TORTOISE: Doubtless. You’ll do very well as a test subject in illustrating the merits of such a book.
ACHILLES: I somehow can’t help wondering what old Einstein would think of it all.
TORTOISE: Why, given the book, you could find out.
ACHILLES: I could? I would not know where to begin.
TORTOISE: You would begin by introducing yourself.
ACHILLES: To whom? To the book?
TORTOISE: Yes—it’s Einstein, isn’t it?
ACHILLES: No, Einstein was a person, not a book.
TORTOISE: Well, that’s a matter for some consideration, I’d say. Didn’t you say that there is music stored in playing-records?
ACHILLES: I did, and what’s more, I described to you how to get at it. Instead of a playing-record being there “all at once,” we can use an appropriate needle and other apparatus and extract real, living music from it, which emerges “a bit at a time” just like real music.
TORTOISE: Are you implying that it is only some kind of synthetic imitation?
ACHILLES: Well, the sounds are genuine enough.... They did come off plastic, but the music is made of real sounds.
TORTOISE: And yet it’s there “all at once” too, isn’t it—as a disk?
ACHILLES: As you pointed out to me earlier, yes, it is.
TORTOISE: Now you might at first say that music is sounds, not a record, mightn’t you?
ACHILLES: Well, yes, I would; yes.
TORTOISE: Then you are very forgetful! Let me recall to you that to me, music is the record itself, which I can sit and tranquilly admire. I don’t presume to tell you that to see Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks as a painting is to miss the point, do I? Do I go around claiming that that painting is only a storage place for long, droning bassoon blasts, melodious piccolo runs, and stately harp dances?
ACHILLES: Why, no, you don’t. I guess that either way, we respond to some of the same features of playing-records, even if you like their visual aspect, while I prefer their auditory aspect. At least, I hope that what you like in Beethoven’s music corresponds to what I like.
TORTOISE: May or may not. Personally, I don’t care. Now, as to whether Einstein was a person, or is in the book.... You should introduce yourself and see.
ACHILLES: But a book can’t respond to a statement—it’s like a black piece of plastic: It’s there “all at once.”
TORTOISE: Perhaps that little phrase will serve as a clue to you. Consider what we just said on the subject of music and playing-records.
ACHILLES: You mean, I should try to experience it “a bit at a time”? What bit should I begin at? Should I start at page 1 and read straight on through, to the end?
TORTOISE: Unlikely. Suppose you were going to introduce yourself to Einstein—what would you say?
ACHILLES: Ah… “Hullo, Dr. Einstein. My name is Achilles.”
TORTOISE: Splendid. Now there are some fine tones of sound for you.
ACHILLES: Tones… hmmm. Are you planning to use those conversion tables?
TORTOISE: Good gracious, what a brilliant thought. Why didn’t it occur to me?
ACHILLES: Well, everybody has inspirations once in a while, you know. Don’t feel too bad.
TORTOISE: Well, you came up with a good thought. That’s just what we’d try to implement, had we the book.
ACHILLES: So, you mean, we’d look up the possible changes in Einstein’s auditory neuron structure resulting from each tone of the utterance?
TORTOISE: Well, roughly. You see, we’d have to do it very carefully. We’d take the first tone, as you suggested, and see which cells it would make fire, and how. That is, we’d see precisely how each number on each page would change. Then we’d go through the book painstakingly page by page, and actually effect those changes. You might call that “round one.”
ACHILLES: Would round two be a similar process occasioned by the second tone?
TORTOISE: Not quite. You see, we haven’t completed the response to the first tone yet. We’ve gone through the book once, neuron by neuron. But there is the fact that some of the neurons are firing, you know, so we have to take that into account. Which means we have to proceed to the pages where their axons lead and modify those pages in the way that is directed by the “structure-changing numbers.”That is round two. And those neurons, in turn, will lead us to still others, and lo and behold, we’re off on a merry loop around the brain.
ACHILLES: Well, when do we ever come to the second tone?
TORTOISE: Good point. It’s something I neglected to say earlier. We need to establish a kind of time scale. Perhaps on each page the time taken for the neuron in question to fire is specified—the time it took to fire in real life, in Einstein’s brain—a quantity best measured, probably, in thousandths of a second. As the rounds progress, we sum up all the firing times, and when the times add up to the length of the first tone, we start in on the second tone. That way, we can proceed to feed in tone after tone of your self-introductory utterance, modifying the neurons that would respond to that utterance at every step along the way.
ACHILLES: An interesting procedure. But surely a very lengthy one.
TORTOISE: Well, as long as it is all hypothetical, that should not bother us in the least. It would probably take millennia, but let’s just say five seconds, for the sake of argument.
ACHILLES: Five seconds required to feed in that utterance? All right. So right now, my picture is that we have altered scores, if not myriads, of pages in that book, changing numbers, on page after page after page, wherever we were led, either by the previous pages or by the tones that we were feeding in, via the auditory conversion tables.
TORTOISE: Right. And now, once the utterance is finished, neurons continue to fire—from one to the next, the cascade continues—so we perform a strange and elaborate “dance,” shuffling back and forth between pages, round after round, without having any auditory input to bother with.
ACHILLES: I can see that something strange is about to happen. After another few “seconds” (if we are to stick to that somewhat ridiculous underestimate) of page turning and number changing, certain of the “speech neurons” will begin to fire. And we would then do well to consult the tables indicating shape of mouth or tension in vocal cords.
TORTOISE: You have caught wind of what is happening, Achilles. The way to read the book is not from page 1, but according to the directions in the preface, which tell about all the changes that must be effected and give all the rules for how to proceed.
ACHILLES: I suppose that given mouth shape and condition of vocal cords, it would be within grasp to determine what Einstein is “saying,” wouldn’t it? Especially given the level of technical advancement we’ve presupposed, that seems only a minor task. So I suppose he would say something to me.