When we talk about a surrogate performer comprised of cellular material that was donated by a being previously possessing experience conducive to the Surrogates output it’s interesting to think about the question – how can we begin to collate the immeasurable details that influence the activity of an entity engineered to perform a specific task?
Consider this scenario – the blood of an aging composer, eager to continue work can be extracted, isolated, proliferated, transformed, differentiated and then embedded into a hybridised Surrogate Composer to continue their work. Production and creative output could possibly still be achieved even if the human is unable or if some environmental elements make it unsafe for the elderly to do so. We posit that the work of this bioengineered entity may be intrinsically linked to its donor.
IPS derived neural network grown in-vitro from a donated skin biopsy.
Can the reverberation of experience be propagated and survive through the transformation process? Perhaps some kind of cellular memory still remains intact even when lab protocols and the metric of science insist that all has been erased and limpid just as there is no way to measure what influences us unconsciously. An exploration, is indeed now possible, into the invisible, organised principles or ‘anima mundi’ that infiltrate all fields internal and external. Do the new neurons of this Surrogate Performer have some kind of biological inheritance and remember coursing through the veins of the human donor? There lies an undeniable interconnectedness between the two actors, a collective memory that withholds the human experience and binds it to the material that keeps us alive. This type of reciprocation where the essence of life is both living it and in control of it, suggests that information can transmute and transfer across technological boundaries. Potentially even having a quantum-like state where it inhabits both realms at the same time. As with vision, a two-way process is involved, an inward movement of light and an outward projection of mental images to shape, process and produce action – one influencing the other.
Does the 17th century mechanistic Cartesian view of our mind being inside our brain hold true when a prepared neural network growing outside of the body has been derived from a donated drop of blood? Is it not possible that the morphic filaments connecting our minds to the time and space of particular experiences also extend further out and inhabit bio-engineered disembodied surrogates? Century’s old Descartes-like, contracted materialistic views of reality and what our creative minds actually are, should be examined using current 21st century technology to pull it apart and propose non-mathematical models of rationality.