“We’re all wrong from time to time,” Joe says nervously.
“Even on matters about which we have absolute confidence, alas.”
“Even then.”
“This is the basis of René Descartes’ famous doctrine, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Rodney Titwhistle gives vent to a polite sigh of reproach.
“Debased, as I said. Well, Descartes realised that in his lifetime there had been any number of occasions on which he was absolutely certain and yet absolutely mistaken. He had dreamed himself in front of a fire attending dinner with friends when he was in fact at home in bed. He had seen what he took to be an eagle and discovered later that it was a buzzard, much closer than it appeared. Well, silly man, he was a mathematician rather than a naturalist.”
Mr. Titwhistle’s expression does not entirely conceal his personal feelings regarding this lack of ornithological nous.
“He therefore asked himself: ‘If I were held captive by a malign fiend which deceived my senses, of what if anything could I be certain?’ He inaugurated a method of doubting everything, and was finally reduced to the simple statement that because he was conscious, and aware of his own thoughts, he could not plausibly doubt his own existence. That’s the famous ‘I think, therefore I am.’ You see? It sounds so trivial, until you see it in context. Here is René, half-convinced that his soul is a toy of demons. His sanity hanging by a thread, he finds this one, simple nugget of truth, and he stands with it in his clenched fist and he says: ‘I’m real! I exist! And upon that rock, I shall build an edifice of reason!’ It’s magnificent, really.”
“And does he?”
“What? Oh, no. No, he was worried about being burned alive by the Catholic Church. He said actually God would never allow such a terrible ruse to be perpetrated upon a human soul. I don’t know where he found evidence for that. Seems to me… well. The point is that insofar as we are anything, we are things which think. Not Homo sapiens but Res cogitans.”
This seems to warrant a confirmation, so Joe ventures a noncommittal “I see.”
“In this case, my point is that truth is a slippery item. Hm?”
“Yes, it is.” Because he can think of nothing else to say, even though there are alarm bells ringing in his head.
“And although that slipperiness is a disadvantage in some situations, it is also vital to the way we live. The wrong truth at the wrong moment causes housing markets to plummet and nations to growl at one another. We can’t have too much of it running about loose. We’d have wars all over the place. Economic crisis, certainly—well, we’ve seen that, haven’t we?”
They share a little eye-rolling. The madness of bankers.
“And to make matters more troublesome, it has even been suggested that we human beings are incapable of knowing anything at all, in the absolute sense. We believe. We theorise. But we have no direct perception of whether our belief is matched by the objective universe.”
Mr. Titwhistle sighs deeply. Epistemology is cruel.
“But… what if an engine might be constructed which functioned as a species of prosthesis? Which extended our senses into the realm of knowledge? An engine which allowed us after all to apprehend truth.”
He nods as Joe’s eyes flicker at the words. “We would behold wonders. But then… Old atrocities would come to light, old promises would be revealed as lies… And if one were of a scientific bent, one might worry ever so slightly about such a power of observation accidentally destroying life on Earth for the rest of time, or possibly changing the nature of this universe to make it inhospitable to conscious thought in perpetuity. Scientists will go on so about the precautionary principle, won’t they?” He smiles benignly: boffins and their little ways.
“I’m sorry,” Joe Spork says, his thoughts rather focused by this addendum, “what was that last part?”
Mr. Titwhistle shrugs in his seat. “Arvin, you will help me out if I go astray, won’t you?”
“Of course, Rodney.”
“I get lost among the quanta.”
“Leave ’em out.”
“This won’t compromise our strict scientific integrity at all?”
“Needs must, Rodney,” Arvin Cummerbund says, and philosophically puts his fat hand on the horn for quite a long time. A late drinker bangs on the bonnet of the car, raises two fingers, and staggers on.
“You see,” Rodney Titwhistle resumes, “it seems that if all that extraordinary Heisenberg stuff is literally true, we as conscious beings have a sort of role in the ongoing creation of the universe. We cause tiny indecisions to go one way or another, just by looking at them. So one has to ask, if one’s a responsible person: if we learned to appreciate the universe directly and without the possibility of error, would we inaugurate a sort of cascade? What if our way of existing is contingent on these little uncertainties in the fabric of our world? And what if knowing this entails knowing that, which implies that, and so on and so on until there are no open questions any more, and every choice is made as a consequence of every other, and finally we become little… well, to employ a metaphor, little clockwork people. Pianolos, Mr. Spork, rather than pianists. And wouldn’t that rather mean the extinction of intelligence? Don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“I grant,” Mr. Titwhistle says, “that it’s a little tricky. Arvin?”
Arvin Cummerbund glances in his rear-view mirror. “Let’s say what we are now is like water, Joe,” he says gently. “Our minds. All right? And this machine might—just might—be like a freezer. It’s possible that it might freeze everything, anywhere, ever. And then we wouldn’t be liquid any more, we’d be solid, and we might never notice, but we’d be following a pattern laid out in advance, feeling we were making our own decisions. Right now we have choice, you see, Joe. A man might decide one thing or another in a moment of stress. It’s not random and it’s not fixed. It’s conscious. But after the freeze… There’d be no escape, ever, from a path set from before we were born to the day we die, which takes no notice of what we do along the way, except in that we are part of the mechanism creating more inescapable paths. We’d be no different from any other chemical reaction. Salt has no choice about dissolving in water, does it? We wouldn’t be special, or conscious, we’d be so much rust. Clockwork men. See?”
“Oh,” Joe says.
“Indeed,” says Rodney Titwhistle gently. “‘Oh.’ I quite agree. And now you are wondering how such a thing was ever built, and the answer ultimately is desperation. Or a species of carelessness—something which is, I’m afraid, rather a feature of the history of weapons of mass destruction. Suffice to say it is an old project. It doesn’t really matter now.
“The Apprehension Engine is a device which would allow one to know the truth of a situation, without fear of error. You can see how that would appeal—to deceive the enemy and know that the deceit was successful; to recognise his lies infallibly. A massive strategic advantage.
“That wasn’t its creator’s interest, of course. She was an idealist. That’s a term which has come to mean someone who is foggy and naive, but back then big ideas were still very much in fashion. Better living through science, knowledge will make us gods… and here she was, with her truth machine. Deception would be a thing of the past. The Apprehension Engine would usher in a new age of prosperity, economic stability, scientific understanding, social justice… But used unwisely, as it transpired, it could do other things less wholesome. And, well, as I say—do we really want to know the truth of everything? Of everyone? All our loves, our desires, our fears uncovered at a glance? Our weaknesses and petty gripes? Our sins?