1. Predictive popular science

How to Create a Mind claims that reverse engineering of the human brain will create an “artificial neocortex that has the full range and flexibility of its human counterpart” but will “only continue to increase in speed.”Footnote ¹¹ Many have challenged the feasibility of what Kurzweil claims.Footnote ¹² My aim here is to probe the language and construction of How to Create a Mind, to demonstrate the power of predictive popular science to create a make-belief that fosters a problematic overvaluation of cognition and renders ageing invisible.

Popular science serves as a networking strategy with which investigators seek to “help in the sale … belief and spread” of their research.Footnote ¹³ Kurzweil is a master salesman, in how he aligns his mission with doing evolution. He first positions his field of expertise as the current end and high point of evolution, technology following in the wake of physics, chemistry, biology, and neurology.Footnote ¹⁴ Thereafter, he places himself in one line with Darwin and Einstein, presenting his own “thought experiments on thinking” as building on their “thought experiments on the world.”Footnote ¹⁵ Connecting his argument to the brilliance of their past predictions is particularly effective, because he makes Einstein’s theories sound extremely approachable—“a young man’s idle thoughts,” developed with “no equipment other than pen and paper.”Footnote ¹⁶ How much more reliable must Kurzweil’s predictions be, with all the technology available to the twenty-first-century scientist. In a second step, Kurzweil lifts the technological mind above the biological: two chapters on biological evolution and its product, the human neocortex, wrap around Kurzweil’s predictions. Concurrently, the functioning of the biological neocortex is reduced to the work of “Lego blocks.”Footnote ¹⁷

Pitching himself as the driver of evolution is tightly entwined with the valuation of cognition in Kurzweil’s project. This is reflected in two short cuts. First, Kurzweil dismisses specific capabilities of the brain because, he argues, from an evolutionary perspective, pleasure and fear are obsolete today: “If it is just human cognitive intelligence that we are after the neocortex is sufficient.”Footnote ¹⁸ And second, Kurzweil conflates cognition with the capacity to memorize and store, working with the assumption that specific brain areas only deal with remembering and forgetting. Yet, attention, perception, and arousal are essential for learning, and these involve body processes in addition to brain processes.Footnote ¹⁹ As such, biologist Steven Rose vehemently opposes the idea that brains could be “constructed out of silicon chips,” pointing to the complexity and dynamics between interconnecting nerve cells: “molecules, macromolecules, neuronal and synaptic architecture, ensembles, binding in space and time, population dynamics; all clearly contribute to the functioning of the perceiving, thinking brain.”Footnote ²⁰ Rose is not alone in his concerns.Footnote ²¹ Comparable criticism has been levelled at the Human Brain Project, funded by the European Union between 2013 and 2023. The project, led by Henry Markram, in Kurzweil’s words in 2012, planned to “simulate the human brain, including the entire neocortex as well as the old-brain regions such as the hippocampus, amygdala, and cerebellum”, by 2023.Footnote ²² The programme achieved three-dimensional maps of 200 brain regions, developed brain implants for cases of blindness, and led to the modelling of functions of memory to advance treatment of brain conditions.Footnote ²³ But overall, reports published in high-impact scientific journals, the popular scientific press, and other media pronounced the programme failed at worst, and of limited use at best.Footnote ²⁴

Concerns about ageing and older age are near absent from How to Create a Mind. This is in keeping with Kurzweil’s convictions that “immortality is within our grasp,” since immortality discourse is always about health and youth.Footnote ²⁵ The invisibility of the ageing body is not new to neurotechnology discourse. As early as 1995, Mike Featherstone observed that descriptions of virtual reality and its opportunities did not include older people. Concurrently, the sociologist argued, the core merit of virtual reality could be to keep the old body invisible—think, for example, of setups that help overcome mobility issues.Footnote ²⁶ Similarly, where fiction represents digital disembodiment (as death approaches) as somatic enhancement, it recurs to the characters’ younger avatars in the virtual reality, not their failing physical bodies.Footnote ²⁷

More significant, the principle of wear and tear, a chief mechanistic hypothesis of ageing, remains unacknowledged for the technologies hailed by Kurzweil. Neurotechnologies have contributed to the idea of human organs, including the brain, as machines that can be replaced when dysfunctional.Footnote ²⁸ Kurzweil enthuses that prospective systems will have “the ability to be copied, backed up, and re-created” but ignores that prosthetic technologies carry anxieties about their potential disappointment, failure, and the risk of getting out of control.Footnote ²⁹ Most of all, there is no critique of how the blurring of human biology with categories of the technological increasingly challenges definitions of the normal.Footnote ³⁰ Kurzweil’s world has no space for diversity, neither physiological nor cognitive. To discuss the implications of this further, I will first turn to Jeffrey Moore’s Memory Artists.

2. Creative science fiction

Moore’s narrative can be read as a fictionalized popular science account by imaginary “Professor Emeritus” Émil Vorta.Footnote ³¹ The novel in hand figures as Vorta’s “memoirs”, written by a “professional writer-translator,” who has “combined ‘dramatic reconstructions’ with interviews, laboratory notes and diary entries.”Footnote ³² The novel also features letters, newspaper clippings, pencil drawings, and chemical formulae. A “Notes” section additionally conveys scientific exactitude, all the while furthering the reader’s uncertainty, since these endnotes are Vorta’s annotations to the ghostwriter’s version of events.Footnote ³³ Such aesthetic strategies challenge the unequivocal authority of the scientific viewpoint and underpin Moore’s take on neurodiversity.

Moore’s “memory artists” are Vorta’s clinical cases: five individuals with diverse cognitive capabilities. A synaesthete, Noel features as “a psychomnemonic wonder, with almost unhuman eidetic powers.”Footnote ³⁴ At the other end of the spectrum, his mother Stella lives with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, while the attitudes, beliefs, and capabilities of Noel’s friends bring out different valuations of memory. Norval tries to reach a stage of synaesthesia with experimental neuropharmaceuticals; Samira experiences amnesia after involuntary drug intake; and Jean-Jacques’ interest in “organic alternative mood elevators” is aligned with quick-witted creativity.Footnote ³⁵

Moore’s novel serves as a fictional response to memory discourses of the 1990s, when first memory enhancing drugs had been licensed for Alzheimer’s disease. These improved symptomatology only modestly, and, within less than a decade, they were used for cognitive enhancement in healthy subjects.Footnote ³⁶ Alongside pharmaceutical manipulation, data obtained in an engineered mouse led to claims that “cognitive attributes such as intelligence and memory” can be genetically enhanced in mammals.Footnote ³⁷ These memory discourses aligned mechanisms of remembering with computerized processes of “encoding,” “storing,” and “retrieving” information.Footnote ³⁸

The popular fascination with a memory of total recall sits squarely within such discourses, whose values Moore interrogates, but not effectively rejects. He suggests that there are always two sides to a condition or capability, as with Noel’s ability for total recall. Those around Noel believe that “with a brain like yours, you’ll go far”, but they also see “something completely shattered, crushed” in him.Footnote ³⁹ In reverse, Moore creates connections between synaesthesia and dementia, where Noel’s experiences are conveyed in terminology that the cultural discourse aligns with Alzheimer’s: “vacant spells and fog” when his mind is overwhelmed, a “tendency to brood, emotional numbness, general confusion.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet, Moore’s eventual world is one without Alzheimer’s, if not ageing. It is Noel’s memory capacity that enables him to come up with a drug that “fights ageing and wakes up the mind.”Footnote ⁴¹ This is relevant because the novel treats dementia as the conceptual proxy of old age and Alzheimer’s as the ultimate spectre of an ageing population. This has huge implications for care policy:

In the face of such considerations, Noel’s “memory pill” conceptually devalues Jean-Jacques’ and Samira’s strategies of care for Noel’s mother.Footnote ⁴³ His pharmaceutical experimentations permeate the entire book; their art therapy appears like an afterthought in one of the novel’s news items.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such textual imbalance chimes with the “gender division” in discussions of posthumanist technologies: public and academic debates are dominated by men, while most critical writers about the topic are women.Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition, this imbalance captures the invisibility and disregard for informal care in cure-seeking contexts: It is Jean-Jacques’ and Samira’s dedication to Noel’s mother in the now that enables Noel to focus all his time and energy on research for a cure.

3. From imaginings to policy

What is the benefit of reading a creative text like Moore’s alongside Kurzweil’s predictions? Aesthetically, the boundary is thin, especially when conceiving of a popular science text, like a novel, as “a literary performance displaying aesthetically significant form.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Moore’s fiction plays with expectations readers have of popular science. As such, Vorta’s exaggerated scientific precision highlights how much Kurzweil sacrifices fact for speculation. Additionally, the “technique of fictionalizing the reader contributes to the similarities between popular science and fiction.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Fictional Vorta’s desire to control what is published about him makes Kurzweil’s aesthetic performance in literary form look comical because exaggerated.

My main concern is that the societal beliefs that inform Moore’s account are shaped by promises like Kurzweil’s. “To build a better future,” a recent policy manifesto by think tank United for All Ages asserts, “we must imagine ourselves there.”Footnote ⁴⁸ But what if our imaginings devalue what it means to be human? Complicit in nourishing “nanodreams,” Moore (like Kurzweil) omits how one’s personality and mind are occasioned by lifelong development, way beyond the neuronal level.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead, both texts convey “a future vision of technological and medical intervention—not social transformation or political action—as the only proper response to disability.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In this sense, they deny a policy imperative for creating opportunities for people along a lifetime continuum of development. Although The Memory Artists explores aspects of the cultural construction of memory, it tends to underwrite a “rhetoric of crisis” about old age that is knitted to masculinist ideals like performance, gain, and marketization.Footnote ⁵¹ These are the values that are encapsulated in Kurzweil’s world, present and predicted. The curative position of neurotechnologies discussed makes accepting that ageing comes with material changes to the body seem meaningless at best.