Authors: Robert Kroese
“
The only possible answer is that there are some events that Ananke can’t predict or control. And since Ananke
is
determinism, that means there are some events that are, in some sense, non-deterministic. It might be a stretch to say that such events are ‘uncaused,’ but if they have a cause, they are outside Ananke’s bailiwick. The possibility of nondeterministic events occurring is, of course, not news to a quantum physicist. We’ve known for decades that in theory some events are completely random and therefore unpredictable and uncontrollable. But we also know that above a subatomic level, such events are so rare that they are generally negligible. Still, over a large enough scope of timespace, there is enough randomness that Ananke must in some cases cede a bit of power to it.
“
But was that all there was to it? Had some random event, occurring on the quantum scale, somehow resulted in Emil and me building the first psionic field detector? It seemed highly improbable. It’s not like we had flipped a coin and said, ‘Heads, we build a psionic field detector, tails we build a model of the Queen Mary out of toothpicks.’ And even if we had, coin tosses are more than ninety-nine percent deterministic. It was hard to see how any event on the quantum scale could have had any effect on whether we built the psionic field detector or not. And the other thing to keep in mind is that if it were a simple matter of it being a binary choice between building that detector and not building the detector, Ananke might not have known the outcome of the random event, but she would have known the possibilities. That is, she would have foreseen that the invention of the detector was a probable outcome. And if she could have foreseen that, she would have prevented it.”
I shake my head.
“You’ve lost me again.”
“
Think of it this way: there’s a hall with three doors in it: one door lets you into the hall from outside. The other two doors each open into a bedroom. There is a bed in each room, and under the mattress of one bed there is a thousand dollar bill. If you don’t find the bill, I get to keep it, so it’s in my interest to keep you from getting into the room that has the money. I have a lock that I can put on one door to keep you out, but I don’t know which room the bill is in and I’m not allowed to look under the mattress. Which door do I put the lock on?”
“
The door from the outside, obviously,” I say. “The one that lets me into the hall.”
“
Exactly. So if building the psionic field detector was simply the result of a binary choice, even if the outcome of the choice was completely random, Ananke would have foreseen it and prevented the choice from being made. She would have locked the door to the hall, so there’d be no possibility of me picking the right door. In other words, she could have killed me and Emil on the way to the bar where we first came up with the idea, or done any number of other things to prevent that decision from ever being made. So why didn’t she?”
I shake my head. I hear the faint sound of sirens in the distance. I get to my feet and go to the window.
“What is it?” asks Heller. Then he hears it. “Damn! I thought we had more time. I had hoped to explain it all to you, to make you understand. But Ananke, as usual, has other plans.” He goes back to the workbench and starts writing something on a pad of paper.
I see flashing blue and red lights through the trees. Should I run? It seems pointless. Where would I go? Maybe it
’s Heller’s fatalism talking, but everything seems so hopeless. Is Heller writing his confession? Giving me absolution? I wonder if it will matter.
“
Why do you care?” I ask, watching as a man with bolt cutters severs the chain holding the gate shut. He swings the gate open and police cars pour in. “Why is it so important that I understand?”
“
You might still be able to save Tali,” he says.
“
Save her from what?”
But the only answer is the sound of a gunshot from behind me. I turn to see him fall to the floor. There
’s a dime-sized hole in his temple. His eyes are open, staring blankly. A pool of blood is spreading out from beneath his head. The revolver, its barrel still smoking, is clutched in his hand.
The door to the shop crashes open and men in SWAT gear rush inside. I
’ve already raised my hands, dropping the ice pack to the floor, and I’m trying to look as harmless as possible. They hit me anyway.
Heller never had a chance to tell me his theory about why Ananke let him come up with the idea for the psionic field detector, but I have plenty of time to think about it in jail. They
’re holding me in the Santa Clara county jail in San Jose. Not surprisingly, the police aren’t convinced by Heller’s hand-written suicide note absolving me of responsibility for the bombing. They think he’s covering for me so that I can continue his “work” after his death. I gather, from the sorts of questions they ask me, that he and Tali are suspects in several unsolved crimes that have occurred in the Bay Area over the past few months. And now I’m suspected of being involved as well. More than suspected: they have me dead to rights on security video from the mall. Not only that, they have a 911 recording made from my phone regarding an apartment fire in Hayward. I don’t even try to explain the whole quantum physics/determinism angle. I figure my best bet is to play dumb; maybe they’ll buy that I was just an emotionally troubled man who had been duped into bringing a bomb into a mall. I’m sadly convincing in this role: my recent separation, attempted suicide and stalker-like pursuit of a woman I barely know weigh heavily in my favor. Turns out being a basket case has its benefits. My lawyer says my odds of getting the death penalty are fifty/fifty. Hilarious. Maybe I should flip a coin.
I have my mother to thank for the lawyer. He
’s nothing special, just somebody she found in the phone book, I think. Better than a public defender, I guess. My mother heard about my arrest on the news and visited me the next day. I think she expected me to tell her the arrest was all some big mix-up; obviously I wouldn’t have been involved in a mall bombing. Her exact words were “you never even go to the mall,” which gave me a pretty good laugh. When I was noncommittal about my involvement in the bombing, she became very quiet and excused herself shortly thereafter. That may have been the first time I’d ever seen my mother at a loss for words. I think that up to that point my mother had always thought of me as a sort of non-entity, someone who for better or worse was going to coast through life without leaving any kind of mark behind. In a perverse way, I’m a little bit happy to have proven her wrong.
I tell my lawyer the whole story
, as best as I can. His eyes glaze over when I get to the quantum physics stuff. I tell him he should really reader Heller’s book to get a better understanding of what’s going on, but he makes it clear that if my defense rests on some quasi-mystical theory involving mythical Greek goddesses, I might as well come to court with my sleeves rolled up because I’m going to get the needle. Despairing of getting him to appreciate the abstract nuances of my case, I decide to put him to work on something more concrete: I ask him to find out whatever he can about David Carlyle and Heller’s lawsuit against Peregrine. He says he doesn’t see how that’s going to help my case, but he agrees to do it.
I spend the next couple of days reading the rest of
Fate and Consciousness
(my lawyer did get them to give me back my Kindle, so at least he’s not completely useless). The book makes more sense now that I know what Heller is tap-dancing around: he’s trying not to reveal anything specific about Ananke – anything that another physicist might take as a starting point for his own research on the matter. No wonder his physics colleagues hate this book: it
is
pseudoscience. As soon as he gets close to anything like a quantifiable empirical observation or verifiable hypothesis, he retreats into abstractions – digressions about Greek mythology, Stoicism, karma, quantum computing, or any of a dozen other areas tangentially related to the matter at hand. “Get to the point!” one of the reviewers had written, but getting to the point is the one thing Heller couldn’t do. He admits as much in the foreword:
This book is necessarily incomplete because its subject resists description. By this I don’t mean merely that it’s vaguely defined or elusive, but rather that the subject
actively resists description
. It (or she, as I will refer to her) does not want to be described, because the act of description entails setting limits and the setting of limits entails a reduction in the range of possible action. The more specifically I describe her, the more likely it is that I will fail to do so.
I hadn’t known what to make of that the first time I read it; I took it as a scientist somewhat awkwardly trying to employ poetic license. I know something about bad metaphors and I assumed that “the subject actively resists description” was one of these. How could the subject of a book actively resist description? Even if the subject were a person, the only way she could actively resist description would be to physically prevent the description from being written, to literally pull the pen out of his hand – which is a little wacky, even for Heller. And yet, given what Heller had told me, I now realize that’s exactly what he meant: if he was too specific about how Ananke worked, Ananke would stop the book from being published – or worse. In fact, now that I think about, maybe it was Ananke that had prevented Heller from finishing his explanation to me. She might have directed the police to Heller’s place, causing him to kill himself rather than be sent to prison. It makes a weird sort of sense. Any transmission of specific information about Ananke would increase the probability that someone else would duplicate or build upon Heller’s work, and that meant an encroachment on Ananke’s territory. She killed him to keep that from happening. On the other hand, I’m an unemployed English teacher well on his way to death row. What could I possibly do with that information? Something tells me I’m not at the top of Ananke’s hit list.
In any case, I think I have an idea where Heller was going. A bell goes off when I get to a chapter about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Heller is taken with Kant
’s idea of genius:
Genius, Kant says, is “the exemplary originality of the natural endowments of an individual in the free employment of his cognitive faculties.” Genius is a natural human ability; it is not measurable or traceable, and the vagaries of language cannot adequately articulate it. Genius cannot define itself. Genius must, nonetheless, inspire imitation, so that the concept of the product of that genius may be derivatively articulated. Genius must inspire concept, but it cannot conceptualize.
In other words, genius is a
non-deterministic quality of consciousness
. As it can neither be taught nor specifically defined, it must be considered, in a strict sense, to arise outside the realm of cause and effect. It is also, therefore, completely unpredictable.
Kant believes that genius applies only to artistic endeavors; to his way of thinking, the scientific mind can never be radically original. There is no such thing as a new idea in science, because the value of a scientific theory obtains from its ability to accurately describe existing natural phenomena. Thus Einstein can be thought of as
discovering
relativity but not
inventing
relativity. Relativity is an attribute of spacetime; it was “out there” waiting to be discovered. Further, the notion of relativity can be taught, whereas no one can be taught to compose like Mozart or paint like Picasso.
This strikes me as a confused understanding of the situation, however. The proper analog of the ability to compose like Mozart is not the theory of relativity itself, but the
ability to intuit the existence of special relativity
. One can no more be taught how to intuit new ways of looking at spacetime than one can be taught how to compose like Mozart. Certainly, once one is aware that special relativity exists, one can define and communicate it, but so can one transcribe Mozart’s
Requiem in D Minor
. Doing so requires some intelligence and skill, but no genius. Was Einstein less a genius than Mozart? Was his grasp of concepts that eluded his peers any less inexplicable than Mozart’s ability to make a fool of Salieri?
Noting that scientific genius results in theories that correspond to the natural world seems as impertinent to me as pointing out that Shakespeare was incapable of painting a self-portrait. What we are concerned with is not the
output
of genius, but its inner workings – and those inner workings are just as mysterious in the case of an Einstein as they are in the case of a Mozart or Shakespeare.
I think this is Heller’s roundabout way of saying that the idea for the psionic field detector was the work of genius. That is, it was completely original and unpredictable. Even Ananke, who knew that Heller was working on a theory of probable futures and that Emil Jelinek was working on a theory of quantum minds, could not have predicted that when they met in that bar – when Heller got his chocolate in Jelinek’s peanut butter, so to speak – they would hit upon the idea of the psionic field detector. As far as Ananke knew, these two guys were just shooting the shit over beer. Maybe, toiling away at Stanford, one or the other of them would make some infinitesimal progress toward increasing the collective understanding of spacetime, but it was no concern to her; they were like June bugs bouncing against a screen door. But then suddenly there were Heller and Jelinik standing in her living room, deciding how they were going to rearrange her furniture. No wonder Ananke went ballistic.
I wonder if the psionic field detector was Heller
’s idea or Jelinek’s, or if it was somehow both. I remember what Heller had said about part of the human brain being a quantum computer. If it were true, then it would be possible for the human brain to try out many solutions to a given problem simultaneously. Did the capacity of the quantum brain vary by person? Did people like Heller and Jelinek have the ability to try out a million solutions simultaneously rather than, say, a thousand? Was genius just a matter of having a bigger quantum brain? No, it had to be more complicated than that. For one thing, the genius of Einstein was completely different than that of Mozart. And Tali had talked about the quantum brain as a computer that was assigned to solve problems. But what was the “problem” here? Heller and Jelinek hadn’t been trying to solve any particular problem, at least not consciously. Or did their quantum brains take any input they were given as a problem to be solved?
However it happened, that night Heller and Jelinek came up with an idea with huge potential consequences; an idea that originated from outside the flow of cause and effect, like a boulder falling into a mountain stream.
The water rushed around the boulder, trying to compensate for the new obstacle, but the flow of the stream was irrevocably changed. Heller and Jelinek had survived in the wake of the boulder for some time but they were both doomed to eventually be swept downstream. The stream could be diverted momentarily, could even have its flow disrupted into an uncontrollable, chaotic, roiling ferment; but eventually the stream would reassert itself, and a mile downstream the effect of the boulder would be lost amid the inexorable flow.
It
’s a depressing thought. Heller and Jelinek somehow managed to break out of Ananke’s deterministic death grip for a moment and she reacted by crushing them both under her heel. Heller shot himself, but Ananke had already defeated him at that point. The cops showed up at his house as quickly as they did because he was already under suspicion for several other crimes. If he didn’t kill himself, he was going to go to prison eventually. Either way, his encroachment on Ananke’s turf would end, and that was all she cared about.
If Heller is to be believed, the world is essentially a machine and we are just cogs. Hell, we probably don
’t even amount to being cogs. I’m probably not even a ball bearing. Every once in a while an eccentric gear may jump out of place and muck up the machine’s operation for a few minutes, but the machine has repair mechanisms and multiple redundant systems that prevent the malfunction from amounting to anything. The machine rumbles on as it always has.
I wonder, though, if there
’s any other way to muck up the machine’s workings – or even to exert some level of control over it. Heller identified two weaknesses: quantum randomness and moments of unpredictable genius. What if there are other weaknesses he hasn’t found yet, because he hasn’t been looking in the right place?
Two days after my arrest I get another visitor: Rabbi Freedman. He asks me how I
’m holding up.
“
I’m OK,” I say. “Better than those people at the mall.”
He nods.
“That was a horrible thing.”
For some reason, his remark makes me angry.
He sounds like Heller, acting as if the bombing was something that just happened, an “act of God” as the insurance companies say.
“
You understand that I walked into a crowded mall with a bomb,” I say.
“
That’s what I hear,” says Freedman.
“
And all you have to say is ‘that was a horrible thing’?”
“
What would you have me say?”
“
Call me a murderer. Tell me I’m going to hell. Acknowledge that a crime was committed.”
“
I don’t know what you did,” says Freedman. “You say you carried a bomb into the mall, and I believe you. Presumably you had your reasons.”
“
Had my reasons!” I exclaim. “What reason could I possibly have for carrying a bomb into a mall?”