7. Ask a Bot
Once again, in Ransom's Guatemalan shack. "I seek audience with Hippocrates."
His server answered him, "Hippocrates is currently busy. You may have audience with him in approximately forty-nine hours."
"Can I speak to Galen?"
"You may speak to Galen in seventy hours."
Grrrrr. "How about Doctor Google?"
"Thirty-nine hours."
Ransom was impatient. He jumped over to The Superhuman League in the hopes of finding Aquinas or Guzman. Aquinas was a nurse, and Guzman was a Quantum Gravity Tomography tech. So Ransom hoped that maybe one of them could answer his medical inquiries. He would rather ask a bot. Even though bots lack common sense, their speech has the quality of being free from human bias and opinion. But today, Ransom would have to repress his introvert tendencies and talk to other human beings.
No Guzman or Aquinas. And no Jesse, just her bot clone. He couldn't ask Jesse-bot. It would be very awkward.
He saw Data pacing around the forum wall. Ransom hailed him and moved his avatar closer to his. "Data, any new links?"
"Um, no. What's up, young man?"
Young man? "Nothing much, Data. I'm just curious. Do you remember me?"
"Ah, yes. Of course. You're Ransom, I spoke to you a couple days ago, if my memory serves."
"Do you mean you natural memory, or your server's memory?"
He looked surprised. "What are you getting at, Ransom?"
"Well I've heard a rumor that Data is Legion. He's not one person, but many posing as one in cyberspace."
Data gave a quick low giggle. "Well you're no fun. Yes, it's true. The Data club is seventeen members strong. And I am perhaps the weakest link. This is the first time that I, personally, have met you, Ransom. This is the first time I've been to this forum."
"I've heard that the Data club is made up of successful professionals who want to keep their identity secret so that no one will know that they spend so much time goofing off on the Net."
Giggled again. "Well, I can't really speak for the other members of Data in regards to their motivations. I always think of Data as an interesting little experiment in gestalt intelligence. But you are correct. Most of us are successful businessmen. I, for instance, am a management executive in a hospital."
"You're not going to believe this, but I came here this afternoon looking for someone with medical knowledge. I have a question to ask. It must be fate that we met."
"Aha." Data frowned. "I'm a little reluctant to give medical advice over the Net. Why don't you ask one of the medical bots?"
"All the medical bots have killer wait times. So I thought I'd just ask one of the members of one of the smartest forums on the Net. I suppose I could ask my server to do a dumb search and look for text related to the exact wording of my question. But, come on, this is the thirties!"
"Yes, quite." Data squinted at Ransom. He appeared to be examining him. "You know, Ransom, there is a bot that specializes in medicine, and he's available exclusively to employees of Seventh Day Wellness Corporation. Since I am a manager, any request from me for audience is moved immediately to the front of the queue. His name is John Harvey Kellogg."
"Whoa! The dude who invented corn flakes?"
"Um, yes. But he was also the leader of the Adventist Health Reform at the turn of the twentieth century."
"And you will let me talk to him?"
"Yes." said Data.
"May I talk to him in private?"
"Sorry no, I can't do that. But it can be just you, me, and the bot."
"Sweet! Let's do it."
"Not so fast." said Data. "You have to do something for me. Answer my question, then you may have audience." Data waved his hand, and Dr Kellogg appeared. A short goateed man wearing a white suit and a parrot on his shoulder.
"Okay, what's the question?"
"When does life begin?" asked Data.
"Life?"
"Please humor me, Ransom. I am sixty-nine years old. but I have the eccentric quality of actually caring what young people think sometimes. My profile on you says that you're a twenty-five year-old Central Floridian. So answer my question. There's no right or wrong answer."
"Uh, okay. I assume you mean when does a single human life begin?"
Data nodded.
In realspace, Ransom got out of the chair he was sitting in and paced the room, careful not to bump into unseen realspace furniture. "Okay, let's examine the possibilities. There appear to be two arguments. One, life begins at birth. And two, life begins at conception.
"Saying that life begins at birth, that has always seemed so arbitrary and dubious to me. I mean, any mother can tell you about the moving and the kicking. It's obvious that the baby's life started long before birth. So why should a fetus be considered any different just because it moved from one place to another? And why should there be the distinction of abortion, if the baby is killed one day, and murder if it's killed the next day?"
"So. You believe that life starts at conception." said Data.
"No, not exactly. I think that saying that life begins at conception is equally arbitrary."
Data's raised his eyebrows. "Really? Please elaborate."
"Well, think about what happens at conception. The sperm and egg unite, and two different germ line genomes combine to form a new and unique genotype. A zygote is formed. A single cell that totipotent, able to become an entire new organism. This cell divides and multiplies and becomes a blastocyst, a small clump of cells the size of a period. The cells of the blastocyst are primordial. They're pluripotent stem cells that can become any type of tissue found in the human body."
"But this is not life?" asked Data.
"Only the most idiotic fundie would say that killing a sperm or egg cell is murder. But the egg and sperm gain no new intrinsic value once the two combine. Yes, the new zygote has the ability to become a human life. But potentiality does not equal actuality. A zygote can become a human life, but it is not alive."
Data scratched his digital nose. "Ransom, you say that the zygote has no intrinsic value over the separate sperm and egg. You don't think a new and unique genetic code has value?"
"Not really. Uniqueness does not equal life. What about twins? If life begins at conception, then where does the second life come from? Our genes don't determine who we are. Putting so much value on your genotype seems to me like a perverse form of Christian predestination."
"Well, I don't know know about that last part." said Data.
"Wait, there's more. Another reason I don't believe believe that a zygote is life, a zygote can be frozen."
"Frozen?" asked Data.
"This comment will prolly start an argument tomorrow. The Superhumanists have placed so much faith in cryogenic storage. But with current technology, as far as we know, a frozen human being is dead and gone forever. The vitality of human life, or the life of any higher order animal for that matter, has the quality of being unstoppable. Once a human life starts, it will go until death. You can't stop living when things go bad, and start your life up again at a more convenient moment. Life as we know it is bound to the hands of time. A zygote, however, can be frozen in time, indefinitely. And to say that those are human lives being held in limbo inside cytology labs all over the world, that's just false."
"Hmmm. Well you still haven't answered my question, Ransom. When does life start?"
Ransom shrugged. "You can't always look at the world in black and white. There must be a time between conception and birth when the central nervous system reaches a level of emergent order that can be considered quote, unquote, life. But I don't know when that point is. I don't think anyone knows."
Data squinted and examined Ransom one last time. "It takes a mature man to admit and accept that he can't have all the answers. I've been talking about this subject all day long at work lately. I wish that everyone was as open-minded as you. Ask Dr Kellogg as many questions as you like."
"Cool." said Ransom. "Server, create a private room for me, Data, and Kellogg-bot." The Superhuman League disappeared, and the two men and one robot found themselves standing on nothing in a blank, white universe.
The Kellogg-bot addressed Ransom immediately. "Hello young man. Did you know that the World Dietary Association recommends that you get at least twenty-seven grams of dietary fiber every day?"
"Uh, yeah. Fascinating. Here's my question. I saw someone earlier this week. A handicapped person, she was paralyzed from the waist down. Now when I was a kid, I remember watching this video of a famous actor who was paralyzed in an accident. He had recovered from his paralysis, and he walked, albeit very slowly, onto the stage of some awards show. Everyone was cheering and clapping and so on. Now I thought that paralysis had been cured."
"I thought you said you had a question." Said Kellogg-bot
Data interrupted. "Excuse me, Ransom, but I'm just curious. You're being quite conversational with this bot. It's probably best to just to ask a straight-forward question."
"Actually, sometimes it's better to talk to bots this way. Rather than just ask a straight-forward question, adding all this extraneous yet related information will force the bot to process things in more different contexts. It will conduct a richer recursive search and use more of it's neural net pathways. This way, it may look for answers in places I never even thought of looking." Ransom tapped his skull. "Bots are still pretty stupid. Sometimes we have to do a little bit of thinking for them."
"Hm. I've never thought of it that way. Please forgive the interruption."
Ransom turned to the bot. "So is paralysis cured, or not?"
"Paralysis is not completely cured." began Kellogg-bot. "However, a major breakthrough was made in 2017 in which successful treatments were developed in repairing the injured spinal cord. Before this time, spinal cord injury paralysis was considered to be permanent. The treatments involve surgically implanting a polymer and fullerene matrix into the spinal lesion. The implant is seeded with neural stem cells and Schwann cells, which are glial cells, or neuron helper cells extracted from the peripheral nervous system. The neural stem cells are obtained from the paralyzed patient through a bone marrow extraction. The stem cells in the bone marrow are cultured in a bioreactor and de-differentiated into pluripotent stem cells. The cells are then differentiated into neural stem cells. This is the preferred method creating a neural stem cell culture. However, in rare cases when de-differentiation does not work on the patient's cell, or if the patient requests it, a neural stem cell culture can be created using the highly expensive process of somatic cell nuclear transfer. In cases..."
"Cloning." said Ransom.
"Ah, yes. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is a method of cloning. However..."
"Look, bot, just tell me why some people cannot be treated."
"Researchers have found great difficulty treating spinal lesions caused by neural tube birth defects. Also, there appears to be a barrier to treatment dependent on the size of the spinal lesion. If the lesion is around three inches, or larger, axonal regeneration cannot take place across the entire length of the lesion. Scientists have speculated that it is impossible to regenerate large sections of the spine using current treatment methods..."
"Why?"
"The spinal cord, in fact, the entire central nervous system is an extremely dense and complex tissue, highly specialized and differentiated for the job it performs. It is theorized that new axons cannot bridge a long gap because the complex idiosyncratic structure lost through injury cannot be spontaneously regenerated from the structure remaining on either side of the lesion."
"Impossible?" said Ransom. "Kinda like rewriting a computer app after a crucial hunk of code has been erased. Or trying to make sense out of Hamlet after someone has ripped act two out of your book."
"I don't know if that metaphor applies to this situation." said Dr. Kellogg.
"Okay, whatever. Just tell me, are there any ideas of how to fix this?"
"Most experts say that more research needs to be done into cellular therapy. And one corporation that has made consistent progress in the field of cellular therapy is The Seventh Day Wellness Corporation, where they not only take an aggressive approach to finding healing innovations, they do so in an ethical manner, with respect to God's creation."
Ransom turned to Data. "You're bot is a corporate whore."
Data shrugged. "He answered your questions to the best of his capacity. And we all have bills to pay."
His server answered him, "Hippocrates is currently busy. You may have audience with him in approximately forty-nine hours."
"Can I speak to Galen?"
"You may speak to Galen in seventy hours."
Grrrrr. "How about Doctor Google?"
"Thirty-nine hours."
Ransom was impatient. He jumped over to The Superhuman League in the hopes of finding Aquinas or Guzman. Aquinas was a nurse, and Guzman was a Quantum Gravity Tomography tech. So Ransom hoped that maybe one of them could answer his medical inquiries. He would rather ask a bot. Even though bots lack common sense, their speech has the quality of being free from human bias and opinion. But today, Ransom would have to repress his introvert tendencies and talk to other human beings.
No Guzman or Aquinas. And no Jesse, just her bot clone. He couldn't ask Jesse-bot. It would be very awkward.
He saw Data pacing around the forum wall. Ransom hailed him and moved his avatar closer to his. "Data, any new links?"
"Um, no. What's up, young man?"
Young man? "Nothing much, Data. I'm just curious. Do you remember me?"
"Ah, yes. Of course. You're Ransom, I spoke to you a couple days ago, if my memory serves."
"Do you mean you natural memory, or your server's memory?"
He looked surprised. "What are you getting at, Ransom?"
"Well I've heard a rumor that Data is Legion. He's not one person, but many posing as one in cyberspace."
Data gave a quick low giggle. "Well you're no fun. Yes, it's true. The Data club is seventeen members strong. And I am perhaps the weakest link. This is the first time that I, personally, have met you, Ransom. This is the first time I've been to this forum."
"I've heard that the Data club is made up of successful professionals who want to keep their identity secret so that no one will know that they spend so much time goofing off on the Net."
Giggled again. "Well, I can't really speak for the other members of Data in regards to their motivations. I always think of Data as an interesting little experiment in gestalt intelligence. But you are correct. Most of us are successful businessmen. I, for instance, am a management executive in a hospital."
"You're not going to believe this, but I came here this afternoon looking for someone with medical knowledge. I have a question to ask. It must be fate that we met."
"Aha." Data frowned. "I'm a little reluctant to give medical advice over the Net. Why don't you ask one of the medical bots?"
"All the medical bots have killer wait times. So I thought I'd just ask one of the members of one of the smartest forums on the Net. I suppose I could ask my server to do a dumb search and look for text related to the exact wording of my question. But, come on, this is the thirties!"
"Yes, quite." Data squinted at Ransom. He appeared to be examining him. "You know, Ransom, there is a bot that specializes in medicine, and he's available exclusively to employees of Seventh Day Wellness Corporation. Since I am a manager, any request from me for audience is moved immediately to the front of the queue. His name is John Harvey Kellogg."
"Whoa! The dude who invented corn flakes?"
"Um, yes. But he was also the leader of the Adventist Health Reform at the turn of the twentieth century."
"And you will let me talk to him?"
"Yes." said Data.
"May I talk to him in private?"
"Sorry no, I can't do that. But it can be just you, me, and the bot."
"Sweet! Let's do it."
"Not so fast." said Data. "You have to do something for me. Answer my question, then you may have audience." Data waved his hand, and Dr Kellogg appeared. A short goateed man wearing a white suit and a parrot on his shoulder.
"Okay, what's the question?"
"When does life begin?" asked Data.
"Life?"
"Please humor me, Ransom. I am sixty-nine years old. but I have the eccentric quality of actually caring what young people think sometimes. My profile on you says that you're a twenty-five year-old Central Floridian. So answer my question. There's no right or wrong answer."
"Uh, okay. I assume you mean when does a single human life begin?"
Data nodded.
In realspace, Ransom got out of the chair he was sitting in and paced the room, careful not to bump into unseen realspace furniture. "Okay, let's examine the possibilities. There appear to be two arguments. One, life begins at birth. And two, life begins at conception.
"Saying that life begins at birth, that has always seemed so arbitrary and dubious to me. I mean, any mother can tell you about the moving and the kicking. It's obvious that the baby's life started long before birth. So why should a fetus be considered any different just because it moved from one place to another? And why should there be the distinction of abortion, if the baby is killed one day, and murder if it's killed the next day?"
"So. You believe that life starts at conception." said Data.
"No, not exactly. I think that saying that life begins at conception is equally arbitrary."
Data's raised his eyebrows. "Really? Please elaborate."
"Well, think about what happens at conception. The sperm and egg unite, and two different germ line genomes combine to form a new and unique genotype. A zygote is formed. A single cell that totipotent, able to become an entire new organism. This cell divides and multiplies and becomes a blastocyst, a small clump of cells the size of a period. The cells of the blastocyst are primordial. They're pluripotent stem cells that can become any type of tissue found in the human body."
"But this is not life?" asked Data.
"Only the most idiotic fundie would say that killing a sperm or egg cell is murder. But the egg and sperm gain no new intrinsic value once the two combine. Yes, the new zygote has the ability to become a human life. But potentiality does not equal actuality. A zygote can become a human life, but it is not alive."
Data scratched his digital nose. "Ransom, you say that the zygote has no intrinsic value over the separate sperm and egg. You don't think a new and unique genetic code has value?"
"Not really. Uniqueness does not equal life. What about twins? If life begins at conception, then where does the second life come from? Our genes don't determine who we are. Putting so much value on your genotype seems to me like a perverse form of Christian predestination."
"Well, I don't know know about that last part." said Data.
"Wait, there's more. Another reason I don't believe believe that a zygote is life, a zygote can be frozen."
"Frozen?" asked Data.
"This comment will prolly start an argument tomorrow. The Superhumanists have placed so much faith in cryogenic storage. But with current technology, as far as we know, a frozen human being is dead and gone forever. The vitality of human life, or the life of any higher order animal for that matter, has the quality of being unstoppable. Once a human life starts, it will go until death. You can't stop living when things go bad, and start your life up again at a more convenient moment. Life as we know it is bound to the hands of time. A zygote, however, can be frozen in time, indefinitely. And to say that those are human lives being held in limbo inside cytology labs all over the world, that's just false."
"Hmmm. Well you still haven't answered my question, Ransom. When does life start?"
Ransom shrugged. "You can't always look at the world in black and white. There must be a time between conception and birth when the central nervous system reaches a level of emergent order that can be considered quote, unquote, life. But I don't know when that point is. I don't think anyone knows."
Data squinted and examined Ransom one last time. "It takes a mature man to admit and accept that he can't have all the answers. I've been talking about this subject all day long at work lately. I wish that everyone was as open-minded as you. Ask Dr Kellogg as many questions as you like."
"Cool." said Ransom. "Server, create a private room for me, Data, and Kellogg-bot." The Superhuman League disappeared, and the two men and one robot found themselves standing on nothing in a blank, white universe.
The Kellogg-bot addressed Ransom immediately. "Hello young man. Did you know that the World Dietary Association recommends that you get at least twenty-seven grams of dietary fiber every day?"
"Uh, yeah. Fascinating. Here's my question. I saw someone earlier this week. A handicapped person, she was paralyzed from the waist down. Now when I was a kid, I remember watching this video of a famous actor who was paralyzed in an accident. He had recovered from his paralysis, and he walked, albeit very slowly, onto the stage of some awards show. Everyone was cheering and clapping and so on. Now I thought that paralysis had been cured."
"I thought you said you had a question." Said Kellogg-bot
Data interrupted. "Excuse me, Ransom, but I'm just curious. You're being quite conversational with this bot. It's probably best to just to ask a straight-forward question."
"Actually, sometimes it's better to talk to bots this way. Rather than just ask a straight-forward question, adding all this extraneous yet related information will force the bot to process things in more different contexts. It will conduct a richer recursive search and use more of it's neural net pathways. This way, it may look for answers in places I never even thought of looking." Ransom tapped his skull. "Bots are still pretty stupid. Sometimes we have to do a little bit of thinking for them."
"Hm. I've never thought of it that way. Please forgive the interruption."
Ransom turned to the bot. "So is paralysis cured, or not?"
"Paralysis is not completely cured." began Kellogg-bot. "However, a major breakthrough was made in 2017 in which successful treatments were developed in repairing the injured spinal cord. Before this time, spinal cord injury paralysis was considered to be permanent. The treatments involve surgically implanting a polymer and fullerene matrix into the spinal lesion. The implant is seeded with neural stem cells and Schwann cells, which are glial cells, or neuron helper cells extracted from the peripheral nervous system. The neural stem cells are obtained from the paralyzed patient through a bone marrow extraction. The stem cells in the bone marrow are cultured in a bioreactor and de-differentiated into pluripotent stem cells. The cells are then differentiated into neural stem cells. This is the preferred method creating a neural stem cell culture. However, in rare cases when de-differentiation does not work on the patient's cell, or if the patient requests it, a neural stem cell culture can be created using the highly expensive process of somatic cell nuclear transfer. In cases..."
"Cloning." said Ransom.
"Ah, yes. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is a method of cloning. However..."
"Look, bot, just tell me why some people cannot be treated."
"Researchers have found great difficulty treating spinal lesions caused by neural tube birth defects. Also, there appears to be a barrier to treatment dependent on the size of the spinal lesion. If the lesion is around three inches, or larger, axonal regeneration cannot take place across the entire length of the lesion. Scientists have speculated that it is impossible to regenerate large sections of the spine using current treatment methods..."
"Why?"
"The spinal cord, in fact, the entire central nervous system is an extremely dense and complex tissue, highly specialized and differentiated for the job it performs. It is theorized that new axons cannot bridge a long gap because the complex idiosyncratic structure lost through injury cannot be spontaneously regenerated from the structure remaining on either side of the lesion."
"Impossible?" said Ransom. "Kinda like rewriting a computer app after a crucial hunk of code has been erased. Or trying to make sense out of Hamlet after someone has ripped act two out of your book."
"I don't know if that metaphor applies to this situation." said Dr. Kellogg.
"Okay, whatever. Just tell me, are there any ideas of how to fix this?"
"Most experts say that more research needs to be done into cellular therapy. And one corporation that has made consistent progress in the field of cellular therapy is The Seventh Day Wellness Corporation, where they not only take an aggressive approach to finding healing innovations, they do so in an ethical manner, with respect to God's creation."
Ransom turned to Data. "You're bot is a corporate whore."
Data shrugged. "He answered your questions to the best of his capacity. And we all have bills to pay."
posted by Graham at 5:07 AM
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