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

certain lawlessness in any proposed correlation between neural events and conscious experiences, or “qualia.” Because really, why couldn’t one neural firing lead to green instead of red? Why would some neural activity correspond precisely and only to a particular experience? Merely because it’s going on in the area that gets statistically excited when the eye is presented with red stimuli? Or merely because the area is hooked up, somewhere, to saying the word “red”? Is it really red only because the signal from the area, through a near-infinitely long feedback and feedforward—that one-two step dance, that shivering oscillation—originates from precisely those neurons and jazzes over to Broca’s pub, puts quarters into the arcade games to activate the pinball levers of a tongue and the forge bellows of the lungs, and some great mechanical machine far beyond sight or knowledge moves its comically large mouth to say slowly and deeply and with the blazing eyes of the Wizard of Oz—“Red! Red! Red!”

Kierk dozes in imagery. A still-verbal homunculus, a split part of him, thinks—let us reframe the intuition. We have our subjective world, and the objective world. Can one ever fully envelop the other, or do they only have, displayed on their surfaces, the distorted reflection of the other?

Two marbles are put next to each other. They touch only at an infinitesimal point.

FRIDAY

Kierk wakes up pleasantly tangled in sheets. Legs over fabric, sliding to the smooth, cooler parts. Groaning, everything hurts, but it feels like things inside him are being knit back together and there is a very old joy in that. On his way to the bathroom he nearly trips over A Confederacy of Dunces lying on the floor by the bed.

At a cafe on Broadway the barista starts making him an iced coffee and Kierk has to explain he wants it hot. The barista lifts an eyebrow—“You know we’re in the middle of a record heat wave, right?”

Carrying his coffee Kierk finds a convenience store. In the cool aisles he grabs a pack of pens and then he browses through the notebook selection, which is minimal. The only ones left are bright pink Hello Kitty notebooks. After a dour moment he chuckles, slapping it on his knee, remembering early on in his California period when he would buy thick packets of printing paper and tear them open and fill the loose-leaf sheets with pages and pages of prose, diagrams, ideas, equations . . . And he feels something he hasn’t felt for a long time: words stirring like small birds in his chest waking from a westward dream.

Kierk sets his tray of sushi down as Carmen looks up from securing a lid on her iced chai tea, a tray already in front of her.

“Do you know what I saw on the way here?” she says. “That Double Trouble graffiti. ‘Torture for torturers.’ Reminds me of what Norman Bennett said about how that researcher got chased by someone in a monster costume. And then whatever it is you saw! That creeped me out. And I think I got spooked from it all, because yesterday after lab, I left late, so it was dark, but I thought I was being followed. Like when someone walks behind you for too long, you know? This guy in a costume. Like a mask with horns or whatever. He was behind me the whole way home. But he must have been going to a costume party because he like, turned off right before my building.”

Kierk looks over at her sushi stuffed with avocado—“ Wouldn’t they leave you alone since you’re a vegetarian?”

“I still do animal research though. Sometimes. Besides, aren’t a lot of people vegetarians in the field?”

“I’m a complexitarian. Only eat things below a certain neural complexity.”

“You would be. So clearly shrimp don’t make the cut.” She points at his rolls with her chopsticks.

“Delicious and dumb. Just the way I like them.”

“What would be an example of something that would make the cut?”

Kierk gestures to the bar. “Among the things here? Octopus. But of course being a complexitarian is just a stand-in. Ideally, we’d all be unconscioustarians.”

“Nonconscious creatures only?”

“Exactly. But without a theory of consciousness we can’t even decide what to ethically eat. Barbarians at the gate.”

“That’s why I stick to vegetarian. Playing it safe.”

“Plants can form associative memories.” He points at her rolls in a mimicry of her. “And they can communicate with each other. How sure are you? Even bacteria colonies trade electric signals.”

“Alright, wise guy,” Carmen says, laughing as she chews. When she finishes—“So anyways how close were you to completion of your PhD when you left?”

“Extremely close. But I’d rather be a lens grinder, and confront real problems, than sit pompously and comfortably among fools and partisans.”

“Your problem is academia, or the way that it’s run, or what? I mean, I have my days, believe me.”

“Fuck the publication-and-grant game most of these people are playing. All that shit is just repetition, just banquet and vomitorium all at the same time. All minor ideas, the majority of them wrong. What I want is a theory of consciousness. That’s it. And after I get it, I’m done. That’s enough for a lifetime. I could live in peace.”

“So you want to be a scientific one-hit wonder. You’d really just publish and . . . leave it?”

“Testing it can be someone else’s job. We need firm theoretical foundations to start it off, and there’s only a handful of people in the world doing that seriously.”

“And you’re one of them.”

Kierk coughs, and Carmen notices he’s already wolfed down half his sushi. “Honestly, yes,” he says, finishing his bite.

“See, I don’t think it’ll even be in my lifetime. If it is, I suspect it won’t come from anyone I’ve ever heard of.”

“If it is in our lifetimes it won’t be anyone we’ve heard of yet because of Occam’s broom.”

“Not the Occam’s household item I am familiar with.”

“It’s when smart people unconsciously sweep inconvenient facts under the rug to support their own pet theories.