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

news, although she felt perhaps he wasn’t mentioning something. Afterward Carmen is drumming her fingers on the lid of her coffee, ruminating, for she had wanted to mention what had occurred last night but it seemed so ridiculous, smaller now, shrunken in the logics of day. She had been woken in the early hours by her phone ringing from an unlisted number. Groggy and dry-mouthed she had picked up and said hello. On the other end had been wet and heavy breathing like the phone was being held up to the mouth of a bull, and she, thinking she might be dreaming, had laid there confused for a number of seconds listening as the breathing intensified. Eventually it reached a crescendo and there came a guttural welling moan, like something coming into its own hands. In shock she had hung up and threw the phone away from her in the bed, fully awake now, looking at it lying sinisterly there like a giant bug. It rang again. Automatically her hand had gone to the light by her bed but then she consciously arrested its movement. Slinking out of bed, in the dark she pulled on her pajama bottoms, and then she snuck into the kitchen and with a quiet snick took down the butcher’s knife from where it hung on a magnetic strip above the sink. Knife in hand she had tiptoed to the door, checked the three locks, and then looked through the peephole into the empty hallway for a while. She slowly checked out the bathroom, using the knife to peel back the shower curtain, opened the sliding door to her closet, and then, very slowly and with her heart beating so fast she could hear it in the quiet, lifted up the covers of her bed and looked under. The street outside was also empty. Exhausted and defeated she had drifted off some time later on when the black sky had developed a tinge of verdigris. But in the bright light of today she just couldn’t bring it up to Kierk, it seemed such an overreaction on her part, an event so separate from the daytime world in which she and Kierk have a date on Friday.

There’s a fuss in the lab as she walks in. All the postdocs are grouped around a computer terminal in the back. Karen is calling in over Skype from the conference, her voice booming from the computer terminal like a high-pitched Wizard of Oz. Early this morning a link to an article had circulated rapidly around the postdocs and graduate students, along with exclamation marks. Some anonymous author had posted a long takedown of various contemporary theories of consciousness, Karen’s included. In fact, hers especially, because the scathing review was focused on so-called “higher-order theories of consciousness” that attributed consciousness to frontal brain regions and neural representations. The anonymous article had been posted on a Scientific American blog. Carmen had read it, her eyebrows rising higher and higher as she scrolled down. Soon Karen’s lab-wide email, hurried and terse, had come out, calling for some sort of reply. Carmen, having only recently and only nominally joined the lab, hadn’t thought it her place to get too involved, so she approached apprehensively now. One of the postdocs is saying—“How the hell did he . . . or she . . . even get this up? Anonymous public peer review. We shouldn’t even address it. It’s just a blog. The format—”

“The format doesn’t matter, the owner of the SciAm blog says this is some kind of supposed wunderkind that he’s letting stay anonymous. When they type my theory or my name into Google all anyone is going to see from now on is this.” Karen’s voice shatters through the speakers and someone reaches to turn her down a little.

Carmen, however, thinks—but the reviewer is right, because there is no reason to believe higher brain regions are necessary for consciousness. There are lesion patients without a prefrontal cortex, it’s not like they are phenomenological zombies lacking all consciousness . . .

The Skype icon blinks on and off. Carmen takes a long sip of cold coffee.

Finally Karen says—“Look, my theory is based on the fact that the same brain regions are involved in theory of mind judgments and internal judgments of self . . . So I don’t know what the problem is.”

One of the postdocs nods enthusiastically at the computer—“He’s basically rejecting all of neuroimaging. Anyone else noticing that?”

“Look, he’s obviously a smart guy but the way I would have done this,” Karen says, “would be—listen, this area is new to me, I have certain questions. I would not have framed it as a direct attack. And he doesn’t understand what I’m saying about theory of mind.”

The group has parted to allow Carmen access to the computer, which she leans forward to speak into. “I think that’s the distinction he’s leaning on. That’s why he’s bringing up animal selves. The author of the post is saying that even simple organisms like bees might have a phenomenological center to their subjectivity. Consciousness is primitive. Basic. It comes before all that higher-level cognitive stuff. Just pure experiencing.”

There’s a pause.

“Are you saying you agree with him?” Karen’s digital voice rings. All heads turn toward Carmen and her clutched coffee cup. Her mind races, outpacing the room, the earth, light. Sketches of possible worlds are drawn, scrubbed away, redrawn.

“. . . No. No, of course not. He’s um . . . he’s . . . He’s rejecting it out of hand because his main point is just that it doesn’t fit his intuitions about which organisms would be capable of feeling things. But whoever said that a theory of consciousness should fit intuitions? Right? Quantum mechanics doesn’t fit intuitions. There’s your counterpoint.”

“. . . Okay, Carmen, yes, thank you, he’s definitely putting the cart before the horse here.”

Carmen hangs her head knowing how weak her point was. What had Kierk called it? Occam’s broom . . . She