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

then the natural order must expand. Your reality is too small. The sole reason anyone wants to eliminate consciousness is solely to keep materialism, which is a metaphysical position, intact. While some philosophers may warp themselves that much, a true scientist could never throw away the obvious, in-front-of-their-eyes evidence. People who say consciousness does not exist are like Parmenides arguing his way into believing that change does not exist. But change is undeniable. Or Zeno making his argument that there is no motion. Yet motion is undeniable. Consciousness is undeniable. And since it exists as an undeniable natural kind, then not all things are physical, therefore physicalism is false. Ex cathedra.”

Jessica laughs, defusing everything, drawing everyone to her. “Another lecture, Kierk! And you say you don’t want to be an academic. But it doesn’t answer the most important question. What’s the next flavor of hookah we should get?”

The conversation moves on. When no one is looking Carmen winks at Kierk. Atif orders more drinks. Greg tries to bring up the subject again, but both Kierk and Carmen simultaneously (not quite however, Carmen moves first and Kierk copies her so fast as to appear simultaneous) ball up their napkins and throw them at Greg, and in reply Alex throws his at Kierk, to general laughter. Kierk stands up jokingly as if to leap over the table at Alex and Alex makes kissy faces at him. Kierk goes out for a cigarette and most of the other Crick Scholars join him, leaving just Greg and Leon at the table.

Sitting back down with everyone, Carmen recognizes that it may be difficult to ever get back up. She hasn’t eaten dinner (a yogurt only, scarfed down standing before she headed out tonight), so four drinks in she begins to gulp water in an attempt to make that feeling of weightlessness leave, that spinning where she circumvolves around an internal axis. Carmen wonders abstractly whether she would go home with Kierk if he pursued her tonight. Her expectations have a color to them now and she can feel them in her body.

“You are all very rambunctious,” Leon says, adding another drink to the glass castle he has raised around him.

“Leon, we are not splitting this bill up evenly,” Kierk says in laughter. The waitress brings over a tray of shots, starts distributing them to rising noise.

Carmen—“Alright, alright, shot time. Hey! Hey! Shot time. Everybody. Everybody. You ever do a neuroshot?”

“This is so sad and uncool I want to die,” Kierk gets out before Carmen hushes him.

“Okay!” she says, looking around brightly, everyone’s gaze on her. “You take the shot, and then, for a chaser, you recite the twelve cranial nerves.” To all the protests—“No, no, it works, it works! Alright. Ready. Set. Go!”

The whiskey burns down their throats, and then, in a drunken chorus searching for synchrony:

“Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Abductens, Facial, Vestibulocochlear, Glossopharyngeal, Vagus, Accessory, Hypoglossal!” they finish together, wiping their mouths, making faces.

“Oh Oh Oh, To Touch And Feel Virgin Girls’ Vagina And Hymen,” Carmen yells, doubling over.

Alex holds up a hand, waits for marginal silence and then says—“On Occasion Oliver Tries To Anally Fuck Various Guys. Vaginas Are History.” Leon finds this particularly funny, pounding the table so hard the drinks dance.

Atif, kindly, turns to Greg, who hasn’t spoken much since his last attempt, and asks him what kind of research he was doing lately. Greg has been nursing a sweating glass of water, and sips it nervously before answering.

“Um, the first project that kind of got me where I am was on artificial neural nets and learning, we were—” the hose is passed around him, “—trying to get the neural networks to be able to distinguish between male and female crabs. Like, photographs.”

“Wait, wait,” Carmen says, leaning in, looking around. “You trained neural networks on crab porn?” The table explodes into laughter. “Like, what grant paid for this? Did they know they’d be giving you money to make neural networks that can watch crab porn?”

Greg has become quickly uncomfortable, and instead of answering he just blushes violently—the conversation sees it, turns away.

“Are you excited to meet some of the guest speakers?” Jessica kindly asks into the air, with Mike immediately answering in the affirmative.

“I heard that Antonio Moretti might speak,” Jessica says. Everyone looks over at Kierk, who shrugs his ignorance.

“There’s some philosophers too, I heard. Dennett might give one next year,” Alex says. Kierk mimes vomiting all over the table, making the requisite noises, and keeps at it, growing ever more dramatic, until everyone is hysterical.

Atif keeps ordering more of those drinks, and soon the tent of the conversation collapses under its own laughter. Kierk watches in a kind of gross fascination as the empty glasses around Leon grow into a small colony. Carmen keeps lightly touching the arms of both Alex and Kierk. Whenever she does, Jessica lets out a small, barely audible sigh and vigorously stirs her drink with a straw. Greg excuses himself early and there is a minor commotion as he attempts to extract himself from the table. Nearly free, he trips over Mike’s foot and Mike tries to apologize as Greg nods and leaves in a hurry.

“Poor kid. I seriously did not mean to trip him at all.”

Carmen bursts out laughing. “Crab porn! He made neural networks watch crab porn.” She sighs wistfully. “That’s all they knew, the poor things.”

Later, after extracting themselves as a group, they open the door and step into summer night air charged by the storm.

Carmen looks up just as lightning splits the sky into halves, breaking the roof to let in its fingers, and she jumps a bit and then is still, thoughtful, listening to the echoes of the low roll. She rarely thinks about the obvious fact of the matter. Drunk, the idea of a universe that contains both the subjective and the objective electrifies her, awes her, all these miracles living out the minutiae of their days, like markers, signs put out by some greater power saying—KEEP