How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (12 page)

“It has a reinforced titanium-unobtainium alloy nanofiber running through it, which allows it to record any changes you make to the text on a real-time basis.”

And so I’m reading this book and somehow in act of reading it, I am, with the help of TOAD and TAMMY, creating a copy of it, in a very real sense I’m generating a new version, actually, that is being simultaneously written into and stored in TAMMY’s memory banks. In doing this, I am making the book my own, in retyping a book that already exists in the future, producing the very book I will eventually write. I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

At the present moment, I am, in fact, reading the text display generated by TOAD on the main screen in front of me, going along through the words and, noticing, here and there, that the words seem to slightly adjust themselves, sometimes a little ahead of where I’m reading, but usually just behind what I’ve read, as if the device is self-editing, modifying the text to fit as closely as possible the actual throughput of my conscious act of reading it. In essence, my reading is a creative act, the product of which is being captured by the TOAD. I’m typing, even though strictly speaking I am using the TM-31’s cognitive-visual-motor-sound-activated recording module, which operates, as you might guess, by simultaneously tracking output from the user’s neural activity, voice, finger movements, retinal movements, and facial muscle contractions. It’s part keyboard, part microphone, part optical scan, and part brain scan. When I want to type, I raise my hands up in front of me, palms down, in a position approximating typing, and a virtual QWERTY layout materializes in front of me. When I want to switch to voice, I just start reading the book, and the unit switches to an auditory-recognition transcription system, converting my voice into modifications in the written text. If I get tired of typing and voice modes, I can simply read the text to myself, and the unit will track my eye movements to determine, with near-perfect accuracy, what word I am reading, based on the minute ups and downs, lefts and rights of my retinas, and then matching those movements, using brain activity data as a kind of rough double check, against the blood flow and heat output of various areas of my language- and concept-processing lobes and sublobes of my brain.

I can switch back and forth among these three modes seamlessly, sometimes even using more than one at a time, and even using all three, so that the machine is tracking my voice, my eyes, my mind, and my finger movements all at once. In the typing-only mode, the unit tracks just my fingers. The same goes for the voice-only mode, i.e., even though I necessarily must use my eyes and brain to read the text in order to pronounce the words out loud, if I choose the voice-only mode, the device does not track my eye movements or brain activity, and only the microphone records the words I am speaking. There are advantages and disadvantages to each mode, and to the various combinations of modes.

Currently I am using both the reading and typing modes. This is because the copy of this book that my future self gave to me was apparently damaged at some point in time (perhaps, as TAMMY suggests, it was damaged in the very act of transferring it to me, a strange sort of loop indeed). As a result, some of the words are illegible. There are blurry areas where the paper has absorbed moisture, and portions that have faded due to the cumulative effects of light over time. There are other places where the text has been scratched out, in some instances by what appears to have been, based on the seemingly random pattern of mechanical injury to the book, some sort of accidental scraping or sharp impact, as if it had been slammed against an extremely hard and thin object, like perhaps the edge of a table (or a time machine door), and in other instances by what seems to have been very deliberate redaction by way of defacement, as if an X-Acto knife or other implement had been applied with precision and intent to excise particular words and sentences.

For instance, right here, the next paragraph begins with the words
what if,
and after those words there is a depression, where the fibers of the paper show evidence of having been pressed down and rubbed vigorously, and what remains is a gray smear of what may have been one or more additional words, as if someone, maybe a reader, maybe the previous owner of this copy, or maybe even me, at some point in the future, wanted to destroy or conceal or confuse the meaning of such a paragraph, so that the question that remains is only:

with no context or other indication of what the rest of the sentence was, or if there even was a rest of the sentence.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the fact that there are missing and damaged words and sentences in the text is that there are places where the book, this book, is simply blank (even though I am pretty sure this makes no sense, since how can I know there will be blanks when I have not, by my own admission, read ahead to see any blanks yet and there haven’t been any so far, I’m still performing the read/write/self-edit process as faithfully as I can, in fact, even this parenthetical aside has been worded exactly as I am recording it, right up to the words I am typing right now and now and now and now, I am typing what appears to be somewhat digressive and extemporaneous rambling, all of which is starting to make me have serious doubts in terms of the whole free will versus determinism situation because even as I am typing from the copy I have in my hand, the text is matching my thoughts exactly, all the way down to—EUREKA!—that random word I just interjected there, or attempted to interject, that word,
Eureka,
having occurred in the text at the precise moment I had decided, internally, to inject a random word in an attempt to diverge from the text, and now, having failed in that attempt, realizing I had better stop now and end this sentence before I dig myself any deeper into metaphysical trouble).

There are gaps, blanks, throughout, which I will need to fill in. There are gaps in my autobiography.

Here is one such gap.*

*NB: This is how the text actually reads in the copy I am working from. The text also includes this explanatory (and somewhat self-referential) footnote, including this second sentence, which is itself a second-order meta-explanation of the already explanatory first sentence. It is unclear what the function of this self-referentiality is, other than to raise doubts in my mind as to the actual provenance of this manuscript, although I do note that this third sentence, just like the rest of this footnote, is also in the text I am copying from, verbatim, which makes it seem almost as if I am, in a way, telling myself what to think, that my future self has produced a record of the output of my consciousness, of my internal monologue. Or rather, a dialogue, between myself and my future self, in which my future self is telling my present self what I have already finished thinking but have not yet realized I thought.

This is consistent with
Libet (1983)
.

And here is another gap.*

*Let’s suppose that I, being a volitional agent, am presented with a choice: I can have either a cookie from Jar A or a cookie from Jar B. After evaluating both cookies, at some point in time I form the intention to take a cookie from Jar A, and then, at a later point in time, I actuate the movement of my arm toward Jar A in furtherance of my choice. This is, intuitively, one might even say obviously, the order in which events occur.

Except that it isn’t.

After Libet, we now know that I actually began moving my arm toward Jar A
before I became aware of my own conscious decision to choose Jar A
. In effect, I decided to reach for the cookie in Jar A before I realized that I made the decision. The question is, which I was I? Which I am I? Am I the decider-I or the realizer-I? Both? Neither?

I am currently reproducing this as correctly as I can, interpolating where necessary, based on my best guess about what I wrote, or would have written, or will write. As a result, I’m not sure this is going to turn out to be exactly the same book as the one I was given, prior to it being damaged and redacted. I doubt it is, or will be, or could be. My job, though, isn’t to figure it out or create it, because it has, to the extent it ever will be, already been created, and figured out. I don’t know the ending because, as I mentioned, I am reading along as I type this. This is a document that came from nowhere. This is a chunk of information created spontaneously out of nothing, filtered through my interpretation and memory.

Just to be sure, I have run this set of propositions, the text so far, through TAMMY’s onboard Plausibility Verification Unit, and it has confirmed that my future self was telling the truth. The book, its existence, its creation, is the product of a causal loop. It comes from nowhere, has no unique origin, and yet its creator is me.

“This book,” TAMMY says to me, “is a copy of a copy of a copy, and so on, forever, like that, I could keep going if you’d like.” It is a copy of something that doesn’t exist yet. It is a book copied from itself.