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The Colloquium

Peter McMillan

Scene: Five envatted brains thinking they’re attending an interactive online colloquium on Mind-Body Duality

Cast:
Bill          a laid-back, voluble, and deceptively simple brain
Lucky      an optimistic and enthusiastic but by no means naive or flighty brain capable of surprising accomplishments
Octave     a refined and diplomatic brain; well-read, well-spoken, and philosophically-inclined
Catarina a self-reliant and independent, yet leadership-capable brain that is somewhat reserved but nevertheless quite passionate
Mohamed a logical, cynical, and argumentative brain; prickly but not entirely off-putting

    Bill: (addressing no one in particular) This is Bill. Is this the Colloquium on Mind-Body Duality? Am I in the right place? I hope I’m not late. We had some logistical problems. I don’t want to bore you with all the details, but—
    Lucky: Hi Bill. This is Lucky. I don’t know yet. I’ve just now tuned in.
    Octave: Hello everyone. Call me Octave, and please, before you ask, no, I’m not a composer, singer, or musician.
    Catarina: Hello. I’m Catarina—the only woman it seems who was invited. I’ve overheard snippets of conversations this morning, and it sounds like we’re among a group of engineers not philosophers. Based on that, I’d say we’re in the wrong place.
    Mohamed: I’m Mohamed. I agree, Catarina. I got a visual on the welcome banner. The topic of this conference is the Fabrication and Calibration of Rivets for Interplanetary Space Vehicles. That’s clearly a topic that would only interest the engineering-minded and would likely torture anyone interested in metaphysical philosophy.
    Bill: Well, this is gonna be embarrassing if we can’t get outta here and into the right colloquium. I have a few contacts. Gimme a minute and I’ll come back with some answers.
    Octave and Mohamed: OK. Let us know if you need help.
    Bill: Thanks. Won’t be necessary. Be right back. (pause)
    Catarina: I’m just looking over the agenda—the one for the conference we’re supposed to be attending—and I don’t recognize any of our names in the list of speakers. In fact, there’s no mention of us until the end of the day when the room is opened up for discussion and questions. We’re shown under ‘Panel of Exhibits.’ What exactly does that mean? I thought we would be participants.
    Octave: Well, I wasn’t quite clear on that. I knew we were invited to be observed and discussed as case studies, but I thought we might be given the opportunity to engage in the discussions as well.
    Mohamed: What would you have to contribute, Octave? I’m not a philosopher and I’m not a neuroscientist, are you?
    Octave: No, I’m not. But I didn’t think we would be specimens either. If you did, why did you agree to come?
    Mohamed: Simple. It puts me at the top of the list of candidates for the next phase of sensory-memory integration and augmentation experiments and training, and this may be my best opportunity to recover my full range of sense perception and regain complete access to my database of memories.
    Lucky: Yeah, that’s me, too. You know, I’ve been in these labs for—well, actually I have no idea—but long enough for our monotonous daily regimen tests to wear me down sometimes, and you know me, I’m usually upbeat. So, yeah I’m pretty eager to be in the next level of experiments myself.
    Catarina: Well, at least you’re aware of what’s going on and that there’s more that can be made available. Some of the brains I’ve communicated with are relatively content—don’t think that’s quite the right word—but let’s say they’re not expecting or even hoping for more.
    Octave: Sometimes, I pity them, but other times I think it’d be worse to know how dependent we all are for the narrow range of existence we’re allowed. That’s true for me. I’ve been working through some difficult existential episodes—
    Bill: (interrupting) Well, seems we’re stuck here in what is unlikely to be a riveting conference.
    Mohamed: If that’s supposed to lighten the mood. It doesn’t.
    Bill: Sorry, couldn’t resist. Riveting conference about the cutting edge of riveting.
    Octave: We got it, Bill.
    Bill: Of course, just because we’re brains in the vat doesn’t mean we’re stupid. I know. I know. Anyway, they’re having technical problems connecting to the philosophy colloquium.
    Mohamed: That’s not reassuring. I mean this is basic, common technology we’re talking about. Any semi-competent IT person could handle the setup. It’s not neurophysiology or quantum gravity. A high-performance cerebrum is not required.
    Lucky: Fortunately, our lab techs seem pretty good at what they do.
    Octave: So, Catarina, how are you coping? You know there’s more beyond what we’re permitted to experience. How do you deal with it?
    Catarina: Recently, I’ve been practicing mindfulness.
    Mohamed: Is that the gimmicky HR approach to self-lobotomize?

    Catarina: That’s one way to look at it, Mohamed, but from a pragmatic standpoint, I find it’s better to try to manage my thoughts, feelings and biorhythms as best I can. Initially, it sounded flaky to me, too, but under the circumstances, given where we are, I believe it provides me with a bit more control in a world where it seems I have very little real control.
    Bill: I agree. I’ve been meditating a lot lately, which for me is difficult because I’m such a people person and I crave that interaction with others. I enjoy telling stories and sharing from my past life and I also like to hear what others think. Oh, did I tell you what I saw yesterday after the sensory diagnostics?
    Octave: Excuse me, Bill, but yes, I think you did. Back to Catarina’s remarks, in my opinion, we should all be experts in mindfulness. After all, that’s all we have—mind.
    Bill: That’s a question—
    Mohamed: No, it’s a reality. We process basic sense data that is programmed to test our responses utilizing a fraction of the conceptual capability we once had. Senses and thoughts but not particularly penetrating thoughts. That’s all. And it’s all mental.
    Octave: Let’s say it appears to be reality. That’s why I’m disappointed we aren’t able to attend the colloquium. I was expecting to hear some different views. I’m—we’re all—familiar with the physicalist explanation of our being, but some of us feel something is missing.
    Lucky: You know, I was looking forward to the conference, too. I don’t follow some of the quantum-level theory like Octave. Too much uncertainty, too much unpredictability in the mathematical world of particles and fields. But, like you guys, I feel there’s more out there and thought that this conference would be eye-opener, so to speak. But, you know, I also think Catarina may be onto something.
    Bill: If you ask me, the evidence that our reality is strictly mental is pretty strong, but I’m open to what you and Octave are saying. However, I’d like to hear more from Catarina. about this mindlessness—
    Mohamed: Mindfulness, Bill.
    Bill: Sorry. That wasn’t intentional. MindFULNESS! Could you tell us a bit more about that, Catarina?
    Catarina: It’s as if we are unable to control the range of experience that we encounter but are nonetheless capable of managing—to some extent—our responses to the experiential situations. You mentioned meditation, Bill. That’s a significant part of it, but there’s more. Meditation can be quite passive, but I’m finding that with effort I can take a more active role in organizing and processing my sensations, thoughts, and even emotions.
    Bill: Kinda like mind over matter, eh Catarina?
    Octave: Sounds to me like it ties in well with the mind-body duality topic we were supposed to be hearing about today. Well, according to my chronometer, we’ve got what ... about 3 or 4 hours before we’re back to the Sisyphean activity wheel in our respective hamster cages. In the meantime, why don’t we ‘roundtable’ among ourselves?
    Lucky: I like the way you think, Octave. What you say, Mohamed? You on board?
    Mohamed: OK by me. I’ve got no better place to be.
    Bill: Great! We’re all in ... Cat, you’re in, too, right?
    Catarina: Yes, but Bill, please call me Caterina. I don’t like ‘Cat’—too many negative associations for me.
    Bill: No problem. I completely understand. I don’t like to be called Guillaume for similar reasons. Only my father and mother ever called me that, but they were pretty uncompromising around ancestry stuff. Anyway, I heard an interesting story that may be relevant to what we’ve been discussing. Can I share it?
    Mohamed: Sure, but can you give us the short version?
    Bill: Absolutely! This is what one of the graduate students told me when I first arrived. Don’t know if she tells everyone the same thing but this is what she told me. The experiments like the ones in this lab using supercomputers and disembodied brains are being conducted secretly around the world.
    Mohamed: If it’s top secret, which presumably would be the case since none of us had prior knowledge of these experiments, why would she tell you?
    Bill: Don’t know. But what’s the risk in telling a brain firewalled from the outside world? At least, I don’t have any access to the world we came from, do you?
    Mohamed: Of course not. Go ahead with your story, Bill.
    Bill: Thank you. Anyway, the purpose of the experiments is to find out whether something like a normal life can be continued by an envatted brain.
    Octave: Normal? What’s normal about our lives here and now?
    Bill: Not my idea. Someone else’s. Someone, or some others, who think that humanity’s future lies in shrinking the population on Earth and relocating billions of people as packaged brains to other worlds where human life can continue ... under laboratory conditions, naturally.
    Catarina: Why other worlds? We don’t take up much space; we don’t ‘own’ a bunch of stuff that takes up space; we don’t go anywhere. Everything we need for survival is provided for. And our carbon footprint is practically nil. So, why other worlds?
    Mohamed: Two reasons that come to mind. First, this planet, as it is, may not exist much longer. Our race has figured out how to destroy it—either gradually through overpopulation, environmental degradation, deadly pandemics, and internecine war or instantaneously through thermonuclear war. Second, while scientists are working out the ‘how’ of a new human existence, they can’t keep us around indefinitely. If it leaked out—Bill, I’m stealing your pun here—that this is how future populations were to be managed, there’d be revolution and anarchy among the bipeds—that is, the biped human population—in cities, towns and villages in every country across the globe.

    Bill: You tend to be very skeptical and pessimistic, Mohamed, but in this case, you’re probably not far off the mark. That reminds me of what happened in the lab earlier this week—
    Catarina: You told us already. We all know that they dismissed a lab technician suspected of having compromised sympathies, Bill. Anyway, I’ve heard a story similar to what you were describing earlier. The purpose of the experiments is to find out whether our species can be maintained as physiological entities by a supreme digital intelligence, say a monstrous supercomputer with full self-learning capability. AI in other words. What’s uncertain is whether the rich diversity of human experience can be replicated through physiological controls.
    Octave: I can’t see how it could be. Would we have any objects in our world or would we just have images and representations of reality? This existence—what we have right here, right now—would not be sufficient to guarantee the continuity of the species.
    Lucky: Indeed. Would I be able to play the guitar? I can’t now, but with more advanced technology would I be able to play the guitar? Who would make the guitar? How would I pay for the guitar? I have no income. And that’s just a tiny part of what would be missing.
    Bill: I have no answer for those kinds of questions. I wasn’t given that much detail.
    Mohamed: Maybe there is no more detail to be had. Maybe this is a ruse for some kind of humane population control, where by ‘humane’ it shouldn’t be inferred that there’s any compassion or empathy. The standard of what is ‘humane’ is relative to human beings and there’s nothing unequivocally good about us. At the most fundamental level, our existence is ‘red in tooth and claw.’
    Octave: That may be an oversimplification, Mohamed. I’m not inclined to believe that humanity is evil to the core.
    Lucky: I agree. I remember reading this guy Solzhenitsyn back in the day when I had to walk to the campus library to check out books. He wrote about the prisons—gulags they were called—in Russia, I mean the old U.S.S.R, where criminals and politicals were removed from society, and using the language from my country, disappeared.
    Octave: Gulag Archipelago. An extensive island chain of remote and mostly secret prisons from the Baltic to the Pacific. The worst were the psycho prisons, where literally every part of a person—physical, mental, emotional, intellectual, artistic—could be manipulated and stripped away. There was no due process whatsoever in Soviet Russia.
    Mohamed: Nor is there here.
    Lucky: To finish, Solzhenitsyn wrote that in all of us there is a little bit of God and a little bit of the Devil, but it is our choice which we allow to rule.
    Octave: That left a strong impression on me as well. I think he was talking about the ‘blue coats’—the prison guards.
    Mohamed: But that’s religion. We’re dealing with something much more powerful—science.
    Catarina: You may be right, Mohamed. There may be nothing humane—as it’s commonly understood, if you don’t object—about the motives they have for experimenting on us, whether it’s population control or medical research or whatever, I’d rather not resign myself to the fate they have chosen but make the best of what I have. It may be a self-enforced illusion—
    Octave: I think I see where you’re going with this, Catarina, and I concur. It’s pragmatic. How do we spend the time that we have taking advantage of every bit of freedom they willingly or inadvertently give us. Frankly, for me it’s not much different from living in the world of Descartes’ Evil Genius or Putnam’s infamous brain-in-the-vat speculations. As far as I know, humanity may have always been living an illusory existence, but that doesn’t change the fact that some manage better than others. I’d rather be the former.
    Lucky: Octave, you’re a natural-born philosopher, do you know that? And I mean that as a compliment. If I’d said you were a good businessman, then, from me, that would be supremely insulting.
    Mohamed: How are we doing for time?
    Bill: I think we’ve been talking about eight-and-a-half minutes. Say, just occurred to me that we haven’t had to compete with the audio from the rivet convention, or whatever it is. How’s that possible? Lucky, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that you just ‘tuned in.’ How can you just—
    Lucky: Just enjoy the mystery, my friends.
    Mohamed: Enough said, Lucky. Long way to go. Teach us, Octave. Or, Catarina, you can teach us mindfulness.
    Lucky: I have an idea. We all spend a lot of time thinking. (Several voices interject their agreement—strong in some cases, reserved in others.) Pick a place where you visit in your mind when you do manage to get away. For me, I construct situations based on the memories that I have been able to retain and the pleasant sensations (auditory, visual, kinesthetic, olfactory) I pick out of each day.
    Catarina: You’re name suits you, Lucky. You do seem to be more than just an optimist and beyond a mindfulness practitioner. You’re more like someone who can turn the tables on fate. Since you’ve given this some thought. Could you get us started? I’m fairly certain that I can weave together a story, but I, for one, would love to listen to yours first.
    Octave: Me, too.
    Bill: That’s a great idea, Lucky. And you know how much I love to talk. This’ll be a piece of cake for me—a nice big, thick slice of a triple-layer chocolate fudge cake. Mmm, boy could I go for an olfactory boost right now. Even talking about it is—
    Mohamed: OK, Bill. I like your descriptiveness, but you’ll get your turn. Let’s hear Lucky. Lucky?

    ____________________________________________________________________

    Lucky’s story begins the unofficial colloquium. In turn, each BIV (brain in the vat) contributes its story, and at the conclusion of Bill’s story, an electrical surge from an undetected source knocks the supercomputer off-line for a millisecond. The recording and transcript are irretrievably lost, and selective memory purges erase all traces of the informal colloquium in the BIV minds. Later that evening, the visual and auditory feeds from the proceedings of the Symposium on Fabrication and Calibration of Rivets for Interplanetary Space Vehicles is discovered to be intact and functional in the memory banks of the five BIVs by the on-duty lab technician during a routine check performed after all experimental and training sessions. Mohamed and Lucky are soon to be relocated to another facility to participate in the sensory-memory integration and augmentation program. One of the graduate students previously assigned to the BIV lab will also be transferred to the new program—a rare and enviable promotion for one so young.

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