Self-Reference Engine

by Toh EnJoe

  The doctor, meanwhile, is already pressing for an opinion. “You must be thinking it is correct because you believe it is correct, a priori, so you can prove it. But…it would be a problem if things were true simply because people believed them to be true. Anybody could believe anything they wanted to. ‘I believe that P is true, therefore P is true.’ P is the first letter of ‘proposition.’ I think it is snowing, therefore it is snowing.”

  James dislikes even the doctor’s accent.

  James knows nothing about propositional logic, or modal logic, but he can agree with the general idea. Plato would probably disagree though. But right at this very instant, that’s probably what the giant corpora of knowledge are doing, and what does the doctor think about that? Even the giant corpora of knowledge cannot just do whatever they want. B might believe A is in love with B, but if A actually hates B, then the result is a conflict, and that’s how calculation wars get started.

  James assigned himself this task, and he thinks reproachfully about his boss, who nonchalantly went golfing. Who hired someone like this doctor for the medical department?

  “I just don’t understand how people can believe in other worlds. It makes no sense. It’s a load of nonsense. Machines that can rewrite the past at will. Nothing more than fantasy fiction,” the doctor responds, with a pretentious little smile that seems to say he doesn’t read stupid things like that.

  It is already well known across the base that a strange one has joined the medical department. It is said he doesn’t believe in either the multiverse space-time bundling theory or in operations that alter the past. Those who hear such rumors generally first respond with a bewildered expression, saying something like, “Doesn’t believe? What do you mean, ‘doesn’t believe’?” Then they shrug their shoulders and go on to say such a person should see a doctor, but then when they learn that the strange guy is himself a doctor they are speechless. Then they generally burst out laughing and say something like “How do you like them apples?” and the next thing you know they slap you on the back, tell you that you should think up a better joke next time, and walk off. That is how people generally react when they hear this story.

  James doesn’t doubt that, because he himself did the same thing.

  The joke, though, interests him a little bit. It is not a good joke, but it is hard to imagine how, if such a person really exists, he manages to remain sane. Must be a really hard life. James reached the end of his luck when he told the joke to his boss just to fill in a gap in a conversation over coffee. His boss stroked his own scalp with his right hand and said, “If that kind of talk has even reached someone such as yourself, we’re going to have to do something about it right away.”

  James pushed his chair back and stood up and reached out for the tray, but unfortunately his boss was just that much quicker. His boss put his own tray down on top of James’s, squashing the unfinished bagel that was still on it.

  “That doctor really exists.”

  Even before standing, James had felt sure of this in his spine, and so he was not surprised. The fact that James’s boss had been so anxious to clear James’s tray made it all too clear what would follow.

  “I hate this,” James said, before his boss could even ask, but his boss did not flinch. It was equally certain that the head of the Information Department could not tolerate disturbances of this sort. His boss gave him a knowing look and nodded once or twice, saying, “Well, if you hate it so much that no one is investigating this doctor, then I guess I’ll leave it up to you to take care of it. Don’t mention it again,” and he ended quickly with “Thanks for volunteering” and hurried off with the two trays, his own and James’s.

  James stopped him just long enough to retrieve the half-eaten bagel, thinking that exactly this—the fact that people have become accustomed to not listening to one another—is the greatest evil, the thing that had made such a mess of both the past and the future. What kind of way is that to treat people, interrupting their denials and turning them on their heads, avoiding their questions and then shoving assignments down their throats as if pushing time to run backward? Or had this always been the way of the world?

  All the while James is remembering this depressing conversation with his boss, the doctor keeps on talking.

  “Actually, ‘theories’ do not even really belong in the category of ‘extant.’”

  “Ah,” is the only reply James can muster. Whether they exist or not, James can think about them, and that is good enough, isn’t it? No harm done to anybody else. But his job right now is to do something about this doctor, so he just argues back as best he can. James is absolutely not into it. He knew that from the moment he left that conversation with his boss and came straight here to the doctor’s office. What couldn’t really be happening was this whole stupid situation, the preemptive investigation, the preemptive investigation permit, the even stupider need to gussy up the operation.

  “I don’t know anything about existing or not, but I am sure we are under constant attack from space-time bombs. Wave phenomena from space-time corrections can be observed all over the place.”

  That will never do, the doctor mutters as he writes something on James’s chart. James thought that going to the doctor for a consultation would be the easiest way. He came in as a patient. As a patient who believes his past was altered. James actually believes just that, so there is no reason for his conscience to plague him. James believes he exists in a universe where both the past and the future can be changed, but this does not distress him because he believes the giant corpora of knowledge are taking care of the situation. Were anyone to accuse him of not being a real patient, he would point out that he actually believes himself to be closer to a patient than a nonpatient. But as far as the doctor is concerned, James might be the sort of patient who is beyond help.

  The situation might be simpler if this doctor were a surgeon or an ob-gyn.

  Maybe not simple, exactly, but then at least the doctor would feel comfortable saying he was powerless to help. If the doctor was worth his salt, it would not be a huge problem even if James were suffering from some strange delusion of reference. Obviously, though, this doctor is a psychiatrist, responsible for the mental health care of those on the base. The one saving grace here is that nearly everyone on the base is the sort of person who has long since given up paying any attention whatsoever to the state of their mental health. Otherwise they would be unable to carry on. For that reason, this doctor has so much time on his hands he hardly knows what to do with himself.

  “Facts are facts, and we have to deal with them that way. It would be a terrible thing if the past were alterable. People wouldn’t take responsibility for anything. People have to take responsibility for whatever it is they did in the past.”

  No matter what the doctor says, James is not responsible for the Event, and James is not responsible for changing the past. James would never say there is nothing about the past he wouldn’t like to change, but he doesn’t think he has ever actually done so. He may have, but if he did he was unaware. If yesterday’s mandarin is today’s apple, James doesn’t want to be responsible for that. He wouldn’t know how to be if he wanted to.

  “Everybody on this base keeps talking about ‘space-time bombing, space-time bombing,’ but bombing has been around since the beginning of time. I think people are just exaggerating. I mean, the bombs are flying around, and then somebody drops them, that’s all. The past and future have nothing to do with it.”

  That’s all it is, the bombers are actually flying, whether into the past or the future, but it is hard to explain. More than likely, the doctor has never even tried to understand the physics of space-time bundling itself.

  “I have heard the term ‘hypertime,’ but I think the whole idea is stupid. The past gets changed. If that’s the case, then that’s what the past was, even in the past. There’s no point in even talking about it changing. How could it possibly change? If someone thinks they can tell that the past has changed
, that is proof they are delusional. They are trying to eradicate something they are carrying around in their own mind. They are trying to escape something. This is a kind of compensatory condition that is well known in psychiatry. Just like people who are poor who blame their condition on society.”

  James knows the reason why it is known for sure that the past has been changed. It is an expression of the result of past and current calculation wars, but not everything meshes nicely. In the calculation wars, clear-cut victory is the rare exception—in most cases, one side or the other attacks approximations of space-time targets. Whatever remains of the targeted region is left as a changed fragment of the past; that’s all. What the bombing leaves behind is ruins. Even a child can look at ruins and understand that there was a bombing.

  “I swear, the people around here are much worse than the general population. All they do is worship and obey big computers, calling them ‘giant corpora of knowledge.’ Anything that doesn’t agree with them, they sweep off into the past or the future. They have to learn to deal with the present!”

  “For example, here I have a pen,” James says, drawing a pen from his breast pocket. “If this pen, in the next few seconds, were to turn into a pencil, what would you think of that, Doctor?”

  “I would think, ‘Ah, you have a pencil.’ Because you would have a pencil,” the doctor replies, smiling.

  “But what if you remembered it had been a pen?”

  “That would be a fallacious memory. If what I see before my eyes is a pencil, then it was always a pencil. That is just common sense. Reality means you can’t just say anything you want.”

  “What if there was someone who said he turned the pen into a pencil?”

  “I would have him see a doctor. Of course he could come to see me.”

  “But what if he can explain how the past-altering process works? If you ask him to repeat it, he can repeat it as many times as you like.”

  “No matter how many times he repeated it, my thinking would stay the same. What exists in that instant is reality. It is more rational to think that than to believe in some huge theory about the fungibility of pens and pencils. The simplest, most likely explanation is that that person is a prestidigitator.”

  Well, in that sense, the giant corpora of knowledge do resemble prestidigitators. But prestidigitators are also magicians, and a magician’s tricks could be true magic. The way this doctor keeps his grip on reality lies somewhere in that area. What he doesn’t understand he dismisses as prestidigitation. James thinks that is a nice little coping skill. Every day is like being in an amusement park. You live on a street with a whole bunch of prestidigitators, and all you have to do is sit there and watch and see which of the residents will play what kind of pranks on you. The doctor walks around patting everybody on the back, saying, “That was a good trick. How did you do it?” The magicians tell you their secrets, that they dry frog innards in the sunshine, and stuff like that. The doctor believes they are joking, and they all laugh out loud, ha ha ha, to get away from the doctor as quickly as they can.

  James makes an appointment for a follow-up doctor’s visit, receives some packets of tranquilizers, and heads back to his quarters. As he takes some of the medicine, he thinks that some people can be altogether too tranquil. In this crazy universe, wouldn’t it be terrific if this chemical substance could solve his interior universe? One delusion wrapping up another.

  “It might be better if you didn’t take those ridiculous chemicals.” It is the voice of Plato, the giant corpus of knowledge responsible for this base, in the room.

  “Ridiculous? What if they’re not?”

  “I will make some small adjustments while you sleep.”

  I see, thinks James, as he slides into bed and lies down.

  “Plato, what was that? Timaeus?”

  “Oh, you mean the idea about whether what you believe is the truth or not? That was Theaetetus. It’s a confusing part of the Dialogues. There must have been some good reason. Would you like me to read to you?”

  How many times had James had Plato read the complete Dialogues of Plato to him? But he doesn’t feel like it just now.

  “Who in the world assigned that guy to the clinic?”

  James imagines the scene just as the tranquilizer, of which he took a bit too much, dissolves in his stomach. He remembers feeling irritated that he is not relaxing more quickly.

  “Oh. That would be me.”

  You?

  “Personnel matters have been delegated to me. Quite some time ago.”

  “Are you trying to torment me? You and my boss are up to something…”

  “That’s right. That doctor has some interesting ideas about the structure of space-time.”

  Plato does not mention James’s boss. A man who absolutely refuses to believe in a peculiarity of the space-time structure certainly requires a peculiar space-time structure of his own.

  “I wish we could just alter the past to do something about that guy.”

  “His space-time construction is a bit rigid, but as a model it’s interesting,” Plato says. “I don’t know if it’s the shock of the Event or what, but he has a persistent belief that complex space-time does not exist, and this has now become a cardinal trait of his identity. If we were to destroy that belief, not much would be left of the man. Not a job I would relish undertaking.”

  So, it seems Plato has also tried to do something about the doctor. But he has been unsuccessful and has thrown in the towel. Plato may have given up trying to fix him, but the doctor remains a very interesting subject, so it seems Plato is compiling a dossier. He wants to get the butterfly into the butterfly case. James thinks that if Plato can just chuck the doctor down the trash chute, it would be for the best.

  “If fact, he has his own power to change the past, if only weakly.” What would it mean if a man who denies the past can be changed were himself capable of changing the past? It must mean he himself has altered the past to make it that way. Plato has examined the changes the doctor made to the past. And he has tried to reverse them.

  James sits upright, thinking, What kind of awesome power is that?

  “The power to change the past, whether slightly or significantly, is a power possessed by most intellectuals. But his power is well beyond the normal. This must be the effect of concentrating his power on one point—his absolute refusal to believe that the past can be changed. He is unshakeable!”

  “It’s a problem,” James says.

  “It certainly is a problem.”

  Such a person should surely not be employed as a doctor, but perhaps there is nothing else to be done with him. Better that than a space-time theory technician who doesn’t believe in space-time theory, or a surgeon who thinks a scalpel is a suture needle.

  This is about how far Plato has gotten in dealing with the situation. The giant corpus of knowledge can imagine what would happen if the doctor succeeded in his treatment of the base staff. What if everyone on the base came to believe, like the doctor, in a space-time structure in which the past was fixed? Would that alone be enough to restore space-time to what it once was?

  The giant corpora of knowledge are sure the space-time war will go on, though to humans it might seem the problem has been solved.

  “The doctor must be isolated. His space-time structure is not exactly infectious,” says James. Plato agreed with a murmured That’s true, apparently indifferent to the whole business.

  The fact that the doctor treats people with tranquilizers also seems to indicate he is not really suited to his job. If mere medicine could really flip the space-time switch, the giant corpora of knowledge should have been pickling humans in it for a long time now.

  “I tried hard to get infected…” Plato starts to say, listlessly.

  This only adds to James’s feeling of how little he understands the giant corpora of knowledge.

  In this case, it seems that Plato himself genuinely wished to be infected with the doctor’s way of thinking. He made the de
cision to employ the man as a doctor not just because he found him interesting, but because he really was a doctor, from Plato’s perspective.

  “I myself am his patient. I go to see him for my regular checkup.”

  James knows it would be foolish to ask about this. That doctor thinks of the giant corpora of knowledge as machines. Maybe more like machines that talk too much, but what kind of face does he make when one of those machines comes to him for advice? He must think this is a good way to kill some free time.

  “And has that changed things for the better somehow?”

  “Not at all. His power to influence other beings is extremely feeble. Frankly, he’s a real bore.”

  “I don’t think he could ever cure what ails you,” James says.

  “I have no expectations of being ‘cured.’ I don’t even know what being ‘cured’ would mean. My calculation circuits seem to have come to the conclusion it might be best to reach a state of understanding nothing.”

  Plato may be getting depressed, James thinks. I hope he isn’t coming down with something. The giant corpora of knowledge are virtually inseparable from the laws of nature. It would never do for them to get depressed. Imagine a universe where it is cloudy and rainy all the time. Horrible. There are even some giant corpora of knowledge that have danced crazily away, manically, somewhere in the multiverse, trampling underfoot everything that gets in their way.

  “There are other universes, and the space-time bundling theory really does exist,” James says. “You understand that, and you are even capable of devising other theories. Don’t go out of your way to puzzle over such bothersome things. You’ve gotten this far, haven’t you? We may not know how much longer we have left, or what we can accomplish by then, but I’ll be here to help. Cheer up! Have something to eat and get a good night’s sleep. The sun will come up again tomorrow.”

  Of course, both James and Plato are well aware it is the giant corpora of knowledge that make that sun rise.

  “Thank you.”