Attention focused on the question of what the Riddle coma is. Since it resembled no known disease, it was unclear whether it was really a coma or indeed something to be avoided. Investigators simply assumed it was a virtual lobotomy, a kind of gridlock of the information in the synapses, completely shutting down higher brain functions. Nonetheless, it was unlikely the coma could be the correlate of a state of meditative enlightenment, because it seemed too deep to be consistent with consciousness. In addition, no known case of Riddle coma has ever shown improvement. Neurosurgery, drugs, and electrical stimulation have had, if any, only negative effects; these attempts have been stopped. The provisional verdict is that the coma is irreversible, although a project has been funded to seek a word to undo the “spell” of the Riddle, by exposing victims to computer-generated symbol strings.
The central question, “What is the Riddle?” obviously has to be approached very cautiously. The Riddle is sometimes described as “the Gödel sentence for the human Turing machine,” which causes the mind to jam; traditional doctrines of the unsayable and unthinkable are cited. Similar ideas are familiar in folklore—for instance, the religious theme of the power of the “Word” to mend the shattered spirit. But the Riddle could be of great benefit to the cognitive sciences. It might yield fundamental information about the structure of the human mind; it may be a Rosetta Stone for decoding the “language of thought,” universal among all humans, whatever language they speak. If the computational theory of mind is at all correct, there is some program, some huge word, that can be written into a machine, transforming the machine into a thinking thing; why shouldn’t there be a terrible word, the Riddle, that would negate the first one? But all depended on the feasibility of a field of “Riddle-ology” that would not self-destruct.
At this point, an even more disturbing fact about the Riddle began to emerge. A topologist in Paris lapsed into a coma similar in some respects to Dizzard’s. No computer was involved in this case. The mathematician’s papers were impounded by the French, but we believe that, although this mathematician was not familiar with Dizzard’s work, she had become interested in similar areas of artificial intelligence. About then four members of the Institute for Machine Computation in Moscow stopped appearing at international conferences and, it seems, personally answering correspondence; FBI officials claimed the Soviet Union had, through routine espionage, obtained the Autotomy tapes. The Defense Department began exploring the concept of “Riddle warfare.”
Two more cases followed, a theoretical linguist and a philosopher, both in California but apparently working independently. Neither was working in Dizzard’s area, but both were familiar with formal methods developed by Dizzard and published in a well-known text ten years ago. A still more ominous case appeared, of a biochemist working on information-theoretic models of DNA-RNA interactions. (The possibility of a false alarm remained, as after entering coma the biochemist clucked continuously, like a chicken.)
The Riddle coma could no longer safely be assumed an occupational hazard of Dizzard’s specialty alone; it seemed to lurk in many forms. The Riddle and its effect seemed not just language-independent. The Riddle, or cognates of it, might be topic-independent and virtually ubiquitous. Boundaries for an intellectual quarantine could not be fixed confidently.
But now we are finding, in addition, that the Riddle seems an idea whose time has come—like the many self-referential paradoxes (of the pattern “This sentence is false”) discovered in the early part of this century. Perhaps this is reflected in the current attitude that “computer science is the new liberal art.” Once the intellectual background has evolved, widespread discovery of the Riddle appears inevitable. This first became clear last winter when most of the undergraduates in a large new introductory course on automata theory lapsed into coma during a lecture. (Some who did not nevertheless succumbed a few hours later; typically, their last word was “aha.”) When similar incidents followed elsewhere, public outcry led to the president’s press conference and this report.
While the present logophobic atmosphere and cries of “Close the universities” are unreasonable, the Riddle coma pandemic cannot be viewed as just another example of runaway technology. The recent “Sonic Oven” case in Minneapolis, for instance, in which a building with a facade of parabolic shape concentrated the noise of nearby jets during takeoff, actually killed only the few people who happened to walk through the parabola’s focus at the wrong time. But even if the Riddle coma were a desirable state for an individual (which, we have seen, it does not seem to be), the current pandemic has become an unprecedented public health crisis; significant populations are unable to care for themselves. We can only expect the portion of our research community—an essential element of society—that is so incapacitated to grow, as the idea of the Riddle spreads.
The principal objective of our report was at least to decrease further coma outbreaks. Public demand for a role in setting research policy has emphasized the dilemma we confront: how can we warn against the Riddle, or even discuss it, without spreading its infection? The more specific the warning, the greater the danger. The reader might accidentally reach the stage at which he sees “If p then q” and p, and so cannot stop himself from concluding q, where q is the Riddle. Identifying the hazardous areas would be like the children’s joke “I’ll give you a dollar if you’re not thinking of pink rats ten seconds from now.”
A question of ethics as well as of policy remains; is the devastating risk of the Riddle outweighed by the benefits of continued research in an ill-defined but crucial set of fields? In particular, the authors of this report have been unable to resolve the issue of whether the possible benefit of any report itself can outweigh its danger to the reader. Indeed, during preparation of our final draft one of us tragically succumbed.
Reflections
This curious story is predicated upon a rather outlandish yet intriguing idea: a mind-arresting proposition, one that throws any mind into a sort of paradoxical trance, perhaps even the ultimate Zen state of satori. It is reminiscent of a Monty Python skit about a joke so funny that anyone hears it will literally die laughing. This joke becomes the ultimate secret weapon of the British military, and no one is permitted to know more than one word of it. (People who learn two words laugh so hard they require hospitalization!)
This kind of thing has historical precedents, of course, both in life and in literature. There have been mass manias for puzzles, there have been dancing fits, and so on. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story about a tune so catchy that it seizes control of the mind of anyone who hears it. In mythology, sirens and other bewitching females can complete fascinate males and thus overpower them. But what is the nature of such mythical mind-gripping powers?
Cherniak’s description of the Riddle as “the Gödel sentence for human Turing machine” may seem cryptic. It is partly explicated later his likening it to the self-referential paradox “This sentence is false”; here, a tight closed loop is formed when you attempt to decide when it is indeed true or false, since truth implies falsity, and vice versa. The nature of this loop is an important part of its fascination. A look at a variations on this theme will help to reveal a shared central mechanism underlying their paradoxical, perhaps mind-trapping, effect.
One variant is: “This sentence contains threee errors.” On read it, one’s first reaction is, “No, no—it contains two errors. Whoever wrote the sentence can’t count.” At this point, some readers simply walk away scratching their heads and wondering why anyone would write such pointless, false remark. Other readers make a connection between sentence’s apparent falsity and its message. They think to themselves “Oh, it made a third error, after all—namely, in counting its own errors.” A second or two later, these readers do a double-take, when they realize that if you look at it that way, it seems to have correctly counted its errors and is thus not false, hence contains only two errors, and… “But… Wait a minute. Hey! Hmm…” The mind flips back and forth a few times and say the bizarre sensation of a sentence undermining itself by means of an interlevel contradiction—yet before long it tires of the confusion and jumps out of the loop into contemplation, possibly on the purpose or interest of the idea, possibly on the cause or resolution of the paradox, possibly simply to another topic entirely.