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

the piles of trash and crushed cans. Alex nudges Kierk and smiles.

“I heard you weren’t in lab today. Or yesterday.”

“Yeah, I was, ah, working on something.”

“Are you okay? Just because, I mean, you did leave the top research lab on consciousness. In the entire world. I heard, well, many rumors. Was it some kind of conflict? Or something else?”

In front of them Carmen has focused her hearing laser-like behind her.

Kierk looks over harshly at Alex. “What you know, you know.”

“So,” Leon interrupts in his thick German accent, “do you find the curriculum of the program appropriate?”

“The required course we have to take on professional development is pointless,” Kierk replies, “if you haven’t noticed already.”

“It is only every other week. You do not believe it will be useful?”

“I don’t believe in professional development.”

Leon smiles an ursine smile. “Yes, it is nice to be younger.”

Now the storm has passed itself off as a mood of the sky. Their speech increases in volume as the sky thunders a bit, as the cars honk off into distances. They all pause at a stoplight, waiting, looking up sporadically. The deep oil spill of a summer storm is spreading over the city. Carmen’s hair flashes around in the warm wind. Atif pulls up his hood, a tall shadow dreaming up rain. The pressure of the air is a vanguard, lifting the hairs on the back of Kierk’s neck. Carmen’s delighted face is upturned, she sticks her tongue out briefly, a quick dart, smiles.

The hookah bar is under a mirror of itself. Two callers yell for them, beckoning north or south. Atif leans his tall frame over the steps and begins a raucous dialogue with them in Hindi. The rest of the group mingles on the concrete until Atif emerges from the conversation and ushers them up to the top hookah bar, the bottom caller now shouting insults, the top caller shouting back.

Inside everyone sits down in a circle. “Pomegranate, let’s get pomegranate!” Jessica says amid the low chatter, to which Carmen rolls her eyes.

Atif orders several rounds of a drink that Carmen doesn’t recognize, but after three her opinion of them becomes quite high. The Crick Scholars quickly begin to amass empty glasses. Eventually they turn to discussing how they ended up in the program, going around the circle. Greg is last.

“I got my PhD in computer science from MIT. But since the brain’s the most complex computer, my principal investigator encouraged me to apply to the Crick Scholarship.”

Kierk is looking at Greg the way one might look at a hideously deformed child, pity and disgust warring on his face.

“What did you just say?”

“That my advisor—”

“No, about the brain. Being a computer.”

Carmen shaking her head “no” at Kierk. Alex puts his head in his palms.

“Well, like, okay maybe it doesn’t have von Neumann architecture, but instead like a parallel processor. It’s definitionally an information processor.”

“That’s totally vacuous. Everything can be described as an information processor. Literally any system. Information processor just means change occurs.”

“But, hmm, but computers systematically transform inputs into outputs.”

“Again, totally vacuous. Rocks do that.”

“What, how do rocks do that?”

“They take in all the forces acting on them and produce an output based on their previous state.”

“Yeah, but those aren’t symbols. Like a symbol processor.”

Kierk’s voice is slightly slurred. “Oh come on. The representational structure of those symbols is only there because humans designate it. Because consciousness fixes it. You could read out Shakespeare from a rock with the right reference codes. Brains are about as much computers as rocks are.”

Greg, flushing a bit—“But computationally brains are much more complex.”

Kierk sighs, shaking his head—“Greg, something being a computer or not has nothing to do with complexity. You can build a universal Turing machine out of like a hundred Legos.”

“I know that!”

“Do you think a Turing machine made out of one hundred Legos is a mind, or a brain?”

“. . . No.”

“So why would you claim any kind of an identity relationship?”

Mike has purposefully started up another conversation with Jessica.

“Listen, I see what you’re driving at,” Greg says over them in his adenoidal voice, rubbing the carbuncle on his nose, “but, well . . . I’m an eliminativist anyways. Consciousness is an illusion.”

When the server comes up Atif waves him away. He wants this to play out.

“And I stand by that,” Greg is saying, defiantly.

“How? How can you possibly?” Carmen is replying, exhaling hookah smoke.

“Listen, don’t ah, don’t treat me like the enemy. I just think consciousness is basically an illusion.”

Carmen, after passing the pipe—“Greg, you just denied the very thing we are all here to study. An illusion for whom? Illusions are perceptions.”

“People used to think the Earth was at the center of the universe too!”

Carmen is shaking her head—“That doesn’t follow at all.”

Kierk sets down his glass hard. “Galileo took observers out of science on purpose. He bracketed them to the side to make it simpler. Now we’re the ones adding observers back in.”

“But I would say that—”

“I would question your ability to say anything once you have denied your own consciousness. You must not cut off the branch you are sitting on.”

Greg is shaking his head ruefully—“But how can you really believe that there’s fairy dust sprinkled onto brain states and that it’s just magic? Is that what you actually believe?”

“Oh! Oh yeah, Greg, yeah, that’s what I believe. That’s the appropriate response when I accuse you of begging the question. That I must believe in fucking magic. Petitio principii, Greg, petitio principii!”

“Kierk, you are so loud right now, just like, tone it down, man,” Mike says, leaning over.

Kierk stares at Mike, but then looks down at his drink. Much more calmly—“Consciousness is a natural phenomenon. It has properties, scope, character. It’s the world in which you live day in and day out. It is unlike, in kind, anything else in nature. It has a greater claim to existence than anything else. Consciousness is not the hypothesis. The outside world is the hypothesis. If you cannot accommodate consciousness in your natural order,