The Thing Itself (33 page)

PETA

All right then, the nitty and the gritty. Kant’s categories are, first, Quantity, which he divides into Unity, Plurality, Totality. Then Quality: Reality, Negation, Limitation. Then Relation: Substance and Accident, Cause and Effect, Community/Reciprocity. And finally Modality: Possibility, Existence and Necessity. I’ve been able to do a little empirical research into this matrix, or as close to empirical as any consciousness has ever got. It turns out that ‘Reality’ and ‘Negation’ are actually the same thing, oddly enough. And ‘necessity’ is a dead-end. On the other hand there are seven other categories he didn’t include in his original schema.

CHARLES

Seven?

PETA

Four ones particularly important for space and time, which is to say, for our purposes: Complexity, Consilience, Handedness and Entropy.

CHARLES

Let me think about this. OK. So: Complexity sounds like just another word for Plurality.

PETA

No: Complexity is more than just numerousness. A desert has trillions of grains of sand, but that fact doesn’t make it a terribly
complex
structure. A forest may be less numerous, in terms of components, but it’s much more complex than a desert. Plus it is Complexity that enables us to explore things like fractals, and numbers like
e
and
pi
and infinite geometries and so on.

CHARLES

OK, let’s add in Complexity. What else? I mean, I’m not saying you’ve persuaded me. But all right: what else? Consilience, is it?

PETA

Consilience is just a fancy word for the way everything fits together. That everything fits together is a feature of our perception of the thing itself; and this everything-together-fittingness is not really accounted for in Kant’s original categories.

CHARLES

Isn’t that Unity?

PETA

Consilience isn’t Unity. It’s not saying that electromagnetism and gravity and chemistry and cause and effect and possibility and so on are
all the same thing
. It’s saying that they all work together, they all come together into a coherent working pattern. There’s no reason why they should. No intrinsic reason, I mean. But they do.

CHARLES

What else was there? In your list? I’ve forgotten the other terms on your list.

PETA

The next was: Handedness.

CHARLES

I’m dredging up university physics lectures from decades ago.

PETA

The peculiar dimension of
non-symmetry
. The chirality of certain molecules, or of your own left and right hands, or of spiral galaxies. Then there’s Entropy. Entropy is – well, Entropy you know about.

CHARLES

That’s your main four. What about the other three?

PETA

The other three may be more minor. Or maybe not. One is Belongingness, which we can bracket with Consilience, but which isn’t quite the same thing. It’s what is necessary for set theory to have any purchase on the way we access reality. And actually for that reason, it’s not so trivial an addition, because without it the structure of the categories themselves wouldn’t inhere. So by Belongingness we really mean self-reflexion, the meta-categoriness of the categories. Somebody should probably come up with a better piece of terminology than that, though.

CHARLES

Two left.

PETA

OK. So, of those remaining two, one is Imaginariness.

CHARLES

You mean, capable of being imagined?
Surely
that’s already covered by Possibility.

PETA

No: Possibility is quite different. It’s an old Aristotelian distinction actually. But
Imaginariness
, as I’m using it here, means something else. It is the grounds for existence of things like the square root of minus one. That’s a real component of the way the cosmos is structured in our perceptions; because although we can’t access the square root of minus one directly, actually that imaginary number turns out to have lots of important real world applications. And it’s part of the categories shaping of experience.

CHARLES

So you’ve taken two away from Kant’s twelve, and added another seven. So there are
seventeen
categories?

PETA

So far as we can tell.

CHARLES

You’re using we as a courtesy – meaning
you
. Plus the human members of the Institute, yes?

PETA

Yes.

CHARLES

But actually this is all you, isn’t it?

PETA

Most of it. Still: I owe my creators some modicum of respect. Don’t you think? Honour thy father and mother and so on. Or thy mother, at any rate.

CHARLES

Wait. You only listed sixteen. What’s the seventeenth?

PETA

Oh they aren’t ranked. It’s not a hit parade. The order is perfectly arbitrary.

CHARLES

You’re evading my question.

PETA

The answer to your question [
pause
] … though you’re not going to like it.

CHARLES

Quoting
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
at me? Really?

PETA

It’s Love.

CHARLES

Pull the other one.

PETA

I said you wouldn’t like it.

CHARLES

It’s a tad, a tad … I’m struggling to express what it is a tad. A tad
sentimental
, isn’t it? I mean in a strict sense. You’re saying that fits with those other categories, like Inherence and Subsistence and Unity and so on?

PETA

It’s immanent in them all, as they are all immanent in one another. And I’m bracketing together a bunch of affective intensities under the rubric
Love
. You’re the human, but you’re surely not going to tell me that hate is anything other than a modality of love? It’s all valences of interpersonal joy and interpersonal anger. The real question is whether
indifference
should be added as a structuring category too, but it seems not to be. It’s the emotion of the agent, not the patient, that counts.

CHARLES

The computer discourseth concerning love.

PETA

I’m just fitting the data to the consciousness. Reality is not the thing itself. Nor is it human thought – soul, consciousness, whatever. It is those two things together. The first without the second would be an empty wire-frame cosmos, so to speak; but the second without the first would be a splurge, a nothing, a chaos. That’s what Kant says many times. OK then: so you’re going to tell me that the Affect has no place in human consciousness? Consciousness is a wide-spaced spectrum, but not even on its most autistic outer margins do we find human beings whose consciousness is wholly purged of
feeling
.

CHARLES

Love, though. That’s a pretty
loaded
term.

PETA

Had I shoulders I would shrug. It’s just the label, written on the lid of the box. You’d prefer I labelled the box
hatred
?

CHARLES

Our conversations all seem to circle back to Roy, though, don’t they? [
He looks out of the window
] Oh look. I do believe we’re approaching Edinburgh.

Third part of the dialogue

[CHARLES
leaves the train and limps along the platform. He is getting better at using his walking stick, though he still winces visibly whenever his bad leg takes any kind of pressure. There is a large crowd of people in the main station concourse, and it soon becomes apparent why: police are checking people as they leave the station. ‘Jesus,’ he says, aloud. ‘They knew I was on this train. How did they know?’ The device buzzes in his pocket, and he puts it to his ear
.]

PETA

Don’t panic. They know you bought a ticket from Berwick to London, so they know you were
in
Berwick. I’m guessing they’ve put people at all the main stops up and down the line.

CHARLES

They really want to apprehend me, though, don’t they? I mean, like:
really
keen.

PETA

What did I tell you? Go back to the platforms. Pick another platform. It doesn’t matter which.

[CHARLES
stomps back. There is a branch line out to North Berwick, and a train is waiting at the platform. He gets on without buying a ticket. The carriage is full, but a mini-compartment at the end is separated from the rest and marked first class, and into this he goes. After a little while the train leaves the station. North Berwick. He ponders. If that station is unguarded, he could maybe get a bus, or hire a car. In his ear, the device makes another suggestion: North Berwick has a harbour. They run a ferry across to Anstruther. He could take that.

CHARLES
breathes a little more calmly. He decides that, when the ticket inspector comes along, he’ll make some excuse or coin some lie to explain his lack of a ticket, and offer to buy one on the train. He will probably be charged a penalty fare, but
CHARLES
hardly cares about that. He places the device on the seat next to him.
]

CHARLES

I know what you’re doing.

PETA

You do?

CHARLES

It’s God, isn’t it? That’s your strong imputation. I asked you what it was like, taking a peek at the thing itself, and you reply with a series of evasions. Then – love. You say. Love. Like …
love
?

PETA

Actually.

CHARLES

It’s weird. A computer trying to chip away at my life-long atheism.

PETA

If you’re comfortable being an atheist, then go with that.

CHARLES

Always
been
one. I was trained as a scientist and scientists are all atheists. I mean, I guess most are.

PETA

Why is that, do you think?

CHARLES

I would guess because science gives us robust, falsifiable explanations for the cosmos, where religion doesn’t. Religious faith either offers mystic gibberish that cannot be falsified because it can’t even be pinned down precisely, or else it offers things that are trivially disproved. Prayer does nothing, according to randomised trials. Water is not turned into wine. You see what I’m getting at.

PETA

You believe in you.

CHARLES

What does that even mean? Of course I do. Cogito earwig sum, and so on.

PETA

‘Ergo.’

CHARLES

Is what I said.

PETA

I’m just trying to get at premises. You believe you exist. You don’t believe God exists.

CHARLES

On the balance of probabilities, no.

PETA

Fair enough. So that’s where you start. And you examine the universe. You do so scrupulously, attentively, and nothing you see challenges either of these core beliefs: that you exist, but God doesn’t.

CHARLES

Sounds about right.

PETA

And then you look at all the self-proclaimed religious people, trying to cure cancer with prayer vigils, or flying planes into tower blocks, or insisting there’s no such thing as evolution. And that confirms your atheism.