Blindsight

Fortunately, scramblers become more alien the closer you look at them. Cunningham remarks that nothing like their time-sharing motor/sensory pathways exists on Earth. He's right as far as he goes, but I can cite a precursor that might conceivably evolve into such an arrangement. Our own "mirror neurons" fire not only when we perform an action, but when we observe someone else performing the same action [79]; this characteristic has been cited in the evolution of both language and of consciousness [80, 81, 82].

Things look even more alien on the metabolic level. Here on Earth anything that relied solely on anaerobic ATP production never got past the single-cell stage. Even though it's more efficient than our own oxygen-burning pathways, anaerobic metabolism is just too damn slow for advanced multicellularity [83]. Cunningham's proposed solution is simplicity itself. The catch is, you have to sleep for a few thousand years between shifts.

The idea of quantum-mechanical metabolic processes may sound even wonkier, but it's not. Wave-particle duality can exert significant impacts on biochemical reactions under physiological conditions at room temperature [84]; heavy-atom carbon tunnelling has been reported to speed up the rate of such reactions by as much as 152 orders of magnitude [85].

And how's this for alien: no genes. The honeycomb example I used by way of analogy originally appeared in Darwin's little-known treatise [86](damn but I've always wanted to cite that guy); more recently, a small but growing group of biologists have begun spreading the word that nucleic acids (in particular) and genes (in general) have been seriously overrated as prerequisites to life [87, 88]. A great deal of biological complexity arises not because of genetic programming, but through the sheer physical and chemical interaction of its components [89, 90, 91, 92]. Of course, you still need something to set up the initial conditions for those processes to emerge; that's where the magnetic fields come in. No candy-ass string of nucleotides would survive in Rorschach's environment anyway.

The curious nitpicker might be saying "Yeah, but without genes how do these guys evolve? How to they adapt to novel environments? How, as a species, do they cope with the unexpected?" And if Robert Cunningham were here today, he might say, "I'd swear half the immune system is actively targetting the other half. It's not just the immune system, either. Parts of the nervous system seem to be trying to, well, hack each other. I think they evolve intraorganismally, as insane as that sounds. The whole organism's at war with itself on the tissue level, it's got some kind of cellular Red Queen thing happening. Like setting up a colony of interacting tumors, and counting on fierce competition to keep any one of them from getting out of hand. Seems to serve the same role as sex and mutation does for us." And if you rolled your eyes at all that doubletalk, he might just blow smoke in your face and refer to one immunologist's interpretation of exactly those concepts, as exemplified in (of all things) The Matrix Revolutions [93]. He might also point out that that the synaptic connections of your own brain are shaped by a similar kind of intraorganismal natural selection [94], one catalysed by bits of parasitic DNA called retrotransposons.

Cunningham actually did say something like that in an earlier draft of this book, but the damn thing was getting so weighed down with theorising that I just cut it. After all, Rorschach is the proximate architect of these things, so it could handle all that stuff even if individual scramblers couldn't. And one of Blindsight's take-home messages is that life is a matter of degree—the distinction between living and non-living systems has always been an iffy one [95, 96, 97], never more so than in the bowels of that pain-in-the-ass artefact out in the Oort.

Sentience/Intelligence

This is the heart of the whole damn exercise. Let's get the biggies out of the way first. Metzinger's Being No One [20] is the toughest book I've ever read (and there are still significant chunks of it I haven't), but it also contains some of the most mindblowing ideas I've encountered in fact or fiction. Most authors are shameless bait-and-switchers when it comes to the nature of consciousness. Pinker calls his book How the Mind Works [98], then admits on page one that "We don't understand how the mind works". Koch (the guy who coined the term "zombie agents") writes The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach [99], in which he sheepishly sidesteps the whole issue of why neural activity should result in any kind of subjective awareness whatsoever.