Last Tango in Cyberspace: A Novel

“emergent storytelling,” a fictional tale written collectively by a nearly anonymous internet, then veering into reality

The human brain does information acquisition, pattern recognition, and goal direction. Give the goal direction system a goal and you give the pattern recognition system a purpose and the information acquisition system a target. Cortisol levels drop. It’s why, Lion believes, everyone needs a mission.

Dune mantra: “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

of the living, we automatically mirror their behavior. In their absence, with nothing to mirror, this lack emotes a feeling, the null set of empathy. Presence or absence of aliveness, Lion believes, is one of the basic bits of information conveyed by empathy.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

Anxiety is the enemy of empathy. Fear makes us egocentric; egocentric makes us blind. An amygdala/prefrontal-cortex two-step that narrows the search parameters of the pattern recognition system. Pretty soon, as anxiety climbs too high, we lose our ability to find one another.

Lion thinks empathy is another way we have learned to recognize life. When the party ends and guests leave, the house doesn’t just look empty. It feels empty. Absence of life gives off sensation. One possibility is mirror neurons, which are the habit machinery beneath empathy. In the presence

the idea of empathy itself only dates to the late eighteenth century. The notion was invented by psycho-physiologist Wilhelm Wundt to describe our ability to experience another’s experience, and different, Wundt thought, from sympathy and compassion. Empathy is about the transmission of information; sympathy and compassion are reactions to that inf

pack. A second-edition Dune, sunrise over Arrakis on the dust jacket, follows.

Live the questions, said Rilke.