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

something more. And we’ve forgotten the other part of us, the consciousness part of us, so everyone’s life is now some kind of half-life. It’s like the legend, I think it’s from Aristophanes, where humans used to be creatures with four hands and four feet and two heads and we all got split in two. And we spend our lives looking for our other half. That’s us now.”

Carmen takes a deep breath, giving a quick glance to Kierk, sees him with hands clasped, face serious, looking like a psychologist bent forward in his chair in a way that feels natural, cultured, expectant.

She continues—“And I didn’t want to be representative of that kind of ontology. I didn’t want to be a body in a culture where everything was just body, just extension, even if those bodies were beautiful, but without a place for mind anywhere. To present only one face. At the time, my ex-boyfriend and I, we called the decision to give up modeling for science ‘the mind-body problem.’ Just a joking thing. But that night I realized I didn’t want to just have a mind-body problem, I wanted to solve the mind-body problem. It took me a while to articulate it to myself like that, but I think it was true in the moment and it’s still true. I don’t regret leaving.”

“And that’s why you study consciousness now?”

“And that’s why I study consciousness now.”

“Fascinating.”

“I don’t usually . . . tell anyone that.”

Leaning back in his chair, Kierk looks like he is appreciating a delectable wine, a psychic swallowing which is then gone.

“Don’t worry, people tell me things all the time.”

“Well, now you owe me a story,” Carmen says, laughing nervously also in relief, her fingers dancing on her coffee cup. “So what about you? How’d you get into this?”

Kierk smiles wryly, looks down, clears his throat in preparation. Outside, beyond him in the window, Carmen can see a single cloud splitting in two like it is undergoing mitosis.

In the summer after they graduated from college, Kierk Suren and Mike Hogan—friends, classmates, and intellectual competitors in many late-night dorm-room debates—had gotten into Mike’s messy black jeep, their science poster, “Neural correlates of bistable perception,” secure in a plastic tube rolling around in the back. Together they had road-tripped up from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Toronto, Canada, so that they could present their poster at the fourteenth annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, held by some clerical error on the exact same weekend and only blocks away from the main site of the G20 economic summit. As they drove, around them a legion of other cars bore protesters heading to the economic summit, protesters who were equipping themselves with an armament of balloons filled with paint, who had signs clanking around in their trunks instead of science posters, many of them listening to radical podcasts and communicating to one another via encrypted text messages. The occupants in the thousand cars around them were preparing for war.

The conference’s opening reception had come with the smell of cigarettes. Mike was already back out on the balcony, smoking. Mike, thin, tall, with Jewish curls grown long, unkempt, talked and thought fast in a way that Kierk appreciated. In college they played chess with each other while running subjects in neuroimaging studies, and as the research subjects a room over watched the Necker cubes flip in bistability Mike and Kierk would exchange black and white pieces in rapid movements. At the time, the two college friends were also roommates for the summer, living in an apartment absent of all furniture except for yoga mats in each of their rooms for sleeping, and piles and piles of books on philosophy and science they passed back and forth, until even Mike’s smoking habit had been transmitted to Kierk.

The welcome seminar to the conference was an affair of Brazilian coffee and glass chandeliers, plush leather chairs and bite-size berry tarts. A few people whose books Kierk had read welcomed the crowd. One of the first seminars was run by a member of Antonio Moretti’s lab, which Kierk would be joining in the fall, so for three hours Kierk took copious notes. Next was an array of seminars held in large presentation rooms, which Kierk bounced back and forth between.

There were pathology talks:

“—a blindsight patient acts blind, they use a cane, their family members say that they’re blind, they live the life of a blind person. A lesion to their primary visual cortex severs the main visual input stream to the brain. Yet if you toss a tennis ball at them, they’ll catch it—”

Neuroimaging talks:

“—as you can see, we’re showing this whole-brain ignition, which is very rapid and occurs after the stimulus is presented. So basically, instead of something being processed in a specific region, it’s more about how the signal becomes integrated with the ongoing process that already dominates the brain, but this process is itself a mystery—”

And philosophy talks:

“—while no one has yet solved the scientific mystery of consciousness, it’s worth noting that theories are currently substrate neutral. There’s nothing special about neurons, no magic fairy dust that makes them consciousness. Because of this, we don’t know where consciousness ends or begins in nature. What about complex systems? Or computer programs? Artificial intelligences? Or networks of interacting agents? After all, you yourself are merely a mob of neurons, all acting in concert, and somehow those neurons collectively generate experience—”

In the late evening everyone left the hotel, their black dress shoes and heels shining wet across concrete, oblivious to the watchfulness of the citizens they passed. After a few hours the same polished shoes all stumbled back to the hotel, as did Kierk and Mike after taking shots with some of the grad students, and it was only when they got back and drunkenly switched on the TV that they saw the cop cars on fire and the police in their riot gear marching in lockstep, and protesters called the Black Bloc, who