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

“Why bother?”

“Fine. You don’t want to look back. That’s fine. But let’s come up with something, the three of us. We have Atif’s experience with primate research. My experience on decoding brain signals. And your experience on the theory side of things. Let’s do something outlandish, attention-getting.”

“What, like hook up all the monkeys’ brains to one another?” Kierk says sarcastically.

“Actually . . .” Carmen pauses. “Actually, Kierk, that’s an incredible idea.”

“I was joking.”

Atif says—“No, I agree with Carmen. Online communication from one animal to the other.”

“And what would I do?”

“Well, what’s your thoughts on it?”

Kierk sighs, but then his hands begin moving as he riffs—“Setting up a big brain made of smaller brains is probably best modeled based on natural brain development. In development brain regions have to come together, integrate themselves into one mind. How do they do that? Feedback. Like a baby finding its foot. All brains start out as many brains. All minds as many minds. They become integrated, rewired into a single entity, through feedback and reward. So we need to design it so that the, ah, monkey group mind, is constantly getting feedback and reward from doing joint tasks, and slowly their brains will interpret the noise they are getting via the implants not as noise, but as signal.”

“How to Build a Hive Mind by Kierk Suren.”

Atif, nodding along—“Starting such a research program would be no small thing.”

Carmen’s eyes are bright tunnels of light. “Listen, people have done brain-to-brain communication stuff but never as part of a systematic research program on consciousness. What’s the bandwidth needed to form one consciousness out of many? And coming from the Crick Scholars! The history, the program, it’s all there. A new frontier in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness.”

Kierk shakes his head. “This stuff is just better and better mapmaking. Or worse, magic tricks.”

“You act like everything is so incredibly problematic,” Atif says, still half-amused.

“Do you know what a pitcher plant is?”

Atif nods. “Of course.”

“Well,” Kierk smiles grimly, “I think some ideas are like pitcher plants. And how happy do you think the one ant is that figures out they’re in a pitcher plant?”

Carmen flings his own paper at him. “God fucking damn it, Kierk.”

Atif looks shocked and unsure, but Kierk just glances down at the paper in his lap, the askew pages with his name on them. Carmen is waiting for him to say something.

“It’s a career move.”

An exasperated sigh. “It’s starting something. Providing a reference point in the literature. Maybe it’s flashy but that isn’t inherently negative.”

“This isn’t how it gets solved.”

Atif—“Do you think we will solve it in this room, now?”

“No.”

“Then why not take the time to do this?”

“If you have strong enough arms, you can bail out a boat with holes in it forever. Even if it’s unsound it never sinks.”

Carmen, visibly frustrated, says—“So you’ll just let it sink?”

Kierk looks down at months of his life in just a few pages of ink.

“Alright. I’ll do it.”

“We don’t want you to do it if it’s going to be—” Atif begins but Kierk cuts him off.

“If I commit, I commit. I’m in.”

They all shake hands. Soon Kierk, standing at the whiteboard, is sketching out a concept tree, and it all becomes a game of intellectual tennis as the ball of the idea is bounced, served, returned, and the board fills up with diagrams of experimental designs, little monkey faces with lines looping between them, some math that Kierk came up with on the spot on measuring neural bandwidth. Quickly the whole expanse has been filled and Carmen takes a picture of it with her phone, then Kierk erases it furiously and they start on another.

After leaving the shower Kierk picks up his notebook, flipping through the pages, looking at the dense blocks of paragraphs. It’s more than he wrote in the last four months of California. Some spigot is open again, and with the notebook in hand he laughs for joy in the empty apartment. Shaking out his wrists and grabbing a pen, he flops down on the bed, his eyes burning, feeling like he is etching his thoughts directly onto the page he is writing so fast.

O Consciousness! To be working on consciousness again! It stokes within me a fire, it beats at my back as if the furies chase me and I flee laughing. It is my heavenly manna and my djinn lover and my assassin all at once. As I rise to its challenge strength flows through my frame, my intellect becomes a piercing lighthouse sweeping across choppy waves, and words summon themselves to me so that I overflow into prose. My cup runneth over. An energy hums in me with such intensity that I can naught but shout it into ink, all in reverberatory response to the very scope of the thing, a problem cosmic in its implications and reach. What a mighty thing, consciousness! What aspect of our world does it not touch? In science it shows itself across all hierarchies, all primary and all special sciences. It appears as the monarch of psychology with all other mental events its yoked subjects. Within neuroscience it hides as the intrinsic meaning of the alien popping of action potentials in the brain. It lurks in the agential equations of economics, pops up as the irreducible remainder after genetics has done its deterministic work, and down at Planck time it may even trigger the waveform collapse that transforms the mere relata of possibility into the definite fact of existence. Indeed, what other candidate for the noumenal is there? Look unto history and see all of it as the consequences of consciousnesses en masse! It is the foundation for all axioms in mathematics, the fixer of reference for all language, and the provider of the only indubitable certainty possible. It is the boundary condition for all knowledge! The domain of universal discrimination! It acts as the demiurge of all art, and yet at the same time it is