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

return. But it is impossible to sleep because of the hot quarter of light from the window pressed against his cheek.

Boxers, pants, shirt. Mouthwash? No time. Cigarettes are on the otherwise bare counter, and he lights one in the elevator and holds it hidden at his side as he passes the manned front desk.

Exiting the building is pushing into a wavering syrup of heat. People fan themselves as they walk, keeping to the negligible and contested shade. The concrete reflects the sun back onto Kierk’s face and he squints along with everyone else. At the first crosswalk he stops to look directly up. Between the spires the sky is mercilessly blue.

It’s like walking into a refrigerator when he enters the CNS, that mechanical cool tinged with the tin of air ducts. He searches for a while to find the room of Dr. George Williams, who’s finally back from a conference. Karen had roped George into being on Kierk’s committee over email last week. Knocking on the half-open door Kierk leans in. The professor is sitting behind his desk. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and he projects the confident air of a man whose life is secure socially, economically, tenure-wise, recognition-wise, and grant-wise. There’s a framed fMRI scan on the wall. There’s a bookshelf, the contents of which are mostly familiar to Kierk. But what attracts Kierk’s attention most directly is the crucifix. The cross hangs metallic and unobtrusive between two photos, barely a pencil’s length in size, yet its incongruity with its environment makes it as weighty as an old ironside.

“Kierk Suren, right?”

“Hello, Professor Williams, we said we’d meet today at 10:00. Is that still okay? I know it’s like 10:30, but if you still have time . . .”

“Please, just grab the door and have a seat.”

Kierk nods to the cross—“So you must be a non-overlapping magisteria kind of guy, huh?”

At first Williams blinks in confusion, but then follows Kierk’s gaze and for a silent moment both regard Jesus’ face orgasmic with beatific anguish.

“Well . . . I don’t let it interfere with my work, of course. A bit of a private issue, actually,” Williams says, obviously peeved.

“Not to worry,” Kierk says. “I’m not an atheist anyways.” Even as he says it, he doesn’t know if it’s true or not. He never does.

Williams shifts in his chair and asks—“So fill me in on what you’ve been up to, what you expect from your committee, and so on.”

Kierk does his best to overinflate his minimal progress. Then they talk logistics for a while, but eventually Williams asks him—“You worked with Antonio Moretti?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you planning on continuing the work you were doing prior to leaving your PhD program, or . . .”

“I disproved most of the work I did. Turns out you’re not really supposed to do that in science.”

“. . .”

“So I want to start something new.”

“That’s fine, I guess. Do you have any ideas right now?”

“Well . . . Last night I was thinking that there are intriguing similarities between problems in information theory and the kind of problems with consciousness.”

“Let me be frank. From what I’ve heard there’s a bit of a self-indulgence problem here. With you. And I’m not sure that it’s the best idea—”

“Let me explain . . . hmm . . . Take a book, for instance. Is there actually any meaning within the words themselves, or are they defined, given by, the reader? See, we know that words are just symbols, chicken-scratch. Look at text from a language you don’t know and the problem jumps into clear focus. It’s the consciousness of the reader that gives any meaning, any content, to the chicken-scratch. The problem of consciousness, interestingly, can be described in the same way. When we look at the chicken-scratch of neuronal firing patterns, what are we to read into them? If you see some neurons firing in, say, the medial temporal lobe, what are we to say about what they mean to the brain? Just because something responds reliably to an object or concept, does that mean it represents it? And most neurons in higher cortical areas don’t reliably respond to anything in particular. And if you say that they mean what they do because there is an interpreter of brain activity somewhere in the brain, well, then we are stuck in an infinite regress, because who gives that observer their internal content, and so on? Is there some universal author who draws across all systems in the universe the epistemic boundaries needed to give consciousness definite content? Does God fix consciousness in place? Some invisible author just makes shit up, assigns this here and that there . . .”

“I, umm . . .”

“. . . in other words: was it God who wrote these signs?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“That quote is originally from Goethe, of course, and then, later, that’s Boltzmann quoting Goethe. Boltzmann was already working on the physics of information way before anybody else was. He was quoting Goethe in respect to Maxwell’s meager and elegant four equations, which summarized so much of the physical world with so little that they seemed divine in origin . . . from scientist to writer to scientist . . . The quote is a beautiful analogy to the paradox . . . Was it God who wrote the signs in our skulls . . . Of course that was before he killed himself for his intellectual failures.”

“Who?”

“Boltzmann. Goethe, on the other hand, reconciled his genius with lived life.”

“. . . . . .”

“. . .”

They avoid eye contact. The silence has grown long enough to be uncomfortable. Finally, Kierk, slapping his knees, stands and leans over the desk to shake Williams’ hand, which is returned with a surprisingly strong grip.

“Have we covered everything?” Kierk asks perfunctorily.

“Ah, I guess we have covered some things. Certainly.”

“Good.” Kierk turns to leave, and it is then that he sees the back of the office door, on which hangs, long and in the shape of a man, a