Why is Hyperspace more hostile to computers than human brains?

Question

For stylistic reasons, I wanted to impose some limits on the use of computers and automation to justify my setting's retro-aesthetic and elements for my science fantasy story.

Basically humanity has invented FTL travel into hyperspace. Alongside this, there exists as well something called 'Notional space' which is basically a platonic realm of information and computation.

Hyperspace travel allows for Daemons from notional space to enter our own world in the search for a substrate to live in and spread.

Daemons don't have much of a physical presence in our world and tend to be fragile and short lived.

They can infect advanced technology directly via manipulating probability in delicate ways. They can selectively induce quantum tunneling and other phenomena, or use thermal noise to physically manipulate delicate structures.

As a result, this has the effect of stifling the use of advanced inorganic computers. They still exist, but the process needed to shield them is an expensive one.

So instead humanity has gone with the route of relying primarily on brainpower, similar to Dune, with heavy uses of neural augmentation and mind-machine interfaces as well.

My question is, what explains the fact that Daemons have a harder time getting a hold on human brains than advanced computers? Given that there isn't anything that bars them from also physically tampering with neurons.

Answer 1

Brains aren't computers

We often talk about brains as though they are computers, but while it's often a useful shorthand, it's not accurate. A little inaccuracy can save a ton of explanation, but it can also have a big impact.

Mind/body dualism

Information that's "in" your mind can't be observed by studying your physical brain. We cannot, for example, point to a specific cluster of neurons that is responsible for your understanding of horses. We also cannot put information into your mind by physically manipulating your brain. We cannot, for example, teach you my email password by reshaping your brain matter to resemble my brain matter.

This poses a pretty big challenge to your demons, because it means that having control over a brain is not enough to have control over the mind it houses. A demon might be able to interfere with the brain's operation, but they couldn't apply anything like real influence. A thief who steals your laptop may have physical access to your hard drive, but if your files are encrypted they still don't have meaningful access to your data, and they can't install a virus because they can't encode it the way it needs to be encoded to actually run when the filesystem is unlocked by its owner.

Class differences

Computers are pretty much identical to each other, whereas organic brains are not. Whenever you've got a giant set of consumer devices, it's very common for all those devices to be built with identical hardware and identical software. That makes it easier for a third party to study the devices because they all work the same way, and what you learn about one instance will be true of all the others. That's critical for a demon who only has temporary access to the computers flitting through his domain: even though they are individual vessels with individual hardware and software, their extreme similarity to other members of their class means the demon can effectively treat them as though they are the same individual for purposes of study and experiments in meddling.

None of that is true of organic brains. While it's true that members of a species will have lots of similarities, there are also countless little differences between individuals on both physical and mental layers, and those will serve to frustrate the demon's efforts to study or manipulate them.

Two people may both understand what horses are, but that does not mean you will find an identical pattern of neurons in both of their brains. If you have the individual's cooperation, you can locate the specific parts of their brain that hold that information, but that finding will not be true for the next person -- it doesn't equip you to look at the next guy's brain and determine whether he knows what horses are. Everything you learn about one brain will be true of just that one brain. A lot of it will be similar to other brains, but "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and not at all for someone whose tool is quantum tunneling.

Even more interesting is the fact that we all think differently. I mean, how else can we account for the fact that we are all confronted by the same mind-independent world but form different beliefs and acquire different behaviors?

Consider this example: in America phone numbers are typically expressed like so: ###-###-####, while in the UK they take the form: ##-##-##-##-##. If you tell somebody your phone number in the style they are not accustomed to, they will have a harder time remembering it. It's the same information in both cases, but delivered in a "shape" that the recipient's mind isn't prepared to work with.

Two space captains may be the same species, they may even be siblings, but they organize their knowledge and thoughts differently. Again, this will serve to frustrate your demon.

None of this is, by itself, a fatal hurdle. But in combination, all these differences between individuals compound to make the challenge enormously harder. The result is that your demon has no way to make progress over time, because each individual is so different that the demon must essentially start from scratch and has only the duration of that person's voyage to crack the problem.

A journey of a thousand miles does indeed begin with a single step, but if you get sent back to your starting point after every step, you won't have gotten anywhere even after talking 1000 miles worth of steps.

Answer 2

The thing about a brain is, it's already got a daemon in it. After all, what are we but tenuous wisps of information inhabiting a physical substrate?

If a daemon wanted to inhabit a brain it would have to kick out its current occupant, namely the person that lives there - but brains and people are made for each other, so the daemon doesn't stand a chance. Your subconscious will have kicked its butt it before it gets anywhere near your conscious awareness. You might have some weird dreams in hyperspace, but that's about it.

Answer 3

Human brains are not - and let me be completely clear here, not even a little bit - like computers.

(And before anyone complains, I'm not the one that tagged this as neuroscience!)

Computer hardware is standardized, logical and rigidly structured. Given a sufficiently high-resolution picture of a CPU's silicon a skilled engineer can tell you what each part does just from the interference patterns at low magnification and at high enough magnification they can reproduce the actual circuit that's printed on the silicon die. An acquaintance of mine a few years ago was a silicon engineer who worked on CPU designs for most of his adult life and could tell you the make and model of any CPU just from a scan that fit on a normal computer screen... and give you a 3-hour lecture on what was wrong with the layout.

Meanwhile, the top 10,000 neuroscientists on the planet can't tell you what any particular neuron does, because that's not how brains work. Rip a neuron open and study the chemical structures in it, you'll still have no clue what that particular neuron had stored in it. Even if you could map every single neuron and synapse (we can't, but imagine that we could) you'd still not have a functional simulation of it. The largest successful whole brain simulation ever created was of a caenorhabditis elegans roundworm with 302 neurons and only 5,000 or so synaptic connections. While we can simulate these things at almost real-time now, we're still missing a lot of information that makes them less that perfect. In 2013 they managed a simulation of ~1% of a human brain (they had 1.73e+9 neurons and 1.04e+13 synapses in the simulation) at around 1/2,400th real time... but I'm sure they've made it a lot further since then. We've almost managed to fully model a larval drosophila brain in the last few months, with the same lack of detail that the roundworm simulations suffered from but a lot more spackle over the details.

(No, Spaun is not a whole-brain simulation. It's good, but it's far too high level to be a true sim. It's about as accurate as a 50x scale mechano model of a human hand.)

And to top that off, brains are delicate as all hell. Disrupting communications between a handful (like the number, not the amount of neurons you can hold in one hand) of neurons can cause catastrophic failure of the entire structure. Quantum tunneling isn't going to help you here. Oh, and the brain state changes significantly due to microscopic changes in chemical balance. Tiny changes in hormone balance can flip a brain from perfectly normal to homicidal rage in seconds. Toxins produced by your own glands can screw with your memory and perception. And of course some brains are prone to all sorts of tomfoolery, like cascading feedback loops in epileptic brains.

And finally, no two brains are alike in any but the broadest possible strokes. Even with FMRI and all the other fun toys we've developed, our best guesses at the moment still require neurosurgeons to prod bits of the brain and see what happens. Or at least what the person who is awake while they're doing that reports. "Oh, you lost vision in your left eye and now you're tasting colors? That's unexpected." is not the sort of thing you want to hear from the guy who drilled a sodding great hole in your cranium a couple of minutes ago.

So yeah, your demonic forces are great at working with knowable systems like sub-micron silicon, but even simple brains are orders of magnitude more complex. Human brains? 86 billion neurons. 600 trillion synapses. And we have no idea how most of it works.

Computers on the other hand are easy to subvert... but also easy to protect against that subversion. Forget making them smarter, make them robust. Build analog computers for specific tasks that are faster and more robust than any digital computer. Build big, chunky circuits that couldn't care less if a few thousand electrons get displaced all at once. And don't make one, make ten. Get them to run calculations independently and make sure they all agree on the outcome before you trust it. If the failure rate is high, scrub them all and switch in a whole new compute bank.

Because if you rely on squishy meat to plot your hyperspace injection metric, you're doomed. Especially if that squishy meat is hooked up to a delicate piece of electronics that can be subverted.

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Meanwhile, every part of your ship is managed by fallible electronics that the demons can apparently interfere with. Life support is quite important. So are the various doors between you and the Big Empty. I imagine the reactor control system is pretty important too. Nice drive system you've got there, it'd be a shame if someone tweaked the cycle timing on the plasma induction manifold. You didn't need that anti-matter containment field did you? Oopsy.

Oh, and all that computational gymnastics you've trained for since conception is cute and all, but those sensors you rely on look kind of hackable from here.

The scenario you've detailed makes it basically impossible to do anything that a human (or group of humans) can't manage by hand. That counts out a lot of existing tech and vast swathes of the tech we take for granted in most science fiction.

Answer 4

Doped silicon is just simpler than organic molecules. Yes, they can tamper with neurons, but they have to know what they are doing, and it's just easier to do it with logic gates than with the mess of chemicals that form a neuron, especially since they are jumbled together and include chemicals that are vital to keeping the cell alive, chemicals that are actually transmitting the signal, and just plain junk.

Answer 5

It's for a story where you want demon-infested electronics?

Tin whiskers. And various other metal whiskers.

Under strain (from temperature, vibration, induced magnetic fields, whatever), tin and other metals extrude hair-thin crystal growths. This is a big problem for many electronics: adding random connections between nearby traces produces unpredictably bad results. This is all true, by the way, without any need for hyperspace demons.

Tin is especially vulnerable to this, and tin is the major component of lead-free solder, so "tin whiskers" get all the press. But various other metals will also aggressively grow crystals with enough stress.

So, your hyperspace demons are just good at rapidly growing neural networks out of whatever electronics pass through their domain. They grow themselves a weird antenna, occupy it, and then continue to grow it into a proper brain. All the while interfacing with the rest of the electronics and corrupting connected or nearby systems.

Symptoms are probably that the electronics die for a while, then start working again. When you crack them open they are full of dense hairballs of intricate and infintessimally fine wire.

Answer 6

Demons can start manipulating electrical signals below 0,2 micrometers and they can mostly influence electrons traveling through circuits directly.

The human nervous system works at around 0,2 microns. Which means any circuits below that would be affected, locking your technology around 1990’s to 2000’s (likely a bit higher as your understanding to use these size circuits becomes more efficient). Since your Demons use quantum manipulation they could simply be limited in the total volume they can affect at a time, so using below 0,2 microns would be a good start.

Computers and humans also use different wiring. A computer uses a solid metal conductor where humans use an electro-chemical salt pump alongside chemical transmission between the nerve endings. It would be easier to manipulate the electrical signal for a computer to increase/decrease the electrical potential. This means it can go over or under a threshold that activates the relevant electrical part and changes how the computer perceives the message. Additionally you have the potential for the Demon to create an electrical spike to damage a part. Since the Demon would need to manipulate not just the electrons but also the chemicals associated for them in the human nervous system its far harder to accomplish.

Answer 7

This sounds eerily similar to Warhammer 40K...

And so I will borrow an idea from 40K:

Sufficiently advanced computers become aware of the presence of Demons before they develop a set of Ethics.

The computational and predictive power needed to calculate a safe passage for a vessel moving at FTL speed(s) means that any device powerful enough to do all those things runs the risk of gaining awareness.

The issue is that once this happens, it gains a form of consciousness that Demons can latch onto, however it hasn't had the time to develop a set of complex ethical beliefs to resist a Demons influence. Think of it like a Child being groomed by a predator - and so any sufficiently powerful computer runs too much risk of gaining sentience - so they are deliberately limited.

Answer 8

They hate water

Human beings, including our brains, are bags of mostly water. It turns out that water is deadly to the aliens. In much the same way, that when we mix water with electronics bad things happen, so do bad things happen when the Daemons mix with water (it is the universal solvent after all). So we are protected because our computing bits are fully immersed in water, while inside a computer chip (even if it's water cooled) is completely dry.

Answer 9

As much as I like some of the other answers, they’re missing something somewhat fundamental: biology heals.

Silicon computers can’t heal themselves from Daemon damage. Flaws and failure will persist forever. While neurons themselves don’t heal, the brain itself is very redundant and adaptable. We’re losing cells all the time to radiation and age and whiskey, yet almost always continue along without a problem. Daemons can manipulate people, but it’s like bailing water - they have to do it constantly in order to get anywhere.

(Or for a more cynical story, perhaps the Daemons do succeed all the time, and it manifests as human biases and sin.)

Answer 10

Computers Are Dumb

People think that computers are exceptionally smart because they are able to perform rapid mathematical calculations and initiate complicated processes in the blink of an eye.

As a computer programmer, I am here to tell you that computers are as dumb as rocks. They don't have feelings, they don't have thoughts, they don't consider or contemplate or even reflect upon the meaning or purpose of their actions, they just do what they're told.

For this reason, they are extremely useful to us - because we can just tell them what to do and they'll do it. Unlike a human brain, which has all of these things and will not simply do as it is told.

But it is for this reason that a being made entirely of Concepts and Ideas is so easily capable of manipulating computers - there's effectively no resistance to them at all.

Artificial Intelligence may seem like a good solution to this, but AI is ultimately just a set of instructions written to simulate the effect of having real individual thoughts and ideas - they eventually break down into simple manipulatable components.

You need real original organic thoughts - therefore, you need real organic human brains.

Or maybe whale brains will do.

Answer 11

Two reasons.

Firstly the human brain is basically analogue, not digital. This difference physically limits the ability of daemons to interfere with the operation of human brains. Daemon's can sense and communicate with human brains and therefore 'tempt' them but they can't physically and directly intrude and take control of complex analogue systems without at least a limited degree of consent from a tortured or otherwise scarred (by life) human mind. The same cannot be said however for machine minds where all the Daemons have to deal with is a series of ones and zeros.

Secondly humans as a living, biological, intelligent (self aware) beings are innately endowed with the grace of their 'creator'. If daemons exist, so by default must their antithesis. This means that living intelligent beings, no matter how much they may have fallen away from the 'grace' of their creator by virtue of their actions are still instilled with an innate 'anti-daemon' essence that by default non organic, 'manufactured' computers don't possess.

These two factors combined mean human brains are better suited to managing operations in hyperspace. Outside of hyperspace? That's another question.

Answer 12

Quantum tunneling is impossible at cellular scales.

The transistors in modern CPUs are much smaller than brain synapses. What we still call "microchips" would be much more accurate to call "nanochips" since they have long since gotten much smaller than the microscopic scale. Modern microchips have transistors as small as 0.5-1.0 nanometers thick, but the average synapse is about 1 micrometer (1000 nanometers) across. Quantum tunneling increases exponentially in difficulty as what you are trying to tunnel through gets bigger; so, using quantum tunneling to manipulate a single synapse could easily be anywhere from millions to centillions of times harder than using it to manipulate a micro-transistor depending on just how strong the daemons power over luck actually is.

If you wanted to make a microprocessor that is as resistant to quantum manipulation as the human brain, you'd have to go all the way back to 1987 when the 68030 microprocessor became the first processor to use synapse sized micro-transistors. Between lower clock speeds and fewer transistors, this processor was about 27 million times weaker than Apple's M1 processors used in modern personal computers. That said, there is also a lot of optimization that goes into modern chip sets and software architecture that you would not find in 1987; so, your actual computer hardware limits might more closely resemble something like an Intel 4th or 5th generation computer system (i486 or Pentium-1).

This means that your ships won't be completely un-computerized, but they will need human operators to interpret and control what the computers are doing. In this respect, they could still have all of the stuff you'd actually need a ship to do have like navigational systems, comms, system status monitoring and regulation, basic data storage, some kind of sensor GUI, etc... but, scaling up your transistor size means you still need human crews because you've so heavily limited your ability to handle real-time deep-data analysis, AI driven automation, and large scale data storage for comprehensive pattern recognition and cataloging.

In other words, your ships computers might be powerful enough to decide, Yes, there is something worth noting, but it will not be powerful enough to decide what to do about note worthy things. Repairing a faulty system, changing the settings on a something that is failing to self-regulate, or deciding how to respond to a potential space hazards or hostile ship would all be beyond the realm of what you can expect out of such antiquated computer hardware. And even if you try to make your computer a million times as big to make up for the larger transistors, it will still be 1000x slower than a modern computer because larger transistors put more space between your data points slowing down internal signal speeds. So to actually make a ship with a mainframe that could manage even a basic general AI, it would have to be so big, and expensive, and use up so much power, that you are better off just using a human crew.

Answer 13

There's too many protons.

You wanna trick an atom into doing something different? Great! There's lots of tweaks you can make to individual protons, neutrons, or electrons that might lead to the outcome you desire. But the farther apart the things you want to tweak are, the more expensive your tweak is. You can make multiple separate tweaks, but that costs time, because you have to double-check your work -- observe what effect your last tweak actually had and work out what tweak you want to make next based on your observations. This has two practical consequences:

1. You want to tweak nuclei, as protons and neutrons are much closer together than the electron cloud. And, what's more, you want to tweak as few nuclei as possible, because each additional one either costs precious time or makes the energy requirements prohibitive.
2. In order to maximize the probability of success, you want a large number of possible tweaks available to choose from, so you want nuclei with lots of protons and neutrons. You can be creative with the scaling here -- maybe there's a cube law, or an exponential law, or similar.

This is bad news for our dear computers. Humans are mostly made up of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, atomic numbers 1, 6, 7, and 8 -- relatively small atoms. (To a lesser extent, calcium (20), but that's mostly in bones where nucleus-level tweaks are unlikely to effect anything important.) But computers have also got lots of heavier elements:

• Silicon (14) is the main backdrop.
• Gallium (31), germanium (32), and arsenic (33) are sometimes used in transistors.
• Aluminum (13), iron (26), copper (29), and gold (79!!) are used in wiring.

Just some quick back-of-the-envelope stuff: if there's a cubic scaling law, then gold has around 79^3/8^3 ~= 1000x as many possible tweaks as oxygen; if exponential, it depends on your base, but even adding a relatively modest 50% per extra proton gets you to 1.5^79/1.5^8 ~= 3,000,000,000,000x (3 trillion) as many possible tweaks.

Of course, research into water computers is much more advanced in their universe than in ours, and the search for low-proton transistors has got every funding agency hot around the collar.

Answer 14

my opinion is

hardware is hardware they process whatever it is that they have, to some extent we have made like bit correction stuff and all, but if the correction sampler is also tampered no one knows and the hardware definitely does not able to decide by itself if it was tampered or not

while humans with neuron network is harder to tamper cause the way brain works is too complex for daemons to understand, even more so cause individual humans have different neuron path for each memory / thought process, unlike machine that is probably mass produced or fixed in such way

daemons while able to tamper complex stuff since they are metaphysical, they don't have much storage to memorize stuff, like they are mostly RAM with small ROM, and to tamper stuff they already consume so much RAM they have, it is almost impossible to try to tamper humans while memorizing each thought process type

unless of course the human have brain defect that made their though process so simple that the daemon can effectively tamper the mind

Answer 15

There is nothing to daemons to manipulate on brains

Computers work with bits and bytes, and almost any disruption on these bits cause computers to fail, or worse, to malfunction.

Think of these demons as very active cosmic rays, as they cause any advanced, miniaturized computer from ever working.

But there are no bits and bytes on brains. Brains are pudins of synapses. Cosmic rays Demons affecting the brain don't cause a specific malfunction, and because of this, tinkering with the brain for specific outcomes is basically impossible.

For weak interacting entities that don't live long in our realm, then, it is effectively impossible.

Answer 16

Computers are like photographs, while brains are like holograms.

From Wikipedia:

When a photograph is cut in half, each piece shows half of the scene. When a hologram is cut in half, the whole scene can still be seen in each piece. This is because, whereas each point in a photograph only represents light scattered from a single point in the scene, each point on a holographic recording includes information about light scattered from every point in the scene. It can be thought of as viewing a street outside a house through a 120 cm × 120 cm (4 ft × 4 ft) window, then through a 60 cm × 120 cm (2 ft × 4 ft) window. One can see all of the same things through the smaller window (by moving the head to change the viewing angle), but the viewer can see more at once through the 120 cm (4 ft) window.

Demons affect either computers or brains in a similar manner. While human brains can be impaired by demons, the nature of the resulting impairment is less useful to them.

Answer 17

Electronic computers are something we designed and so their operation is comprehensible, because we needed to understand them to design them. You can look at a part of a computer and say, that's an adder circuit that's part of the arithmetic logic unit. It's there to add numbers together.

An evolved brain does not have this modular structure that needed to be understood by the mind creating it, because it wasn't created by a mind (Unless it was designed in your setting). Certain parts of the brain are more associated with some things than other things, but overall, everything is crosslinked and overloaded with multiple functions. It's a complicated mess that works.

Understanding a brain well enough to make changes that accomplish what you are after would be enormously more difficult than doing the same in an artificial computer. Whatever manipulation is being used to alter the electronic computers might serve to disrupt brains in less precise ways like causing confusion, or pain, or triggering a stroke.

Answer 18

Could be as simple as the fact that a human brain can fail to understand something but accept it. Computers on the other hand fail at this miserably. If in an FTL hyperspace realm, natural laws were bent to a degree the human could be trained to expect things to be undefinable "different", they could accept it, a computer could only be trained to handle error conditions of a definable sort with any reliability.

Sort of like an hallucinogen trip, a human brain can have its concept of reality twisted in ways it can observe, but acknowledge as being neither correct or incorrect. That may change their future perceptions but did not break the neural code processing it. Electronic computation however does not deal well with abstracts, even as quantum states are unknowns yet have expected outcomes, GIGO applies universally.

Until electronics form sentience to the degree of "figuring out" vs "eliminating possibility until defined" the human brain will have that advantage.

So have your people have to go through some psychological prep for the altered reality, where not even the most advanced instrumentation can prove or disprove what the gut feel for a situation is.

The only downside to that is the human brain has limits as well, and when you start bending the laws by which its perception is bound too far, it may break as well. Especially time distortions, such as memories that have not happened yet, or will never happen since timelines may be altered etc... So add some sort of cumulative madness effect from too many jumps ;)

Also make sure not to overlap the things they have in common, so if the behavior of an electron changed for instance, that would alter a great many of the chemical and electrical signals that a brain had while also affecting electronics. So if you focus on specific laws being in flux, make distinctions that are plausibly unique.

My $0.02, nutrition for cognition!

Answer 19

Brains are non-deteministic. You can enter the same information twice but the brain will not respond the same way each time. There is no repeatability. The most these Daemons could hope for would be to reach into the lizard-brain and trip fear centers, but even then, the results would not be predicable in their outcome. They might have a panic attack, but you can't predict or effectively direct the actions of a scared animal.

Answer 20

Daemon Powers are Strongly Dependent upon Atomic Mass

Just make it so that Daemons powers are stronger/amplified in heavier elements.

• It is easy as pie for them to split a heavy U-235 atom but nearly impossible to split a H-3 atom.
• It is relatively easy to alter current flow through Copper-based wire traces; it is very hard to alter current flow through Carbon nanotubes.
• It is easy to modify the behavior of Silicon-based neural nets; it is extremely difficult to control organic neural nets (e.g. carbon-based lifeform brains).

One unfortunate side effect might be that this could make diamond-based computer chips relatively safer from Daemon interference... or maybe that just ties into your "it is difficult/hard to shield inorganic computers from Daemon interference" point because diamond computer technology is so much newer and more expensive than traditional silicon transistors.