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

and then Kierk tells her that he confirmed that Williams really was at the conference, news that disappoints her. Finally, he also tells her about his revelation during the blackout last night.

“As long as you’re still doing that first paper you said you’d do, right?”

“It’s just not what I’m focusing on right now.”

“Because I think Karen is kind of pissed at you right now.”

“I know, I know. Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, while you were deciding all this, during the outage I was just sitting in my apartment reading. To candlelight. It was very romantic.”

“What were you reading?”

“Some of Descartes’ correspondence, actually. But anyways, tell me some of your preliminary ideas.”

They spend some time going over some of Kierk’s thoughts, sketching things out in the notebook that he brought, their eyes serious as they talk.

“In the end the problems go back to Hume. We can observe the brute physical objects of the world, but we can’t directly observe the relations they have, only infer them. Relations like function, or computation, or representation. The world is like this big user interface that we read into. Take the brain and its neurons. That description, the neuroscientific one, is just one functional description of many. A physicist might see the same pinkish blob as a quark cloud, an economist might see it as an agent. All performing different functions.”

“So something that always bothered me was how many different kinds of neuroimaging techniques there are, and how, um, diverse they all are. Across space and time. A correlation at one level might not be there at another.”

“Yes! A neuron could be firing an action potential or not. Are these its states? What about its physical location, its temperature, its receptivity, the damn . . . the damn internal decay rate of calcium signals. So its states depend on your level of description. Which you chose! And what function is it performing? Depends on how far back you look and where you look. Maybe it’s firing so you think it’s ‘on,’ but then you zoom out, and as part of a group of neurons, or a module, it’s actually ‘off.’ See, it’s like we, as conscious observers, are highlighting some set of relations. And by imagining them—”

“Wait, imagining is a strong word. How about selecting?”

“Okay, by selecting them, we form our model, but at its heart it’s still based on us conscious observers.”

As they talk Carmen asks fundamental questions with an acuteness that Kierk finds startling. Unnoticed by them the bartenders are lurking nearer to them, attempting to overhear the strangely fascinating esoteric conversation of this young couple.

Carmen gestures over to the bartender. “Two more martinis, good sir.”

The ordered martinis long gone, both of them have excused themselves to go to the restroom. Kierk, pissing into a urinal, uses one hand on the wall to steady himself. He cannot believe this is happening between him and Carmen. He feels feverish from not having had sex for months. If they don’t go home together he will have to tie himself to a mast like Odysseus. But it’s not going to come to that, some barrier has been breached and Kierk thinks of those deterministic model systems he used to study, where once some invisible line is crossed an attractor sucks the system forward into a future state. He looks down at his penis and smiles like a munificent master.

Six feet away through a wall Carmen pops a squat to pee and stares at the side of the graffitied door, having that out-of-body experience of drunkenness: she is both squatting and watching herself squatting. She thinks—bracketing just like Husserl. Then she snort-laughs while peeing. After wiping off and washing her hands she spends a brief moment looking in the mirror, thinking that if he doesn’t make a move ASAP she is going to shove him into some dark corner and have her way with the boy.

When they both get back Kierk says—“Hey, want to get a drink somewhere else?”

To which Carmen immediately replies—“I have wine at my apartment.”

“Sold.”

On the way over everything seems to be alive with gender, each building leaning on the one next to it, rubbing; spaces are tight, occupied, waiting, each small thing become so biological as to breathe.

At Carmen’s apartment they spill in through her door, both laughing because it takes her so long to find the right key among all the others and Kierk pretends to die a little each time she tries the wrong one. The railroad apartment is a long rectangle covered in photographs, many are of New York City, and there are explosions of color in the form of carefully cut-out medical illustrations framed and hung up: the colored blues and reds of enzyme activity, the shaded regions of the brain stem, Kierk even recognizes the intricate trees of Cajal’s drawings of cerebellar Purkinje neurons.

As Carmen heads to the bathroom Kierk sets his notebook down and heads for her bookshelf. It’s always the first thing he does upon entering a home, go right for the library like a bloodhound. His fingers play over the spines, past a few popular science books, stuff on philosophy of mind. He stops, finger-walking back to a specific title stuck in the middle of a shelf, pulls it out.

“What’s this? Is this the selection of Descartes’ correspondence you were talking about?” he says over the distant sound of running water. “I mean, I know the general story . . . The princess raises that objection of interaction to Descartes’ substance dualism . . . and the two of them—the princess and the philosopher—they fall in love but they never get together . . .”

Carmen spits out mouthwash, adjusts her hair in the mirror, looks at herself from several angles, flares her nostrils to make sure they’re clear, examines her pores, winks at herself, comes out of the bathroom smiling and a little bit wobbly.

Closing the collection of letters Kierk puts it back in its home nestled between Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Kundera’s The Unbearable