And then your kind invitations to visit the Gatehouse, when you allowed me to work in the lab on his experiments and set my eye to his telescope, and when you later tucked me up to sleep in his sleeping pack. I delivered such sermons about how I felt his spirit in that place. In the lab, with the goats, under those stars, I felt still at last.
How I blathered on. You were so indulgent of my grief, when yours must have called for its own space and quiet.
In light of all this, it seems unforgivable that I should have neglected our correspondence.
Now you must be wondering why, after all this time, I have finally found the courtesy to write back. There are two reasons I can sort through for my rudeness. First, I myself have lived in a bit of a fog since Chris’s death. I keep trying to find my own hand, my own arm. I’ve stumbled round quite a bit, trying to approximate things such as comfort, but it hasn’t been perfectly natural for me. Second, in these five years I have felt a lack of faith that I thought perhaps would be upsetting to you. In our conversations about spiritual things, we used to share a certainty that Chris’s spirit was with us still. I remember it was great comfort to us. But in truth my faith was broken even during my last Easter visit, and my thank-you letter felt awfully untruthful.
Since then, if I am honest, the state of my belief has declined even further, as a result of new scientific developments. You remember that I used to believe our spirit might be the force that determined the actions of the material composing our brain. Since quantum physics had it that material is indeterminate, and that for any material state a set of outcomes is possible, I was convinced that there must be an immaterial governing force determining the eventual outcome. That, I held, was the relationship between spirit and body: the spirit exists to choose our bodies’ paths into the future. So we both believed, and even if I could not be certain of a place such as heaven, I thought that after death, a spirit must migrate into another body here on earth. It seemed to me that spirits must be drawn to the animus of a body. Sometimes, thinking of that chambered nautilus at school, I imagined Chris’s spirit had migrated there, and still lived in those little rooms. Thus we two could share our faith in Chris’s presence, either in heaven or here with us still.
But around the time of that Easter visit, I began reading a physicist called von Neumann, who persuaded me that indeterminacy exists only at the level of our measurements. I became convinced that everything is in fact determined by its physical shape, and so I gave up on such an entity as the spirit.
It was as if I had lost Chris all over again. The world seemed a terrible haze. I thought of you often, of course, but it seemed beyond my rights to write to you expressing such inconsolable feelings.
But things have now changed some. I think I’ve come to believe once again. Gödel has proven that arithmetic is incomplete, and I think I am close to proving that not all problems can be decided. Do you see what that means? If there is no symbolic system that can determine the solution to any problem (symbolic systems being all the more manageable and complete than the physical ones they represent), then not all physical problems are predetermined. And if not every situation can be decided in advance based on its material properties, then we must have an internal animus for deciding our course. Thus the idea of free will has risen up again in my brain, even more strongly than it did in the days of my Easter visits, when I took communion under Chris’s window at your parish church.
And so I’ve finally come round to writing you, because I’m not so hopeless as I was for a while. Only now I’m a bit overwhelmed with everything I want to say, in order to catch you up on what’s happened.
In terms of personal affairs, I can really only write that life has proceeded. Chris was my dearest friend. Since he passed away I have not found another one like him.
Compared with Chris, the other people at King’s all seem so awfully ordinary. It gives me a thrill to think what a hit Chris would have made amongst the intellectuals here, but for my part, I slip by unnoticed. Out of curiosity, I’ve taken up violin, but I’m not nearly as good as he was at piano. I do practice quite hard, and I am of course interested in the mathematics of sound, but my actual efforts tend to unravel. Without Chris, there is often the sense of unwinding. I try to continue in the habits he taught me, but I sometimes wonder why I should try.
This is the uneventful state of my personal life. In terms of the science, however, things are looking up. I’ve been working on an interesting problem this summer, and (you may shake your head in disbelief) I am sure that Chris has assisted me through the process. Answers have started to come, usually when I am running. You’ll remember that I was never much good at sports, but to run it seems all one needs is an interest in counting one’s footsteps. I go outwards from town, through the countryside, and when the blood begins to beat in my ears I sometimes hear Chris’s voice. When I grow tired, I lie down in the pastures amongst befuddled sheep, and I summon Chris to help me sort through the strand of numbers crossing the sky. I think, though this may sound strange, that I’ve absorbed some of his mind — some of his patterns of thought — into my brain. In my own head, I can sometimes hear his words, or his clever answers to a bothersome question.
And this is precisely where my current project comes in. I’ve begun thinking that I might one day soon encounter a method for preserving a human mind-set in a man-made machine. Rather than imagining, as I used to, a spirit migrating from one body into another, I now imagine a spirit — or, better yet, a particular mind-set — transitioning into a machine after death. In this way, we could capture anyone’s pattern of thinking.
To you, of course, this may sound rather strange, and I’m not sure if you’re put off at the idea of knowing Chris again in the form of a machine. But what else are our bodies, if not very able machines?
The practical science of this is still rather vague in my mind, and I admit to some confusion on a few key points of engineering, but the idea itself is complete. A mechanical brain! A mathematical computing device that can process the entire world, just as a brain is able to do. I still think of Chris’s idea that those old boring diaries we read in English class were time capsules, preserving the writers’ patterns of thought. And look at me, all these years later, still working on a time capsule! One that might capture the best friend of my life.
It is still a long way off, of course, but I’ve made a few good strides. I’ve developed a method for representing “mental” patterns with algorithmic sentences. You give the machine input in the form of a series of symbols, and it processes that input using a specific mental pattern. Then the machine produces a response, which may or may not change the machine’s original algorithmic sentence. This last bit is crucial, for it is how our machine will actually learn, independent of external assistance. And so the machine will embody a mind, or any number of minds, each one coded by a separate sequence of commands.