George and Tanaka were going at it again in the lunchroom. It was always the same tiff, the "hard" problem of consciousness. "Nobody knows what consciousness is," George was saying. "Maybe it's a hallucination."
"That's daft," replied Tanaka. "Is you real or isn't you?"
"Ares I real or arsen't I? What's that got to do with consciousness?"
"Just -- everything."
Eyes rolled around the table. Here we go again.
"It's been effortlessly shown that consciousness is an epiphenomenonal byproduct of neural activity," Tanaka went on.
Bernadette snapped her strawberry Bubbalicious, twirled it around her middle finger, and sat dramatically indifferent, like a centerfold for New Nihilist magazine. She was named after the Four Tops song, but carried on with people in the office like she was named after Bernadette Devlin, child of Irish Republicanism. Maybe she was black Irish.
"Tuck your effie-pherimonal byproduct," George countered. "Nothing's right or wrong but thinking makes it so."
"Macbeth?" queried Tanaka.
"Hamlet," George brought back. Tanaka raised his brow, impressed.
Bernadette snapped a bubble, unimpressed.
"It wasn't always that way," said George. "There was a time when we were more integrated in our thinking -- "
"-- oh, here we go again," Tanaka interrupted.
"We saw human experience as a blend of the quantitative and qualitative. We messed up when we separated the two."
"Who separated the two?" said Lionel, the 3D printer techie, munching on a BLT, mayo at the corner of his lip.
"I'm getting to that," said George. Tanaka started giggling hysterically. "With the emergence of scientific thinking we needed to be able measure and prove what we were arguing; poetry wasn't enough. So we separated the qualitative from the quantitative."
"Who did?" said Lionel, ready for some.
"Galileo did," said George. "Galileo bequeathed us the mind-body problem."
"Well, f*ck Galileo," said Lionel.
"Don't worry," said Tanaka, "the Roman Inquisition made him pay for that apostasy."
Marie made a fart sound. She hated the two of them and was fond of making fun of the pair behind their backs. Andy, who had been in special forces during one of the wars, looked at the pair like he could envision a hostile merger of their faces, then went back to reading his Philip K. Dick novel. Michaela, the suave, attractive brunette, and leggy lab assistant, snarked at George and Tanaka, "Why don't you two get a room."
Danny, the long-suffering supervisor, was unamused at the pair of well-educated cryogenicists carrying on like common back alley tomcats hissing and caterwauling. They made some lunches a misery. Danny tsk-tsked to himself and wondered why he hadn't moved on to the Los Alamos lab when offered a position of responsibility there. Nano nukes were the latest rage and answer to the endless need for more electricity, and his systems engineering know-how (he had an MCSE) would have seen him comfortably ensconced, in command, and wanted. Here he seemed like a buffoon. He sometimes felt like pulling out a set of blue balls and juggling them when the pair carried on, and made his implied leadership implausible.
Bernadette snapped a bubble. One more universe bites the dust. Plenty more snaps where that came from though, her expression declared. Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God.
Danny sighed, "Oh, no." He said to Michaela, "Mickey, that might sound a bit sexually orientalist, what you just said." He didn't tell her he'd like to share a room with her. She gave him a look of rebuke, and smiled, for she knew he needed her in his fantasies. Danny hid behind the headlines of The Boston Globe, like, say, God, indifferent supervisor to human affairs, only interested in parsing the headlines of their acts, anxious to get to the crossword puzzle. Dylan once sang that if his thought-dreams could be seen they'd probably put his head in a guillotine. If Michaela knew the specifics of his neural byproducts about her, she would probably have punched him in the face.
Bernadette destroyed another world. Snap! A silent bell seemed to ring, and folks got up from their plastic seats noisily and filed out the door, back to their duties in the cryogenic lab. Back to the frozen corpses and body parts. George and Tanaka lingered, went on with it.
"George, I think there may be a way to solve our differences."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," said Tanaka. "Do you remember that great debate back in the day between David Chalmers and Christof Koch."
"The neuroscientist versus the philosopher? Sure, I remember. Koch argued that the state of science was such that we'd have an answer to the question of what consciousness is by the year 2023. Koch said it's all a product of the brain. And Chalmers, the Aussie, bet him that no such revelation or discovery would come."
"That's right," said Tanaka. "And here we are many years later without a naked emperor to laugh at."
"Well, okay," said George, "that's one way to put it. Crudely, I would have thought."
"So, I have a proposal. Let's try to solve this ourselves. I ordered some clone kits from Paradisio Science Products."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," said Tanaka. "Two heads. One of Don Bradman, and the other, Ted Williams."
"You're sh*tting me?"
"I wouldn't sh*t you, you're one of my favorite turds." George imagined Bernadette snapping a bubble. He said, "Two heads?"
"Yeah. Synthetic heads, of course," said Tanaka. "We wouldn't disturb the Don's or Teddy's real heads."
"Hmm. But will they function the same way?"
"Well, we'll find out," said Tanaka. "Should be alright. They are the latest human brain organoids."
"Hmm. Well, what about the bodies?"
"Lionel is putting together the bodies. As with the brains, it's all DNA reanimated and re-embodied."
"I've heard about such experiments. But it all seems a little on the frankenstein side of things, ask me. I thought we could just turn on the heads and run some consciousness tests -- some Turing, maybe a little bit of Searles, some Wombat designs. But, say, how's the Don's head been reconstituted?"
George was referring to the fact that Ted Williams, the great Boston Red Sox slugger and Hall of Famer, had commissioned his body and brain to be frozen upon death, hoping to return to life in the future when cryogenics was mature and miracles of reanimation were routine. But Don Bradman, the great Test cricket batsman for Australia, hadn't been, as far as anyone knew, preserved in any way after his death.
"Don's a total DNA job. His hair, I think. Whereas Teddy, of course, saw a nick of his flesh from his head come off."
"Hmm," said George. "Won't that --"
"-- Nah, dunt matter. Might even enhance the experiment. I guarantee that by the time we're done we'll know all we want about qualia and have sufficient quanta to make some cogent assignations of reality."
"It's on, then."
*****
Second Go, the cryonics company that George and Tanaka and the crew worked for stored all manner of biological material, from frozen ancient tundra specimens to monkeys to humans who'd volunteered to be frozen for scientific experimentation. Why? One reason was to, ostensibly, prepare an ark full of terrestrial genotypes for transport to one of the new worlds in the galaxy where scientists had discovered water and, therefore, the possibility of supporting terrestrial life. George was skeptical. Tanaka was gung-ho though.
"We can't get our sh*t together here, why bring it elsewhere?" George might say.
"We can terraform the new environment, and, George, we will change, evolve, and be better for the long journey."
"Only way I'm going on a journey like that is if I'm like Bruce Dern in Silent Running alone with a space terrarium full of the galaxy's best mary jane."
"Mary Jane?"
"Marijuana," said George. Tanaka lifted his brows, impressed.
It was lunchtime and George sat at the staff room table quietly feeding on an egg salad sandwich, dark rye. The others similarly munched in normal, satisfied silence. Lionel had seenTanaka retrieving something from the mailroom, and "Mr. T" hadn't yet joined the others. Bernadette, seemingly grateful for the lack of tension that Tanaka's absence presented, had laid aside her tremendous wad of Bubbalicious, blueberry today. She was enjoying a wrap of some sort and a coffee frappe. Michaela was tossing a salad with her fork and reading the latest Vogue. Andy was eagerly reading the same Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? while moving a corn cob across his mouth the way early Bob Dylan moved a harmonica. Danny surreptitiously ogled Mickey and nibbled on a PBJ sandwich, white bread.
Tanaka came in with two boxes. He walked over to George and excitedly placed a square cardboardish container before George. "They've come in," said Tanaka. "The heads." Eyes rolled their way. He put his own box in front of George's and pulled out a genetically reconstructed facsimile of Don Bradman's head. For fun, Tanaka had placed a green and gold cricket cap on the head of the Great One. Tanaka placed the other box on the table. George took out the Swiss Army knife he carried everywhere and cut open his box, and, after a quick uneasy rummage, pulled out the head of Ted Williams, aka, Teddy Ballgame. Tanaka pulled a cap out of his pocket and placed it on Teddy's head. It was a Boston Red Sox cap. "A present," Tanaka said. "Thanks," George lisped in gratitude.
"What the f*ck?" gasped Lionel, putting aside his bag of crisps.
Bernadette had the wad back in and was working up a serious mastication session with the gum. She stared bewildered at the two heads on the lunchroom table.
Tanaka sensed the frisson change in the room and hastened to explain the purpose of the two heads on the table. "I know our constant carping over the nature of consciousness has got on some of your nerves and put some of you to sleep," Tanaka began. "George and I have decided to end our differences by performing an experiment that will once and for all reveal the true nature of human reality."
Bernadette was snapping now. And you could tell that Lionel was just aching to have another go at Galileo again. Andy kept reading Dick. Danny said, "Look guys, we appreciate the robust debate over consciousness, but the union might not take kindly to severed heads on the table." Michaela laughed.
"Well, technically, they're not severed; they're rebuilt. And we're about to re-embody them, too," said Tanaka.
"What Professor Tanaka is trying to say, before he applies the sleep hold on everyone in the room," began George, referencing the old time TV wrestler known to get opponents in a nelson hold and apply pressure that put them to sleep -- and out of contention for the champion's belt, "is that consciousness is a tough nut to crack -- "
Bernadette snapped.
"-- We don't know what it is or even why. Last year I read in a science magazine that some scientists think it may be the result of a virus that came on a meteor from outer space -- "
"Imagine that," Tanaka interrupted. "Inner space created by outer space."
Snap. Snap.
George continued. "Whatever it is, it looks like it's here to stay. But recently Tanaka and I read an article in Nature that wondered if consciousness could be re-obtained if a severed head were reattached and life brought back into it. As you all know, such an event is our mission here at Second Go. You may also know that the great baseball player Ted Williams opted before he died to have his body frozen and stored by a facility like ours with the hope and understanding that he would one day awake with new life. And be ready to go -- "
"Ready to go?" said Lionel. "What, like ready to play ball?"
"Yeah, that's right," said Tanaka, as if George had handed him off in a tag-team maneuver.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
"And," Tanaka went on, "we have a similar deal with the great Australian cricket player Don Bradman. But we don't know if Bradman arranged for his body and brain to be frozen on death. But we have here in these heads the reconstructed frameworks of consciousness for both these great sportsmen. Ted Williams's brain is a clone of his actual brain. While Don's is a replica based on cytogenetic mapping using AI."
Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap.
"So," said George, taking the baton, as it were, "the question is what will happen when Teddy and the Don are reanimated with new bodies. Will they remember their previous experiences and be able to build on their conscious awareness with new experiences? Or will they be zombie-like, like the walking dead in the mall in that old time film, Dawn of the Dead?"
Bernadette was hopelessly upset and sounded like a frantic telegraph machine.
Lionel said, "So we need to put the heads on new bodies, right?"
"That's right, Lionel, and that's where you and your 3D biological printer come in," said Tanaka.
"Sure, I can do that," said Lionel. "Color printing, right?"
"That's right, Lionel," said George. "We're going for the whole shebang -- color and all. Now, if consciousness is all the byproduct of brain work only -- an epiphenomenon -- then Don Bradman should be the golden boy. If it's an amalgam of mind and body working together, as I argue and firmly believe, then Teddy Ballgame will carry the day, and he'll be back to hitting .400 in no time. Qualia and quanta."
"Neat-o," said Andy, the tough Dick-reading parachutist veteran of two wars. "That means we might all be able to come back to consciousness some day after we're dead. Woo-hoo."
"F*ck me, Galileo," Lionel whistled. But you could see in his eyes that he was keen to get going on the body reconstructions.
George and Tanaka picked up their respective heads, with caps, and faced off in the lunchroom.
"U-S-A!" shouted Michaela somewhat derisively. Danny groaned.
*****
To make things more interesting, at the last minute George and Tanaka decided to have the sports greats play in the other's sport -- Teddy would come back to play test cricket and Don Bradman would see what he could do with a baseball.
The PR department of Second Go managed to turn the experiment into a major promotional event. Executives of major league baseball and of Australian cricket agreed to hold a special lottery to bring each star, in their reconstructed primes (Go, Lionel!), directly to the majors. Streaming services saw record sign-ups. Cricket and baseball now held in throe global audiences on the scale of soccer, with that sport's exciting-to-watch nil-nil draws.
In Adelaide, professional home of Don Bradman, Ted Williams took to the oval in near silence, as the sun-drenched crowd smirked in derision (a national character trait). Williams looked lost in his first few test matches, as if he'd just woken up (essentially he had), and was a duck in each of the first several innings, scoring no runs, and drawing laughter that made Teddy feel like a fish on a maximum security cell block, edgy and walking funny. Famous for his cheek regarding the crowds in Boston, where Williams had played as a Red Soxer, Williams gave the Adelaide crowd the first amendment with his middle finger. That got the crowd going. "Feckin Yank." "Get a dog up ya." "Conspiracy theorist!" "Did a plane crash into your twin lobes?" (Nobody understood this last reference.) But Teddy woke up all the way, too. Suddenly his innings run count went up -- 45,107, 181, 234, 270, 300 feckin runs! He was a favorite, and the Aussie national team couldn't wait to get its teeth sunk into the English side again.
Meanwhile, in Boston and around the stadia of the league, Don Bradman looked woefully inept. Folks in the stands scratched each other's heads wondering why he could only seem to excel at balls thrown in the dirt. He'd dispose of those pitches so nastily that pitchers would stand there with a hangdog look on their faces wondering if they were hallucinating. 450 feet to straight away centerfield and Bradman knocked the beer right out of some morbidly obese belly bulger's hand. It took a while for the crowd to warm to the Don, but, as with Teddy in Adelaide, soon the numbers did all the talking -- from .175/ 13/ 54 to 475. avg / 77 homers / 221 RBI.
On and on it went all season in each sport, cricket and baseball. The Don soon learned to hit every baseball that came his way, in the dirt or in the air -- he didn't seem to care. Teddy Ballgame, while never loved in Adelaide because he had Yank genes (and many worldly folks knew that the "conservative" Australian culture presented a picture of what America might have been like had the South won the Civil War), he still battled for their hearts and minds with his mighty bat, and he wasn't bad in the field either. Folks complained about his "personality disorder," but they liked how he put the British pommies down when they played.
But the promotion began to wear thin. Folks were starting to have had enough of the experiment that few folks could remember the point of. After a while it wasn't much fun to watch players routinely produce prodigious scoring without a lot of effort (it seemed). Folks wanted a return to the banal drama of ordinary mortals striving for excellence in sports that so often delivered humiliating letdowns in form and function. Executives of baseball and cricket decided to end the promotion and to ask the superstars to retire. "F*ck you," said Teddy Ballgame, and the Don exclaimed a similar sentiment to Major League Baseball wonks.
They decided to remove the stars from their sports forcibly and melodramatically and with extreme prejudice. The Boston GM recalled that all the way back in 1967 a promising slugger named Tony Conigliaro had his career shortened by a bean ball that clocked him in the noggin. And no one in Australia, even after about a hundred years, forgot Bodyline and the way the English try to quash Don Bradman's profligacy by throwing the ball at his head. These means and methods were repeated. Digging in at home plate, sporting then a .567 batting average, Don Bradman faced off against a youngster named Jack Hamilton who proceeded to throw a 111 mph fastball directly at the Don's kisser; he was Tony C'ed; he was dead. Teddy Ballgame had finished his first innings having scored 175 runs, when he stepped in for his go in the second innings. Down he went like a sack of Army issued powdered eggs. DOA at Adelaide General. The ABC was loathe to replay the hit on TV not because of the violence but because the home crowd seemed to be cheering the hit and it was felt this reaction could only tarnish the reputation of a nation that had fought so hard against the Turks for freedom and had begged its way onto the UN Human Rights Council as a model of humanity.
*****
In the lunchroom at Second Go, not long after the Experiment was prematurely ended, George and Tanaka sat at the table eating their sandwiches and salad -- quietly, like everyone else. They didn't have much to say. The Experiment was over and they returned to their genetic research, not having resolved the problem of consciousness to either of their satisfactions. There had been some changes around the place. Danny had moved on to Los Alamos to oversee a nano nuke program. Bernadette had been hospitalized for neurasthenia and wasn't expected back. Lionel, too, had moved on, his 3D body reconstructions having inspired him to open a boutique service that featured cloning and CRISPR enhancements, making him fabulously wealthy and feeling secure and handsome. He never cursed Galileo again. And Michaela had taken over the reins of the office, replacing Danny. She, too, celebrated her promotion by changing her appearance from a gray Sears-driven office suit to wearing a mini skirt and other provocations and make-up arrangements out of a Fellini film. (Satyricon?) Only Andy, the noble paratrooper who had dropped in behind enemy lines in two wars, and who spent all of his lunchtime reading sci-fi novels, hadn't changed. He was Andy. And one slow day, purely out of curiosity, he turned to George and Tanaka and asked the Question: "So which one of you guys won the bet on consciousness?" He was eating German potato salad. His grandfather, also a commando jumper, had seen Dresden burning as he fell from the sky.
George looked up and over at Andy, and then around at all the new faces at the table, and said, "Consciousness won."
"Yeah, but is it integrated or an epiphenomenon? Isn't that what you two were beefing about?" asked Andy. You could see that he left the skins on his potatoes. Nor were they soft-boiled; for you could hear him crunch the cubes as he munched. Probably he used apple vinegar, the nose surmised.
"Well," said Tanaka.
"He asked me," interrupted George.
"He asked us," replied Tanaka.
"A**hole."
Tanaka went on. "Well, both superstars started up again where they left off. So, there was no net loss of consciousness. But what most people don't know is that after games and matches Teddy and the Don, after answering tons of media questions, disappeared into their hotel rooms, and did God knows what. See, their loved ones were long dead and neither had any living relationships. They were each rather like automatons who could hit the hell out of a ball and wow the masses, but were woefully unprepared for the experiment. In short, they were lonely men. Self-conscious men. And I believe that even George would agree that they were done a favor by being whacked."
"Here. Here," said George.
"And so, the question of consciousness itself goes unanswered?" Andy went on.
"Afraid so," said Tanaka.
"You two," said Marie, laughing hysterically. "What fuckwits!"
Andy laughed too and went back to his potato salad and the Philip K. Dick novel.
Michaela made a face at Marie, that winked at the same time it communicated a warning about the excesses of the first amendment.
Yeah, probably apple cider vinegar.
