Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

We shot the usual academic breeze for a while—how the administration was killing us, how nice it was to have a mostly empty campus in the summer, how criminal it was that academic salaries were lagging ever further behind private-sector equivalents—and then I got down to the heart of the matter, so to speak. “I was reading online that you’ve been doing some remarkable work in recovering lost memories.”

“Yes, indeed. I hope someday to apply it to a few of our federal politicians.”

“Ha-ha. But, see, here’s the thing: I don’t remember anything from the first six months of the year 2001.”

Namboothiri’s unibrow ascended his forehead. “But your memories before that, and after, are normal?”

“As far as I can tell.”

He leaned back in his chair and interlaced his fingers behind his balding head. “Do you have any idea why you can’t remember that period?”

I took a deep breath. If this man was going to help me, he had to know at least part of the truth. “Yes. It has to do with the nature of consciousness. I was one of the subjects in an experiment done back then at U of M, and it had the effect of knocking me down to being a philosopher’s zombie.”

“You’re shitting me. You mean Chalmers and all that crap?”

“Yes, exactly. For those six months, my lights were on, but nobody was home, and I can’t remember anything from that period. And yet a philosopher’s zombie must have some sort of memory—otherwise, its behavior wouldn’t be indistinguishable from that of a normal person. I took courses, I interacted with people, I even managed a relationship with a girl—and the memories of that time had to have been stored somewhere. But for the life of me, I can’t access them.”

Namboothiri nodded slowly. “We all have memories we can no longer access. For most of us, that’s everything before about the age of three; that’s when we switch from indexing memories visually to indexing them verbally. The switching happens at the same time children start having imaginary friends—and that makes perfect sense: they’re beginning to have an inner monologue and don’t yet realize that it’s themselves that they’re talking to.”

“Very Julian Jaynes,” I said, referring to the author of one of my favorite books, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

“Exactly. Anyway, verbal indexing is much more efficient, which is why once you have a significant vocabulary, you switch over to it. It’s way easier to mentally say, ‘Remember the house my friend Anil lived in’ than it is to shuffle mentally through pictures of every house you’ve ever committed to memory, hoping for a match. But, you know, there are adults who do index their memories visually. Ever read Temple Grandin? The famous autistic?”

I nodded and cited the title of her most popular book. “Thinking in Pictures.”

“Exactly. And apparently she does.” He brought his hands down to his armrests and leaned forward, almost conspiratorially. “You know as well as I do that neuroscience advances through a series of unfortunate accidents—fortunate for us, the researchers, but often devastating for the patients. You know how rare retrograde amnesia is—outside of soap operas, I mean. Imagine how rare it is to find someone deep on the autism spectrum suffering from it. But one of my patients here has precisely that condition. Poor woman suffered a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident; couldn’t recall anything much from before the collision, her whole life basically wiped out.”

“Like Lieutenant Uhura in ‘The Changeling.’” I’d expected the usual blank stare I got when I made one of my patented “All I need to know in life I learned from Star Trek” references, but, to my surprise, Namboothiri pointed a finger at me, and said, “Exactly! In that episode, Nomad supposedly wiped her memories. But, you know, what must’ve really happened is the same thing that happens when you format a disk drive. A normal formatting doesn’t wipe the drive clean; it just wipes the file allocation table—essentially, the index. All the other ones and zeros on the disk are left intact, which is why you read about police recovering files criminals thought they’d erased. That’s what must’ve happened to Lieutenant Uhura: the indexing of her memories was wiped, but the memories themselves were left intact—which explains her being back at work on the bridge of the Enterprise in the next episode. Well, same thing for the woman in the motorcycle accident. Her memories were still there, but the index of them—in her case, as an autistic, a massive visual index—was damaged by the impact. But using a variation of the Montreal technique, I’ve been able to help her re-access her memories.”

“You mean with direct electrical stimulation of her brain? Like Wilder Penfield did? The whole ‘I smell burnt toast’ thing?”

“Yes. Of course, we’ve come a long way since Penfield’s day. We don’t have to open the skull to do the stimulation. The beauty of it is, as we learned thanks to the case I’ve been talking about, the visual memory index, long abandoned in neurotypicals, is physically separate from the verbal memory index. So, in your case, well—how old are you?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Fine. Well, in your case, we don’t have to rummage around through the thirty-six years or so of memory that you’ve indexed verbally. If I’m right, any memories you laid down during your philosophical-zombie period will be accessible through the visual index. Instead of looking for a six-month needle in a thirty-nine-year haystack, the memories from those six months in 2001, or at least the index entries for them, will only be mixed in with a few years of much older memories, and, since those memories are of early childhood, they’ll be easy to recognize as irrelevant to the task at hand.”

“Excellent, excellent. Thank you.”

“Have you had a recent MRI?”

“No.”

“All right. I have a friend at St. Boniface. Let me call her and see if she can squeeze you in.” He picked up the phone on his desk and made a call; I only heard his side.

“Hi, Brenda, it’s Bhavesh. Listen, I need to get an MRI done for a… a patient of mine, and I don’t want to—what? Really? Hang on.” He held the handset to his chest. “How fast can you get over to St. Boniface?”

I frowned. “This time of day, no traffic? Ten minutes.”

“Go! She’s got a cancellation at half-past two.”

I hurried out the door.

“So,” I asked, looking out at the sea of faces, “in our example, why do we accord moral standing to Jacob, but not to the robot? Why do we say the state can’t execute Jacob but it can shut off and dismantle the robot?”

“Well,” said Zach, in the second row, “Jacob is a Homo sapien.”

“Homo sapiens,” I said.

The kid looked baffled.

I was reminded of the Wayne and Shuster skit about the assassination of Julius Caesar. The private eye investigating Big Julie’s demise orders a “martinus.” “Don’t you mean martini?” asks the bartender. And the detective snaps back, “If I wanted two, I’d ask for them.”

“Homo sapiens is singular,” I said. “There’s no such thing as a Homo sapien.”

“Oh. Okay. So what’s the plural of Homo sapiens?”

I rattled off all seven syllables: “Homines sapientes.”

The kid didn’t miss a beat. “Now you’re just making shit up.”

“Jim, thank you for coming in,” Namboothiri said. I’d found an email from him waiting for me when I’d woken up, and had hustled back to his office.