1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.3 An Enchanting Original
1.2.3.19 Nature
After a while she got the hang of visualising which categories of information she was interested in and reducing the flood of information to more manageable level by willing Truesight to suppress everything else. She felt relief at being able to talk again, but there was regret in there too as she sense of wonder faded away. Would it ever be as good again? Perhaps she could experience her own recording? It would make an amazing segment for Alderney, when it could be released. She smiled at the thought, feeling a longing for it, then had a troubling thought. Perhaps too amazing? If even she desired it, what effect might it have upon someone with an addiction-prone personality? She should ask an expert. Actually, didn't Bungo knew lots about the human brain and altered states?
Except there were other things she wanted to talk to Bungo about now. She asked Minion to remind her later, then set the thought aside.
Kafana: “Bungo, you’ve got a really organised way of thinking about skills. I’m afraid my division of stuff has been much more haphazard. I wonder if it makes a difference in practice?”
Bungo: “They discussed that on Divine Mountain. The prevailing view was that the numbered skills as they get displayed to us are just a view upon what we can actually do, and the system bases its decisions upon the underlying stuff not upon the simplified view. But only XperiSense knows for sure.”
Kafana: “That makes a lot of sense to me. Something felt wrong about using just a single number as a measure of people’s singing ability, and saying the higher numbered singer was better than the lower numbered one.”
Bungo: “Well yeah, but people like having tangible evidence that their efforts are being rewarded by improvement. This is a game. People like to win games.”
Kafana: “Some people like to win, no matter what they’re doing, even if they’re talking with a friend about who a mythological figure slept with, thousands of years ago. Soul Bound certainly looks like a game, but what if that’s not all it is? What if it has, right from the start, been intended as a sandbox, as an experiment, and the game-like elements are there to distract us from that?”
Bungo: “Now you’re starting to sound like Wellington and Bulgaria.”
Kafana: “I’ve been talking with them. I wanted to know their take on the big picture, what they think is really at stake if humanity doesn’t get its act together. And I want your thoughts too, Bungo. You have a knack for seeing angles upon problems that don’t occur to others. What do you think is the highest priority issue, the root cause, the greatest threat or opportunity?”
Bungo: “Wow. You don’t ask the easy ones, do you? I don’t know about it being the most important or urgent issue, but I guess there’s a problem I see coming that doesn’t get a lot of coverage. If I can take it in stages, and you don’t expect me to be a practised presenter like Bulgaria or Wellington, I could talk a bit about that, I guess. Would that be ok?”
Kafana: “Sure. Take it in your own time, whatever you feel comfortable sharing. This isn’t being broadcast, and I really want to get to know the new you, not judge you by who you used to be.”
Bungo stayed silent for a bit, then asked a question: “You know the old joke about democracy? That it is a terrible system, the worst one...”
Kafana finished it for him: “...except for every other one we’ve tried.”
Bungo: “Exactly. For hundreds of years, philosophers wrote books about their idea for the perfect system of governance that would result in an idyllic utopia in which there was peace, freedom, safety, liberty and justice for all. And none of them worked. They all stumbled on one insurmountable problem.”
He turned to her, an earnest look upon his face.
Bungo: “Human nature. People are the problem.”
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
She nodded, not in agreement but to encourage him to continue. She had a feeling that if she interrupted too much, he’d just clam up, and she was the one who’d asked to hear his thoughts.
Bungo: “If you can assume the populace is well informed, rational, benevolent, hard to deceive, etc then pretty much any system will work, from monarchy or communism, to anarchy or libertarianism.”
Bungo: “Lack of benevolence can be kept in check by transparency and enlightened self-interest, to a certain extent. If the populace is well informed and has the ability to kick the rulers out when they don’t act as though they were benevolent, that can act as a balance.”
Bungo: “If much of the populace isn’t well informed, but they are rational enough to identify and listen to those who are well informed, then a free press and a strong tradition of punishing rulers who weaken the safeguards hampering rulers or interest groups who wish to amass a disproportionate amount of power and resources for themselves, can act as a balance, provided the populace values that sufficiently to pay attention when the press starts ringing alarm bells, and spends the effort to check sources and become informed when needed, to sort the real dangers from the false alarms. Sorry, that sentence got away from me, didn’t it? I’m not good at this.”
Kafana: “No, you’re doing fine. So, some problems with human nature can be compensated for. But not all of them?”
Bungo: “Ever studied chimps? They were nearly wiped out by bio-weapons intended to target humans without the genetic markers for certain skin-pigments, during the Bad Years, but a few survived and one of the Neo Songhai projects has been building them back up, so I’ve seen a few. The young ones are cute, but the adults can rip your arms off. In some ways their musculature and skeleton are better designed than ours.”
Kafana: “No. I saw some in a zoo, once, when I was a child. But I’ve never studied them.”
Bungo: “I studied their genetics when I was working on developing intelligence boosters. There are a handful of regions on their chromosomes that have stayed the same in most primates, but by comparison with which humans have undergone mutation at an unexpectedly fast pace. Some of these Human Accelerated Regions cover things like opposable thumbs or walking upright. But the biggest of these regions, HAR1, covers the brain.”
Bungo sounded a lot more relaxed and confident when talking about the details of biology or chemistry. It was a side of him she rarely saw.
Kafana: “Humans brains are so complex. That must take thousands of genes. Millions. How long did it take you to study them all?”
Bungo grinned.
Bungo: “One week. Until 5 million years ago, humans and chimps were the same species. HAR1 is only 118 base pairs long, where most proteins require about 1000 to encode. HAR1F is the non-coding gene that includes HAR1 and affects when and how much reelin gets produced, mainly between the 7th and 18th week of pregnancy. Reelin affects the connectivity, plasticity and positioning of neurons.”
Kafana: “So just one gene then, but the human version of reelin is vastly different to the chimp version of the protein?”
Bungo: “Nope! Identical protein, just the release instructions differ. And of those 118 base pairs, only 18 of them differ between humans and chimps. Think of it like someone performing origami by moving a pencil across a sheet of paper and pausing it to add a fold every time you ring a bell - change where you put the folds, and you end up with a masu box not a lotus flower. Or, in this case, you change the size and layered structure of the neocortex.“
Kafana: “What are you saying?”
Bungo: “Basically, we’re chimps. Yes, we’re not as hairy and we walk around with our opposable thumbs, but the key difference is that our neocortex is larger than a chimp’s. The rest of the brain, the bits containing our fears and memories, is pretty much identical. Human nature is chimp nature, with a dollop of additional rationality splatted on top as a last minute piece of garnish added by the chef.”
Kafana: “I find that hard to believe. Humans are amazing. We’ve built farms on the moons of Jupiter, written great poems and painted great pictures.”
Bungo: “Chimps can’t use a complex vocal language; they’re lacking our FOXP2 gene. But if you teach them sign language, they can make use of a vocabulary with hundreds of words in it. That’s better than most 2 year old humans, and even some politicians.”
Bungo: “And they can teach skills to their children, even pass on bits of sign language. But stop teaching a group, leave it entirely to them, and the knowledge degenerates over the generations. Human brains are just about good enough that from generation to generation, a group of humans accumulates knowledge, via parents teaching skills to children and on a tribal level by elders passing on songs and other oral history.”
Bungo: “It is the thinnest of margins. Later, as we learned enough to support cities and created specialised knowledge workers, things accelerated. The speed of knowledge accumulation increased again once we gained the ability to write down records and index them. But that glacial pace of our original rise from cave dwellers and hunters to early farmers shows our brains were only just sufficient. If you strip our culture and language from us, within a generation you get feral humans whose behaviour is little different from that of chimps.”