Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“Yes?”

Menno continued along, the packed-down snow squeaking underfoot. “Background noise…” he said, slowly pursuing the idea as if it were a rabbit that would flee if startled. “In the auditory cortex…” His heart was pounding. “Preferentially present in those who study psychology.”

“Well, I always said psych students were a little weird.”

“It’s not just that,” Menno replied. “Psych attracts a certain kind of student: kids trying to make sense of themselves. Cheaper than therapy, you know?”

A single puff of chilled air: “So?”

“So, they’re obviously chewing things over, ruminating, wondering.” He felt his eyebrows colliding with the wool of his cap, and he lowered his voice, as if speaking softly would make the idea sound less crazy. “The background stuff. It isn’t noise.” He shook his head. “It’s—my God! It’s inner monologue —stream of consciousness! It’s the constant background of a normal life, all the stuff you’re thinking inside: I wonder what’s for lunch. Jeez, is it Thursday already? Gotta remember to stop by the store on the way home. Those thoughts—those articulated thoughts—are made of phonemes, too. They’re never spoken, they’re never even subvocalized or mouthed. But they’re words all the same, made up of phonemes. And so the question isn’t—”

“The question isn’t,” said Dominic, coming to a dead halt beneath skeletal branches, “why some people do have background noise in their auditory cortices. The question is why most people do not.”

I entered the lecture hall in the aptly named Tier Building, rows of first-year students rising in front of me. Some were looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed even now, at stupid o’clock in the morning, but most still showed signs of struggling to wake up. Tim Hortons had clearly done dynamite business before class: half the students had red cardboard cups on their swing-up desktops.

I tucked my hands into the pockets of my black denim jeans and strode to the lectern. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to start with a joke. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.” I smiled and waited until I had their full attention—or, at least, attention from those who usually gave it. “Here goes: why was the road crossed by the chicken?”

I continued to smile at them, but no one laughed. After a few seconds, I said, “Tough room,” and that, at least, merited a few chuckles. “Anybody? What’s the punch line?”

A white girl with long red hair in the third row started to say, “To get to the…” But she trailed off, apparently realizing that although that worked when the setup was the normal “why did the chicken cross the road,” it didn’t make sense here.

I tried again: “Anyone? Why was the road crossed by the chicken?”

An Asian boy in the fifth row folded his arms in front of his Winnipeg Jets sweatshirt. “There’s no answer to that, Professor Marchuk.”

“Why not?”

The boy’s tone conveyed that his word choice was deliberate: “Well, this ain’t English class”—and that, too, got some chuckles—“but your joke is in the passive voice. There isn’t anybody deliberately doing anything, so there’s no one to assign the motivation of ‘to get to the other side’ to.”

“Exactly!” I said, delighted, as I always was, when a session got off to a good start. “And you’re right, this isn’t English class; it’s psychology. So let me introduce you to a core psychological concept, namely the notion of agency—the subjective awareness that you are initiating and executing your own actions. And then we’re going to talk about why, although we all believe that we do indeed have agency, perhaps we really don’t…”

I returned to my condo, grabbed a shower, put on a wine-colored shirt and black slacks, and drove over to The Forks. Once again, I was listening to the CBC; The World at Six was on.

“—and the stunning news that the leader of the New Democratic Party has chosen not to seek re-election this time out,” Susan Bonner said. “We reached political analyst Hayden Trenholm in Ottawa. Mr. Trenholm, what do you make of his announcement?”

A man’s voice with a hint of a Maritime accent: “The NDP were the front-runners in the 2015 election but stumbled badly under then-leader Tom Mulcair, and his replacement certainly also failed to excite. But if they can come up with someone people from across the political spectrum can get behind, the New Democrats could make some interesting gains. Of course, they’ve been searching in vain for a person like that since Jack Layton passed away in 2011…”

I parked my car and headed out into the cool evening air. I’d made reservations for us at Sydney’s, an upscale place housed in the century-old Grand Trunk Pacific Railway Stable. Kayla was already seated when I got there—gotta love that punctuality—and—what a sweetheart!—she’d already asked the server to bring a vegetarian menu for me. We had a great table by a semicircular window; it arched up from a horizontal sill overlooking the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Kayla was wearing a shimmering blue top and gray pants.

After we’d ordered, I said, “So, at lunch you were talking about the quantum physics of consciousness.”

She took a sip of wine. “That’s right. My research partner is a woman named Victoria Chen. As I said earlier, she’s developed a system that can detect quantum superposition in neural tissue.”

“I’m no physicist, but I thought you couldn’t have quantum effects like that in living things.”

“Oh, it definitely happens in some biological systems. We’ve known since 2007 that there’s superposition in chlorophyll, for instance. Photosynthesis has a ninety-five percent energy-transfer efficiency rate, which is better than anything we can engineer. Plants achieve that by using superposition to simultaneously try all the possible pathways between their light-collecting molecules and their reaction-center proteins so that energy is always sent down the most efficient route; it’s a form of biological quantum computing. Vic was curious about how plants manage that at room temperature while we have to chill our quantum computers to a fraction above absolute zero to get superposition. And, well, as I mentioned at lunch, I’ve long been interested in the Penrose-Hameroff model that says quantum superposition in the microtubules of neuronal tissue is what gives rise to consciousness. So I convinced Vic to let me try her technique on people, to see if there really is superposition in human brains.”

“And?”

“And, oh my God, yes, there is. It’s not quite what Hameroff and Penrose proposed, but they definitely opened the door for this line of work.” She sighed wistfully. “I suspect Vic and I will have to share our eventual Nobel with one of them—they only allow three people on a Nobel, so Stuart and Roger will have to fight it out between themselves.”

“Ha.”

“Yeah, see, they think consciousness occurs in the moments of collapse from superposition to classical physics—that each moment of collapse is a moment of consciousness, forty or so of them per second. It was an interesting theoretical model when they first put it forth in the 1990s, but Victoria has shown that superposition in microtubules, unique among body structures, is maintained indefinitely—indeed, probably permanently.”

I frowned. “But I thought quantum superposition was fragile. Doesn’t it fall apart?”

“Not as far as we can tell. Not ever—or at least not as long as the person is alive.”