Time Off

Chapter Fifteen

Here we go! Abel is definitely on board. I have a great team up and running in his craggy old hippocampus, titillating, massaging and gentrifying those neural pathways. As a man anticipating a future of rising humiliations in his transition from barely tolerable to dejected outright, Abel has shown perhaps the most remarkable progress of all. It's nearly what we might expect from the young and impressionable. But the resigned and desperate are not to be underestimated. We were all surprised by Abel and it has launched a new trajectory in our efforts. You see the elderly have the knowledge and experience, albeit sometimes buried and forgotten.   Some hardware upgrades, which we are capable of influencing directly, can resurrect some of the mental giants of the past, reinvigorated by a new lease on life and the pursuit of knowledge and the truth. It is a beautiful new dynamic that is now embodied by Abel Jennings.

Abel's thought experiments are currently taking him on a wild ride. He has already formulated a new concept of the atomic nucleus that is not far off. The question begging is how exactly do nuclei absorb energy and how does that process square with a century of measurements ranging from ionization energies to colliders to the fine structure constant. His latest notions are consistent with his areas of expertise. Armed with only a basic framework, gleamed from a few hours of conversation with Roy Sussman, Abel is off and running. And completely apart from some core notions, related mainly to quantum physics, he has imagined something new and unexpected.

Following a rich and satisfying telephone exchange with Sussman a few weeks earlier, Abel fell into habit and sauntered into his neighborhood pub, albeit with new spring in his step. Perched at the bar, he pulled on the cool pint of bitter and felt himself relax as he drifted into a trance. Normally, chatty, Abel drew stares from the bartender and the regulars. They frequently glanced his way, expecting him to join the fray, offering counterpoints or other trivial insights on whatever was being bantered about.

But on this particular day, he was somewhere else. Although puzzled, no one was concerned enough to question his unusual state, as they carried on with their slurred deliberations. Abel was somehow, in that moment, imagining a world where his own good fortune, which was something like a spark to his brain, had also visited itself upon the masses. And not only was there new enlightenment, but even more, there was a collective understanding among the many, such that differences and disagreements were simply cleansed away, mere vestiges no longer finding harbor in a new reality laid plain and bare before all.

A strong slap on the back jolted him from his fantastical thoughts as he quickly hoisted his jar and fell into step with his comrades. But half of him still clung tightly to new thoughts, compelling thoughts. From that moment, it was as if he had split into two and appeared and acted normally in the world, yet he was only half there, maintaining a facade, while another half of him churned away endlessly on the review of old ideas but mostly the conception of the new.

Abel is now consumed with the subject of consciousness. Why does this topic raise its mysterious head so often? Probably because it is the grand question. I have alluded to the fact that we are not prone to speculation in the way that you are. Therefore, with respect to consciousness, we are familiar with a litany of possibilities and their arguments. Because the knowledge is common among us, there is no believing, or convincing, or doubting. There are only knowns, unknowns and probabilities.

So let's talk about that. I mentioned before about the law of survival. In human scientific terms, many would agree that it is clearly a natural law. However, physicists would not regard survival as a fundamental, physical law. That aside, survival is a useful case to examine consciousness, perhaps the most useful case.

One must acknowledge that survival is a strategy that is shared by all biological living creatures, including single cells, human beings and everything in between. In humans, survival is complicated in that societies vary, and all of the various societies have changed rapidly over time. So it may not be obvious how survival has manifested itself in different places and at different times. But the trait is there and it is always working and ascribed maximum priority. Be it competition, courtship, fear or glory, survival is at the heart of it. Living humans, living their lives, are the evidence that survival as a concept is validated by those that live and carry on in the world.