s amazing that he’s recovered any mental function at all, with such an extensive injury. Normally such a patient would be permanently comatose. He ought to be a vegetable.”

“I think you’re using the wrong concept,” Snaresbrook explained patiently. “Brian has not, in fact, ‘recovered’ in the usual sense of the word. No natural healing process has repaired those connections of his. The only reason that his brain acts like more than a bunch of disconnected fragments is that we have provided all those substitute connections.”

“I understand that. But I can’t believe that we got enough of them right.”

“I suspect you’re completely correct about that. We were only able to approximate. So now, when an agent in one part of his brain sends a signal to some other place — for example, to move the arm and hand — that signal may not be precisely the same as it was before his injury. However, if we got things nearly right, then at least some of those signals will arrive in the right general area, somewhere they can have roughly the right effect. And that is the important thing. Give the brain just half a chance, and it will do the rest for you. The same as in any surgery. All the surgeon can do is approximate. One can never restore exactly what was there before — but that usually doesn’t matter that much because of how much the body can do.”

She looked at the monitors: blood pressure, temperature, respiration, carbon dioxide — and most important of all, the brain wave scan. The characteristic patterns of normal, deep sleep. Without realizing it she let out a deep breath. There were real and positive results now. Everything she had seen in the past weeks that suggested that her unorthodox, new, unproven plan might work after all.

Benicoff was waiting in the room outside, started to stand and Erin waved him back, sat down slowly in the armchair across from him.

“I’ve done it!” she said. “The words bubbled out, finally released. “When you saw him last — it was a very early stage. I have been working with him, helping him to access those memories and thoughts that are the periphery of his mind. He is still confused about a lot of things of course, has to be. But he speaks well now, has told me his age, that he is fourteen years old. And now he is asking about his father and stepmother. Do you realize what that means?”

“Very much so — and I’m happy to be the first to congratulate you. You have taken what was essentially a dead man with a dead brain — and have restored enough of his earlier memories to bring him to a mental age of fourteen.”

“Not really. Much of that is illusory. It certainly is true that Brian has now recovered many of his own memories of himself up to the age of fourteen. But very far from all of them. Some parts are missing, will remain missing, leaving gaps in his memory that may interfere with a lot of his abilities and attitudes. Furthermore, the age of that cutoff is far from sharp. A lot of threads that we’ve repaired do not go all the way up to that date — while others go well past that time. But the important thing is that we’re starting to see signs of a reasonably well integrated personality. Not a very complete one yet — but one that is learning all of the time. Much of the original Brian has returned — but in my opinion not yet enough.”

She was frowning as she said it, then forced a smile.

“In any case, none of that need concern us now. The important thing is that now we can enlist his active, thinking cooperation. And that means that we can proceed to the next stage.”

“Which is — ?”

Snaresbrook looked at him grimly. “We have done just about as much reconstruction as we can do ‘passively.’ But there still are many concepts mat we simply have not reached. For example, Brian seems to have lost virtually all his knowledge about animals, a particular form of aphasia that has been seen before in cerebral accidents. We seem to be at the point of diminishing returns in trying to reconnect all of Brian’s old nemes. So although I plan to continue that, I shall now also begin the new phase. It might be called knowledge transfusion. What I plan to do is to try to identify those missing domains — those domains of knowledge that virtually every child knows, yet Brian still does not — and upload the corresponding structures from the CYC-9 commonsense data base.”

Benicoff weighed the significance of this, started to speak — but she raised her hand to stop him.

“We had better discuss this at another time.” She shook her head, felt herself fading, felt the onslaught of exhaustion too long held at bay.

“Now let’s get a sandwich and some coffee. Then, while Brian is sleeping I’ll get my notes up to date. He is going to need guidance every step of the way. Which means that I — and the computer — will have to know more about him than he knows himself.”

The restraints had been removed and only the raised sides of the bed remained in place. The end of the bed had been lifted up so that Brian was no longer lying flat. The bandages that encased his skull covered the connecting fiber-optic cable that led to the back of his skull. All of the drips and other invasive devices and monitors had been removed; the few remaining ones were small and noninvasive and fixed to his skin. Other than his bruised and bloodshot eyes and pallid skin he looked to be in adequate health.

“Brian,” Erin Snaresbrook said, looking at the brainwave monitor as the wavelength changed to consciousness. Brian opened his eyes.

“Do you remember talking to me before?”

“Yes. You’re Dr. Snaresbrook.”

“That’s very good. Do you know how old you are?”

“Fourteen. My last birthday. What happened to me, Doctor? Don’t you want to tell me?”

“Of course I do. But will you let me set the pace, explain things one step at a time in what I think is the best order?”

Brian thought for a moment before he spoke. “I guess so — you’re the doctor, Doctor.”

She felt a sudden spurt of enthusiasm when he said this. A small verbal joke. But immense in significance, since it indicated that his mind was alert and functioning.

“Good. If you let me do it that way I promise to tell you the complete truth — to hold nothing back from you. So first — what do you know about the structure of the brain?”

“You mean physically? It’s the mass of nerve tissue inside the skull. It includes the cerebrum, cerebellum, pons and oblongata.”

“That’s pretty specific. You have had brain trauma and have been operated on. In addition—”

“There is something wrong with my memory.”

Snaresbrook was startled. “How do you know that?”

There was a weak grin on Brian’s lips at this small victory. “Obvious. You wanted to know my age. I have been looking at my hands while you talked. How old am I, Doctor?”

“A few years older.”

“You promised that you would tell me only the complete truth.”

She had planned to hold this information back as long as possible; the knowledge might be traumatic. But Brian was way ahead of her. The truth and only the complete truth from now on.

“You are almost twenty-four years old.”

Brian ingested the information slowly, then nodded his head. “That’s okay then. If I was fifty or sixty or something really old like that, it would be lousy because I would have lived most of life and wouldn’t remember it. Twenty-four is okay. Will I get my memories back?”

“I don’t see why not. Your progress to this point has been exceedingly good. I will explain the techniques in detail if you are interested, but first let me put it as simply as I can. I want to stimulate your memories, then restore your neural access to them. When this happens your memory will be complete and you will be whole again. I can’t promise that all of your memories will be restored. There was injury, but—”

“If I don’t know they’re missing I won’t miss them.”

“That’s perfectly correct.” Brian was sharp. He might only have the memories of his first fourteen years now, but the thinking processes of his conscious brain appeared to be much older. He had been a child prodigy, she knew. Graduate school at fourteen. So he was not just any fourteen-year-old. “But not missing a memory is only a small part of it. You must realize that human memory is not like a tape recorder with everything stored in chronological order. It is very different, far more like a badly maintained file system organized by messy and confusing maps. Not only messy to begin with, but we reclassify things from time to time. When I say that I have memories of my childhood — that is not true. I really have memories of memories. Things that have been thought about over and over, simplified, reduced.”

“I think I understand what you mean. But please, before we get started, there are a few things you will have to tell me. Ten years is a long time. Things happen. My family…”

“Dolly has been here and wants to see you.”

“I want to see her too. And Dad?”

The truth only, Snaresbrook thought, although it would hurt something terrible.

“I’m sorry, Brian, but your father — passed away.”

There was silence as slow tears ran down the man’s — the boy’s — face. It was long moments before he could speak again.

“I don’t want to hear about that now. And me, what about me, what have I done in those years?”

“You’ve gotten your degrees, done original research.”

“In artificial intelligence? That’s what Dad does, what I want to do.”

“What you have done, Brian. You have succeeded in everything that you tackled. In fact you made the breakthrough to actually construct the first AI. Before you were injured you were at the threshold of success.” Brian noticed the juxtaposition of the terms, made the snap logical leap.

“You have told me everything so far, Doctor, I don’t think that you have held back.”

“I haven’t. It would be unfair.”

“Then tell me now. Does my injury have anything to do with AI? Was it the machine that did it? I always thought the stories of evil AIs were dumb.”

“They are. But men are still evil. You were injured in the laboratory by men wanting to steal your AI. And reality has turned out to be quite the opposite of myth. Far from being evil, your work with Al-assisted micromanipulators has aided me greatly — and has enabled me to bring you here and speak with you like this.”

“You must tell me all about AI!”

“No, Brian. We must rebuild your memories step by step until you can tell me how AI works. You were the inventor — now you are going to be the rediscoverer.”