Menno looked startled. “Huron?”
“She was one of your students. I saw her yesterday, for the first time in almost twenty years. She told me I—I hit her back then. Me!” I shook my head, still struggling with that reality. “And then, my God, the horrible things I said in that last interview. Un-fucking-believable.”
He nodded slowly. “You did change near the end. I don’t know why.”
“You must have some idea! And, for Pete’s sake—why’d I change back to normal?”
“Jim, honestly, I don’t know. But . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, for almost six months before that change, you were indeed a philosopher’s zombie.” He moved his head left and right—perhaps in negation, perhaps visualizing the hordes that had haunted him for decades. “And you were just as vacant, just as empty, just as dead inside as the countless millions of others surrounding us all the time.”
—
I walked—or staggered—out of the lobby of Menno’s condo onto Portage Avenue. Here, at lunch-time, there were thousands of people going east, and thousands more going west, and I just stood still, an island in the stream, fighting to keep my balance.
Coming toward me was a man with his head bent and his thumbs typing away on his phone. Behind him were two men wearing earbuds—both, as it happened, with the distinctive white Apple cables. They flowed past, not even glancing at me, just mindlessly navigating around an obstacle.
Mindlessly.
Jesus, could it be?
Three teenage girls were coming toward me now, smoking. The Surgeon General’s report had come out probably before their parents had been born, but still, vapidly, they smoked. This time, I was the one to move out of the way, trying to avoid their exhalations.
And since I was moving, I continued to do so; Newton’s first law, and all that. I passed a homeless man, a cardboard sign next to him saying, “Hungry—Please Help.” In front of him was an empty Campbell’s soup can; some people had tossed coins into it.
I wonder if Canada eliminating pennies from circulation in 2013 had much of an impact on panhandlers. Of course, anyone offering a single penny would have been rightly cursed for it, but, still, there was a lot less small change to go around. On the other hand, Canada had one- and two-dollar coins in wide use, something Americans had never managed; maybe our indigents did better than theirs.
Years ago, I’d read that the introduction of the first credit cards had had a big impact on the incomes of bunnies in Playboy Clubs. Before that, when they’d had to pay cash, men would say “Keep the change,” even if it resulted in exorbitant tips. But once they started filling out charge slips, they did the math and tipped the normal percentage.
Christ, what digressions! But that’s the way my mind works—one thought sparking another, a cascade of notions and connections. And I’d always assumed it was that way for everyone, but . . .
But if what Menno had found was true, then most of these people weren’t having inner monologues like mine; most of them didn’t have thoughts bouncing around from place to place. No, most of them weren’t thinking at all, at least not in a first-person, self-reflective way; they weren’t having any subjective experiences.
I looked at them as I continued to walk. Hundreds upon hundreds of people wearing blue jeans—a default, an easy choice, a simple rule.
I remember Monty Henderson, who lived on my parents’ street. He’d gone on to join the Calgary Police. He said that on the first day of training the new recruits were told to “fit in or fuck off”—and they all just capitulated.
I was moving mostly against the flow of pedestrians now; for whatever reason, the tide had turned, and the bulk of them were going west. One bumped into me. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and beetled on.
I’d once seen a documentary about flocking behavior in birds. To get the effect we observe, each bird only has to apply three simple rules. The “separation rule” says avoid crowding your neighbors—you gotta give the other birds some room in order to avoid collisions. The “alignment rule” says look at where all the other birds are going and pick a heading for yourself that’s an average of everyone else’s trajectories. And the “cohesion rule” says move toward the average position of all your neighbors, an edict that prevents the flock from dissipating. Computer models that employ these rules produce behavior indistinguishable from real flocking; similar rules control the schooling of fish.
Could the movements of humans be equally simple? Birds almost certainly did this without conscious thought; fish clearly did.
A flock of birds. A school of fish. A crowd of humans.
Were we really all that different?
And were other rules just as simple, and just as mindlessly applied? Choose clothes that are similar to those that others are wearing; adopt phrases you’ve heard others use; lower your gaze when passing someone; try not to bump into people, but if you do, apologize.
So many of the things we do are clearly algorithmic. Did I really think I was the first unathletic kid to fake tripping over a nonexistent stone to explain a pathetic performance in a race? They all do that. The first guy to try the old yawn-becoming-an-arm-around-her-shoulders-at-the-movies bit? They all do that. The first person to . . .
Maybe it didn’t even take three rules; maybe it took only one.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
15
THE University of Manitoba has an illustrious history in psychology and philosophy, which is why I’d chosen to go there, and why, despite an urge to refer to my students as Sweathogs, I’m happy to still teach there. It’s where pioneering neurophilosophers Patricia and Paul Churchland taught from 1969 to 1984; it’s where Michael Persinger of God-helmet fame got his PhD in 1971; it’s where Bob Altemeyer produced the test for right-wing authoritarianism that was extensively cited in Nixon counsel John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience; and it’s where Menno Warkentin did his pioneering reciprocal-altruism studies. And so, of course, there were faculty here who might be able to help me with my problem, but I wanted somebody who wasn’t closely associated with Menno, and so I looked up memory researchers at other institutions. Soon enough, I settled on Bhavesh Namboothiri, who taught across town at the University of Winnipeg. I’d met him in passing at a few conferences: a husky guy perhaps ten years older than I with a New Delhi accent I occasionally had trouble parsing.
I went to meet him in his office, which was an odd wedge shape, with tomato-soup-colored walls and bookcases so shallow that a couple of centimeters of many volumes stuck out past the shelves; I hoped they were bolted in place.
We shot the usual academic breeze for a while—how the administration was killing us, how nice it was to have a mostly empty campus in the summer, how criminal it was that academic salaries were lagging ever further behind private-sector equivalents—and then I got down to the heart of the matter, so to speak. “I was reading online that you’ve been doing some remarkable work in recovering lost memories.”
“Yes, indeed. I hope someday to apply it to a few of our federal politicians.”
“Ha-ha. But, see, here’s the thing: I don’t remember anything from the first six months of the year 2001.”
Namboothiri’s unibrow ascended his forehead. “But your memories before that, and after, are normal?”
“As far as I can tell.”
He leaned back in his chair and interlaced his fingers behind his balding head. “Do you have any idea why you can’t remember that period?”
I took a deep breath. If this man was going to help me, he had to know at least part of the truth. “Yes. It has to do with the nature of consciousness. I was one of the subjects in an experiment done back then at U of M, and it had the effect of knocking me down to being a philosopher’s zombie.”
“You’re shitting me. You mean Chalmers and all that crap?”
“Yes, exactly.
For those six months, my lights were on, but nobody was home, and I can’t remember anything from that period. And yet a philosopher’s zombie must have some sort of memory—otherwise, its behavior wouldn’t be indistinguishable from that of a normal person. I took courses, I interacted with people, I even managed a relationship with a girl—and the memories of that time had to have been stored somewhere. But for the life of me, I can’t access them.”
Namboothiri nodded slowly. “We all have memories we can no longer access. For most of us, that’s everything before about the age of three; that’s when we switch from indexing memories visually to indexing them verbally. The switching happens at the same time children start having imaginary friends—and that makes perfect sense: they’re beginning to have an inner monologue and don’t yet realize that it’s themselves that they’re talking to.”
“Very Julian Jaynes,” I said, referring to the author of one of my favorite books, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
“Exactly. Anyway, verbal indexing is much more efficient, which is why once you have a significant vocabulary, you switch over to it. It’s way easier to mentally say, ‘Remember the house my friend Anil lived in’ than it is to shuffle mentally through pictures of every house you’ve ever committed to memory, hoping for a match. But, you know, there are adults who do index their memories visually. Ever read Temple Grandin? The famous autistic?”
I nodded and cited the title of her most popular book. “Thinking in Pictures.”
“Exactly. And apparently she does.” He brought his hands down to his armrests and leaned forward, almost conspiratorially. “You know as well as I do that neuroscience advances through a series of unfortunate accidents—fortunate for us, the researchers, but often devastating for the patients. You know how rare retrograde amnesia is—outside of soap operas, I mean. Imagine how rare it is to find someone deep on the autism spectrum suffering from it. But one of my patients here has precisely that condition. Poor woman suffered a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident; couldn’t recall anything much from before the collision, her whole life basically wiped out.”
“Like Lieutenant Uhura in ‘The Changeling.’” I’d expected the usual blank stare I got when I made one of my patented “All I need to know in life I learned from Star Trek” references, but, to my surprise, Namboothiri pointed a finger at me, and said, “Exactly! In that episode, Nomad supposedly wiped her memories. But, you know, what must’ve really happened is the same thing that happens when you format a disk drive. A normal formatting doesn’t wipe the drive clean; it just wipes the file allocation table—essentially, the index. All the other ones and zeros on the disk are left intact, which is why you read about police recovering files criminals thought they’d erased. That’s what must’ve happened to Lieutenant Uhura: the indexing of her memories was wiped, but the memories themselves were left intact—which explains her being back at work on the bridge of the Enterprise in the next episode. Well, same thing for the woman in the motorcycle accident. Her memories were still there, but the index of them—in her case, as an autistic, a massive visual index—was damaged by the impact. But using a variation of the Montreal technique, I’ve been able to help her re-access her memories.”
“You mean with direct electrical stimulation of her brain? Like Wilder Penfield did? The whole ‘I smell burnt toast’ thing?”
“Yes. Of course, we’ve come a long way since Penfield’s day. We don’t have to open the skull to do the stimulation. The beauty of it is, as we learned thanks to the case I’ve been talking about, the visual memory index, long abandoned in neurotypicals, is physically separate from the verbal memory index. So, in your case, well—how old are you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Fine. Well, in your case, we don’t have to rummage around through the thirty-six years or so of memory that you’ve indexed verbally. If I’m right, any memories you laid down during your philosophical-zombie period will be accessible through the visual index. Instead of looking for a six-month needle in a thirty-nine-year haystack, the memories from those six months in 2001, or at least the index entries for them, will only be mixed in with a few years of much older memories, and, since those memories are of early childhood, they’ll be easy to recognize as irrelevant to the task at hand.”
“Excellent, excellent. Thank you.”
“Have you had a recent MRI?”
“No.”
“All right. I have a friend at St. Boniface. Let me call her and see if she can squeeze you in.” He picked up the phone on his desk and made a call; I only heard his side.
“Hi, Brenda, it’s Bhavesh. Listen, I need to get an MRI done for a . . . a patient of mine, and I don’t want to—what? Really? Hang on.” He held the handset to his chest. “How fast can you get over to St. Boniface?”
I frowned. “This time of day, no traffic? Ten minutes.”
“Go! She’s got a cancellation at half-past two.”
I hurried out the door.
16
“So,” I asked, looking out at the sea of faces, “in our example, why do we accord moral standing to Jacob, but not to the robot? Why do we say the state can’t execute Jacob but it can shut off and dismantle the robot?”
“Well,” said Zach, in the second row, “Jacob is a Homo sapien.”
“Homo sapiens,” I said.
The kid looked baffled.
I was reminded of the Wayne and Shuster skit about the assassination of Julius Caesar. The private eye investigating Big Julie’s demise orders a “martinus.” “Don’t you mean martini?” asks the bartender. And the detective snaps back, “If I wanted two, I’d ask for them.”
“Homo sapiens is singular,” I said. “There’s no such thing as a Homo sapien.”
“Oh. Okay. So what’s the plural of Homo sapiens?”
I rattled off all seven syllables: “Homines sapientes.”
The kid didn’t miss a beat. “Now you’re just making shit up.”
“JIM, thank you for coming in,” Namboothiri said. I’d found an email from him waiting for me when I’d woken up, and had hustled back to his office.
“My pleasure.”
“I have the MRI scans from St. Boniface.”
He sounded concerned—and that made me concerned. “Oh, my God. A tumor?”
“No, not a tumor.”
“Then what?”
“It turns out the medical-imaging group at St. Boniface didn’t have to open a new file for you. They already had one.”
“But I’ve never been there—well, except to visit sick friends.”
“Ah, but you were there, in 2001. It seems I’m not the only importunate professor in town. Back then, one Menno Warkentin twisted a few arms and got you in to be scanned, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
My heart was pounding. “And?”
“And my friend at St. Boniface sent that scan along, as well. They normally don’t keep records from that far back, but yours was tagged for retention for research purposes; the radiologist noted he’d never seen anything like it.” He turned to a monitor. “Here you are today, in 2020.” He hit Alt-Tab. “And here you are in 2001.”
I knew the layout of the brain, but I was no expert at reading scans. “Yes?” I said, looking at the older scan.
“Here,” said Namboothiri pointing at a thin hyperintensity line—what one might have taken for a scratch on the film if it hadn’t been a digital image.
“Damage to the amygdala,” I said, stunned.
He pointed to another line. “And the orbitofrontal cortex,” added Namboothiri.
“The paralimbic system,” I said softly.
“Bingo,” said Namboothiri. He pointed to the recent scan. “The encephalomalacia has abated over the years, although the lesions are still present. But the abnormality dates back to at lea
st”—he peered at the bottom left corner of the image—“June fifteenth, 2001.”
“My God. Um, look, could transcranial focused ultrasound create lesions like that? That’s what Menno’s equipment used.”
“TUS? No way. These are more like, I dunno, burns.”
“Shit.”
“Anyway. I thought you’d want to know. I’m going to work with the recent scan, mapping out where to search for your missing memories. Sadly, I do have many other things on my plate, but I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”
—
I pushed the flat of my hand sharply against the slate-gray door to Menno’s office and it swung open, banging against the wall-mounted stopper. Pax rose up on all fours, and Menno swung around in his brown leather chair. “Who’s there?” he asked, sounding more than a little frightened.
“It’s me,” I said. “Jim Marchuk.”
“Padawan! You startled me. What can I do for you?”
“You’ve already done plenty,” I said, fury in my voice as I closed the door behind me. “I’ve seen the MRI.”
Menno’s broad face often betrayed what he was thinking; I suspect that since going blind, he’d more or less forgotten about trying to control his facial expressions. And so this, naked in front of me, was what someone looked like when, after almost twenty years, they heard the other shoe falling. Still, he made a game attempt: “What MRI?”
“The one done near the end of my dark period, showing the lesions to my paralimbic system.” Normally, by this time, Pax would have curled up at Menno’s feet, but she recognized the anger in my tone: she stood at attention, ears perked, mouth open, teeth exposed.
“Jim . . .”
“What were you trying to do, for God’s sakes?”
“I’m sorry, Jim. I’m so, so sorry.”
“How many times were you going to use me as an experimental animal?”
“It wasn’t like that, Jim. Not at all.”
“Christ, first you knock me into a coma—”
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