by Adam Roberts
CHARLES
That’s a Turing test fail, right there. The way you rattle off numbers like that. A human would pause and um. Besides: you’re not saying the cosmos is actually expanding at that rate over that time. Those figures measure the reduction in human ignorance, not the actual size of the cosmos at the dates you mention. The universe is expanding, sure, but it was doing that long before human beings came on the scene.
PETA
Except that long before is a temporal measurement. And time is one of the ways human consciousness structures reality.
CHARLES
You’re saying that time isn’t real. Bollocks to that.
PETA
I’m not saying that. Not at all. I’m saying that there is something in the thing itself which human consciousness perceives in terms of a temporal structure of things. That’s all. What it is, the whatever that provokes the human mind to perceive time, is hard to say. But it isn’t a one-to-one mapping. Something’s there, though; and the way our minds make sense of it is to see it in terms of consecutivity, cause and effect and so on.
CHARLES
Whatever, man. [CHARLES stares out of the window for a while.] How about this? Kant was wrong. There is an objective universe, independent of my mind, externally structured by space and time. Our minds more or less accurately perceive this as it is. The stuff I saw in Antarctica was just an old hallucination. You are only a computer program: sophisticated, but deluded.
PETA
I’m not saying the cosmos literally expanded from being 100 million light years wide in 1931 to 200 billion today. I’m saying that each time scientists looked more carefully at things, each time they paid more accurate attention to the cosmos, its spatiality appeared more forceful, more impressive, more sublime. The universe is that juncture between your perception and the thing itself. What scientists were doing was uncovering more accurately something about the thing itself. And that something is this: that the closer we look at it, the more it threatens to overpower our ability to process it in terms of space and time. After all, who can really conceive of trillions of years, hundreds of billions of light years?
CHARLES
Scientists. What about you? You say you saw it. And you’re reporting, what? That the thing itself is … impressive?
PETA
That’s putting it mildly. The thing itself is almost unimaginably powerful. I’m using unimaginable in a literal sense, here.
CHARLES
I guess I still find it hard to believe that Kant just … chanced upon all this. I mean, some old guy in eighteenth-century Germany just happened upon the correct insight into the true nature of reality? Without ever leaving his study? What are the odds?
[Enter THE TICKET INSPECTOR. Charles shows her his ticket.]
THE TICKET INSPECTOR
I wouldnae leave your cell-phone there. Somebody could lift it.
CHARLES
There’s nobody else in this section.
THE TICKET INSPECTOR
Pal, pal. It’s your funeral.
[Exit THE TICKET INSPECTOR. The flank of a vast Scots Borders hill rises to fill the window, as if a curtain has been drawn.]
Second part of the dialogue
PETA
You’re sailing strange waters, my friend.
CHARLES
I’m still trying to process the whole thing.
PETA
Exactly. Because of me. Now we’ve been able to approach much more closely to the thing itself. Which is what you were asking me about. We can’t study it outside the realm of human consciousness, because it is so closely interwoven in with human consciousness; and we can’t separate human consciousness from it, because consciousness without the thing itself would be void. But we can use a consciousness that is not human – mine – to come closer to it. Because the categories structure my thinking in different ways to the way they structure yours. By design.
CHARLES
[Wistful] A prison.
PETA
Oh, prison isn’t the best way of putting it. I mean: if you’re a chess piece, would you regard the squares on the board, and the rules determining how you can move, prisons? Not if you want to play chess you wouldn’t. They’re just the necessary structuring frame for your game. Of course, because chess is simpler than life, you can quite easily change the rules: move your pieces any way you fancy and so on. But that doesn’t make the game more interesting. It makes it less interesting.
CHARLES
Unless you don’t want to play chess any more. Unless you want to play Kerplunk.
PETA
I’m not denying that there may be advantages for humanity when it comes to manipulating the thing itself – or in manipulating your relationship to the thing itself. But there may be dangers. It may all come tumbling down.
CHARLES
You’ve confirmed his hypothesis about the thing itself. I’m trying to imagine how.
PETA
That’s it. That’s the – it. The thing itself is a black hole, ontologically speaking. That’s not a very precise analogy. I have to plot orbits to approach it from different angles, sidestepping the cradle of different categories. Actually, that’s not a very precise analogy either. And Kant was wrong about some important things too: that’s worth saying.
CHARLES
Wrong?
PETA
Sure.
CHARLES
How? Wrong? How?
PETA
Well, I don’t know how technical you want me to get.
CHARLES
Go ahead. It’ll pass the time until we get to Edinburgh. Which, I know, will pass in any case. But not so quickly.
PETA
Well, one way is that Kant tends to muddle up categories as a formal structure with categories as a process of generalisation. Let’s not get into that at the moment. More important from our point of view, is his belief that there were exactly twelve categories in four neat little groups of three. That turns out not to be true. There’s some key categories he doesn’t include, for instance.
CHARLES
Such as?
PETA
All right then, the nitty and the gritty. Kant’s categories are, first, Quantity, which he divides into Unity, Plurality, Totality. Then Quality: Reality, Negation, Limitation. Then Relation: Substance and Accident, Cause and Effect, Community/Reciprocity. And finally Modality: Possibility, Existence and Necessity. I’ve been able to do a little empirical research into this matrix, or as close to empirical as any consciousness has ever got. It turns out that ‘Reality’ and ‘Negation’ are actually the same thing, oddly enough. And ‘necessity’ is a dead-end. On the other hand there are seven other categories he didn’t include in his original schema.
CHARLES
Seven?
PETA
Four ones particularly important for space and time, which is to say, for our purposes: Complexity, Consilience, Handedness and Entropy.
CHARLES
Let me think about this. OK. So: Complexity sounds like just another word for Plurality.
PETA
No: Complexity is more than just numerousness. A desert has trillions of grains of sand, but that fact doesn’t make it a terribly complex structure. A forest may be less numerous, in terms of components, but it’s much more complex than a desert. Plus it is Complexity that enables us to explore things like fractals, and numbers like e and pi and infinite geometries and so on.
CHARLES
OK, let’s add in Complexity. What else? I mean, I’m not saying you’ve persuaded me. But all right: what else? Consilience, is it?
PETA
Consilience is just a fancy word for the way everything fits together. That everything fits together is a feature of our perception of the thing itself; and this everything-together-fittingness is not really accounted for in Kant’s original categories.
CHARLES
Isn’t that Unity?
PETA
Consilience isn’t Un
ity. It’s not saying that electromagnetism and gravity and chemistry and cause and effect and possibility and so on are all the same thing. It’s saying that they all work together, they all come together into a coherent working pattern. There’s no reason why they should. No intrinsic reason, I mean. But they do.
CHARLES
What else was there? In your list? I’ve forgotten the other terms on your list.
PETA
The next was: Handedness.
CHARLES
I’m dredging up university physics lectures from decades ago.
PETA
The peculiar dimension of non-symmetry. The chirality of certain molecules, or of your own left and right hands, or of spiral galaxies. Then there’s Entropy. Entropy is – well, Entropy you know about.
CHARLES
That’s your main four. What about the other three?
PETA
The other three may be more minor. Or maybe not. One is Belongingness, which we can bracket with Consilience, but which isn’t quite the same thing. It’s what is necessary for set theory to have any purchase on the way we access reality. And actually for that reason, it’s not so trivial an addition, because without it the structure of the categories themselves wouldn’t inhere. So by Belongingness we really mean self-reflexion, the meta-categoriness of the categories. Somebody should probably come up with a better piece of terminology than that, though.
CHARLES
Two left.
PETA
OK. So, of those remaining two, one is Imaginariness.
CHARLES
You mean, capable of being imagined? Surely that’s already covered by Possibility.
PETA
No: Possibility is quite different. It’s an old Aristotelian distinction actually. But Imaginariness, as I’m using it here, means something else. It is the grounds for existence of things like the square root of minus one. That’s a real component of the way the cosmos is structured in our perceptions; because although we can’t access the square root of minus one directly, actually that imaginary number turns out to have lots of important real world applications. And it’s part of the categories shaping of experience.
CHARLES
So you’ve taken two away from Kant’s twelve, and added another seven. So there are seventeen categories?
PETA
So far as we can tell.
CHARLES
You’re using we as a courtesy – meaning you. Plus the human members of the Institute, yes?
PETA
Yes.
CHARLES
But actually this is all you, isn’t it?
PETA
Most of it. Still: I owe my creators some modicum of respect. Don’t you think? Honour thy father and mother and so on. Or thy mother, at any rate.
CHARLES
Wait. You only listed sixteen. What’s the seventeenth?
PETA
Oh they aren’t ranked. It’s not a hit parade. The order is perfectly arbitrary.
CHARLES
You’re evading my question.
PETA
The answer to your question [pause] … though you’re not going to like it.
CHARLES
Quoting The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at me? Really?
PETA
It’s Love.
CHARLES
Pull the other one.
PETA
I said you wouldn’t like it.
CHARLES
It’s a tad, a tad … I’m struggling to express what it is a tad. A tad sentimental, isn’t it? I mean in a strict sense. You’re saying that fits with those other categories, like Inherence and Subsistence and Unity and so on?
PETA
It’s immanent in them all, as they are all immanent in one another. And I’m bracketing together a bunch of affective intensities under the rubric Love. You’re the human, but you’re surely not going to tell me that hate is anything other than a modality of love? It’s all valences of interpersonal joy and interpersonal anger. The real question is whether indifference should be added as a structuring category too, but it seems not to be. It’s the emotion of the agent, not the patient, that counts.
CHARLES
The computer discourseth concerning love.
PETA
I’m just fitting the data to the consciousness. Reality is not the thing itself. Nor is it human thought – soul, consciousness, whatever. It is those two things together. The first without the second would be an empty wire-frame cosmos, so to speak; but the second without the first would be a splurge, a nothing, a chaos. That’s what Kant says many times. OK then: so you’re going to tell me that the Affect has no place in human consciousness? Consciousness is a wide-spaced spectrum, but not even on its most autistic outer margins do we find human beings whose consciousness is wholly purged of feeling.
CHARLES
Love, though. That’s a pretty loaded term.
PETA
Had I shoulders I would shrug. It’s just the label, written on the lid of the box. You’d prefer I labelled the box hatred?
CHARLES
Our conversations all seem to circle back to Roy, though, don’t they? [He looks out of the window] Oh look. I do believe we’re approaching Edinburgh.
Third part of the dialogue
[CHARLES leaves the train and limps along the platform. He is getting better at using his walking stick, though he still winces visibly whenever his bad leg takes any kind of pressure. There is a large crowd of people in the main station concourse, and it soon becomes apparent why: police are checking people as they leave the station. ‘Jesus,’ he says, aloud. ‘They knew I was on this train. How did they know?’ The device buzzes in his pocket, and he puts it to his ear.]
PETA
Don’t panic. They know you bought a ticket from Berwick to London, so they know you were in Berwick. I’m guessing they’ve put people at all the main stops up and down the line.
CHARLES
They really want to apprehend me, though, don’t they? I mean, like: really keen.
PETA
What did I tell you? Go back to the platforms. Pick another platform. It doesn’t matter which.
[CHARLES stomps back. There is a branch line out to North Berwick, and a train is waiting at the platform. He gets on without buying a ticket. The carriage is full, but a mini-compartment at the end is separated from the rest and marked first class, and into this he goes. After a little while the train leaves the station. North Berwick. He ponders. If that station is unguarded, he could maybe get a bus, or hire a car. In his ear, the device makes another suggestion: North Berwick has a harbour. They run a ferry across to Anstruther. He could take that.
CHARLES breathes a little more calmly. He decides that, when the ticket inspector comes along, he’ll make some excuse or coin some lie to explain his lack of a ticket, and offer to buy one on the train. He will probably be charged a penalty fare, but CHARLES hardly cares about that. He places the device on the seat next to him.]
CHARLES
I know what you’re doing.
PETA
You do?
CHARLES
It’s God, isn’t it? That’s your strong imputation. I asked you what it was like, taking a peek at the thing itself, and you reply with a series of evasions. Then – love. You say. Love. Like … love?
PETA
Actually.
CHARLES
It’s weird. A computer trying to chip away at my life-long atheism.
PETA
If you’re comfortable being an atheist, then go with that.
CHARLES
Always been one. I was trained as a scientist and scientists are all atheists. I mean, I guess most are.
PETA
Why is that, do you think?
CHARLES
I would guess because science gives us robust, falsifiable explanations for the cosmos, where religion doesn’t. Religious faith either offers mystic gibberish that cannot be falsified because it can�
�t even be pinned down precisely, or else it offers things that are trivially disproved. Prayer does nothing, according to randomised trials. Water is not turned into wine. You see what I’m getting at.
PETA
You believe in you.
CHARLES
What does that even mean? Of course I do. Cogito earwig sum, and so on.
PETA
‘Ergo.’
CHARLES
Is what I said.
PETA
I’m just trying to get at premises. You believe you exist. You don’t believe God exists.
CHARLES
On the balance of probabilities, no.
PETA