Authors: Robert Kroese
I pace across my tiny apartment for a few minutes, trying to avoid the sad truth: as bad as witnessing the tragic deaths of several people would be, I can
’t imagine it would be any worse than hanging around this shitty apartment all day. If the weather was decent, I might go to a park and read for a few hours, but it’s cold and windy. So I’ve got nothing to do but sit and think about a tragedy that I might have prevented. Fuck!
I call Heller back. I know he
’s manipulating me, that he doesn’t care about whether those people in Alameda live or die, but it doesn’t really matter. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.
“
Hello?” says Heller’s voice.
“
What do you mean, I don’t need the randomizer?”
“
Are you going to do it? Go to the Alameda crux?”
“
Yes.”
“
Are you in your car?”
“
Not yet.”
“
You’d better get going. I’ll explain while you’re driving.”
“
All right. Call me back in two minutes.”
I get in the car and start toward Alameda. Heller calls me back and I put him on speaker. He tells me the crux is at an intersection downtown, in about ten minutes. When I ask him about the randomizer, he says that the critical part of the randomizer is the part that detects the radioactive decay, because that
’s the part that actually injects randomness. He says he can hit the button on the device in his shop and text me with the result.
“
But I need some way of interfering with the coin toss,” I say.
“
A push should do it,” he says.
“
What do you mean, a push?”
“
I mean give the target a shove. Right before they toss the coin.”
“
You’re nuts.”
“
Why?” he asks.
“
You mean physically shoving the person.”
“
Correct. If you time it right, you’ll interfere with the toss.”
“
What do you need the randomizer for, if you could interfere by just shoving people?”
“
As I said, the important part of the randomizer is the decay detector. That’s what generates randomness. How you translate that randomness into an effect on the macro scale is immaterial. I’ll trigger the randomizer here a few seconds before the crux and text you the results. If the randomizer emits a pulse, I’ll text you a one, and if it doesn’t, I’ll text you a zero. You give the target a shove if I text you a one.”
“
How do I know they will even go through with the toss if I shove them?”
“
You don’t. The crux may turn out to be a phantom in the data.”
“
You mean I’ll prevent the crux from happening, which means the event will occur as if I hadn’t tampered with it.”
“
Six of one,” says Heller. “Counterfactuals …”
“
Yeah, yeah,” I say. No time for another philosophical quagmire. “How hard do I have to shove them?”
“
Not very. A tap on the shoulder might even do it. But a shove is safer. Just make up your mind exactly what you’re going to do before you get my text. It has to be decisive, so there’s no question about whether you’ve interfered or not. And make sure you
only
interfere if I text you a one. If you shove the target either way, then you’ve removed the randomness.”
“
And Ananke wins.”
“
Exactly.”
“
OK, I’m almost there. Text me the exact time, when you get it.”
“
I will. Thanks, Paul.”
Fuck you, Heller, I think. But I hang up without saying it.
Talking to Heller makes me uneasy in a way I can’t quite define. Claustrophobia is the closest thing I can think of, like I’m walking down a long hallway that’s gradually, almost imperceptibly narrowing. I know that eventually it’s going to narrow to the point where I can’t even move, and yet somehow it will still keep narrowing until I’m crushed between the walls. And still the walls will narrow until I’m completely obliterated and the hallway itself disappears. But I can’t stop walking.
Heller tells me that thinking in counterfactuals will drive me crazy. Maybe that
’s true, but
not
thinking in counterfactuals may also drive me crazy. That’s what freedom is, right? The ability to make choices. If I look back on everything I’ve done and think, ‘I couldn’t possibly have done anything differently,’ then what’s the point in doing
anything
? So thinking that you should have done something differently drives you crazy and thinking that you couldn’t have done anything differently also drives you crazy. Maybe the rabbi was right: I’m going to think myself to death.
I find a parking space on a side street down the road a couple blocks from the crux location. Checking my phone, I see that I
’ve got about three minutes. I jog toward the intersection. When I’m about halfway there, I get a text from Heller reading:
9:43:25. 60 ft sw of xing
Presumably that means sixty feet southwest of the intersection. My timing is just about perfect; I see a group of teenagers arguing good-naturedly about something just past the intersection. If I walk briskly, I can get to them right around the time of the crux. Unfortunately, as I near the intersection, the DON’T WALK sign begins flashing and the light turns yellow. I can’t make it in time. The light turns red as I get to the edge of the curb, and cars begin to pull forward. It’s not a huge intersection, but there’s enough traffic to block my way. I check my phone: ten seconds. The teenagers are still arguing. One of them, an Asian kid who looks around seventeen, is poking around in his pockets. He pulls out a coin.
Cars are still crossing the intersection with just enough speed and frequency to make it impossible to cross. My phone beeps. I
’ve gotten a text from Heller. It reads: 1.
Shit. That means I
’ve got to get across the intersection and shove the kid before he tosses the coin. For a second, I wonder if just yelling at him will do it. Yelling should be enough to jolt his nerves a bit, right? But while I’m considering this, there’s a momentary lull in the traffic and without thinking, I dart into the street. Turns out I’ve misjudged the speed of an SUV; the guy slams on his breaks and slides to a halt, knocking me onto the pavement. I’m stunned, but I hear the kids gasping and shouting. I look up to see them staring at me – except for the Asian kid, who is watching a coin fall. It hits the back of his left hand and he slaps his right palm over it. “Tails!” he exclaims.
The driver of the SUV, a big, red-faced guy, leans out his window.
“Hey, you OK?” he says. “Why’d you run out in front of me?”
I wave at him, brushing gravel off my pants.
“I’m fine,” I say, not feeling it. No point in shoving the kid now (although I kind of want to), so I continue onto the sidewalk and walk past the group of kids. As I’m walking down the sidewalk, I get a one-word text from Heller:
YES
Heller and I hadn’t settled on a formal signal for success, but that can only mean the tampering worked: I prevented whatever was going to happen, simply by running out in front of traffic. I guess I must have given the kid enough of a jolt to alter the result of the toss.
I turn around and see the kids getting into a little old Volkswagen parked near where they were standing. Thankfully, they
’ve lost interest in me. The car pulls away, and I jog after it a little ways. The event location – that is, the location of the event that will no longer happen, is at the intersection, a hundred or so yards away. The light turns red as the Volkswagen approaches, so I have plenty of time to catch up. I check my phone and see that the event time has come and gone. Nothing has happened. And there’s no way to know what
might
have happened. People are just going about their business. No accolades for me today. How
does
Tali do this? If you fail, you get to see a bunch of people get killed, and if you succeed, nothing happens. I resist the urge to holler “You’re welcome!” to nobody in particular.
I
’m about to turn around and head back to my car when something catches my eye. No, not something,
someone
. A pretty brunette in a black coat standing on the sidewalk kitty-corner from me, observing the intersection. Next to her stands a tall, blond man in a dark suit and an overcoat. He says something to her and she replies. Then she walks to a Cadillac parked alongside the street and gets in the backseat. He follows.
I try to yell to her, but I
’m still hoarse from yesterday and my rasping call is lost in the noise of traffic. I can’t tell if she saw me or not. The Cadillac makes a U-turn and pulls away. Tali is gone.
Once back at the apartment, I try to make sense of what I
’ve just seen. Why would Tali be at the Alameda site? Who was the man she was with? Did Heller know she would be there? Is there something he’s not telling me?
There
’s definitely something about Heller I don’t trust. To the extent that I understand him, his actions seem rational, but there’s something wrong with a man who wouldn’t lift a finger to prevent a tragedy that was going to kill several people. He would have been perfectly happy to let those people die. It was only my insistence on intervening that saved them.
I
did that, I think. I saved lives today.
On the other hand, yesterday I caused a fire that killed several other people. That
’s the fair way to look at it, isn’t it? I can’t take credit for saving lives today if I don’t take the blame for yesterday’s deaths. If I hadn’t interfered at the apartment building in Hayward, the event wouldn’t have happened. Tina wouldn’t have been distracted from her cooking and there would have been no fire. Would have, could have, should have. Counterfactuals. They’re coming to take me away, haha!
I
’m also suspicious about the way Heller clams up whenever I mention Tali. There’s definitely something he’s not telling me. Did he know what Tali was up to? If he knew Tali was going to be in Alameda and he didn’t want me to see her, why did he send me there? And if Tali and he were somehow conspiring against me, he would have warned her I would be there. I don’t really see Tali as the conspiring type anyway; maybe I’m deluded to think that I understand her, but I still don’t believe she intended to stand me up. Something outside of her control prevented her from meeting me at Garibaldi’s. Something involving the man I saw getting into the Cadillac with her. Was she being blackmailed somehow?
I wonder if I should tell Heller about seeing Tali. What if he has something to do with her disappearance? That seems unlikely; I don
’t think he’s faking his concern for her. And yet, there’s clearly something he’s not telling me. Maybe Tali disappeared to get away from him. That makes some sense: maybe she realized that he’s off his rocker, and she didn’t want to work for him anymore. But was she really so afraid of him that she would disappear without warning? And why would she make a date – OK,
appointment
– with me if she knew she wasn’t going to make it? What could she have suddenly found out that made her want to vanish?
But the real question is: who was the man with her
in Alameda? Whoever he was, he’s the key to Tali’s disappearance. Either he had taken her against her will or they were conspiring together. It didn’t look like she was being coerced physically, but maybe he had some other sort of leverage against her. There just isn’t any way to know.
I spend the next several hours obsessing over the events of the past few days, trying to consider some angle I
’ve missed. Intermittently I turn to Heller’s book for clues about his behavior and what might have driven Tali away. I’m struck by a passage on free will. This part gets a little abstract, so I won’t blame you if you want to skim it.
Free will is the name we give to the phenomenon of consciousness causing changes in the physical world around us, and as such it can only be understood insofar as consciousness itself is understood. But consciousness (alternately referred to as “awareness”) seems to be one of those things that although we know it when we see it, it’s impossible to define.
One thing we know about consciousness is that it exists only in the present. Although we can talk about being aware of events that are going to happen or of events that have happened, we cannot be aware of the past or future in the same sense that we are aware of the present. In fact, our awareness of both the past and future are necessarily filtered through that elusive medium known as the present. To put it another way, we can be aware
of
the past or future, but we cannot be aware
in
the past or future.
We can only understand free will in terms of consciousness, and we can only understand consciousness in terms of the present. So what is the present? We tend to think of the present as one of three possible divisions of time: past, present, and future. Oddly, however, the laws of physics have very little to say about these divisions. It
’s true that entropy moves in one direction, with disorder increasing as we move from the “past” to the “future,” but the crucial point is that there is no objective past or future intrinsic in time itself. If we look at time as a line, identifying which part of the line is “past” and which part is “future” is as impossible as determining which part is “left” and which part is “right.” It depends on your point of view.
We thus resort to saying that the future is
“what hasn’t happened yet.” But this is merely a restatement of the problem. When we say that something
is happening
, we are saying that some cause is having an effect. But cause and effect are the same in the past, present and future. More precisely, the division between
happened
/
happening
/
will happen
is meaningless in terms of the laws of physics. We assume that when a scientist talks about the results of an experiment, she is talking about something that happened in the past, but that is merely a recognition of our limited viewpoint, not an indication of the limitation of the laws of physics. In fact, science assumes that the results of any experiment will be the same as the results of an identical experiment conducted in the past (or future). If this weren’t the case – if past results were not indicative of future results – then science would be a pointless pursuit.
As far as the laws of physics are concerned, there is no difference between past and future.
So if we are aware of the passage of time but time does not actually pass in any objective sense, then our division of time into past, present and future is an arbitrary artifact of our awareness. Maybe the passage of time is simply the mind’s way of making sense of reality. We experience only the present moment because that’s all our brains can handle. But in that case, the present is just an arbitrary brain-sized chunk of the universe. Essentially we are creating the present by being aware of it.
This presents us with a strange situation. We
’ve said that consciousness can be understood only in terms of the present, but now we see that the consciousness
creates
the present. So consciousness somehow creates the medium in which consciousness works. This seemingly paradoxical notion is not so strange when we consider consciousness as something that gradually comes into being – which of course it does. An infant’s consciousness is rudimentary because he has no sense of the present (conversely, we could say that the infant has no sense of the present because he has only rudimentary consciousness). One might object that in fact the infant knows
only
the present, but that is saying essentially the same thing. The present can only be understood as the dividing line between the past and the future, and the infant has no sense of either. Experiences flow past him in a seemingly arbitrary manner and disappear without being made into memories. Only gradually does the child start to notice patterns amid the experiences, and these patterns are stored as memories. Then, as new experiences pour in, they are compared against memories. This comparison is the basis for the child’s understanding of the past and future, from which arises his awareness of the present.
It
’s interesting that a child’s gradually developing awareness of space occurs in much the same manner as his awareness of time. As an embryo, a child is aware of no distinction between the internal and the external, between
I
and
other
. After the child is born, and as it grows, it is bombarded with sensory input that reinforces the distinction between the subjective and the objective, and it is the awareness of these categories that gives rise to the child’s awareness of
self
. But as with
present
, the concept of
self
is an artificial construct arising from this arbitrary division of subjective and objective. If you take a scalpel to the self in an attempt to separate it from the rest of the universe, you’ll eventually find you’ve got nothing left. We’ve each individually created a concept of self as a sort of survival mechanism, but in a sense there is no such thing as the self.
But if no self
exists, then how can a person be said to have free will? How can someone devoid of a self even be considered a person? My intuition is that the typical understanding of free will has the matter backwards: it isn’t the self that has free will; it’s the will that creates the self.
An embryo has no sense of time or space and therefore has no consciousness. What an embryo
does
have, however, is a will. Like all living things, from a dandelion to a blue whale, an embryo has a desire to live. The will of a three-week old human embryo or a dandelion is weaker and certainly much less well defined than that of a typical adult human, but the will is unmistakably present. For that matter, it’s hard to observe millions of spermatozoa desperately trying to reach an egg and fail to see a rudimentary will at work. Life cannot exist without will, and over time (given a sufficiently complex vessel and suitable environment), will gives rise to consciousness – that is, to the self.
Is the self then just an observer, a sort of passive figurehead created by the will?
Not exactly. It is clear that once consciousness arises, it can then affect the will in some way. Consider the young athlete who becomes conscious of the value of winning a triathlon and whose will responds with the determination to do just that. So there develops a sort of feedback loop in which the will creates the consciousness and awareness then strengthens (or possibly weakens) the will.
It may be helpful to think of the will as a sort of vitality or
“life force” which can, under the right circumstances, give rise to consciousness. Consciousness can then mold the will, for good or ill. So consciousness is not entirely passive, but it is secondary to the will. Consciousness needs the will, but will does not need consciousness. What then of our choices? Is it not the self that is choosing to have a second helping of lasagna rather than a salad? No, it is the will. Although the self can mold the will to an extent, it is always the will that decides. This explains my experience of wanting to choose the salad but being unable to: the self is aware of the consequences of the choice, but it cannot overrule the will. When it comes down to actually making a choice, the self is reduced to an observer. After the choice is made, of course, I will insist that “I” made it, but that is a fiction borne of the fact that I am unable to understand myself as two competing entities in a single mind. It is not I who chooses, but the will.
This part creeps me out a little. I think maybe it’s because whenever I hear somebody talking about the “will,” I start thinking about Nietzsche and Hitler. It’s not just me, right? I mean, basically what he’s saying is that there’s this sort of primal life force that drives everything we do and that exists before consciousness, rationality, ethics, morality – all the stuff that makes us human. Maybe I’m misrepresenting him, but I picture this life force as existing in a sort of platonic realm somewhere, like a cosmic storeroom. I remember reading about the Jewish myth of the “treasury of souls,” which stores souls until the angel Gabriel is ready to stuff one into an embryo. Something like that, anyway. Except that a soul is a complete thing in itself – it’s really the person’s identity, his personality – or at least the basis of a personality. There’s an implication that God created each soul as a unique thing with its own purpose. The way I picture Heller’s storeroom, it’s more like one of those machines that spits out a glob of plastic or cookie dough or whatever onto an assembly line. The “will” is just an amorphous blob of goo until it gets shaped into something by the machinery of the factory.
The blob of goo has no personality, no rationality, and no sense of right or wrong. Not only that, but it seems like it lacks the capability of
developing
a sense of right or wrong. Heller calls it a “life force,” which is a little weird, considering that he deliberately
doesn’t
call determinism a force. He personifies the universe and then reduces free will to some kind of abstract force, like gravity or electromagnetism. If the will really is a “force,” in this sense, then it’s completely unthinking and unfeeling. All it does, all it
can
do, is exert itself in a purely mechanistic way against the rest of the universe. Sure, it can be limited and molded by consciousness and experience, but it seems to me what Heller calls “molding” is really just behavioral conditioning. The will tries to grab a cookie and it gets slapped, so it learns not to grab the cookie. But it doesn’t suddenly develop a sense of morality. It’s still the same blob of goo, but now it’s been squeezed into a different shape. So it can learn to act morally, but it doesn’t become moral. There’s a word for people who learn to act morally without actually possessing any morality. It’s
sociopath
.
The phone rings.
Heller.
“
Hello?”