I taught Travis how to use the Big Dipper to find Polaris, Arcturus, and Spica; pointed out the Summer Triangle of Altair, Deneb, and Vega (which, I said, was where vegans like me came from); and showed him the smudge of the Andromeda galaxy, the most distant object one can see with the naked eye, 2.5 million light-years away. That meant, I said, he was looking back in time 2.5 million years: the photons now kissing his retinas had left Andromeda at the same time the first members of the human genus, Homo, had appeared.
“Huh,” he said. “You think there’s anybody else out there?” He was leaning for support against my car’s side panel—the one that had been replaced recently.
I thought again about the silence from the stars, about whether races are doomed to snuffing themselves out. “Maybe ours now has a fighting—or a non-fighting—chance.”
I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the snort. “You think we’re in some sort of utilitarian utopia now? People are people, and quantum physics be damned.”
“It’ll take time,” I replied, as my eyes found kite-shaped Delphinus. “The new crop of quicks has to make sense of the world around them. But no one with conscience can look out at all the suffering, all the poverty, all the unfairness, without aching to do something about it. You had a conscience briefly; you remember what it’s like.”
Perhaps Travis shrugged. “Sort of. I can’t muster the feeling again, but, yeah, it was different.”
“It’s better,” I said firmly.
“Even with the regrets? The second thoughts?”
“Even with.”
Silence for a time. I caught a meteoric streak of white in my peripheral vision, a mote of cosmic dust expiring.
“You know, you’re an unusual person,” Travis said. “Even among Q3s, you’re an aberration. It’s not like there are suddenly four billion James Marchuks out there.”
My gaze dropped to the horizon, the land in front of us a great empty page. “The rioting has stopped,” I said. “American troops are out of Canada, and the McCharles Act has been repealed. Other positive things will happen, too. Give it time.”
“I gave it time once already. I fast-forwarded two decades, remember? Things got worse, not better.”
“This will be different.” Overhead, the constellations of summer blazed, but I flashed back to that confabulated winter sky on New Year’s Eve all those years ago, the mighty hunter Orion rearing up. “Do you know when I was first knocked into a coma? December thirty-first, 2000. I missed the big party.” I sang softly: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind…”
“But at least you were awake for the really big party the year before,” Travis said.
I was about to launch into my “but there was no year zero” bit when it came to me. True, the numbering system had been devised using Roman numerals, which had no zero, but our system does, and this—right now—was the real year zero. All that talk about whether 2000 or 2001 had been the beginning of the new century was irrelevant: this was the dawn of the next millennium, the next era, with four billion people—for the first time in those 2.5 million years, the majority—uplifted from emptiness to full consciousness with conscience; truly the greatest good for the greatest number.
And, yes, there were countless challenges ahead of them; doubtless they weren’t yet sure how to proceed.
But they would think of something.
Further Reading
As the quote from David Chalmers at the front of this novel (taken from an interview with him in the Summer 1998 issue of the excellent magazine Philosophy Now) says, “It may be a requirement for a theory of consciousness that it contains at least one crazy idea.” Throughout this book I put forward a theory that, at first blush, might seem to contain rather substantially more than just the requisite one crazy idea, so let me share this list of some of the nonfiction reading that informed my thinking. (Please note that the commentary below contains spoilers for this novel.)
First and foremost, this novel hinges on the notion that consciousness is fundamentally quantum mechanical in nature. The seed for this comes from two books by Sir Roger Penrose:
Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Penrose, Roger. Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
The first one outlines Penrose’s logic (based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem) for why human consciousness has to be quantum mechanical. When Penrose first put that idea forward, he had no idea where the quantum-mechanical processes might be taking place. But anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff had the notion that they were occurring in the hydrophobic pockets of microtubules; Penrose elaborates on that thought in the second book, and the two of them have collaborated on several papers since. A recent one that provides a good overview is:
Hameroff, Stuart, and Roger Penrose. “Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the ‘Orch OR’ Theory.” Physics of Life Reviews 11 (2014) 39–78.
And for a recent update on the whole notion of quantum processes in biological systems, see:
McFadden, Johnjoe, and Jim Al-Khalili. Life on the Edge: The Coming Age of Quantum Biology. New York: Crown Publishing, 2015.
My novel also hinges on the notion of the philosopher’s zombie, an idea most associated with Australian philosopher David Chalmers, who discusses it many places, including in these excellent books:
Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Chalmers, David J. The Character of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
(I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know both Stuart Hameroff and David Chalmers. Stuart and David long co-chaired the biennial Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference, and, when I gave a keynote address there in 2010, it was Dave who introduced me to the audience.)
Although I’m sure he wouldn’t frame it this way, if you want empirical evidence that there really are multitudes of p-zeds mindlessly following authority figures, check out the work of Bob Altemeyer, a now-retired professor of psychology coincidentally at the University of Manitoba (where my character Jim Marchuk teaches). His free PDF ebook available at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey is compelling:
Altemeyer, Bob. The Authoritarians. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2006.
The audio version, with a comprehensive introduction written by former Nixon White House counsel John Dean and updates and reflections added by Altemeyer, is even better; you can get it at Audible.com.
For ways in which our complex behavior could be the result of things other than self-aware consciousness, see:
Duhigg, Charles. Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012.
Gigerenzer, Gerd. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007.
Hood, Bruce. The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Koch, Christof. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012.
Lieberman, Matthew D. Sociaclass="underline" Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. New York: Crown, 2013.