The Thing Itself (12 page)

She angled her head a little. ‘You have a problem with the neatness?’

‘You don’t?’

‘Isn’t your job to make things neat and clean?’ Before I could reply she said: ‘Maths is all about the patterns. About the neatness. Physics is basically applied maths.’

‘This is a theory of everything, and it’s neat as a pin. It’s like constellations in the night sky – the stars are scattered more or less randomly. When we group them together as bulls and ploughs and whatnot we say nothing about the stars and everything about the human obsession with order. Kant’s categories are like that. Disposing everything that exists into four neat little boxes called, eh,’ I consulted the screen, ‘quantity, quality, relation and modality. Subdividing each of those into three further neat little sections. It’s— OCD, is what it is. I read up about Kant, and that’s just the kind of man he was. Got up every day at exactly the same time, crossed the town square on his way to work so at exactly the same time that people used to set their watches by him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging. Takes all sorts. But he was a weird little man obsessed with order and neatness, and he produced a philosophical system that – surprise! – discovered order and neatness to be the truth of the whole cosmos.’

She said: ‘I agree.’

‘You do? Well there we are. Can I go home now?’

‘Except that you’re making an argument in favour of what Kant says.’

‘I am?’ I sniffed. ‘It’s like,’ I added, abruptly, remembering something, but not remembering from where I remembered it, ‘the story of the scientist who looked into a microscope and sketched what he could see, and then it turned out he hadn’t used the device properly and had ended up sketching the reflection of his own eye.’

She smiled at this, making her ugly face uglier. ‘Exactly so. You’re saying that Kant’s philosophy tells us more about the way Kant’s mind worked than about the world. I agree. That’s precisely the point. Kant’s philosophy says that the only thing we
can
know about the world is the way our minds work. We don’t have some magic access to the way things really are. We only have what we perceive and think. We have what our senses tell us, and what our rational minds can deduce.’

‘That’s not true, though. We know
loads
of things about the external world, independent of my observational bias.’

‘You have some magic access to things that doesn’t involve observing them, do you?’

‘Not that. But we can
combine
a whole bunch of different observations, iron out subjective quirks from the data, approximate reality to within really fine tolerances.’

‘You’re still thinking in the old paradigm,’ she said. ‘The fact is: you perceive space because “perceiving space” is how your mind is structured. Time is the same. So we perceive the thing in itself, and that data comes in, and our minds convert it into space, time, causality and so on. We can’t help doing that. It’s how we work.’

‘So there’s no space, or time, or causality or any of that, in the real world?’

‘Kant would say,’ she said, taking a forkful of scrambled egg, ‘we can’t know.’ She ate, swallowed. ‘We can only know what we perceive. We can’t get past our structures of knowledge and reasoning to get at the baseline reality.’

‘So I get in my car and drive a hundred miles, I haven’t really gone anywhere. It’s like, what, the Holodeck?’

‘The what?’

‘You know: the Holodeck in
Star Wars
. You’re saying the cosmos is in the business of tricking us. A giant system of illusion.’

‘You mean
Star Trek: The Next Generation
,’ she said, pouting. ‘That’s a poor analogy, I think. The Holodeck was a room – a three-dimensional space – that created the illusion of being a much bigger space. We’re not talking about that, here. I agree with you; it certainly
seems
to me that I move through space. I instruct my body to move, and my legs cycle through their stride, and I appear to travel from A to B. If you pressed me, I’d guess
something
is happening in the Ding an sich that informs my sense data. I’m just not sure what. Maybe it’s a mode of resistance, rather than a mode of distance. Maybe it’s something else.’

‘So we feel like we’re moving but we’re actually just walking on the spot?’

‘Not even walking on the spot. Our legs aren’t actually moving, any more than we are, because movement of our limbs would require spatial extension. But something about the thing in itself gives us the impressions that we interpret as swinging our legs, as walking along. Something about the thing in itself registers forces as equal and opposite; something actualises the sensations we perceive as spatial and temporal.’

I thought for a bit. ‘How do you
know
it’s not, though? You just told me you don’t
actually
know anything about the thing in itself. Maybe it is structured by space and time after all?’

She shook her head. ‘Now you’ve come full circle. Now
you’re
the one arguing the million-to-one coincidence that our perception of the true reality just happens to coincide exactly with that reality. We’re wearing orange spectacles and everything looks orange, but you’re arguing that if we could ever take the spectacles off then everything would actually
be
orange. Actually, there are good reasons for thinking it isn’t like that.’

I tried what I can see now, looking back, was my last throw. I didn’t think of it that way at the time; it occurred to me as just another of the great stack of reasons why the Kant stuff was all nonsense. But it was actually the last thread connecting me to my old mode of thinking. ‘You know what makes this all so arid? It doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t make
any
difference. I’m saying: I walked a mile, measured on my pedometer. You’re saying I only
think
I walked a mile, and my pedometer is wrong – that it only appeared to me that I walked a mile. So what’s the difference? Even if you’re right, I still have to walk that mile to the shops to buy milk to go on my cornflakes. Maybe it’s a real mile, maybe it’s an artefact of my perceptions: it adds up to the same thing.’ Warming to my theme, I added: ‘And, like, science. We measure Jupiter and determine it has a diameter of a million kilometres. You say: it only appears to have that diameter, because space is a function of our minds, not of the real reality. That what looks like a million-kilometre-wide planet is actually only some peculiar kink in the Ding an sich. I could agree with you, and it would make no difference. I could disagree, and it makes no difference. No difference at all. We can do things with our spatial measurements of the solar system, like send probes to land on comets and arrange satellites to beam television around the world. So your Ding an sich might be real reality, or might not, and either way it makes no difference to the way we actually live our lives.’ I sat back, feeling (I confess it) suddenly rather pleased with myself. ‘That’s a nice knockdown argument,
if
you like.’

‘What you’re forgetting,’ she replied, ‘is we have something Kant didn’t have.’

‘A fucking sense of humour, is it?’

‘AI,’ she said.

This is what set the dominoes trembling in my head, ready to tumble. ‘You what?’

‘Kant, as you so eloquently noted, was talking about his own structures of consciousness. His, yours, mine. He said that we can’t get behind them. We cannot get round the back of space and time, any more than a man whose corneas have been dyed orange can help seeing the world with an orange tint. Space and time are how humans
see
reality, and until very recently we’ve only had human beings’ experience to talk about. Now, though, it’s possible to build a whole new way of thinking.’

‘We can’t step outside our way of perceiving the universe,’ I said. ‘But computers can.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Computers still need time,’ I said. ‘Sure they’re
fast
, but we’re still talking about sequential operations of calculation and iteration. They need to perform physical operations, through circuit boards that have length breadth and width. They’ve been getting smaller, it’s true, but they still take up space.’

‘Very good,’ said Kostritsky. ‘It’s pleasing to have our confidence in you justified. Still something of the professional scientist somewhere inside the garbage disposal man.’

‘The fuck!’ I said, stung, and unable for the moment to think of a wittier retort.

‘Of course you are correct. Until very recently that’s been true. Until very recently computer thought was subject to similar limitations with respect to accessing the Ding an sich as we are ourselves. That’s not surprising, when you think of it. We made them in our image. But, latterly, we’ve been building new kinds of computer, on radically different principles. And we’ve discovered that, once you abandon the notion of trying to
copy
human consciousness, AI is really quite easy to achieve.’

I digested this. It was – well, huge. ‘You’ve done this?’

‘We have, yes.’

‘You’ve built functioning AI? Here, in this institute?’

‘Sure.’

‘A rational, sentient, intelligence consciousness, unfettered by the constraints of space and time? One that can see into the Ding an sich?’

‘Essentially, yes. Pretty much.’

‘Pretty much?’ I boggled.

‘There’s work still to be done,’ she conceded airily. ‘But we’ve done enough to confirm that Kant was right.’

I took a long breath in. ‘And I’m supposed just to talk your word on that, am I?’

‘Talk my word?’

I breathed out. ‘
Take
your word, I mean.’

‘No, Charles,’ she said, with perfect ingenuity. ‘You’re supposed to see for yourself. That’s why we invited you here.’

‘You’ve done this thing,’ I said, ‘but you haven’t announced it to the world. It’s like you don’t
want
the Nobel Prize.’

‘There’s no Nobel Prize in computing,’ she observed mildly.

‘Or whatever the hell the equivalent— Look: come on. You’ve really done what you’re claiming, if you have, I mean, actual working AI: the world will go crazy. Crazy! Ticker-tape parades, chat shows, your own brand of perfume. Why haven’t you announced it?’

‘The main reason,’ she said, and stopped. She yawned, enormously. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I am tired. The main reason is that AI is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end.’

‘What end?’

‘Direct manipulation of the Ding an sich of course. Come on, Charles, think! Can’t you imagine the possibilities?’

‘Possibilities.’

‘Take space. Distance could be eradicated. And not just human-scale distances. Stellar distances. We could reach the stars, the galaxies. And time? Well, time travel may be more than reality can bear, but we’re working on
slowing
time … giving ourselves as much time as we need to compute any problem, to prolong consciousness as long as we wish. Really, even a simpleton can see how revolutionary it would be to break through the prison of space and time.’

I felt dizzy. ‘You’re a cult leader, trying to brainwash me. That’s all—’ I didn’t know what it was all. I stopped.

‘It’s incredible, I know. But, look, we’re not there yet. There are certain, uh, obstacles to clear.’ She yawned again, massively, and poked her now-cold scrambled egg with her fork. ‘We have a broad three-point strategy. First, to get a clear enough view of the thing itself to confirm, or deny, Kant’s theories. Well, we’ve done that.’

‘Jesus Beelzebub,’ I said.

‘Second, retrieve specific data about the thing in itself, via an AI unfettered by time and space. And third, to use those tools to begin
manipulating
the thing itself. That’s what we’re still working on. And that’s why we need you.’

‘Me.’ I shook my head.

‘You and your friend.’

‘Roy. Not my friend. Very much not.’

‘As you said yourself: back in the 1980s computing was too primitive to support AI. Those old machines were slow, with very meagre processing and memory. And they were locked into the structures of space and time, in terms of their operating parameters. It shouldn’t have been possible to do anything with such a machine, as far as getting access to the Ding an sich was concerned. Yet Curtius did it. We don’t know how. It shouldn’t even have been possible – yet he did. We figure he was some manner of genius.’

‘That would be genius spelled p, s, y, c, h and o.’

‘Mentally challenged, yes certainly. Difficult. Geniuses often are. But he could be the one to provide the key. The key to accessing the
real
reality. And once we do that … well, everything changes. For all of humanity.’

‘Accessing the thing itself.’ Nausea uncoiled itself in my gut. ‘Look if
that’s
what happened to the two of us in Antarctica then my very-much advice to you would very-much be: leave it the
fuck
alone.’ There were flickers of light in the corner of my eye. My hands were trembling.

‘We understand that your experience,’ she said, ‘was not … pleasant.’

‘I’m going to be sick,’ I said. And indeed a hot sensation of nausea was churning through my gut. ‘All this abstract metaphysics— I didn’t make the connection with the South Pole. Jesus, Professor: what if you connect with the Ding an sich and it turns out to be, like, a hell dimension?’

‘There’s no danger of that.’

Demons flickered in my mind’s eye. Leering, mocking. What I had done with Irma last night: had her consent been, shall we say, compromised? Damned, damned, damned. A glimpse of the real reality and it was darkness, visible. ‘
You
didn’t see them,’ I said, and my stomach clenches sharply. My filled tooth bulged and throbbed.