Read Online Sum by David Eagleman - Free Book Online

stakes are so low; the gods are not large and powerful and they know it. So they try their best to stand out and to be heard, given the limits of their random talents and the cards they are dealt. They discover themselves tossed into a sea of interaction with strangers, struggling for progress in a network of jealous competition. Many of them embrace a suspicion that something extraordinary could happen if they could collaborate on a meaningful scale, but they find themselves continually stymied by the personalized nature of their goals.
    Lately it has become popular to theorize that their incapacity to coordinate is the only reason they have not destroyed us. But the truth is that they are fond of us and work to keep us well protected. When they feel overwhelmed by their own struggles, they sit down and observe a traffic jam. They watch how each human driver aims for his own private piece of the city, isolated from neighbors by layers of glass and steel. Some of the humans reach out to make cell phone contact with a single friend out of the innumerable hordes. And gazing out over the steering wheel, each human feels the intensities of joy and grief as though his were the only real examples in the world.
    Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: we are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

 
    Impulse
    Just as there is no afterlife for a computer chip, there is none for us: we are, after all, the same thing. Humans are the small networked units of hardware running a massive and unseen software program, the product of three cosmic Programmers. The Programmers are experts in building flexible computational substrates made of nodes—in this case, humans—that are mobile, self-healing, and possess high bandwidth. With every contact between humans, the network crunches through calculations immeasurably large, reconfiguring its colossal circuitry on the fly, computing for beings on a different spatial scale.
    The surprise is that all the computational operations run below the surface of our consciousness. So take careful note the next time your neighbor’s eyelid produces a single, barely perceptible twitch. Normally neither of you would be conscious of it—but your subconscious brain notices. To those hidden parts of your brain, the detected twitch stimulates a cascade of changes: genes unwrap, proteins blossom, synapses rearrange. All this is well below your awareness—you are merely carrying the brainbox with no acquaintance with what happens inside it. This surge of neural activity causes you immediately to release pheromones that are consciously undetectable but have considerable influence on the nervous system of the young woman sitting next to you: moments later, she unwittingly taps her left foot, once. This is picked up by the brain of the tourist sitting across from her, and onward the computation evolves.
    In this manner, all across the vast network of humanity, signals are passed at a blinding pace without any of us knowing we are messengers. The unconscious lifting of a finger to scratch under the rim of a hat, the sudden appearance of gooseflesh, the exact timing of a blink—these all carry information and compel the processing to the next stage. The human race is a gargantuan network of signals passed from node to node, a calculation of celestial significance running on the vast grid of the human substrate.
    But it turns out that a tiny, unexpected bug has crept into the program, an anomalous algorithm that the Programmers did not intend and have not yet detected: our consciousness. Everything we adore, abhor, covet, can’t bear, take pleasure in, desire, pursue, crave, aspire to, long for—all these run on top of the planetary program, hidden within the thick forests of its code. Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
    The Programmers are as unaware of our conscious lives as we are