Page 96 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Sweet Oblivium

“Well, this is embarrassing,” said Hydrargyrum Diggers. “Like
Leith, I have a man-made concoction popping out of the nexus of
microbiology, gene research and big-data computation. But mine is
not designed to harm. That doesn’t mean it won’t turn out to have
been under the control of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but that is
getting me ahead of myself. My secret laboratory is a capitalist
enterprise with the goal of creating the next “killer app”, a rather
loaded term for a wildly successful product marketed through
online sales. Again we have the genome, already purchased through
an unconnected third party but available to the individual paying for
it. You say that isn’t the case today—that consumers only receive a
summary—but the courts will decide in favor of the buyer, soon
enough. And we have the research tying specific genes to their
phenotypical expression. Add to that the established knowledge
about the pain and pleasure receptors in the brain and the
hormones related to stimulating them, and you have the proprietary
programming for Sweet Oblivium.”
“The interface between gustatory ecstasy and the senses of taste
and smell is a network of specialized nerve cells in the mouth and
nose. These have evolved in every species to assure the ingestion of
nutritious compounds in the environment and the avoidance of
toxic chemicals. That brain processing is modulated by two
conditioning neural feedback loops: the loss of attraction caused by
tachyphylaxis and the waning of appetite driven by information
from the stomach—the feeling of fullness. Unsatisfied desire in the
presence of acute hunger or the ungratified stimulation of those
sensory signifiers of the presence of the craved object can lead to
acute frustration; this was demonstrated in the classic experiment of
pigeons continuing to peck a food-delivery lever long after it ceased
functioning, to the point of exhaustion and death.”
“My point is not to validate behaviorism as the ultimate model
of the human mind, although any scientific enquiry treating our
psychology in a mechanistic fashion in order to meet the
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