The Revelations by Erik Hoel (some good books to read TXT) 📗

could just be a coincidence. Greg had probably changed his name in order to avoid the exact kind of search result that Carmen was turning up now . . . Everything she knew about him is falling away, every comment he had made didn’t seem awkward anymore but creepy. Maybe he had lied his way into the program, maybe Atif had found out, maybe when Greg had left early that night he had gone to make sure Atif didn’t tell anyone else . . .

Her mind churning with such thoughts she again approaches Kierk. About to speak, she pauses, thinking—but what if Greg had nothing to do with it and I am about to spread that he faked results . . . It’s enough to ruin his career here, and who really knew the whole story? Carmen couldn’t let that happen without knowing for sure. Two years ago she had attempted to replicate a famous neuroimaging experiment. But Carmen had failed to find the effect, indeed, her data hinted at the exact opposite hypothesis. The advice from on high had been to drop it. Everyone she had talked to paid due respect to replication of course. “The backbone of science!” they all declared, but at the same time she was told that it would take months to make the replication attempt ironclad, only to submit it to a bottom-tier journal where it would be peer-reviewed for publication by the author of the original study who would tear it apart in revisions anyways. Since then she’s watched the original result rack up a string of citations, filling her with more doubt than a case of outright fraud—an example of the huge gray area of statistical analyses and leading questions and unexamined assumptions. Scientific methodology, she was beginning to feel, was not more special and self-correcting than anything else: garbage in, garbage out.

She regrets not publishing her failure to replicate. But she also doesn’t want to start a witch hunt without knowing all the facts first.

Before reaching Kierk all this goes through her mind in an instant, a nonverbal conceptual structure activating memories without needing to replay them, a turning of some high-dimensional object faster than language or logic.

Instead she just says to him—“Sorry to bother you again. Can I bum a cigarette?”

Kierk looks up at her, rolls up the paper he’s been reading and punctuates each word by slapping the desk with it—“This. Paper. Is. Horrible.”

Kierk is wandering the city after work, his feet a steady rhythm into a thready evening red, a spillage of light bisecting the grid. It is as if heavenly forces were about to trumpet in and charge from the west. Men and women move in outlines from dark to red and back again. He’d left work with his mind spinning, and he’s been steering his way by the spire of the Empire State Building against a sky streaked with bleeding cirrus clouds.

Up ahead a small crowd has gathered, staring at something, and it takes a moment for the thing itself, a transparent cephalopod, to lift above their heads into view: a plastic bag, handles trailing behind. For a while he watches it rise, and then fall, and then skyrocket to rise again, drifting up the evening-scaled sides of the skyscraper, then fall, and now it sweeps across the sidewalk twirling and the children in the crowd follow after trying to catch it but with pirouettes it evades them, letting them get close before darting mockingly away. Kierk, standing apart, viewing the scene through several lenses simultaneously, settles finally on the most physical and melancholic, as befits his mood—that this plastic bag dancing in the wind is an illusion of personality. There is a conspiracy of trains of air and in truth it is not coy, nor playful, nor coquettish, and so, further . . . is not all life an illusion of this nature? Are not organisms similarly mere structured materials pumped full of the wilds of outside energy, of cloying storms and coquettish asynchronies, and cut off from their external sources would not all vibrant life fall just as limp as the bag does now, in the energy doldrums as the wind leaves it, each organism revealing, as it collapses into a rubber mask of its former self, what it has been all along: an inanimate object?

He knows such thoughts stem from the papers he’s been gobbling up. As usual there’s no one to talk to about these things, it’s all internal, a hidden layer between input and output sparking off in convolutions as he walks. The wordy but logical sequence of the dialectic is what comes most naturally to Kierk, so that’s how he often engages these subjects, like he’s having an internal argument with himself, switching to play both parts, as if he were an actor in ancient Rome donning first the crying mask and then ducking backstage to reply with the laughing mask.

Crying Mask: You’ve been spending an awful lot of time trying to finagle your way around the laws of physics, looking for your precious Theory of Consciousness. But the laws of physics are what they are, and there’s no room in there for minds. It’s full, causally complete. Seems to me you’re on a fool’s errand. Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.

Laughing Mask: How can you say there’s no room for minds because of causal completeness when causation is just another frame-variant phenomenon? Causation requires observers, interveners. Causation requires consciousness. Besides, the so-called laws of physics are just averages that seem to work rather well at predicting simple, two-body systems.

Crying Mask: Predictable that your objections depend on baseless assumptions. Who cares about causation? I’m talking about the wave function. That’s all there is. One big wave function evolving, spinning off many worlds as it does so.

Laughing Mask: Oh really? And how sure are you about that?

Crying Mask: Do you really not know how well we can predict at the microscopic level of physics? It’s perfect.

Laughing Mask: But