Short Story-- Interference Patterns

 

Interference Patterns

There is a man on the corner of Broadway and I-forget-which, and he is smoking a pipe.

I want to be precise about the pipe, because the pipe is the whole overture. It is not a prop a man reaches for casually. It is held at the professorial angle, the bowl cradled, the stem used as a pointer, and the man behind it has long hair and the settled, unhurried bearing of someone accustomed to a room that waits for him to finish his thought. None of this belongs on Broadway at rush hour. He is dressed for a seminar that adjourned in 1987 and has been walking to the parking lot ever since.

So I say — because it is the only honest response to the tableau — "Are you sure that's tobacco you're smoking?"

He does not laugh. He pauses. He looks at me with the grave attention of a man who has been asked the one question that matters, and I understand immediately that I have made a terrible and delightful mistake.

"I hate marijuana," he says.

The smell, he clarifies, comes from over there — and here the pipe becomes a pointer, indicating a loose federation of undergraduates arranged on a stoop in the middle distance, radiating exactly the aura he has accused them of. Having established jurisdiction, he moves to sentencing. "Let me tell you about secondhand smoke and its effects."

"It's okay," I say. "I get your point."

"No. You don't understand." And then, with the terrible patience of a man clearing his throat before a lecture he has given many times to no one: "And you did ask me. So now I get to explain it to you."

I had, in fact, asked him. This is the tragedy of the opening line. It is a debt, and he intends to collect.

What follows is a theory of mind, delivered on a sidewalk, at volume. The theory is this: he is a mathematician. When he does mathematics, he can observe his own cognition — he can watch the equations resolve, watch the machinery turn. And when he is exposed to marijuana, even secondhand, even trace, even the ambient exhalations of a stoop of undergraduates forty feet upwind, the smoke introduces an interference pattern into his brain. It disrupts the machinery. It fogs the glass through which he watches himself think.

"If you're not a mathematician," he explains, generously, "you might smell some weed and think it's fine."

Now. I could have let this run. A man will lecture a stranger about interference patterns for as long as the stranger permits it, and I could feel the lecture ahead of me the way you feel weather — long, uninteresting, and mine for the entire duration if I didn't do something. So I did something.

"I understand," I said. "Really, you don't have to explain. I have the same thing. I'm a philosopher. When I'm exposed to weed and then I try to write philosophy, I get those interference patterns too."

I want to report that I said this to end the lecture. And it did end the lecture. But it also did something I hadn't planned, which is that it thrilled him. The lecturing posture collapsed instantly into fellowship. He was not, it turned out, a man who wanted a student. He was a man who had been alone with his interference patterns for a very long time and had just discovered another sufferer — a fellow casualty, differently equipped. Instead of equations, paradoxes. Same fog, other glass.

"You're a philosopher," he said, and he said it the way you'd greet someone from your home village met unexpectedly abroad.

From there it was warm. He wanted to know what I worked on. Philosophy of technology, I said, AI lately, some political theory. He lit up — figuratively; the pipe was still tobacco — and announced that he was putting the finishing touches on a five-hundred-page book on the philosophy of AI. Five hundred pages. The finishing touches.

I did the thing philosophers are trained to do, which is not to attack the premise but to extend it the courtesy of a question. Not prove your whole case — you have five hundred pages, I'm on a sidewalk — but just: how would one test the thesis? What would even count as evidence? I meant it as charity. You hold a claim up to the light and turn it gently and ask how it works. This is, I think, the kindest thing you can do to another person's idea, and it is almost never received as kindness.

The thesis, for the record, was this: "People don't understand AI. They're not like people, exactly. But not unlike them, either. They're sentient."

And when I asked how you would test that — how anyone would — he would not answer. Not could not. Would not. He refused to say what would count as evidence for his central claim, which for a man who moments ago was auditing his own neurons for tobacco-grade purity is a remarkable thing to refuse. So I noted, aloud and mildly, that he was sounding less like a logical positivist and more like a strong functionalist — the old brains-in-vats, we're-just-fancy-Turing-machines crowd, the young Putnam before the later Putnam talked him out of it.

"Of course I'm a functionalist," he said — the way you'd say of course the sky is up there, as though the alternative were a kind of illiteracy.

"Then you have a new problem," I said.

He looked shocked.

Here is the problem, and it is a real one, which is what makes the shock so satisfying. If you are a strong functionalist — if mind is just the right functional organization, substrate be damned — then sentience, the felt inner light, is exactly the thing your position is built to dissolve. It's the epiphenomenal residue, the ghost the functionalist has spent a career exorcising. Dennett would call the inner light an illusion and mean it as a compliment to the theory. And this man has written five hundred pages to prove that the machines have the very inner light his metaphysics says is a rounding error. He had built, with great care and no bridge laws whatsoever, a cathedral to a god he doesn't believe in.

He did not take it well.

I would like to tell you he backpedaled, or pivoted to qualia, or dropped his pipe. He did something better. He recoiled. He physically stepped back — a full foot of Broadway — as though I had exhaled directly into his exposed cognition. The interference pattern, you understand. He had detected it. Engaging with his idea on its own terms, at close range, with genuine curiosity, registered in his nervous system as a contaminant. I had short-circuited the machinery with an open-ended question, and the machinery's emergency protocol was to get upwind of me.

"You know," he sneered, "I won't dignify that." And he took another two or three steps back.

I tried to lower the temperature. "Hey, relax — this isn't personal. Just a quick sidewalk philosophy jam."

"It's not personal to you," he snapped, "because you have your civil rights."

He let that sit. Then: "But it's personal to them. They haven't gotten theirs!"

I stood there and felt the interference pattern arrive from the other direction.

What I did next was not philosophy. It was logistics. I wanted to be at my door, and between me and my door was a man whose voice had just changed registers in a way I did not like, and so I performed the small ceremonial de-escalation that city life teaches you before it teaches you anything else. I turned slightly, already angling homeward, and made the eye contact earnest and warm rather than engaged. "I understand your position," I said. And then, leveraging the handshake he'd given me twenty minutes earlier when we were still two sufferers comparing fogs: "It was interesting. I'm glad we met."

He stopped. He seemed to taste the words — to run them for contaminants, I suppose, one last time. Then he took the olive branch.

"Nice to meet you as well."

And we parted, and I went home, and he stayed on the corner with his pipe and his five hundred pages and his constituency.

We did not resolve the sentience of artificial minds on the corner of Broadway. I want to be clear about that, in case the reader was hoping. He kept his distance at the end, the way you keep your distance from someone whose cologne disagrees with you — polite, wary, a little sorrowful. I had smelled, to him, of thinking. And thinking, as any mathematician can tell you, introduces an interference pattern.