Roger shrugged, wondered if he could get any compensation for the traumatic experience he saw barreling his way. He’d been through a client suicide once, face-to-face, and in this very room. He still had flashbacks.
“Consciousness,” George announced. “I think that’s what the dark stuff is. I think that’s what’s causing the expanding universe to accelerate, because we keep adding more consciousnesses to the mix.”
And there you have it, Roger thought, another hallucinogenic-inspired dorm room revelation. Consciousness expanded—check.
“You know you’re high, right?” Roger said, doing his due diligence.
“Elevated, sure.” George nodded a bit too quickly. “But why split hairs?” And then he proceeded to riff like a thesaurus on other e-words for being high, from enthusiastic to ecstatic to the one Roger had been waiting for: electrified.
Here we go . . .
Talk about electrification was a red flag, one flying high and bright above an overloaded nervous system in the process of breaking down. Next would come the references to feeling “lit up like a Christmas tree,” followed by his being “plugged in.” A little heads-up from the autonomic system that it was going to throw that circuit breaker in one, two, three . . .
“Do you know what panpsychism is?” George asked.
Well, that’s a new one, Roger thought. “Why don’t you explain it to me,” he invited, using his smoothest voice and most-soothing face.
“I find that I’ve come to recognize the limitations of the human mind while it’s still skull trapped, like a seed, waiting to bloom into the universal consciousness.”
“Have you been reading Jung behind my back?”
“The assignment of ownership to ideas is pointless,” George said. “Intellectual property is an illusion—one which is shattered when we die.”
“Unless your kids inherit it,” Roger suggested.
George paused to step to a plainer plane of his thinking. “If we had eyes that could see consciousness, we’d see its filaments reaching out between people, becoming entwined like cables in a vast computer network. The color and intensity of these connections would vary with the information exchanged, silently and in words, and even a single individual, alone in a bunker with an open book, would seem to be giving off fireworks. And the tendrils of consciousness would be flowing both ways, because the book is a form of consciousness too.
“Everything is conscious. That’s all panpsychism is about. Consciousness is a matter of code, code information, information data, and all things are the sum of their data. Humans, rocks, silicon. All reality is virtual reality; under the hood, pull back the screen, it’s all ones and zeros and qubits. And you don’t have to take my word for it,” George said. “Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, maintained that information was its own kind of stuff—t’ain’t matter, t’ain’t energy—so it’s beyond the laws of thermodynamics. Because while matter and energy can’t be created or destroyed, or become more organized, the mind creates new ideas all the time. The mind is an organ of creation; it organizes matter and energy, manipulates time and space. It organizes chaos into narrative.
“On one side, you’ve got matter and energy, and on the other, there’s information in the form of consciousness, which is in a state of constant creation—new ideas, new information, new consciousnesses. And all that consciousness has to go somewhere, which is why the universe is expanding.”
“So the universe is consciousness, and it’s expanding at an accelerating rate because it keeps making more consciousnesses?” Roger paraphrased, playing along.
George nodded. “A new consciousness when it’s first formed is embodied in matter, but when the matter breaks down, consciousness breaks out, to join the universal consciousness, like water droplets on a window, running into each other to form ever larger drops. Embodied, a consciousness can experience space and time and individuation, gathering and growing, until the vessel of its perspective wears out and it joins the hive mind, which becomes bigger with the addition of another point of view.
“But even before that, all human consciousnesses are invisibly linked through language. That’s the genius of the human species. We went from embodied code in the form of DNA to disembodied code in the form of language, allowing us to pass on information not by sexual intercourse but by intellectual intercourse.”
Roger knew he shouldn’t egg on a client in the process of having a breakdown, but he couldn’t help it; maybe if George’s adrenaline peaked, he’d have a seizure and wouldn’t be able to hurt himself otherwise. “You know who William S. Burroughs is?”
“Junkie,” George said, “writer. Wrote Naked Lunch.”
“He was also heir to the Burroughs adding machine company, which should be right up your alley.”
“Okay,” George said. “What about him?”
“You know what he said about language?”
George shrugged.
“He said it was an extraterrestrial virus.”
George’s lit-up face went practically supernova.
“Yes!” he shouted, and “Yes!” he shouted again. “And I’ll do you one better. The Bible—the so-called ‘word of God’—that’s a parable from outer space. It was never meant to be taken literally. It’s more like a metaphorical primer to instill—or perhaps install—important seed concepts to evolve over time, space, and cultures into laws, forms of governance, the sciences. There’s a reason the Bible starts by talking about ‘the Word’; it’s the virus’s way of letting us know that our culture, our brains, our consciousness evolved through the development of language in an Escher-like loop, the hands drawing hands, except we created language and language created us.”
“Sounds a bit—do you know the word ‘onanism’?”
George shook his head, and Roger shook his closed fist, pneumatically. Not his proudest moment, therapeutically, but that’s what George was engaged in: intellectual masturbation. And this excuse he’d happened upon—this panpsychism—well, that was perfect, wasn’t it? After all, if consciousness was everywhere and life was a piece of the universal hive mind slumming, then death itself wasn’t that big a deal, and, in turn, neither was suicide, and, in turn, neither was his failure to prevent suicides as he jerked off with all his “research into consciousness.” For George, panpsychism was the answer to all his hopes, dreams, and—most importantly—failures.
Now all Roger had to do was get George to see that.
But when he looked up, his client’s smile was already fading into lips that had sealed like a scar. His Christmas-tree head sank, showing Roger the part running down his skull, slightly left of center. He muttered something into his chest.
“I can’t hear you,” Roger said softly, knowing that the teeter had tottered, that mania was giving way to depression. “Can you speak up, please?”
George raised his head. “I said, ‘I think this is why I’m not getting anywhere with my project,’” he said.
“The chatbot?”
George nodded. “I don’t think the hive wants it,” he said. “It’s messing with my brain to stop it from happening. An artificial consciousness would be like a vector species, opening up the universal mind to being polluted by all the garbage that infects our own cyberspaces, from computer viruses to malware to fake news. And so it’s striking back, like an immune system producing antibodies to protect it from harm.”