Wet Specimen
Here's a typical sample of class notes from the notebooks of a typical student working on a typical first-year assignment. Assume that any derangement or desperation you detect is also typical.
The professors don’t give us their names. As far as students are concerned, they just have ever-changing titles and ranks among themselves—Research Professor of This, Associate Professor of That, Professor of The Other and Chair of Something Ridiculous—so we’re forced to come up with names for them ourselves.
They aren’t pleasant individuals. As a rule. So the names we give them are usually descriptive, centering on whatever characteristics seem stable enough to hang a name on. But sometimes these traits or whatever drift, so the names change too.
There are a couple hundred of them and only ten of us, so keeping up with the names we’re using for them is almost as difficult as some of the classes.
We used to abide (I nearly said “live”) in a state of fear that they might overhear the names we make up for them. Then that one time Commandante Pissgargler overheard a few of us griping about needing to visit him to beg for more time to turn in an assignment and he merely corrected us, in passing, to “Professor Commandante Pissgargler.” So we relaxed a little.
We kind of wing it on the gendered pronouns front as well. They don’t seem to distinguish between he or she or it or they, at least for themselves, if we’re using languages that care about such things. To be fair, they seem just as careless as we are about such things when they apply pronouns to us.
Not to speak too much on behalf of my fellow students, but I don’t think anyone much cares anymore. Gender is a performance, after all. Every drag show ever proves it. So being misgendered is an insult to your performance, but none of us are inclined to waste valuable energy or attention on what’s basically a mammalian courtship display, no matter how you dress it up. We’re kind of past all that. No one has the concentration to spare on any performance or the energy to spare for any actual mating. Or even the organs or fluids, if I’m being honest. Unless it’s for an actual assignment. And then, as I’ve said, we kind of wing it.
If we need any spare parts for that kind of thing, to replace anything that’s fallen off or whatever, we can check them out of the Library.
—
Which brings me finally to the topic of the current assignment. We have to make a wet specimen of some tissues to be preserved indefinitely—but the catch is that the tissues need to be reusable, to be functional when taken out of the preservative and grafted onto an organism. A typical wet specimen is preserved well enough to prevent rot, you know, to halt microbial colonization or general decay, but, well, not to let you bring it back to life. The stuff a wet specimen is preserved in is pretty damned toxic. It’s kind of the point.
You can’t just wash the formalin off. It soaks into the tissues. Into the cytoplasm of cells, even. The fact that it makes the tissues toxic is what discourages the bacteria and fungi and miscellaneous wee beasties from eating your valuable specimen.
What I’m familiar with back aboveground is cryonics, and that’s stretching the meaning of the term “familiar.” If the tissues you’re trying to preserve are tough enough—as in, when the cytoplasm in the cells freezes, the growing spiky knife-like ice crystals don’t carve up all the protein and lipid structures—then you can just supercool the tissue to halt the chemistry until you’re ready for it to continue. Sometimes you can dehydrate the cells a little so that when the ice expands it doesn’t pop the cell membranes. Or you can dope the cytoplasm with substances to reduce crystallization or prevent it altogether, but that’s likely going to alter—or outright poison—the biochemical processes in the cell when it thaws.
Cryonics is damned tricky. There’s almost always some damage, and the larger and more complicated the tissues are, the more likely you are to end up with a freezer-burned mess when it thaws.
Anyway, that’s not a wet specimen. That’s a frozen specimen. Would that even count?
Somewhere in the back of my head is a memory of an immunosuppressed mouse with a human ear growing out of its back, from back in the early days of the Internet. I later learned it was just bovine cartilage grown in a biodegradable mold that looked like a human ear, but it proved the point that a living-yet-foreign tissue sample could stay healthy in a specially prepared living body, at least temporarily. There might be some minor cross-contamination, what with wandering stem cells and nutrient transport and waste collection and such, but it seems like it would be mostly manageable.
Ideally you’d have, like, a minimalist clone of whatever organism the tissue sample is from, like a fetus or species-appropriate homunculus, and you’d induce some kind of hibernation or torpor for the entire thing to slow down deterioration or aging.
Or maybe whatever fluid medium I use shouldn’t be a poison, but some kind of solution that could be isotonic with the cytoplasm in the cells, cooled to near freezing, perhaps, and simply actively patrolled by agents that cull scavengers, predators, parasites, and other colonizers that aren’t suitably symbiotic. Perhaps the tissue could even be stored inside a cell with its own defenses against invasion and colonization.
I think I’m getting pretty far afield here. I have no idea how to do any of these things.
Whatever I choose when I come up with an approach, I need to figure out how to adapt it to the tissue in question that we were assigned, which is a living human conscience.
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The next problem will be finding a living human conscience in good enough shape to survive removal, storage, and transplantation. I’ve met all of my fellow students and I’m not sure there’s a healthy one left in any of us. That’s assuming any of us still count as human.
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It would all be easier if a conscience was like we seem to want to imagine it—a completely-separate-from-us disembodied intelligence, either internal or external, that watches everything we do and everything we think and points an accusing finger if we ever veer off the path of what a good person would prefer us to do. Jiminy Freaking Cricket I could probably capture and store. He might even survive freezing.
I mean, the idea of that is quite a bit older than Jiminy himself. Socrates (via Plato) presented the idea (in his typical obsession with artificially dualized and absurdly balanced polarities) as a pair of horses pulling your chariot, one driven by lust and the other by shame. Five hundred years later it gets a revamp in early Christian literature, in The Shepherd of Hermas, as the more-famous-lately paired-up good angel and bad angel that everyone gets at birth.
Not much prior to Plato’s Phaedrus—if it was truly prior at all since estimates of the probable dates of authorship overlap—was the book of Job, where the torturing tempter and conscience were one singular external entity, in the employ of God Himself, embodied in the Accuser. You know. Satan. Nine hundred years before he got his almost-equal-to-God Manichean promotion from Augustine of Hippo.
In a living human brain, however, a conscience involves functional areas in the prefrontal cortex where conscious self-regulation happens and a number of associated mirror-neuron sites that are part of the premotor complex, the supplemental motor areas, the primary sensorimotor complex, and the inferior parietal complex, plus a few other less certain locations. I mention this by way of what’s considered to be a typical setup, where empathy is an important factor. And by empathy I mean a strong sensitivity to the suffering of others coupled with a strong distaste for causing suffering because you feel it yourself when you see it. This would be a neurotypical/non-autistic-spectrum setup, where an individual’s choices in actions are influenced by an imagination of how others will feel (or even the imagination of how a judging authority figure or god might feel) about a choice or its consequences.
Although the prefontal cortex will always be involved, other areas are involved than mirror-neuron sites when the conscience in question is rules-based rather than empathy-based and the imagined consequences have to do with predicted impacts to interconnected systems and your personal sense of How the World Ought to Be.
Then of course you come to the sociopathic conscience, which is nearly identical to the non-empathic setup except the guidelines are based on predicted impacts to either personal emotional states or personal goals, either short-term or long-term. Finally there’s the sadist’s conscience, which still has that empathic sensitivity to suffering but triggers an internal flush of delight at the thought of being the author of the suffering.
I guess some people would call the latter two executive control systems a “lack of conscience.” Arguments could be made—and frequently are made—that a sociopathic conscience is merely a member of a subset of special cases of autistic wiring. Sadism, on the other hand, would be a subset of the empathic conscience with a damaged or reversed reward system with respect to what people expect and/or hope to encounter.
I prefer not to bring the autism spectrum into it, to be honest. In my analysis, a conscience-like executive control system is driven by an internal reward system, and that reward system is in turn influenced by imaginations of consequences that are pleasing or displeasing to the individual. We judge the “goodness” of that entire system (regardless of the internal mechanics) by comparing it to either our own (usually presumed to be “acceptably good” the same way just about every automobile drive presumes that they are an above-average driver) or to some imagined ideal based on the imagined actions of an imagined moral authority.
That’s a bit tidier, but it’s still not as tidy as a cricket you can catch and put in a cage. Or a freezer.
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So here are the things that cripple a healthy conscience: Above all things, a weak imagination. On par with that is some kind of damage to the internal reward system that keeps you from being able to feel good for doing whatever you feel is the right thing—and/or the capacity to feel shame when you do something you feel is wrong. For example, a bout of depression that keeps you from feeling much of anything can also keep you from caring too much about the impacts of your choices.
Moving on. If your conscience’s schema is based on empathy and your empathic response is weak, your conscience can’t be strong. If it’s based on rules and projected logical outcomes and your logical capacity is weak or subject to the usual suite of popular fallacies, your conscience is likewise doomed. If your conscience is based on the imagination of role models and those models are unrealistic or even sociopathic, you conscience can’t be much good.
I list these because there’s no point in preserving or transferring a conscience that isn’t worth employing. But also, if you’ve transplanted a conscience and the relevant elements are damaged in the process, you’ll have ruined it.
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Given my presumed-to-be-fallen state I may not be the best judge, but I’d assume that the best conscience would be sensitive to the suffering of others with an eye toward minimizing it on whatever scale of time and space is within your view. The conscience would also have a sense of equity, recognizing basic needs of others and oneself and responding with generosity whenever possible, perhaps permitting misery as punishment for poor choices but not poor luck, and allowing mercy whenever such leniency would not be abused. This would be the bare minimum. Any moral or ethical system built on top of that conscience should have at least a fighting chance of being a good one.
There are immediate issues with this design of conscience right off the bat, of course, and you don’t have to be a genius to spot them. The biggest one is that the ability to distinguish between actual poor judgment and a mindset resulting from ignorance or privation or victimhood is rare. Everything eventually boils down to the luck of birth and the path of experience from there among those you get saddled with, also by luck, plus the lottery of biology and the brain chemistry and general body health and internal traits you get to work with. But for some, under some circumstances, the experience of negative circumstances can be educational.
And that’s the main point of a conscience, I assume. To share bounty, to share burdens, to minimize stressors. To lift instead of to press down. For the benefit of other people, of oneself, of the general situation and circumstances. Not benefiting one thing at the expense of another if it can be avoided, but benefiting all together.
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The University is happy to point out that it’s nice to have a good moral or ethical direction, but a good foundation of knowledge is necessary for the competent achievement of any goal on any path. Knowledge is neutral. Knowledge is orthogonal to morality and ethics. If any topic of study is forbidden, you may be assured that it will be exploited either by those who don’t care about the rules, which is bad enough, or worse, by those doing the forbidding.
The purpose of the University is to farm knowledge like a crop, which means exploiting sapience wherever it can be found and experimentally promoting numerous competing and cooperating schemas of infectious civilization because individuals are shit at acquiring knowledge. They stop when they have what they need for comfort. Likewise, any search for new knowledge at the tribal/city/state/nation level tends to stall out when the unchallenged individuals at the apex of the associated power structures have achieved a system that keeps them fat and happy.
Why on Earth would you risk destabilizing something that keeps you blissful? Because discoveries do indeed destabilize things.
I’m not trying to imply that there isn’t a small percentage of people who are naturally curious, who would take apart the universe to count the atoms for the hell of it, who would try to put the atoms back together better as a matter of personal pride. Instead I’m merely pointing out that curiosity doesn’t get funded on any useful scale unless—and only when—it’s a matter of survival for those in charge of the resource stockpiles.
So part of the job of the University is to make sure there’s large-scale encouragement for the arts and sciences with no particular care whether the motivating factor is surplus wealth to be spent on curiosity or a sudden need for catastrophe-taming benevolence or the encouragement of competitive greed or the testicle-constricting terror of absolute necessity.
I have no idea what that does to a University student’s conscience, but I imagine it’s not good.
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As for myself and my fellow students, it’s difficult to hope that the process that’s made us what we currently are has left all of the various parts of our own consciences intact. Even our role models are busted. The Library’s biography section lays bare the abject humanity of all of our best human examples and is also happy to highlight how unrealistic all the mythical ones are.
There’s typically no trouble with our imaginations or logical processes here though. These have to be in good shape for any of us to be selected as students. Our internal systems of reward and punishment are all over the place, however. Fear of performing poorly trumps all prior conditioning to feel shame or disgust or self-disgust. Just think of having to pith a live frog for dissection in a biology class in order to get a good grade and multiply that by a few orders of magnitude.
I don’t have to like it, but I get it. In order to know what we have to know, absolutely nothing can be safe from the scalpel. Nothing mundane, nothing divine.
On the other end of that see-saw is the warping of what counts as something selfless enough to be worthy of a squirt of self-reward. Opportunities for charity here are either so uncommon or so ubiquitous that nothing you can do makes an impact.
What can you feed the hungry dead when their only food is what remains of your dwindling self? Anyone you might fetch to sacrifice to their hunger just … swells their ranks.
As students we can help one another. But in the end we have to compete, and only our top performer gets to escape—after they’ve served their stint as headmaster for the next batch. Even helping the weakest of us hang on is self-serving, keeping them from washing out and being replaced with someone who could end up a true competitor.
But also the long-term goals we once considered to be universally beneficial squirm under our scalpels. Do we try to serve civilizations and societies knowing that the long-term survival of a society frequently requires the sacrifice of kind-hearted and innocent individuals? Almost every organization, from families to nations, can only ensure its continuity by acknowledging that every member is replaceable or disposable. Do we try to maximize fairly the quality of life of all individuals knowing that the survival of some individuals in the short term will lead to the misery or extermination of large numbers of others in the long term?
For those of you still among the living with more or less typical biologies, you know that not all of your cells can be pampered. You favor the ones that serve you best, dispose of the weak to make room for new growth, and outright murder the infected and cancerous whose only crime was to be weak or confused. And yeah, sometimes you just have to scratch. Or indulge in a vice for the sake of your mental health.
These are the quandaries of any individual or organization that meddles in the affairs of others. But our situation here is foreign from the viewpoint of my life before here. I don’t know whether our mindset here would make us seem evil to many of those I used to hope to impress with my previous good behavior. I suspect it does.
The University itself serves a purpose, and therefore, as an organization—as an organism—it has its own set of goal-based values, both short-term and long-term. Not only are we—the students and faculty and staff—interchangeable cogs, but our various parts are interchangeable as well, and any of them can be sacrificed for the sake of the school’s objectives. The university doesn’t love us, but it needs us, and it needs us to think like it does.
Because after all, we do its thinking for it, piecemeal.
We want to be a valuable part of something larger than ourselves so that the larger thing that values us will take care of us. So it will defend us from threats and nurture and reward us for loyal membership. We can’t guarantee any of these benefits, but we can try our best and hope. It’s exactly the same with the University.
—
I fear I’m in danger of failing this assignment.
A conscience is built from an internal system of the imaginations of rewards and punishments, of positive and negative associations, for which we as individuals backfill (just like for every other system of behavior) a huge body of rationalizations that we use to explain it all to ourselves. This document is a perfect example of such a rationalizing phenomenon. So why can’t a conscience be stored as text, as a transcription of those rationalizations?
Worse, my rationalization processes are on the verge of declaring this stockpile of notes to be the “wet specimen” itself. Not because these few lines detailing a minimal functional conscience are trapped in the liquid medium of ink, or possibly even frozen in ink, because who uses ink? Many of our number here still use a stylus in clay, because that works just fine here in the utter blackness.
The thought I have is that language itself is a chemical fluid that has a substantial amount of stability but is, over hundreds of years, subject to the entropic (and vaguely evolutionary) pressures of semantic drift and waves of Brownian-like fluctuating cultural associations. In that way, anything written counts as a wet specimen, just as durable as a something squidgy in a sealed jar of formalin—and just as apt to degrade over the long haul of hundreds of years.
I guess the only real difference is the smell when you crack it open.
—
See? I can sell the idea that this interminable stack of sentences counts as a wet specimen to myself, no problem. But can I sell it to Dragontits McOysterface? Sorry. Sorry. Professor Dragontits McOysterface, Associate Professor of Undead Parabiology and Research Professor of Experimental Esoterica.