AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And he was too good a diviner not to penetrate the religious hokum, not to see through to the essential rightness of his role in the project.
Given the known perils, there had to be a safety fuse. There had to be someone willing and able to blow up the ship.
Flattery knew the reasons. They were reality of the most brutal kind.
The first crude attempts at mechanical reproduction of consciousness had been made on an island in Puget Sound. The island no longer existed. “Rogue consciousness!” they had screamed. True enough. Something had defied natural laws, slaughtered lab personnel, destroyed sensors, sent slashing beams of pure destruction through the surrounding countryside.
Finally, it had taken the island—God knew where.
Poof!
No island.
No lab personnel.
Nothing but gray water and a cold north wind whipping whitecaps across it and the fish and the seaweed invading the area where land and men and machinery had been.
Just thinking about it made Flattery shiver. He conjured up in his mind the image of the sacred graphic from his quarters, absorbed some of the peace from the field of serenity, the tranquility of the holy faces.
Even Moonbase didn’t walk too close to this project now. It was all a sham to educate ship personnel, to frustrate the eager young men and women.
“Each project ship must maintain its coefficient of frustration,” went the private admonition. “Frustration must come from both human and mechanical sources.”
They thought of frustration as a threshold, a factor to heighten awareness.
It made a weird kind of sense.
Thus, there were crew members like Flattery … and Prudence Lon Weygand, and machinery that broke down, robox repair units that had to have a human monitor every second—and programmed emergencies to complicate real emergencies.
Chapter 9
The universe is derived from an ultimate principle of spiritual consciousness, the one and only existent from eternity. Accepting this, you become an affirmer of The Void, which is to be understood as the Primordial Nothingness: that is, the raw stuff out of which all is created as well as the background against which every creation can be discerned.
—The Education of a Chaplain/Psychiatrist (Moonbase Documents)
It had been a tiring watch and Flattery longed to return to his quarters. He wanted to bathe himself in the field generator there, to examine the mood of the computer complex. That was one of his prime duties: to be certain that the computer had settled back into pure mechanism after being deprived of its last Organic Mental Core. There was always the off chance that one of these attempts might achieve success by accident.
But there was no way he could leave early without arousing the wrong kinds of suspicions. Well, there was another duty for the psychiatrist-chaplain to perform. He looked at Bickel.
“You can’t monitor every nuance of your machine’s behavior,” Flattery said. “You can’t be certain of every way its circuits may interact.”
“Yeah,” Bickel said. “Adding all the parts doesn’t give you the sum you want—or need. So why wouldn’t those numbskulls at UMB build their circuits around Eng multipliers? Answer me that.”
Timberlake glanced at Flattery, thought: Go ahead! Get Bickel started on that subject. He’s Johnny One-Note on that one!
“There was some mention back at UMB,” Flattery said, “that you were trying to get them to use—”
“Trying?” Bickel snarled. “I practically got down on my knees and begged. They acted like I was a moron, kept saying computers only add—even when they’re multiplying it’s only series addition. They kept this up until I—”
“You offered no logical circuit changes,” Flattery said. “That’s the way I heard it.”
“Because I didn’t get the chance,” Bickel said. “Look! The Eng multiplier is solid-state and small enough to fit into any of our miniaturization requirements. It works something like a cathode follower, so the circuit requirements aren’t too weird for us to follow. It’s essentially a multiplier. Depending on the circuitry, it’ll take several potentials of linear, semilinear or even nonlinear circuits and it’ll yield a potential which is the product of the inputs. It multiplies them. But what’s more important, when you reverse the circuitry, you get a device that taps a circuits—divides it, mind you—at a point which varies with the load. It works like a nerve cell!”
“The UMB team must’ve had good reason not to take you up on this,” Prudence said. “If they—”
“They said I hadn’t proved this was an analogue of organic function,” Bickel sneered. “Hadn’t proved it! Keerist! They wouldn’t even spare me computer time to work out test circuitry. Everything was tied up trying to define consciousness.”
“You buy their definition, don’t you?” Flattery asked.
“If I did, I wouldn’t’ve asked them to define it again,” Bickel snorted. “I’ve had about all the label juggling I can stomach. Consciousness is pure awareness, they said. Then what about the objects of consciousness? I ask. Disregard them, they say. It’s pure awareness. What’s awareness without an object to focus on? I ask. Not important, they say. It’s pure awareness. Then they turn right around and say this pure awareness is a pattern of three primary forces. What are these three primary forces? An ‘I’ entity plus the organism of this entity plus everything external which could act as a stimulus. Plus objects! But that’s not it, they say. This merely means pure awareness juggles three factors and it’s a senseless complication to try to multiply them two and two when you could add them and follow the circuits in a much more direct fashion.”
“You’re oversimplifying the argument,” Prudence said.
“All right, I’m oversimplifying! But those are the essentials.”
“And you had a ready answer, of course,” she said.
“I’ve already told you I couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal any computer time.”
“But you insist you can prove your—”
“Look,” Bickel said, “they told me I couldn’t prove an organic analogue. But I know I can.”
“You just know it,” she said. “You can’t find words to quite—”
“When you’ve worked with as many thoughtput instrumentation and computer designs as I have,” he said, “you get a feeling for function. There are times when you can just look at the design of a circuit and you know immediately how it’s supposed to function. You don’t need the manufacturer’s specifications.”
“Do I understand you correctly?” Flattery asked. “You’re referring to God as a manufacturer? If that’s—”
“Go ahead!” Bickel snapped. “Look at the design of the human cerebellum. Don’t try to pick a fight with me over who designed it. Just look at it. You’re a doctor. What’s it suggest to you?”
“What does it suggest to you?” Flattery countered.
“That some potential effect is mediated there,” Bickel said. “This is a balancing system … very like the vestibular reflex that keeps us from falling on our asses when we walk.”
“But the cerebellum also is a terminus,” Prudence said.
“Cerebral output to the cerebellum doesn’t even stop when you’re asleep,” Flattery said. “How can you—”
“So the cerebellum soaks up energy like an infinite sponge,” Bickel said. “Energy is always pouring into it—emotional, sensory, motor, and mental energy. Why do we blandly assume the cerebellum engages in no activity? You can’t find that anywhere else in nature or in devices made by man—where a system as complicated as this just sits there and does nothing.”
“You’re arguing that the cerebellum is the seat of consciousness?” Flattery asked.
“And you haven’t defined consciousness,” Prudence said. She kept her attention fixed on Bickel, hiding her excitement. His argument wasn’t new, but she sensed he had a clearer understanding of where he was going with it than ever before.
“Seat of consciousness? No! I’m arguing
that the cerebellum could mediate consciousness, integrate it, balance it … and that consciousness is a field phenomenon growing out of three or more lines of energy. We are more than our ideas.”
“Prue’s right,” Flattery said. “You’re not defining it.” He glanced at Prudence, aware of her excitement and resenting it. Knowing the source of his resentment gave little solace.
“But I can come at it through the back door,” Bickel said.
“What it’s not?” Prudence said.
“Right!” Bickel said. “It’s not introspection, not sensing, feeling, or thinking. These are all physiological functions. Machines can do all these things and still not be conscious. What we’re hunting is a third-order phenomenon—a relationship, not a thing. It’s not synonymous with awareness. It’s neither subjective nor objective. It’s a relationship.”
“We’re more than our ideas,” Prudence said.
“There’s the answer to the UMB’s glorified adding machines,” Bickel said. “It’s what I kept telling them … about this undefined human consciousness. When you add the inputs as a series in time you don’t always get an answer corresponding to the outputs. And since it isn’t addition, it has to be a more sophisticated mathematical problem.”
Timberlake, listening to Bickel, could feel the fitness intuitively. Bickel was going in the right direction, even though the landscape around them was fuzzy. We’re more than our ideas.
Prudence leaned back, weighing Bickel’s words. He had to be given free rein, that was the directive. But he also had to feel he was being obstructed. Sensing that she had let herself get too close to the problem, she forced anger into her voice: “Damn it to hell, you still haven’t defined it!”
“We may never define it,” Bickel said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t reproduce it.”
“You want to start mocking up a prototype to test your theories?” Flattery asked.
