giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm hope so.
IT IS 2 P.M. before Nahum’s stomach makes itself heard over his brain and we break for lunch. With the equations put away and at least a few picograms of Nahum’s informational content devoted to his ravioli, I feel more comfortable asking the dimwit questions I’ve wanted to ask all morning.
What do you think it would feel like to be a free-floating soul, a fart of energy in some god-knows-where-or-what dimension? Nahum makes the analogy of the computer: Your basic core of consciousness, he imagines, would be like the operating system. On top of that you have various overlays: word processing and spreadsheet programs and such if you’re a computer; if you’re a human being, perception, language, reason, memory. When you die and the brain shuts down, the overlays fritz out. You’re left with the operating system: a sort of a primitive, free-floating awareness. Nahum imagines existence would be “like what it is for us now, minus all the superficial trappings.”
It’s that minus-all-the-trappings bit that gets me. If you can’t think in words or see or hear, what are you like? Coma victim? Lichen? Nahum shrugs. It’s just an analogy, just a guess. I posed this question to Lui later in the week. He was dubious about the possibility of the informational content of a person’s consciousness leaving the body in any sort of organized form. “Decay heat is not ordered information,” he said. Meaning, I think, that the blip of energy that was your personalitymay indeed continue to exist after you die, but not in the form of your personality. Not in the form of something you can be or use.
I later relayed to Nahum what Lui said and asked him to comment. “Remember,” I wrote, “in replying to me, pretend you are talking to a seventh-grader.” Nahum disagreed with Lui. His reply ran to a thousand words and would have been understandable to any seventh-grader familiar with Kant, Locke, negentropy as the measure of nonrandomness, and the Enigma encryption machine. Here is the part I understood: “This energy is freely malleable in terms of the physical form it might take … and it is not necessarily the case that any one of them would be ‘preferred.’”
Well, “preferred” in the sense that it would be more fun to be a spirit that can think thoughts and remember memories than to be, say, a black hole or a piece of static electricity. But I decided to leave it be.
Nahum orders bananas Napoleon for dessert, just one more way we’ll never understand each other. We’re back to talking about the box, the system. I realize I forgot to ask him what kind of organism he’s planning to put inside. The dessert arrives, a massive custard download held vertical by wafer shelving.
“So what goes in it?” I’d been assuming a lab mouse.
“Banana pudding, mostly.”
When I get back home and I look at Nahum’s twenty-five-page “Proposal for Testing the Energetics of Consciousness and Its Physical Foundation,” I will picture a plate of banana pudding in a box.
Theoretically, Nahum could sacrifice anything from a bacterium on up. He is leaning toward leeches. “I worked with leeches for a long time. They’re slimy and they latch on to you. They’re a very awful organism. I hated those things!” Thecouple at the table beside us turn to look at the man who hates leeches.
Last question: What does he think the result will be? Does free-floating consciousness energy exist? “My bias is that it does exist,” says Nahum. “But I would never say that I know that.” He puts down his spoon. “Until I prove it.”
4
The Vienna Sausage Affair
And other dubious highlights of the ongoing effort to see the soul
T HE YEAR WAS 1911. Duncan Macdougall, feeling fairly certain he had proved the existence of the soul (by weighing it), now was determined to see it. He wanted, he said in a newspaper article from that year, to know what color * the soul was and how
IT IS 2 P.M. before Nahum’s stomach makes itself heard over his brain and we break for lunch. With the equations put away and at least a few picograms of Nahum’s informational content devoted to his ravioli, I feel more comfortable asking the dimwit questions I’ve wanted to ask all morning.
What do you think it would feel like to be a free-floating soul, a fart of energy in some god-knows-where-or-what dimension? Nahum makes the analogy of the computer: Your basic core of consciousness, he imagines, would be like the operating system. On top of that you have various overlays: word processing and spreadsheet programs and such if you’re a computer; if you’re a human being, perception, language, reason, memory. When you die and the brain shuts down, the overlays fritz out. You’re left with the operating system: a sort of a primitive, free-floating awareness. Nahum imagines existence would be “like what it is for us now, minus all the superficial trappings.”
It’s that minus-all-the-trappings bit that gets me. If you can’t think in words or see or hear, what are you like? Coma victim? Lichen? Nahum shrugs. It’s just an analogy, just a guess. I posed this question to Lui later in the week. He was dubious about the possibility of the informational content of a person’s consciousness leaving the body in any sort of organized form. “Decay heat is not ordered information,” he said. Meaning, I think, that the blip of energy that was your personalitymay indeed continue to exist after you die, but not in the form of your personality. Not in the form of something you can be or use.
I later relayed to Nahum what Lui said and asked him to comment. “Remember,” I wrote, “in replying to me, pretend you are talking to a seventh-grader.” Nahum disagreed with Lui. His reply ran to a thousand words and would have been understandable to any seventh-grader familiar with Kant, Locke, negentropy as the measure of nonrandomness, and the Enigma encryption machine. Here is the part I understood: “This energy is freely malleable in terms of the physical form it might take … and it is not necessarily the case that any one of them would be ‘preferred.’”
Well, “preferred” in the sense that it would be more fun to be a spirit that can think thoughts and remember memories than to be, say, a black hole or a piece of static electricity. But I decided to leave it be.
Nahum orders bananas Napoleon for dessert, just one more way we’ll never understand each other. We’re back to talking about the box, the system. I realize I forgot to ask him what kind of organism he’s planning to put inside. The dessert arrives, a massive custard download held vertical by wafer shelving.
“So what goes in it?” I’d been assuming a lab mouse.
“Banana pudding, mostly.”
When I get back home and I look at Nahum’s twenty-five-page “Proposal for Testing the Energetics of Consciousness and Its Physical Foundation,” I will picture a plate of banana pudding in a box.
Theoretically, Nahum could sacrifice anything from a bacterium on up. He is leaning toward leeches. “I worked with leeches for a long time. They’re slimy and they latch on to you. They’re a very awful organism. I hated those things!” Thecouple at the table beside us turn to look at the man who hates leeches.
Last question: What does he think the result will be? Does free-floating consciousness energy exist? “My bias is that it does exist,” says Nahum. “But I would never say that I know that.” He puts down his spoon. “Until I prove it.”
4
The Vienna Sausage Affair
And other dubious highlights of the ongoing effort to see the soul
T HE YEAR WAS 1911. Duncan Macdougall, feeling fairly certain he had proved the existence of the soul (by weighing it), now was determined to see it. He wanted, he said in a newspaper article from that year, to know what color * the soul was and how
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