The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

“Facebook . . .” Kierk mutters angrily under his breath from his crouch, then—“You should get in touch with him again. If the big problem with the relationship was that he moved then the only thing that’s stopping you is pride. Besides, you two looked like you were good together.”

“Thanks but uh . . . How would you know?”

“Oh, it’s obvious from the photo,” Kierk says distractedly as he pulls out a game from the shelf. The plastic in his hands makes him feel nostalgic for his fifteen-year-old self and there is a delay before he speaks again. “You were living together. The whole aesthetic is different than here, far livelier, more plants. It’s softer, tempered, a good aesthetic alloy. Your intellect, his heart, that kind of thing. And that photo has a lot of love in it. You know? The things with love in them are so vulnerable to criticism, you can always tell.”

Alex is staring at him from behind the kitchen counter, paused mid-sip. Kierk holds up the plastic green container, shakes it.

“Hey, so I’m pretty high. Do you want to drink beers and play Halo?”

Alex just laughs—“I knew you did other things than read. You’re just like everybody else, you big poser.”

“Think what you want,” Kierk says, putting in the game, “just be ready to back up your shit talk with action cause I’m ’bout to get my PhD in brutality.”

Alex takes a controller as the high-definition intro starts up on the big screen and the music blasts out of his subwoofers but his thoughts have returned to an old problem, which is suddenly being reexamined. That hypothetical that had seemed so tenuous to him had been treated like such an obvious fact, injected into his thoughts by Kierk like dye into a river, spreading everywhere from a single focal point, and he’s so shook that he gets blown up by a grenade right away.

“Get it together, Alex!” Kierk yells as he unloads an entire clip of ammunition.

Kierk’s pacing back and forth in the box of his apartment in the early morning hours, pulsing with a tired energy, a feeling of great psychological change building up.

From the frantic work of the weekend there is paper all over the floor. On the pages the Turing machines were in bloom, sending their long tongues of ticker tape in tangled ropes across sheets. Over the white landscapes specimens crawled, like the beasts of mechanical rovers, some had the extending proboscises of limbs, von Neumann machines, looking ready for reproduction, crawling about like low-slinking cats.

The revelation . . .

When he had woken up in Carmen’s apartment on Saturday the first thing he had seen had been a framed drawing. A self-portrait by Carmen. Maybe an exercise from a class of hers, and an amateur work, yes, but the shaping of the white space into the elegant form of a standing figure with one leg back, along with the determined nature of the charcoal that filled the rest of the image, gave the central form an undeniable power, carved from the black page like a statue from marble. It had slowly come into focus, and his waking thought, that first fully formed cogent experience, had been—you can draw using only negative space and so cannot I root out a theory of consciousness from where it hides by solely drawing the negative space around it? If he could charter the problems of each approach to consciousness a global outline would emerge, something from nothing. Yes, he had explored many things before. But he hadn’t used them to create a web of commonalities of failure.

Thus, he had started with computation. After a weekend of work the conclusion was what he had known already. Computation alone could not explain consciousness. Any system of sufficient size and complexity could be interpreted as running any number of programs, all at once, an interpretation that is dependent on an observer. And thus the loop was closed—because how could consciousness depend on some observer, on another consciousness? Proof of impossibility by infinite regress . . .

With computation thrown out he had spent Sunday on its more general cousin, information. He’d examined the exchange of bits, the changing of states, considered the fundamental equations of information theory. But measuring information required specifying both a state-space and probabilities. Yet what state-space? That, he had finally concluded, must be delineated by an observer as well. And what probabilities? In the basement of probability theory there were also observer-based decisions being made about token versus types and reference classes and probability as degree of belief. His reasoning is that if probabilities and state-spaces aren’t objective, there’s again proof of impossibility by infinite regress.

With these two proofs of impossibility constructed he felt he had filled in some small part of the drawing. But progress had felt slow. So Kierk had grown depressed, anxious in his febrile dreamings of automatons, disgusted by himself, by his egoism and his failure. He had doubted his genius at every turn. He had paced the distance between shadows like Eratosthenes. There was a fermentation taking place within, he knew, but it was stymied. He had felt like a fly flitting from wall to wall, slowly mapping the contours of a bottle it couldn’t possibly understand. He wanted to scream so loud and for so long it would travel from earth outward and outward until it became part of the cosmic background radiation and was forever.

All at the same time there was Carmen . . . who is now popping into his head as much as anything about consciousness. Her influence on his thinking is growing. A distraction that had been present all weekend. Every time he goes to work on the issue, in his awareness she becomes more solid, like the development of a haunting, a carmine rose growing up out of equations. Sometimes beautiful thoughts, sometimes bawdy ones, sometimes about protecting her, all were blended together—he wants to fuck